WLT (3 page)

“I have wasted half my life in the company of boring and stupid and ofttimes treacherous men but I have yet to regret a single moment I spent alone with a beautiful woman,” said Ray. “And I've yet to meet one who isn't beautiful.”

He couldn't help himself, Ray said. If there was a stylish woman nearby, he had to stand by her. And then he smelled something, and that wasn't his fault, was it? A lovely woman gave off a glow. He felt young and lively next to her, found himself telling stories and jokes, and if she didn't tell him absolutely no, to get away, he stayed stuck to her, and eventually, sometimes, he got lucky. “If I was your age, I wouldn't have time to come to work at all,” said Ray. “I'd be bed dancing day and night.”

Roy was disgusted with Ray's romantic ways, and told him so, but it was only envy, Ray could see that. Roy was a frustrated man, and his bad breath was a sure sign of sex deficiency. “Roy breathe on you yet today?” Ray would whisper to Laurel, the receptionist. “Ripe, huh? I tell you, he smells like the cemetery after the earthquake hit. No wonder he can't get his ashes hauled, huh?” Laurel Larpenteur had a creampuff mouth and big brown eyes and was one of Ray's favorites. Such a cutie. He loved to stand behind her and put his hands on her little shoulders and let his fingers tiptoe down the slope to her collarbone. He was saving her for a lucky day.

He told Laurel, “My brother Roy is one of the great original minds, but unfortunately he never wrote it down. But then, most of it was wrong, of course. Which is typical of brilliant men. Eighty percent of the time when they dip down into the font of wisdom they come up with a handful of horse hockey. You wouldn't believe the crap he's dreamt up. His very first major invention was the rear-drive horse-pushed wagon, which was a thrill to steer, I assure you. Last week, he proposed a radio show based on
eavesdropping
—you'd hang a mike in a hole in the wall, and broadcast it. Once he designed a radio theater —it seats fifteen people and it has
sixty-four separate speakers
all around you so the sound moves around you. Brilliant. Unfortunately, you'd have to own sixty-four radio stations to run the thing. But if a genius like Roy happens to have a good manager like me, he can do okay, but unfortunately he can't bear to be contradicted. So he stays in Moorhead, on the farm, and spends days alone in his workshop. Little cot in the corner and a potbelly stove and his workbench and drawing table. Neat as a pin. His wife sends hot lunches to him in a bucket that winches out on a wire and he winches back his dirty laundry. Why would a man live like this? Alone on the godforsaken prairie surrounded by whispering cornfields and phlegmatic Swedes if instead you could go to picture shows and snazzy restaurants and dance with a beautiful woman with her head on your shoulder and her perfume driving you wild? I tell you, I have wasted half my life in the company of men and I have yet to regret a moment spent with a beautiful woman. Alone, that is. In groups, they're worse than Shriners.”

Ray kept on the trail of Cowboy Chuck through the winter and spring of 1938. He hired a detective named Connors who traced the Cowboy Chuck script to an Underwood typewriter in the sales office, so Ray called in Art Finn, the sales manager.

“If it wasn't my brother, which it wasn't, then it was you, Art, and don't think I don't have a sense of humor, I do, but don't crap in the nest, doggone it.”

Art just laughed. “If I were going to pull a fast one, would I use a typewriter in my own
office?
What kinda squarehead do you think I am?” Art said he thought it might be Reed Seymour. “Seymour's had a snaky look about him for weeks. Ask him. I dare you. Sneak up behind him and yell ‘You're the asshole behind Cowboy Chuck!' and see if he doesn't flinch.”

So Ray called in Reed Seymour. The young man arrived, moist and quivering, eyes dilated, and Ray hadn't the heart to accuse him. “How's everything going then?” he asked. “People treating you okay? You getting a chance to write any scripts for Grandpa Sam these days?”

“Things are swell, Mr. Soderbjerg,” he said in a voice so much thinner and higher than the big deep one he used in introducing
Friendly Neighbor
. “Do you want me to start writing scripts?”

“Mr. Seymour, I just want you to keep on doing good work. You're one of the premier announcers in radio in Minneapolis. You just keep on setting a high standard for the others.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Seymour was too young to know words like
quim
. It was Art all right.
Okay,
thought Ray,
there's one for Art
.
Let him laugh. One is all he gets. Next one is my laugh.

Cowboy Chuck stuck in Ray's craw for months. “Anyone who wants to could walk in and put us on the rocks in a minute,” he told Roy. “Walk up to that microphone and say
Shit piss pecker
and we can kiss it all goodbye.” He leaned forward to whisper this, and leaned back. His brother's breath reeked of Lucky cigarettes and oranges.

So Roy paid Leo LaValley $10 to tell a raw one on the
Noontime Jubilee
, to get a rise out of Ray. Roy sat by Ray's big oak desk with the souvenir coconuts and the
Queen Mary
and the portrait of Vesta that lifted to reveal a naked French girl lounging in a wing chair, and Roy cranked up the volume as Leo said, “So Knute told Inga he loved her so much he wanted to buy her a fancy new bed—he said, I want one with that big cloth thing up over it? She said, a canopy! He said, no, that's
under
the bed and we're going to
keep
it down there.”

