News Commentator Paul Harvey Loved His Jefferson County Farm
Local radio listeners protected his family privacy
Radio newsman Paul Harvey was one of the nation’s most beloved broadcasters. His twice-a-day broadcasts reached an estimated 24 million people every week thru 1,200 ABC News stations, 400 Armed Forces stations, and columns in 300 newspapers.
PHOTO Paul Harvey in his ABC Radio network broadcast booth. The Atlantic Magazine.
He became the undisputed voice of America’s heartland starting in the 1950s, opening every broadcast with his upbeat greeting: “Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey… Stand by for news!”
He was the voice that stopped people spinning the radio dial. For millions, Paul Harvey was part of their daily lives.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, he descended from five generations of Baptist preachers. His father, a policeman, was murdered by thieves. Yet Paul Harvey’s distinctive voice was always upbeat, friendly, and clever. He captured peoples’ attention like no one else. On April 1, 1951, the ABC Radio Network debuted Paul Harvey News and Comment. Every day he rose at 3:30 a.m. at his Chicago home to scan national wire reports for unusual, humorous or heartwarming reports he could re-kindle for his national broadcasts.
Cheery comments such as, “I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is” and “Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be” favored him with advertisers and listeners. His enormously popular feature “The Rest of the Story” preceded his show-closing catchphrase, “Now you know The Rest of the Story. I’m Paul Harvey. Good Day!”
The Reveille Ranch
1938 Nash Lafayette Custom similar to one enjoyed by Paul and Lynne Harvey . (c) Barrett-Jackson
For decades he owned a farm in Jefferson County nicknamed The Reveille Ranch. He and his wife Lynne, whom he always called Angel, visited on weekends from Chicago. Their son, Paul Harvey, Jr., owner of two additional farms in Missouri, often accompanied them.
Paul Harvey, Jr., told Missouri Life Magazine in 2017, “My dad met my mom in St. Louis in 1940 when they were both working for radio station KXOK. She was a well-known radio broadcaster and personality, and my dad came on to KXOK as program director. They actually met on the elevator and my dad, thinking fast, asked if she could give him a ride to the airport. She wasn’t exactly sure what to say but agreed and they stepped into her 1938 Nash Lafayette Coupe. On the way to the airport, she asked Paul, ‘What time does your flight leave?’ and Paul replied without a hitch, “What flight?’ They were married within the year, in June 1940.”
Angel, formerly known as Lynne Cooper, grew up in University City and was a Washington University graduate. When they met, Harvey was attracted by Lynne’s white 1938 Nash Lafayette coupe. They maintained it in mint condition throughout their marriage. The Harveys could often be seen driving that car on Arnold’s Highway 61 as local phone lines burned with chatter that the famous couple was cruising around town.
PHOTO Paul and Lynne Harvey . (c) National Radio Hall of Fame
In 1998, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described Paul Harvey’s 350 acre farm a few miles south of Arnold as “raising soybeans and cattle. It was situated down a winding country road, past a trailer park, an ill-tempered spotted dog, a collection of small houses and pickups, and then, the massive entrance gate. It is a collection of well-kept white buildings in the rolling green countryside. The bluffs of the Illinois shore, across the Mississippi River, are in the distance.”
Paul and his Angel often worked together on his scripts, and he typically credited his success to her influence. She was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1997, seven years after her husband. Paul Harvey, Jr., joined the creative team to help his mom and dad prepare scripts for “The Rest of the Story” as they grew older. In 2001, Paul Harvey, Jr., was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, too.
Protecting Privacy
Many Jefferson Countians met or saw the Harveys during the flood of 1993. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in 1998, “Some of them haven’t forgotten the day Paul Harvey, in his yellow Cadillac, drove over big hoses pumping water out of a flooded village. He did it twice. It gave the National Guard fits…”
“No one, it seems, claims to know for certain just where the Harveys’ place is. They’ll give clues, but to hear them tell it, they just don’t know for sure. It’s a wonderful, small-town conspiracy of silence. But just about everyone has a Paul Harvey story,” wrote Post-Dispatch reporter John M. McGuire.
