Ken Minyard (b. 1939) spent the better part of thirty-five years at KABC-AM (790) and helping define the personality-driven, locally rooted style of talk that dominated Southern California airwaves before national political programming took over the format. He is best remembered for three successive partnerships, each of which carried the KABC morning slot for years, and for a manner on the air that favored conversation and reassurance over confrontation.
Minyard was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and entered radio at thirteen. He went college at San Francisco State. He married in 1958, had two children, and then divorced.
In 1969 Minyard joined KABC as host of his own issues-oriented program. The station was then under the management that built it into one of the country’s first successful all-talk operations, and it gave Minyard the platform from which his career grew. In 1973 KABC paired him with Bob Arthur, and the partnership became the foundation of his reputation.
Robert “Bob” Arthur (1921-1997), born Joseph Arthur Prince and raised in Kansas, had come up as a newsman, working at KTLA and KNX before joining KABC, and he carried the nickname “Mr. News.” His pairing with Minyard produced The Ken and Bob Company, which ran from 1973 to 1990. The show coined the phrase “EGBOK,” short for “everything’s gonna be OK,” and the slogan entered Southern California speech. The program held the top of the Los Angeles morning ratings for most of its run and rarely fell below third place. In 1988 it staged the first live broadcast from a float in the Rose Parade. The chemistry rested on Minyard’s commentary and easy curiosity set against Arthur’s dry delivery and news authority. In 1986 the two men received a joint star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the radio category.
Arthur left the show in 1990. Accounts differ on the tone of the departure, with some describing a retirement and others reporting that management forced him out over his age. Minyard carried the program alone for a short stretch and then asked Roger Barkley to join him.
Barkley (1936-1997) brought his own large reputation. For twenty-five years he had formed half of Lohman and Barkley, the comedy team whose morning show ran on KLAC, KFWB, and KFI and built a cast of recurring characters and a fictional town called Pine City. That partnership ended in 1986. When Barkley joined KABC in 1990, the pairing of two established morning stars made news in the Los Angeles market. The Ken and Barkley Company aired from 1990 to 1996 and, like its predecessor, ranked at or near the top of morning drive for much of its run.
The market changed under them. FM talk shows multiplied and the morning competition grew sharp, and by 1996 the ratings had slipped. KABC removed Barkley. Minyard later said Barkley took it hard and that the station had demanded the change. Barkley was diagnosed with cancer the following year and died in December 1997, within months of Arthur’s death the same spring. Both of Minyard’s signature partners were gone by the end of 1997.
Minyard continued. In 1996 KABC paired him with Peter Tilden, a younger host who brought a more satirical edge to the morning slot. The new program kept Minyard’s accessibility but could not hold the audience, and KABC released both men in 1998 as the ratings fell. Minyard then went to KRLA, where he hosted a syndicated program with his son Rick Minyard for roughly eighteen months, a rare instance of father and son sharing a talk microphone. In November 2001 KABC brought him back, this time alongside Dan Avey, a return that reflected the audience’s lasting attachment to him. On October 15, 2004, Minyard announced his retirement on the morning show, closing thirty-five years on Los Angeles radio.
His career ran outside radio as well, though on a smaller scale. He appeared regularly on the syndicated Dinah Shore television program across two seasons in the 1980s, made a guest appearance on the Fox sitcom Married… with Children, and took a small part in the 1988 film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! In 1986 he hosted an unsold pilot for a television revival of the old joke-telling game show Can You Top This? These projects drew on his radio celebrity rather than building a separate one.
The substance of Minyard’s work lay in his approach to the form. He described himself as a “Bobby Kennedy liberal,” and he kept his programs civil and broad rather than partisan. The shows ran on local concerns, human interest, traffic, food, and the texture of Southern California life, with recurring contributors such as traffic reporter Jorge Jarrin and auto expert Leon Kaplan. He guided listeners through the region’s hard mornings, from earthquakes to the unrest of the early 1990s, and his steadiness in those hours strengthened the bond he had built with commuters over decades. He resisted the move toward shock formats and ideological combat that reshaped talk radio in his later years, and his retirement in 2004 marked, for KABC and for the city, the close of an era in which a morning host functioned as a daily companion rather than a partisan.
