Paul Harvey, Bob Cluck, and the Top 50 Banquet

Bob Cluck and I lost a friend yesterday. Paul Harvey, the radio personality, died.

Mr. Harvey did not know that he was our friend, but he was, since the evening in spring of 1961 when he was the featured speaker at the Abilene High "Top 50" banquet. In fact he provided unique content to the friendship that Bob and I had begun in 1955, in seventh grade. We found great humor in insulting each other, gently. The trick then became always having something handy to insult each other about.

These weren't shouted insults, declared out loud, but almost an inside joke. Others might get our humor, but more by inference than intent. Both of us had – still have – low thresholds of mirth, but the mirth was low-key. I think our elders had a lot to do with that. My grandmother was an icon of taciturnity, and her humor was almost the soldier's humor, crafted and honed in the battles of the Great Depression, when she was a widow raising six kids. My uncle Clyde must have studied her closely. Yesterday in a blog, I asked you to look at my blog photo, and note the smile. Clyde smiled exactly like that. But not often. When he did, it was for him the equivalent of jumping up and down on the coffee table.

When Bob and I got to the point where we were going to each other's houses, I found a kindred spirit in his mom, Katherine. She was always composed, never laughed out loud, as most people laugh out loud. When she was really tickled, she would sort of chortle in place, and a look would come into her eyes as if to say forgive me for this outburst. She looked like she could have studied under Jack Benny, or Bob Hope. We formed a bond. I know she was usually glad to see me. I hardly ever walked in the Clucks' door on Grand Ave. that she hadn't just made a lemon icebox pie.

Charlie, Bob's dad, was an insurance executive and by necessity more emotive. Still, he was of a reserved turn of mind. One day, fooling around, Bob and I knocked a hole in the sheetrock of their living room wall. Well, actually, I was the one. I pushed Bob backward harder than I meant to. I thought that was it, for me, in the Cluck household, but Katherine and Charlie, inspecting the hole, found humor in it, as did Bob, heaven knows, who had something he could use on me forever.

When Mr. Harvey came to town in 1961, Bob and I were seniors at Abilene High. I was one of the top 50 graduates, gradewise, and was invited. Bob was not. He has never let me off the hook. Nor I, him. I took to telling people that I taught Bob everything he knows. Bob took to telling people that he knew Mike Grant, who was invited to the banquet and met Paul Harvey. Bob is a greeter at the First Baptist Church in Abilene and I would like to know how many people he told this morning that he knows Mike Grant, arguing, seriously, as a listener might begin to believe, why they don't have a Mike Grant Day in Abilene.

That is Paul Harvey's lifelong contribution to the friendship of just two people in the world he knew. I mourn his loss particularly for that.