Growing up in rural Michigan like I did, we were relatively limited in the things that we had for entertainment.
For example, our town’s movie theater would close for the winter after Halloween due to the fact that until 1997 it had no heating system. If you wanted more than one television channel, you had to either get cable or attach an antenna to your house that would make Elon Musk blush and think that he is underperforming.
We were also limited in our radio options. If you were the average kid walking around in the late eighties going into the nineties with your Walkman around town, chances are you were only going to get maybe five radio stations if it wasn’t cloudy.
Which means you ended up listening to things that kids of a similar age in larger cities would probably have never listened to.
For example, I have probably heard more Paul Harvey on the radio than anyone my age probably has. If you were waiting for the school bus, Paul Harvey was on the radio. If you were driving with your parents, chances are you were about to hear The Rest Of The Story.
Heck, that man followed me everywhere. When I would visit my North Carolina grandparents every summer, my grandpa would light up like a Christmas tree when Paul Harvey came on.
Even when I joined the military and would have family send tapes of radio broadcasts from their home area, it seems like Paul Harvey was on half of them at one point or another.
He had many endearing qualities. For one, he was honest. If Paul Harvey told you something it was the truth. Second, the man could tell a good story. He was one of those people I could hear talk for hours. Third, the man was as smart as a whip.
He had almost a prophetic view of the future. It’s almost as if he had been able to see what was coming in the modern political landscape. He saw what things were going to be like in present day.
He saw this…in 1965.
Yes, in 1965, when my own mother was still trying to figure out what her favorite color was Paul Harvey got on the air and recited a speech from an essay titled “If I Were The Devil”.
In it he outlined the various ways in which the world would slowly become corrupted and how it would happen so slowly that we would almost not see if coming until it was too late.
It almost seems strange that the world started going to hell in a handbasket around the time Paul Harvey stepped away from the microphone for the last time.
It is a shame that more people didn’t heed his warning back in the 1960s. Maybe some of the evils that we now have to fight through on a daily basis would have been easier to fight had we just listened to him more closely.