EGBOK
At five in the morning the AM booth is a small bright room at the end of a dark hall. A clock with a sweep hand. A microphone on a boom. A board of faders and a rack of cart machines loaded with jingles and spots. Above the door a red bulb. When it burns, a man’s voice reaches a few hundred thousand cars on freeways that feed a city not yet sure the day can be survived. For seventeen years Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur sent three words into that dark. Everything’s gonna be OK. They cut the words to a slogan, EGBOK, and the city said it back to them at gas pumps and breakfast counters. The slogan outlived the show. That is the whole career in a seed, and it is also a problem worth opening.
Ernest Becker held that every culture is a hero system, a set of rules for earning the sense that a life counts in a scheme larger than its own death. The hero system tells a man what to do to qualify for significance and how that significance will outlast him. Religion grants it through the soul. Nations grant it through the flag and the line of descent. Work grants it through the structure that stands after the builder lies down. Becker’s hard claim is that all of it runs on a single fear, the animal’s knowledge that it ends, and that the fear is held off by symbols promising the man he is more than meat.
Set Minyard inside that claim and a small thing turns large. The morning man does not raise the cathedral or carry the colors. He hands out, by the hour, the reassurance Becker says culture exists to supply. His product is the denial, sold retail, five mornings a week, between the traffic on the eights and a spot for a Cadillac dealer in Glendale. The commuter merges onto the Hollywood Freeway in the half-light with a stranger’s death behind every set of brake lights, and a voice he has heard for a decade tells him the city is still here and so is he. The voice does not argue this. It assumes it. Assumption is the gift.
What kind of hero wins by seeming to do nothing heroic? Minyard’s bid for the thing Becker calls symbolic immortality runs opposite to the usual route. He does not build a monument. He becomes a habit. To be woven into the routine of a city is to live in its body, recalled later by people who cannot recall a single thing he said, only that he was there at six while the coffee perked and the kids found their shoes. He earns permanence by dissolving into the ordinary. The achievement hides inside its own modesty.
The record helps here by failing. Minyard’s childhood sits close to blank in the public account, the birthplace contested, the start in radio unconfirmed. The morning man arrives with no recorded morning of his own. Becker named the deepest wish the causa sui project, the wish to be one’s own father, self-grounded and self-made. A man with no documented origin and a microphone stands most of the way there. He is pure present tense. The hour turns over and he begins again, the same warm voice, no yesterday clinging to it.
Sacred words do not carry one meaning. They carry what the hero system needs them to carry, and OK is a sacred word. Turn the dial on that same dark freeway and the word changes shape on every frequency. On the all-news station OK is a number. The jobless rate held, the count from the overnight came in low, the Sepulveda Pass is clear. Reassurance arrives as arithmetic, and the listener relaxes by the decimal. Spin the wheel and the morning business report offers a different OK, the futures green before the bell, no margin call yet triggered, and inside that hero system reassurance is the most dangerous feeling a man can have, the comfort that gets a position carried one day too long and blown to nothing. Spin again and the Christian broadcaster preaches the opposite of EGBOK. This world is not OK and was never built to be. The peace Minyard sells before the traffic is the very complacency the preacher warns against, a soft lie that keeps a man from the only OK that holds, which waits on the far side of this life and not within it. To the preacher, Minyard is a kindly anesthetist working the wrong patient.
Step off the dial and the word splits wider. In a trauma bay near dawn OK means vitals holding, a blood pressure that has stopped falling, and nothing about the day, the city, or the soul. Down a corridor in a hospice OK has been emptied of survival altogether. The nurse who says he is OK now means he is not in pain while he dies, and the family learns to hear the word as mercy rather than promise. To a man who left a regime and a war behind him, OK is a roll call after shelling, a head count, the lie you tell the wounded to keep them still until the truck comes. And to the organizer who reads the morning city as a field of arranged sleep, EGBOK is the enemy itself, the broadcast opiate that floats the commute on a cushion of false calm and sends the worker to his bench unangered. Reassurance, in that system, is theft. The same three words that make Minyard a friend make him, to the revolutionary, a thief of the only thing that might wake a man up.
This is why the morning man stays gentle and stays local. A hero system survives by keeping its sacred terms unexamined inside the house. Minyard keeps the talk on traffic, food, the kids, the chopper over the Cahuenga Pass, the small repairs of the day. He calls himself a Bobby Kennedy liberal and then declines the fight that name might pick. He resists the turn the medium takes around him, because the turn runs on a rival hero system pitched at the same dial.