Just as Roy had hoped, Ray hit the roof. He jumped to his feet and yelled, “
That's
it!” He fired Leo and drew up a WLT code covering all aspects of broadcasting (“The Principles of Radiation”), including a list of subjects to be avoided—sexual matters, bodily excretions, things that could be considered sacrilegious—and a dress code—jackets and ties at all times, trousers clean and pressed—and tips on music—No “hot” playing. No Jungle Rhythms. No showboating. Play the notes. No Crooning or Moaning. The Principles concluded: “Just follow these instructions. Don't ask why or by God I'll show you why, and this applies to everyone. Put a little starch into the performance, don't whisper. Most importantly, don't get big ideas about yourself. Just because you're ‘On The Air' doesn't make you somebody. You're not. By the grace of God, it is given to us to cast our bread on distant waters. ‘See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.' Eph. 5:15. No exceptions to this policy.
Management
. ”

Leo was hired back the next day, of course, but Ray told the engineers to keep an eye out for people in the
Barn Dance
audience who seemed agitated and to be ready to throw the switch—there were plots, Ray believed, at a certain fraternity at the U and also in the city room of the Minneapolis
Tribune
to smuggle a person onto a WLT show to make a smutty remark. He hired two ushers named Stan and Gus Ekroos, big sturdy fellows, who could remove a person from anywhere in the ballroom in less than twelve seconds, using hand signals and a two-man fireman's carry. Ray made a new hiring policy: no fraternity boys, no college grads, nobody with a newspaper background. He could imagine a person like that running into a studio and yelling, “Suck off!” He could imagine a new announcer reading the livestock report: “Nos. 1, 2, and 3 220—330-pound barrows and gilts sold at 21.50 to 22.75, and No. 1 pig shit, 15-25 cents.” He could imagine the duo-pianists Elmer and Walt playing merrily away as Alma Melting sang,

Or Avis Burnette, Small Town Librarian, going to work weekends in a tavern, and Dad Benson of
Friendly Neighbor
unbuttoning her bodice and drinking sloe gin. “Your breasts are as firm as a tabletop,” he would exclaim as thousands of families across Minnesota and Wisconsin leaned forward. “Oh boy! and look at those pert nipples!” Ray imagined LaWella Wells stopping in the middle of
Adventures in Homemaking
to tell how he had had his way with her for a year. She was so sweet and her breasts like little apples but you didn't need to say so on the radio. “He took my clothes off me and lay on top of me,” she would say. “He put his thing in me. He pressed against me. He made me. It was him, not me. A cheap, vulgar, rancid old man. I hated it. Fortunately, it was over before I knew it.”

W
LT (With Lettuce and Tomato) was founded by the Soderbjergs in 1926 to promote their new restaurant in the old Pillsbury mansion on Nicollet Avenue near the ballpark. Two years before, they had sold the family ice business on Medicine Lake, seeing refrigeration on the horizon, and bought the house, hoping to become the sandwich kings of south Minneapolis. The mansion had been the seat of the famous old flour family, later becoming the Portland Mortuary where two generations of well-heeled Lutherans had been carried out of this world in gloomy opulence, shined on by a French chandelier. Slender, semidressed maidens cavorted over the fireplace.

Dropping the Soderbjerg
j
, Ray and Roy opened Soderberg's Court with six sandwiches on the menu: egg salad, onion and cucumber, toasted cheese, chicken salad, ham and Swiss, and the Hamburg.
Best Quick Lunch in Town at Any Price
, said the sign. The egg salad was tops, four inches thick at the middle and served on wheat bread with a good hard crust, but their first year was grim, long days spent looking at empty tables. They lost a bundle—so they brought in their aunts, Ingrid and Grete, to run the kitchen. The ladies expanded into hot dishes such as Liver Loaf and Salmon Puffs and Tuna Mousse and Baked Baloney, and salads (Confetti Coleslaw, Kraut Rounders) and desserts, which many considered their best feature. The Chocolate Gotcha Cake was fabulous, the Tomato Soup Cake too, the Apple Pie in a Bag, the Cherry Stackups. But Soderberg's still was going nowhere.

The aunts thought the missing
j
might be why. “If you're ashamed of your own name and turn your back on your own heritage, then you're in trouble from the start,” they said, but Ray pointed out that, in Norway, the family name was Molde, taken from the ancestral village near Trondhjem. When his dad, Mads Molde, came over in 1881, he went into ice, that being what he knew best, and started the Molde Ice Company. After he learned English well enough to understand that the name Molde is like a lampshade on your head, he changed it to Beneficial Ice and invented for himself the name Soderbjerg—
bjerg,
meaning “mountain,” and
soder
from Minnesoder—and he immediately felt a surge of prosperity, which he celebrated by changing his first name to Eugene. No, dropping the
j
was small beer compared to Dad. Dad had thrown out as much of his heritage as he could get his hands on. And Americans, Ray said, cannot pronounce “-bjerg” and rather than make a fluff would eat elsewhere. Which, it appeared, they were doing anyway.