For example: Mary Hostetter, of the Blue Owl Restaurant, said Paul Harvey loved the Blue Owl’s fresh rhubarb pie. “When he’s here, we don’t give away his identity or whereabouts,” she said. “But then he talks, everybody knows. During the flood, he came here in a boat and shouted, `Hi, Mary! Got any pies left?’ He’s just a neat man.”
Carl Bossert told McGuire that when the Harveys are at Reveille, “everyone knows because of the big, black limousine that cruises up and down the road. I like to listen to him on the radio, I love the homespun yarns,” Bossert said.
Reveille is where Angel Harvey stored her Nash Lafayette Coupe and, also, an antique fortepiano hand-made by the famed Conrad Graf of Vienna in the 1840s, whose pianos were played by Beethoven. It was discovered in the 1950s at a central Missouri farm.
PHOTO 1998 Canary Yellow Mercedes-Benz Kompessor SLK 230 convertible like Paul Harvey had (c) ClassicChrome.net
Paul Harvey’s only child Paul Jr., who as an adult used his father’s real surname, Aurandt, was a concert pianist after graduating from Chicago Musical College. Then, for more than 25 years Paul, Jr. was a big part of the family business, helping to write scripts for “The Rest of the Story.”
“`The Rest of the Story’ is because of my mom,” he told the Post-Dispatch in 1998. “She saw the value of that as something separate from other features in the news.”
When broadcasting for ABC Radio Network from downtown Chicago, the Harveys lived near each other in River Forest, an affluent suburb infamous as home for some of Chicago’s well-known crime bosses dating to the Al Capone era. Paul and Angel’s River Forest mansion was where Paul, Sr., rose before dawn for a bowl of oatmeal with vitamins before typing his scripts on yellow copy paper.
The 1998 Post-Dispatch story noted that the Harveys used limousines liberally. “Angel Harvey also has a white car parked in the River Forest garage. It’s a Rolls Royce. Next to it is Paul Harvey’s newest toy – a 1998 canary yellow Mercedes-Benz Kompessor SLK 230 convertible. License plate ABC PH. “This is something I drive when I don’t want to attract attention,” Paul Harvey told the reporter, laughing about the sexy Kompessor that Harvey claimed to drive “only on days when the sky is clear and birds aren’t flying.”
PHOTO President Bush gives radio broadcaster Paul Harvey the Medal of Freedom. White House photo
A British newspaper, The Independent, wrote, “Harvey earned his money the old- fashioned way: By doing everything himself. He chose the stories for his shows, wrote his own scripts, and read the commercials on air, insisting that he only endorsed products he believed in. The items he selected had to pass an ‘Aunt Betty Test,’ named after a typical Missouri housewife (in fact his sister-in-law). If the story was unlikely to interest her, he wouldn’t use it.”
Harvey was known as an arch conservative yet there were limits: in 1970 he urged Richard Nixon not to expand the Vietnam war into Cambodia. “Mr. President,” he said on the air, “I love you… but you’re wrong.” In 1982, he announced his support for the Equal Rights Amendment because it would mandate equal rights for women.
“’There are places in the world where women are conspicuously and forever second class,” he said on the air. “But none of those places is any place you or I would want to live. The American legal system forgives criminals, embraces illegal immigrants and kowtows to the gimme-gimmes. Any hophead can get a free ride through three layers of jurisprudence demanding his ‘rights. Without the Equal Rights Amendment, women don’t rate as high as those sleazy night crawlers,” he said. When the Amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate, some pundits said Angel had influenced his opinion. Yet it was never added to the Constitution due to historic political arguments that continue today about women receiving equal pay, serving in the military, and other gender issues.
Lynne (Cooper) “Angel” Harvey died in May 2008. Paul Harvey, Sr., passed away nine months later, in February 2009.The Harveys deeply loved their Jefferson County hideaway. They escaped to it as often as they could. They loved the Jefferson County area and the people. That is obvious when you enjoy these two videos they created. One is a tribute to Jefferson County police officers, the other a tribute to local farmers.
Story for the City of Arnold by Jeff Dunlap. Good day!