The shock jock denies death by a different theology. Where Minyard soothes, the transgressor offends, and the offense is the immortality. Howard Stern built a national audience on the premise that the hero is the man who says the forbidden thing out loud and is remembered for the wound. Two metaphysics share one band. The companion wins by being repeated. The provocateur wins by being quoted. One promises the listener he is safe. The other promises him he is alive because he is shocked. FM carried the second voice into Minyard’s market through the early 1990s, and the books began to slip, and the morning that runs on the assumption of order found itself competing against the morning that runs on the thrill of its breach. Minyard once put the trade plainly. Talk radio is tough. You won’t work forever.
Then the hero system met the thing it exists to deny. Arthur left the chair in 1990, pushed out by men who decided he had aged past use. Minyard brought in Roger Barkley, who knew the whole arithmetic of partnership and loss, having outlasted Lohman and once heard himself blamed for ruining the other man’s career. In September 1996 the city tuned in on a Monday and Barkley was gone, removed over a weekend at the station’s demand, and Minyard kept the chair and changed the format and said the day was fine. Within fourteen months both men were dead. Arthur in the spring of 1997, Barkley that December, the two voices that taught a city to say everything’s gonna be OK silenced inside a single year while the third voice stayed on the air and said it again at six.
Hold that picture, because Becker’s whole argument lives in it. The man whose work is the denial of death buries, in twelve months, the two partners who built the denial with him, and goes to the booth the next morning and performs it for everyone else. The sacred word gets tested against two literal corpses, and the test is not whether Minyard believes the word. The test is whether he can keep saying it. He keeps saying it. The hero system does not require sincerity. It requires continuance. The red light burns, the cart fires, the city merges into the half-light, and the voice does the only heroic thing the form allows, which is to show up and assume the day.
On October 15, 2004, after thirty-five years on Los Angeles radio, Minyard told the morning audience he was done. He was a popular man retiring on his own terms, brought back to KABC twice by listeners who would not let the voice go. He had his star on Hollywood Boulevard, won in 1986 beside Arthur, and a city’s worth of people who say to this day that they grew up on Ken and Bob. The symbolic immortality is real. It is also thin, and Becker would press the thinness. The form retired with the man. AM personality radio, the companionable local morning, gave way to national political talk, the transgressor’s grandchildren, syndicated and angry and bound to no city’s freeways. The vehicle that carried Minyard’s denial of death died at about the hour he stepped out of the chair. He sold a city the assurance that everything would be OK for thirty-five years, and the city believed him, and the one buyer he could never reach was time, which took the partners, then the format, then the morning itself.
The light above the door goes dark. That is the last EGBOK. It does not promise anything past the end of the hour, and it never did. The gift was always the hour.
The Beat on the Eights
Randall Collins (b. 1941) argues that the smallest engine of social life is the interaction ritual, and that it runs on four things present at once. Bodies in one place. A boundary that keeps others out. A single focus of attention all parties share. A mood that climbs as they share it. When the four lock and find a rhythm, the ritual throws off three products. Solidarity in the group. A charge in each person that Collins names emotional energy. And a symbol that stands for the whole and holds its charge as long as the group keeps handling it. Profane the symbol and the group turns on the offender with righteous anger. Starve a man of the ritual and his emotional energy drains toward flatness and retreat. Men go where the charge is. They return to the rooms that fill them and avoid the rooms that empty them, and the sum of those returns, run forward across years, is a life and a society both.
A booth at KABC at a quarter to six meets the four conditions before a word goes out. Two men sit at a board. Headphones on. A cough button under the thumb. Cart machines racked and loaded, the jingles cued. A clock with a sweep hand on the wall and a red bulb above the door. Bodies in one place, the first ingredient, met in the most literal way the medium allows. The glass and the closed studio make the boundary, the in-group of two against the dark hall. The clock and each other hold the focus. The mood begins to climb as the second hand comes around toward the top of the hour.
Then the rhythm. Ken sets a line and Bob takes it on the half beat, dry, and the timing is the whole of it. The listener at home hears two men who seem to read each other’s breath. Collins gives that feel a hard name. Rhythmic entrainment. Two nervous systems falling into a shared cadence, turn and answer, the micro-coordination of bodies that no script supplies and no memo installs. Chemistry is this and nothing more occult than this. When the entrainment runs clean the charge flows both ways and out the transmitter. When it stutters the charge dies in the room. Ken and Bob entrained, and the entrainment is the reason a city said their slogan back to them for a generation.
