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Ray grimaced and shook his head. She was a bitch. Call it Norwegian negativity, but, boys, it was a dubious invention. He had been alarmed by it from the very beginning. He slowly came to despise it. Radio was too successful to be killed. But how awful!
    The sheer bulk of it! After a year they had broadcast more words than Shakespeare ever wrote, most of it small talk, chatter, rat droppings. Radio personalities nattering about their pets, their vacations, their children. Dreadful. The thought that normal healthy people didn’t have better things to do than sit idly absorbing it all—the daily doings of Avis and her cheery friends and Little Corinne warbling “My North Dakota Home” and LaWella’s recipes for oatmeal cookies, the cowboy bands, the Norsky Orchestra, Grandpa Sam telling the story of Squeaky the Squirrel, and Vesta droning on earnestly, plowing through Louisa May Alcott—it was eminently dreadful, he thought— I hope to high heaven people don’t listen to all this!
    Radio invaded the home and distracted the family with its chatter and its gabble. It only made sense as a service for the elderly, the sick, the crippled, the shut-ins, the feeble-minded. That was why Ray told Leo to be careful to avoid references to people going somewhere—e.g. “Dress warmly when you go to work tomorrow . . .”—it would make the bedridden feel bad.
    But the audience grew and grew, and it wasn’t all cripples—persons apparently sound of mind and body sat enthralled by this trash.
    Every day brought more people hoping to audition, a long snaky line of mouse-faced women in cloches and pimply men in shabby dinner jackets clutching retouched photographs of themselves, clippings from hometown papers, letters from their friends. A man in a cape , for crying out loud. There were dialect comedians, elocutionists, yodellers, mandolin bands, church sopranos, novelty trombonists, gospel-singing families, people who did train imitations on the harmonica, eephers, Autoharpists, a regular Pandora’s box of talent, everybody and his cousin trying to worm their way onto the airwaves. They stood shuffling in the vestibule and around the cashier’s cage, they lurked in the back hall between the kitchen and the scullery, they waited patiently, silently, ready to burst into great terrible grins at the approach of Management. A man even accosted Ray in the men’s room. “I’d be glad to help around the place—wash dishes, peel potatoes,” he said softly, “if you could get my girl on the radio. She sings. She’s fourteen. She’s waiting in the car.” Pleadingly, he put his hand on Ray’s shoulder as Ray took a leak—Ray jumped two inches.
    The ambition to get on the radio puzzled Ray, who thought of performers as children, idiots, idiots who happen to enjoy being watched, and then he had an alarming thought. If all these people wanted to get on the radio, chances were that one of them was a nut. Somewhere in this mob of talent was some screwball who wanted to ruin him by getting on WLT and doing something so repulsive and vile as to make his name Mud in thousands of homes, including the Pillsburys’. Someone who’d burst into a joke about humping a sheep, or launch into the one about the young man from Antietam who loved horse turds so well he could eat ’em. Or the beautiful girl from the Keys who said to her lover, “Oh, please! It will heighten my bliss if you do more with this and pay less attention to these.”

    So, as WLT approached the end of its first year, he decided to sell it.
    He told Roy, “So the restaurant is making money. Fine. But if I could sell the sonofabitch radio station, I’d do it tomorrow.”
    â€œSell it to me and Roy Jr.”
    â€œDon’t want to sell it to somebody in the family.”
    â€œWhy not? We’ll buy you out,” said Roy.
    â€œDon’t,” said Ray.