WLT (7 page)

But advertisers were waiting, hat in hand, to get into the temple. People approached Ray at the Minneapolis Club, inquiring about sponsoring a show. One day, Mr. Pillsbury spoke to him. Not one of the flour-mill Pillsburys but a second cousin named Paul Pillsbury who was in the pie business. He told Ray that many of the
other
Pillsburys got their ideas from him, that he was the forward thinker in the family, and that if Evelyn Pies (named for his wife) came to WLT and did well, then Pillsbury's Best XXXX would not be far behind.

At last! A Pillsbury! Ray accepted his check on the spot, and that week
Let's Sing
became
The Evelyn Pie Hour
—

And once the dam broke, the river poured in. There was a deluge of money.

Almicus Whole Bran Flakes and Hot Bran Beverage picked up
Organ Reflections
, and
The Rise and Shine Show
briefly became
The Blue Ribbon Shoe Polish Show
and then
The North Star Tooth Powder Program. Adventures in Home-making
was picked up by Crystal Bottled Water (“When neighbors drop in . . . nothing shows you care more than a big cold glass of Crystal Spring Water”), and
Elsie and Johnny
were sponsored by Hummel Hardware and
The Noontime Jubilee
became
The Green Giant Pea Shelling Party
and then
The Wheaties Jamboree
and then
The Bisquick Whoopee
and finally
The Wadena Beanfeed Jubilee
sponsored by Wadena Canned Beans and Cabbage, with The Corn-shuckers Quartet to sing:

Today's Good Citizen
was brought to you by Munsing-wear Wool Work Socks (“One size for all makes a comfortable fit, / Three nice colors and they're hand-knit”) and there was
The Excelsior Bread Show
with sweet Alma Melting and her Bakery Boys singing “Excelsior! Excelsior! It rises ever higher! It's white, you see, for pur-i-ty, so join the Excelsior Choir.” There was Edina Chewing Tobacco (“It never offends”) and DuraTop Desks and VentriloTone (“Ever wish you could throw your voice like this man here?”
Help. Let me out of this box
. “Amaze and amuse your friends with VentriloTone!”) and The Minneapolis Institute of Graphology and The Donna Marie College of Charm and Ramon's Warm Cafe.

As for rates, Ray told Roy Jr. to charge what other stations charged. So he did. The advertisers bought every minute offered to them and begged for more. To discourage them, Ray raised the rates in the fall, and again in the spring, and six more times in the next three years, and nobody complained. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” said Ray. “If they didn't give it to us, I guess they'd throw it in a ditch.”

But the plain fact was: if you were in retail sales and you advertised on radio, you got rich, and if you didn't, you went broke. There were ten big department stores in Minneapolis and five of them turned up their noses at radio and began their long steady decline toward extinction. Newspapers were all well and good if the reader had his eye out for an ad, but for planting the seeds of customer loyalty, nothing beat friendly broadcasting. By 1931, WLT was netting a profit of about $10,000 a week.

The spring of 1931 was cold. There was a false thaw in March and then the blizzard hit. It dumped snow for three days and after that the thermometer froze. On March 15, Ray got his dividend check, and the next week he boarded the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Alma went with him. They stayed at the Gardens of Allah Hotel, gambled at the S.S. Rex in Santa Monica, ate dinner in a restaurant shaped like a hat, rode rickshaws around downtown, and snuck into the Paramount Studio and became extras, standing at the rail of a fake ocean liner and waving and waving as the Marx Brothers darted past, ducking behind them. Ray told Roy Jr. it was the heavenliest two weeks he ever spent in his life. It cost almost a thousand dollars and when he got home, on a cold wet April afternoon, and recalled California, he knew he was in radio to stay. It was the money. He wanted to earn that kind of dough. And it was nice to think that Stanford McAfee, the big man from Manhattan, wasn't earning a fraction of that.

That wasn't McAfee who took the beautiful Alma west on the Chief and made love to her in a cozy roomette as they rocketed through the night, no, and it wasn't McAfee plunking down C-notes and scooping up the chips at the roulette table, with the lady on his arm, and it wasn't McAfee who squired her to snazzy dives and bought her oysters and bootleg French champagne at fifty bucks a pop. It was Ray Soderbjerg, the iceman. “Good for me!” he thought.

He had founded a land-office business and he had firm control of it with Lottie on his side. She had put her twenty-percent in his hands. She told him to run the company and to consider her a silent partner. She said she hoped that she and Roy would reconcile someday, the big stoopnagel, but that she was with Ray when it came to WLT. He was the business head in the family and always had been. So that was that.