A problem sits inside the praise. Collins is strict about bodies in one place, and he is skeptical that a ritual carries far through a wire. The booth holds two men. The audience is half a million strangers scattered across freeways that never see each other. How does a ritual built for a dyad become a ritual for Los Angeles? The morning form solves the distance with two devices, and the solution is the craft.
The first device is the clock. Everyone tuned to 790 hears the same traffic on the eights at the same instant, the chopper over the Cahuenga Pass, the slowdown at the Sepulveda Pass, the count read out while a thousand men sit in the same backup. The simultaneity manufactures an imagined assembly. No one is in the room, and yet everyone is in the hour, focused on one point at one moment, which is most of what Collins asks of a shared focus. The freeway becomes a dispersed congregation that never learns it is one.
The second device is the portable sacred object. EGBOK leaves the transmitter and rides in the listener’s mouth. He says it at the gas pump to a stranger filling the next car, and the stranger nods and says it back, and the two of them run a small ritual on the concrete with the symbol Minyard handed them at six. The charge does not stay in the booth. It recharges off-air, in micro-rituals between people who never met the man, and it comes back primed the next morning when they return to hear the voice that minted the coin. A sacred object lives by circulation. EGBOK circulated through a metropolitan area for seventeen years, and every gas-pump exchange paid a little energy back up the chain.
Cut to the man in the car. He drives to a job where he takes orders and gives none. Collins has a cold finding here. The order-taker loses emotional energy across his day, drained by every instruction he receives and cannot refuse, while the order-giver gains it. The morning voice reaches that man before the draining starts and lends him a charge to carry in. The companion does not lecture him and does not sort him. The companion entrains him, gentles him into the hour, sends him onto the off-ramp fuller than he merged. The product is not information. The product is emotional energy, delivered on a schedule, and a man will defend the source of his charge the way he defends little else. That is why a habit becomes a thing men grow fierce about, why grown listeners brought Minyard back to KABC twice and say to this day that they were raised on Ken and Bob. They are not recalling content. They are crediting the source of a charge they felt every working morning of a decade.
The partnership ledger reads clean once emotional energy is the unit of account. Bob fused because the entrainment held. Roger Barkley fused for the same reason and from deep stock, a man who had run the morning rhythm with Al Lohman for twenty-five years and brought a trained sense of cadence to the chair in 1990. The booth synchronized again and the books stayed high. Peter Tilden ran cold. Satire keeps a different beat, sharper, angled at the listener rather than alongside him, and the two men never settled into a shared cadence the audience could entrain to. The ritual went flat. The charge thinned. The ratings fell, and KABC released both men in 1998. The pairing with his son ran colder still, and the format explains the chill before any question of talent arises. An afternoon syndicated slot has no morning clock, no metropolitan simultaneity, no freeway congregation focused at one instant. Strip the clock and you strip the imagined assembly, and a ritual with no shared focus throws off no charge. The slot could not entrain a city because the city was not assembled to be entrained.
Then the chain broke at the root. FM multiplied through the early 1990s, and the audience that had faced one point at one moment came apart into a hundred private streams. The listener stopped sharing a focus with the man in the next lane. He began to listen alone, and soon he began to listen sorted, tuned to the station that flattered his team. Collins lets us see what replaced the morning ritual, because the new talk runs a ritual too, a different one. Its charge comes from righteous anger at an out-group, the power ritual that bonds a crowd by naming an enemy and profaning him together. That ritual needs no shared metropolitan focus and no warmth. It needs a target. Minyard’s morning ran on the opposite supply, on a mood the whole dial once held in common, and once the dial fragmented the common mood had nowhere to form. He could not out-anger the angry, and he would not try. He had called himself a Bobby Kennedy liberal and kept the talk on traffic and food and the small repairs of the day, which was the right craft for a ritual of solidarity and the wrong weapon for a ritual of contempt. He saw the engine failing and said so in the plainest terms the trade allows. Talk radio is tough. You won’t work forever. Read through Collins, that is a man watching the chain that fed him come apart link by link.
