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10 p.m., he was dead set against a Saturday night barn-dance show. Saturday night was a family’s one night together and radio shouldn’t go barging in and spoil it.
    â€œAll week long, we used to look forward to this,” he told Leo. “My dad came home from the ice plant and played pick-up-sticks with us kids while Mother made spaghetti and meatballs. We did the dishes together and sang all the Norwegian hymns we knew, all three of them, and then we lay around the living room and Mother and Dad told us stories. He was caught in a blizzard once and would’ve died but he heard a bull bellow and he headed that way and walked headfirst into a haystack and crawled in and survived the night. That was our favorite story. It used to scare the bejabbers out of me. Then Mother played the piano. She played songs that could make you bawl your eyes out, like Backward, turn backward, 0 Time in thy flight, make me a child again just for tonight , which made me weep even though I was a child. Then we started the round of baths. I was the oldest and I went last, so I’d sit and read Horatio Hornblower or David Copperfield or Robinson Crusoe. Best night of the week. Why should we ruin this by putting some show on the air that makes people sit around like morons at the state asylum?”
    â€œYou chase every skirt in town and now you stand here and talk about the sanctity of the family?” cried Roy.
    Ray held up his hand. “Every sinner has high ideals,” he said. “Just because you can’t reach the summit doesn’t mean you can’t see it.”
    But there was always a way around Ray, and Leo talked him into it.
    Leo said, “Think of the people who are far away from their families on Saturday night, people who are lonely, people who need a little laughter, a little companionship. Our radio family will be their family. No, it’s not like having your loved ones close, but it’s better than looking at the wallpaper.”
    Ray agreed to a nighttime show on one condition, that WLT would sign off for five minutes to give families a chance to turn off their radios. Five minutes of precious silence, then the chimes and—“WLT now resumes its broadcast day, transmitting at 770 kilocycles from studios in Minneapolis. The correct local time is 7:05 p.m.” Then the band would strike up the Old WLT Barn Dance theme song:
    Hello, hello. It’s time for the show.
We’re all dressed up and raring to go.
Hello to our friends and our neighbors out there,
Won’t you come in and pull up a chair?
Don’t bother to change to your good shirt and pants,
We’re only the Old Barn Dance.
    Â 
    Howdy, friends and neighbors, from the Old WLT Barn Dance here at our old stomping grounds, with some of the home folks here to sing and play your favorite tunes for you—starting off with a bang as we bring up Uncle Lester and his old squeezebox to play you the Yes She Does Polka!
    â€œI hope people aren’t actually listening to this,” said Ray, meaning the Pillsburys. He hated polkas. Accordions depressed him. Uncle Lester pounding out a rollicking polka and crying “Hoo! hoo! hoo!” was all Ray needed to feel down in the dumps all day.

    Every day, Ray posted himself by Soderberg’s front door under the arch of plaster lilies, decked out in a natty blue suit with a polka-dot bow tie, checking the patrons filing in the big oak doors. Not the captains of industry he had hoped for, but a crowd of honyockers and wahoos and lady shoppers and old galoots with an afternoon to kill. Soderberg’s had reopened as a hamburger restaurant, thanks to the tremendous effect of the Lettuce & Tomato station on sales: five hundred were sold daily, Roy invented a Rotary Fryer and Grete and Ingrid slapped the patties on the wheel, the grease floated in the air, the kitchen stank. Radio! A dazzling success! But so dreadful!
    When his Sons of Knute congratulated him on WLT,