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Elsewhere in the news, George Credenza, wife of the candidate for state representative from Louis Credenza, Senior County, spoke long distance last night to her sister in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Lloyd Brossbar, the former Dorothy Kiddons of Rapid City, South Dakota. Mrs. Brossbar is said to have told Mrs. Credenza that the children are well and send their love to their aunt and uncle. KROP has also learned that they thanked them for the chemistry set … The 8 P.M. Worcester temperature was sixty-two degrees.’
    “It was at KROP that I got to do my first remote, calling in my news over the telephone when I was sent to Lincoln to cover Charley Credenza’s maiden speech in the legislature. It was, I recall, a filibuster. No particular issue was at stake, no great principle; Charley just didn’t want to give up the floor. They finally had to vote cloture on him—the first time in Nebraska history. I was there. Marshall Maine was there.
    “But do you know what the Credenzas liked best? Better even than self-reflexive history or on-the-spot coverage? Human interest. Folksy coda. I scoured the wire services and newspapers to feed their need for anecdote, their love of contretemps and feeling for that long line of the pratfallen—stick-up men who pulled their heists in front of police stations on plainclothesmen, double-parked judges who appeared before themselves on traffic raps, candidates for mayor out- polled by their wives. And when, as it sometimes happened, the news was all hard that day, I made up stories. ‘And that would be all the news if it weren’t for the fellow in the Pacific Northwest whose wife filed for divorce today; her first, his fifth. This time, however, Leonard Class of Seattle, Washington, may have some difficulty meeting his alimony payments, for Leonard lost his job as well as his wife. The city fathers are just a little upset with Leonard’s marital difficulties and have voted to remove him from his position as Director of Seattle’s Bureau of Matrimonial Counseling.’
    “‘You have a nose for news,’ Poke Credenza himself told me after one of these stories. And so I had—a flair for all the trivial lessons of come-uppance, an intuition into the Credenza conscience itself. I fueled their condescension with an endless parade of housewives who won national bake-offs with ready-mixes and firechiefs whose homes burned down. The human comedy, the lofty laugh, a bit of patronage, and no harm done.”
    Ultimately he went too far, betrayed by the dark side of his professionalism that came to light in northeast Nebraska.
    These were heydays. There was Uncle Don and his “That ought to hold the little bastards.” Coast to coast, it seemed, in the primest time of that prime time, there were open keys, unthrown switches, bloopers, stoopnagelisms—but diffusing accident, there was form, order, a national sense of the institutional. There was Allen’s Alley, The National Barn Dance, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, Lux Presents Hollywood, Town Meeting of the Air. And not even partisan, a wider community than mere fan —though these were the days of the signed glossy, of the fifty- cent “family album” of stars—something constituent almost, franchised. One knew that all America was tuned in. You can see the photographs in the encyclopedia. The family in its cozy parlor. (It is always wintertime in these photographs.) Father in his business clothes, Sis in wools, Mother with a bit of knitting in her lap, the floorlamp behind her right shoulder, the shade slanting the light forthrightly where her book would be if she were reading. The son is stretched out on the floor, belly to carpet, doing his homework. The gothic radio, like a wooden bell, on a table in the corner. They smile or are concerned or absorbed or wistful, as though they hear a song common to each—an anthem perhaps of some country where they had all once lived. The caption explains that this American family, like so many millions of