On October 15, 2004, after thirty-five years, Minyard told the morning audience he was done, and the red bulb above the door went dark. The ritual ended with the man, and the form ended close behind him, the companionable local morning giving way to the syndicated anger that needed no city to assemble. One thing outlived the transmitter. The sacred object kept its charge. People who never sat in the booth and cannot name a single thing the man said still say everything’s gonna be OK to each other at gas pumps and breakfast counters, a coin minted at a board at dawn and still in circulation, a charge running down a chain whose first link is long off the air.
The Boulevard Star
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) holds that cultural life takes place in fields, structured spaces of position where players compete for a capital the field alone makes valuable. Each field runs between two poles. At the autonomous pole stand the producers who work for the regard of other producers, who honor craft and treat the chase for money as a kind of disgrace, where the man who refuses the market wins the only prize that counts inside the house. At the heteronomous pole stand the producers who serve outside demand, who measure themselves by sales and audience size and take the market’s verdict as the verdict. Most fields tilt one way or the other. Commercial radio tilts hard toward the heteronomous pole, since the books rule and the advertiser pays, and the ratings book is the field’s hard currency. The interesting players are the ones who hold an autonomous position inside a heteronomous field, who win craft honor in a house built for the cash register. Minyard is one of these.
Two poles ran through Los Angeles morning radio, and Minyard took one by declining the other. At the craft pole stands the companion, the man whose value lies in a respect that other broadcasters extend, who is called civil and intelligent by the trade and treated as a practitioner of something hard to do well. At the attention pole stands the transgressor, the shock jock, who serves raw demand and takes audience size as the whole of the argument. Both men fight for the same band and the same dollar. They are not doing the same job by different means. They occupy opposed positions in one space, and each position defines itself against the other. The companion is everything the transgressor refuses to be, and the field needs both poles to exist, since the warmth reads as warmth only against the offense, and the offense reads as daring only against the warmth.
Habitus comes first in any Bourdieu reading, the set of durable dispositions a man carries in his body from where he started, the feel for the game that looks like nature and is history. Minyard’s warmth presents as habitus. It does not present as technique. The voice carries an unforced small-town ease that no program director installs by memo and no consultant teaches in a seminar, the disposition of a man who seems to have been formed somewhere plain and kind and to be giving it away without effort. The field reads that ease off the voice and credits it as native. Here the record turns useful by staying blank. Minyard’s origins sit close to undocumented, the birthplace contested, the childhood unrecorded. The field consecrates a habitus the biography cannot confirm. Bourdieu would press exactly there, because the naturalization of an arbitrary thing is the field’s signature move. A disposition that might have been cultivated reads as a gift of birth, and the reading is the value. The warmth works because it does not look like work.
Now the capital. Minyard accumulates the kind Bourdieu calls symbolic, the recognition and prestige that the field’s authorities confer, and he accumulates it at the craft pole where the transgressor cannot reach. He holds social capital too, the durable relations that produce returns, the bond with Arthur and then with Barkley, the bench of contributors, the traffic man and the auto man who give the morning its furniture of trust. And he holds, for most of his run, the field’s hard currency, the ratings, the top of the book for the better part of twenty years. For a long stretch the two capitals move together. The craft honor and the numbers point the same way, and a man who holds both looks unassailable.
The position itself is a stance, a thing Bourdieu calls a position-taking. Minyard calls himself a Bobby Kennedy liberal and then declines to spend the label, keeps the morning on traffic and food and the small repairs of the day, refuses to sort the audience into teams. Read as a stance in the field, the refusal is a bid for the autonomous pole, a disavowal of the cheap heteronomous play that would trade craft honor for a hotter number. The disavowal earns him symbolic capital. The trade reads as integrity, and integrity is the autonomous pole’s coin. The trouble waits in the convertibility. Symbolic capital banks well when the field holds steady. It converts poorly into the field’s hard currency once the field restructures and the hard currency is all the station will accept.
The body enters as capital that depreciates, and the field shows its hand on the aging man. Arthur is pushed out in 1990 by management convinced he has aged past use. Barkley is removed over a weekend in 1996, the city tuning in on a Monday to find him gone at the station’s demand. Read these as the field withdrawing consecration from bodies that have lost their market position. The heteronomous pole prizes the demographic the advertiser will buy, and an old voice depreciates against it no matter how clean the craft remains. The men’s symbolic capital, the respect and the long service, cannot stop the withdrawal, because symbolic capital does not pay the advertiser. Minyard outlasts both partners and survives on the same terms they failed, an autonomous-pole player kept on only so long as his number still serves the heteronomous demand. He is living on borrowed convertibility.
