Paul Harvey Aurandt (September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009) was an American radio broadcaster for ABC News Radio. He broadcast News and Comment on mornings and mid-days on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays and also his famous The Rest of the Story segments. From 1951 to 2008, his programs reached as many as 24 million people per week. Paul Harvey News was carried on 1,200 radio stations, on 400 American Forces Network stations, and in 300 newspapers.
Early life
Harvey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 4, 1918, He made radio receivers as a young boy, and attended Tulsa Central High School, where he was two years ahead of future actor Tony Randall. Teacher Isabelle Ronan was "impressed by his voice". On her recommendation, he started working at KVOO in Tulsa in 1933 helping to clean up when he was 14. He eventually was allowed to fill in on the air by reading commercials and the news.
He continued working at KVOO while he attended the University of Tulsa, first as an announcer and later as a program director. He spent three years as a station manager for KFBI AM (later KFDI), a Wichita, KS radio station that once had studios in Salina, Kansas. From there, he moved to a newscasting job at KOMA in Oklahoma City, and then to KXOK in St. Louis in 1938 where he was Director of Special Events and a roving reporter.
Career
World War II
Harvey then moved to Hawaii to cover the U.S. Navy as it concentrated its fleet in the Pacific after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He eventually enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces but only served from December 1943 to March 1944 resulting from a medical discharge. He then moved to Chicago, where in June 1944, he began broadcasting from the ABC affiliate WENR.
Career in Chicago
In 1945, he began hosting the postwar employment program Jobs for G.I. Joe on WENR. Harvey added The Rest of the Story as a tagline to in-depth feature stories in 1946. One of Harvey's regular topics was lax security, particularly at Argonne National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility southwest of Chicago. To demonstrate his concern, just after midnight on February 6, 1951, he entered the grounds by scaling a fence and was quickly apprehended by security guards. In 2010, The Washington Post, having obtained 1400 pages of the FBI file on Harvey, described it as an "act of participatory journalism."