After my TV audition debacle, and with Amy’s tacit support, I began to clown around with my newscasts. This was the heyday of the folksy broadcaster, such as Paul Harvey. So I began ending my news with nonsensical sign-offs such as “And remember, folks, you can’t make a silk purse out of a corn crib” or “Don’t forget, friends, that you can take the farmer out of the country, but you can’t make him drink.”
Oscar Halvorson, the station owner, got a chuckle out of these little jokes. His wife Faye, on the other hand, was driven into a cold fury by them. But now I was feeling my oats, and her cutting remarks to me about my ‘childish on-air tricks’ didn’t draw blood anymore. It was obvious that she had no say in how Oscar ran things, at least as far as I was concerned; so I shrugged off her hectoring with a grin.
I settled into my new career, still missing the camaraderie of clown alley, but resigned to the fact that I would have to carry on the hallowed traditions of lunacy all by myself there in northwestern North Dakota. I was buoyed up considerably by the letters and postcards I continued to receive from my old pals back at Ringling. I rejoiced when I got Tim Holst’s announcement of a baby girl born to him and his wife Linda. Chico sent me several long letters detailing the trials and tribulations of being the new boss clown -- he wrote that his ultimate goal was to displace Bill Ballantine as Dean of the Ringling Clown College. Apparently Uncle Bill was losing popularity with Irvin Feld and upper circus management due to the poor material he was sending as First of Mays. (And it wasn’t long before Chico and his wife Sandy did become the heads of Clown College; Uncle Bill was given a lukewarm send-off by the show and returned the favor by writing his autobiography, Clown Alley, in which he alternately showered affection on the circus and broiled it with acidulous comments on certain inept personalities.)
The month of May that year was a typical meteorological Jekyll and Hyde story for North Dakota. The month started with raging snirt storms -- a combination of blowing snow and dirt that froze cattle where they stood and covered everything with a gray slush. Then the temperature rocketed into heat wave mode in a matter of days. My journal shows that on May 25th it reached one-hundred degrees by two in the afternoon. There was only one thing a newsman with my background could do under those circumstances -- I would broadcast an attempt to fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of Service Drug on Main Street.
At noon I took my trusty mike out into the blazing heat, with egg in hand, and cracked it over a cement slab in front of the drug store. The crowd of perspiring citizens that gathered to watch this carnival stunt freely offered their opinions as to whether or not the egg would cook. The majority were sure that it would. I gave the egg a full two minutes to fry -- with breathless commentary. But the egg did not cook at all -- not even a little white around the edges. As the crowd melted away I was left, not with egg on my face, but egg on the sidewalk -- which I had to clean up to the satisfaction of the manager of the drug store. Do you have any idea how hard it is to wipe up egg yolk on a hot sidewalk? It was anticlimactic, to be sure, but it made the local newspaper, and even old Ben Innis, the Voice of KEYZ Radio, our main competitor, mentioned it on his evening newscast. Oscar was pleased as punch with my caper -- he gave me a ten-dollar a month raise.
It looked like I had a future in radio, after all. Channeling my goofy clown ideas into audio nonsense. My success impelled me to the next Great Leap Forward in my life’s trajectory.
I was going to ask Amy to marry me.
(to be continued)
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