Lottie wasn't as bad a singer as a lot of people thought, he decided, and she was sure to improve with experience. So now she had her own show, as “Miss Lily Dale, the Lady With A Smile,” and every morning at 10:45 a voice with a carnation in its lapel said, “And now . . . Gruco brings you Miss Lily Dale with more of your favorite songs—to bring a smile or a tear, but always . . . to lift the heart!” Gruco was a sort of plaster that made wet basements dry. “My basement was dark, damp, a place where I kept potatoes,” said Lottie, who now was ensconced in an apartment at the Antwerp, a stately old pile next door to the Ogden, “but now, thanks to Gruco, it's as elegant as the rest of the home, light and dry and sweet-smelling, a place where one can entertain guests.” She sang three songs, a big horse-faced lady in a wheelchair, and chirped “Goodbye everybody! See you tomorrow!” and then the voice said, “WLT, Your Home in the Air, originating from studios in downtown Minneapolis,” pronouncing “Minneapolis” as if Minneapolis were Paris.
The next time you're downtown at the lunch hour, may we suggest a visit to the famous Soderberg's Court restaurant—home of Soderberg's delicious and handsomely prepared sandwich plates
—he went on, while underneath a piano softly played the “Meditation” from
Thaïs.
Then came
The Classroom of the Air
, when Ray lay down and took a deep snooze.

T
he money kept rolling in. Dutch Brand Coffee wanted a show in which coffee-drinking would be prominently featured, so Dad Benson came up with
Friendly Neighbor
, in which he and his radio family would sit down and eat lunch.

“And do what?” asked Ray.

“Converse,” said Dad.

“Converse?”

“We'll sit and talk and say things back and forth, like families do.”

“Who's going to pay to hear that?”

But it was a beautiful idea, so simple. The show opened as daughter Jo (played by Faith Snelling) was fixing lunch. Her husband Frank (played by various actors: Frank didn't say much, just “Uh-huh” and “Well that's for sure” and some chuckling) was drinking coffee, and Jo told the latest news in Elmville—about Mr. Lind the grocer and his spendthrift wife Hazel, Pastor Tuomy who was new in town and something of a slow learner, the town drunk Walt, the next-door neighbor Bernadine Biggs and her helpless husband Lester, the mailman Mr. Tummler, and Florence Roney, Jo's girlhood chum, engaged for twenty years to the banker's son, Rupert Lemmon. Then Jo said, “There he is now!” and the door opened and in came Dad, to sit and reminisce about old times and quote a few adages and recite a poem and talk to the listeners in a voice as natural and homey as if they were right there, and of course to keep asking for another cup of that
good coffee
. The show thrived from the first instant, thanks to Dad's voice: that warm dry Minnesota voice with a slight burr, a little catch in it, a little hesitation that got the listener leaning forward. Mail poured in. It was the first WLT program to attract tourist traffic, people hoping to see what the performers looked like. They stood outside on the sidewalk, and when they spotted Dad, they whispered, “That's him.”

Oddly, as its audience grew, Dutch Brand Coffee went downhill, a victim of the success of the similarly named Dutch Toilet Cleanser. Briefly, Dutch became Scotch Brand Coffee, but that name raised thoughts of glue in the customer's mind, so they changed the name to Mama's and the company collapsed six months later. The coffee was replaced by Miles Lumber, then by Anne-Marie Cream-Filled Candies, and finally by The Milton, King Seed Company, and every spring the Bensons put in a big garden, which always yielded tons of produce. Jo served very little meat for lunch, they were mostly vegetarians from then on. And Milton, King became a giant in the Midwest. When you thought about flowers and vegetables, you just naturally thought about Milton, King. Thanks to radio and Dad Benson, when Minnesota children read the Song of Solomon, they assumed that all those plants were Milton, King products.

It had happened so fast!
A few months!
In the beginning, people gave speeches, played songs, told jokes, and then suddenly there were
radio
shows, like
Up in a Balloon
with Vince Upton and his wife, Sheridan Thomas, playing the parts of Bud and Bessie, a wealthy Minnetonka couple who, weary of the coal business, decide to sail with the wind in a helium balloon,
The Minnesota Clipper
, and together they drift in the stratosphere, describing the lands far below as Homer Jessie the sound effects man cranks the wind machine and makes geese cries and dribbles popcorn (popped) onto a newspaper for the sound of rain. Homer was a true magician. The brave couple descended to the coast of Greenland to see a glacier break up (a cookie tin loaded with rock salt), landed in the Sahara Desert (a boxful of crushed corn flakes), plunged into the Amazon rain forest (a deck of cards, birdseed, and a C-clamp), and in Hawaii were almost struck by a wave of molten lava (mayonnaise, balsa sticks, and a box of gravel). With a teacup, an ice-cream stick, and a twopenny nail, he could make the firebell ring and the horses dash from the barn and the burning house slowly collapse as the pumpers throbbed and the neighbors screamed—nobody knew how he did it.