My first reaction to hearing that Paul Harvey had died -- to be honest -- was surprise that he was still alive.
It's not like I followed his career all that much. In fact, while he may have broadcast in Chicago, the first time I heard of him was in the wild squatter scene of West Berlin in the 1980s when one of the few radio stations in English was Armed Forces Radio and he was on that.
I can remember hanging out with the "posse", in the ramshackle surroundings of a building that only a few years earlier had been abandoned, passing around bottles of vodka and beer and engaging in the kind of crazy chitchat that only people in their twenties can do when all of a sudden out of the radio-cassette player came these memorable words:
"A woman was all alone in her house, in bed. A man broke in. He climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. He forced open the door. He leaped upon the bed, tore off the covers and sheets. At which point, the woman pulled a gun from under the mattress and shot him dead three or four times."
Then came a pause right before the finale:
"And that's why we need guns in America."
The complete salacious absurdity of the story was only intensified by our bohemian surroundings. We were a long way from the America of Ronald Reagan ... and Paul Harvey.
In a way I guess his passing at this moment is appropriate. It seems the era of Ronald Reagan is finally over. And that's a good thing. May he finally rest in peace.