Harvey was the Apostle of Main Street

Last of two parts.

And now, the rest of the story.

Like his father, Paul Harvey embodied salt-of-the-Earth qualities that endeared him to nearly all he met.

When the famous radio commentator was 3, his father, Harry Harrison Aurandt, went out rabbit hunting with a friend who also worked for the Tulsa, Okla., police department. When they came upon four armed men hiding from the law, a gunfight ensued and Harvey’s father was shot.

After holding onto life tenaciously for two days, Aurandt died of his wounds. The fugitives were apprehended the following day after being identified by the surviving friend, who was a police detective.

Intent on quick vengeance, a lynch mob estimated at more than 1,500 strong crowded around the jail where the men were being held. According to an account in the 2000 book “Oklahoma Heroes: The Oklahoma Peace Officers Memorial,” the criminals were smuggled out to safety and subsequently tried, convicted and received life sentences.

As a radio personality Harvey also received tremendous loyalty from his legions of fans. After several years of learning the ropes of radio, he was ready for the big leagues.

When Harvey was discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1944, he and his wife, Lynne, moved to Chicago. The seasoned radio broadcaster quickly landed a job with WENR radio, an affiliate of ABC.

After arriving in “the city with wide shoulders” the couple decided to pool their talents. When Harvey replaced a big band program with a 10 p.m. news broadcast, his wife got the job of being its producer and general manager.

“News by Paul Harvey” quickly became the most popular program on Chicago radio. When World War II ended in the summer of 1945, he became the host of a program called “Jobs for G.I. Joe.”

A year later, Harvey started doing in-depth feature pieces he dubbed “The Rest of the Story.” It became a stand-alone series

in 1976 and continued up until Harvey’s death on Feb. 28.

It wasn’t long before top ABC executives took note of the man with the folksy baritone and ability to effortlessly move from a monologue into a commercial message. In later years Harvey was quoted as saying of his sponsors, “I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is.”

On April 1, 1951, ABC Radio Network debuted “Paul Harvey News and Comment” to a nationwide audience. The radio-loving kid from Oklahoma had hit the big time at the age of 32.

With his voice booming out of radios from New York City skyscrapers to West Coast farmhouses, Harvey soon became a part of Americana. His crisp, enthusiastic “page one” announcement alerting listeners that he was about to start became a famous catch phrase.

When Harvey spoke at the University of Virginia’s Cabell Hall on April 21, 1965, he started by delivering his patented “Good Evening Americans — page one.” On Oct. 16, 1967, he was back in Cabell Hall.

By then the nation was fully enveloped in the agonies of the Vietnam War. Harvey, like many of his fellow Americans, was in favor of pulling out all the stops to win the war quickly and get it over with.

“We should either drive it or park it,” Harvey said in reference to the war. “A faucet dripping American blood — endlessly, ceaselessly, purposelessly — anywhere in the world is inexcusable and un-American.”

Harvey also offered his views that evening on contemporary life. He said he didn’t believe in the “Pollyanna premise of no work and all ease, all honey and no bees.

“Earth isn’t supposed to be paradise. Paradise is being prepared somewhere else. We have to establish here whether we deserve to be there. This is a disorderly planet and will continue to be.

“We will not be able to do without mopping and sweeping and hoeing, not ever. Weeping for a dead past is vain and foolish. Those good old days were good, but now they’re gone. Now they’re the good new days.”

The reigning Miss Charlottesville, Tonya Byers, was one of the people who traveled to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport to see Harvey off after his two-day visit. A Daily Progress photographer snapped a picture of the grinning commentator with the beaming beauty queen.

“If [my wife] sees this picture, she’ll never believe it was a business trip,” Harvey joked.

In fact, the couple apparently enjoyed one of those marriages most newlyweds dream of having. Harvey always referred to his wife as “Angel,” and she was all that and more. In 1997 she became the first producer to be inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.

An indication of the family relationship that Harvey had long established with his listeners came on May 17, 2007. During his daily broadcast that day he told his radio audience that his beloved wife had been diagnosed with leukemia.

When Mrs. Harvey died at the age of 92 on May 3, 2008, she was lauded as a pioneering force for women in radio. Bruce DuMont, founder of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, was quoted as saying, “She was to Paul Harvey what Colonel Parker was to Elvis Presley. She really put him on track to have the phenomenal career that his career has been.”

That career would last only a little longer. On Feb. 28, Harvey died in a hospital near his winter home in Phoenix. The voice heard by Americans on more than 1,200 radio stations across the land, as well as 400 Armed Forces Network stations around the globe, was stilled. One of Harvey’s proudest moments had come in 2005, when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s most prestigious civilian award. By then the “apostle of Main Street” had become a cultural icon, embedded in the psyche of America’s consciousness.

In a way Paul Harvey had become something akin to a human version of Route 66 — aged, yet loved all the more for the stories told and yet to be told.