"No One Dies Tonight."

At KGCX I learned that people dislike having their names mispronounced. Especially dead people -- or, rather, their relatives. The Everson-Coughlin Funeral Home handled most of the stiffs in Williston and paid ten dollars per obit announced on the air, as long as they were handling it. One of the first obits I read was for a Richard Sylvester Koch. I pronounced ‘Koch’ as cock. Even mild mannered Oscar got on my case about that. So I learned forever after that Koch is pronounced like the soft drink -- Coke.  Except, apparently, in New York, where a Koch is a Koch, with no apologies.

Another thing I quickly learned was that there’s news and then there’s news. The real news was handled by the Williston Daily Herald and KEYZ Radio. The paper had six full-time reporters covering everything from church basement suppers to murders. KEYZ had Ben Innis -- the Wise Man of Williston. Born and bred in a log cabin on the Missouri within a stone’s throw of the town’s Pioneer Park, Ben knew everyone -- and everything. He was more familiar with the skeletons in the closets of the elites than he was with his own wife. Sometimes he seemed to announce the news before it actually happened, such as the time he said on his evening broadcast that the city council had voted unanimously to reject a zoning change for the Maisy Building. The council meeting wasn’t until eight that night, but Ben told me “those idiots won’t pass it just because old man Maisy is from Idaho -- he’s not a local.” And Ben was right -- it didn’t pass.

I, on the other hand, was not expected to handle any hard news. Not if it interfered with business. This was brought home to me when a prominent furniture store owner killed himself. He’d been ill for a long time and his store was going into the toilet, so one evening he pulled out a hunting rifle and drilled himself. “Self-inflicted gunshot wound” is how the paper and KEYZ phrased it. KGCX didn’t phrase it at all, because, in the words of station manager Bill Anderson, “They’re one of our biggest advertisers -- we can’t air anything about it; otherwise they’ll yank their advertising.” When I pointed out that the paper and the other station were running it without any undue loss of revenue he just shook his head warily and said “You don’t understand the nature of the beast yet, Torkildson. Just kill the story.”

So I killed the story. And realized, in the parlance of today’s internet world, that I was to produce nothing but clickbait. I began wondering if maybe the clown academy idea was not such a bad idea after all. If I could actually get it up and running I could say ‘adios’ to KGCX and their faux news.

I was now having lunch with Becky Thingvold twice a week at the Service Drug Store. She lapped up the baloney I provided about the clown school I meant to open, and the paper published these fables with a straight face.

“Here’s why I became a clown” I told her at the beginning of our luncheon confabs. “I read a book by Harpo Marx when I was a kid, called Harpo Speaks!. In the book he tells about going to Russia in the mid 1930’s on a goodwill tour for the State Department. One evening he was scheduled to do a show in Moscow at 7pm, but the stage manager nervously told him to wait. Finally, at nine that evening he was told to go on. He immediately noticed that despite his best efforts at zaniness the audience sat like wooden statues and kept staring at a darkened balcony as if waiting for a cue. Finally a roar of laughter came from the darkened balcony and the audience immediately began laughing and cheering and clapping. Harpo couldn’t understand what was happening, so he just finished his show, took his bow, and got off. That’s when the stage manager told him that Josef Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator, had been the one who held up the show and then burst out laughing at Harpo’s antics. In fact, he now wanted to meet Harpo up in the balcony. Harpo was understandably nervous, since this was right in the middle of the Great Purge, when Stalin had tens of thousands of Russians executed for no reason except he didn’t think they were good Communists. So Harpo goes up to see Stalin and they chat a minute through an interpreter. Stalin tells Harpo he enjoyed the show and that it took a lot of strain off him for the night. And then a clerk comes in, bows, and whispers in Stalin’s ear. Stalin smiles, shakes his head, and tells the clerk something that surprises him. The clerk leaves, Stalin shakes Harpo’s hand, wishes him well on his Russian tour, and leaves with his burly bodyguards. The translator stays behind and tells Harpo, with tears in his eyes, that the clerk was from the execution detail, telling Stalin that the killings were ready to commence. Stalin had replied ‘no one dies tonight.’ He was in too good of a mood after watching the clown perform. The translator then kissed Harpo’s hand and told him ‘You have saved hundreds of lives today!’”

Becky was visibly moved by this story. She knocked over the ketchup bottle to grab hold of my hand after I said softly: “That’s why I became a clown -- so maybe someday, somewhere, no one has to die.”  I thought perhaps we were going to kiss right then and there in Service Drug. But instead she said: “What a great line to end my next piece on your school! This might get me the Sevareid Award!” Then she hurried back to the newspaper office, thanking me for the fried egg sandwich I’d gotten her. I stuck around a while in the booth, idly breaking wooden toothpicks in half.