FM multiplies through the early 1990s and the audience fragments. The single dominant position that a top morning man once held breaks into a hundred contested slots, and the heteronomous logic intensifies as the competition sharpens. The dominant currency shifts toward the pole Minyard refused. Attention by provocation becomes the winning play, and the craft honor he banked at the autonomous pole loses its rate of exchange. He cannot out-attract the transgressor and will not try, since trying would spend the symbolic capital that is the point of his position. KABC pairs him with Peter Tilden, the books slip, and the station releases both men in 1998. A man rich in respect and short on the only currency the restructured field will spend gets moved off the board.
He comes back. KABC returns him to the morning in November 2001 beside Dan Avey, and the return reads as the field acknowledging a consecration it could not quite retire, a value the audience refused to let lapse. On October 15, 2004, after thirty-five years, Minyard leaves on his own terms, a thing the field rarely grants and a sign of capital held to the end. The clearest fixing of that capital sits in the concrete of Hollywood Boulevard, the star he won beside Arthur in 1986, the field’s institutions stamping his value into the ground where it cannot be revised. A star is consecration made permanent, prestige set in terrazzo, the autonomous pole’s prize in its most literal form. It marks a man whom the field judged worthy by its own internal measure of craft.
The boulevard fixes Minyard’s value at the craft pole at the moment the field is abandoning the craft pole for the pole of pure attention. His consecration is real and his capital is real, and the field that issued both moved on to a place where neither would trade. The companion holds his star on a street walked by tourists while the morning he practiced gives way to the syndicated transgressor, the heteronomous pole victorious across the band. He kept his honor and lost the exchange rate. That is the position he chose, and the choice was sound by the only measure he respected, and it cost him the field.
Nothing to Pass On
The obituaries might reach for magic. They might say Ken Minyard had a gift, an ear, a feel for the morning that no one could teach and no one could replace. They might call the thing between him and Bob Arthur chemistry, and they might leave the word there, unexamined, as if it named a substance the two men shared and carried into the booth. The trade tells the same story about itself. Warmth cannot be taught. Timing cannot be installed. A man either has the morning in him or he does not, and the ones who have it hold a knowledge that lives below speech, passed from veteran to veteran by proximity and never by rule. This is the romance of tacit knowledge, and Stephen Park Turner (b. 1951) spent a career taking it apart.
Turner’s target is the idea that a group shares a hidden content, a set of tacit rules or skills or presuppositions that sits beneath the surface and gets handed around. In The Social Theory of Practices he presses one question against the whole tradition, from Durkheim through the readings of Wittgenstein, and the question is fatal. By what route does the shared thing travel? If a practice is real and held in common, there must be some way the same content gets from one head into another, and Turner finds that no account supplies it. There is no collective store from which men download a common skill. What the romance calls shared tacit knowledge has no path by which to become shared. So Turner draws the deflationary conclusion. The shared object does not exist. What exists is individuals, each one habituated by his own history, each carrying his own dispositions built from his own long feedback, and the habits of different men sometimes mesh well enough to throw off the appearance of a common practice. The sameness is imputed after the fact. It was never downloaded, because there was never anywhere to download it from.
Turn that on the chemistry of Ken and Bob and the substance dissolves. The two men did not share a thing. Each arrived at the board with his own habits, formed over years Turner would call individual and uncopyable, Arthur the newsman with his dry economy, Minyard with whatever ease his undocumented life had laid down in him. Across seventeen years they calibrated to each other, each adjusting his own habits in answer to the other’s responses, a million small corrections running both ways until the two separate sets of dispositions interlocked so tightly that a listener heard one fused thing. The interlock is real. The shared substance is not. Two nervous systems, each habituated alone, learned to mesh through feedback, and the mesh is the only thing the word chemistry ever named. Take one man out and the mesh is gone, and nothing transfers to the next chair, because the interlock lived in the fit between two particular histories and not in either man’s possession.
This is why no program director could install the morning by memo, and Turner explains the failure better than the romance does. The romance says warmth is too deep to teach, a sacred knowledge that resists words. Turner says there is no content to teach in the first place. A man cannot hand another man his habits, because habits are the causal residue of one life and do not detach from it. The new host does not lack a secret the veteran withholds. He lacks the history that built the veteran’s dispositions, and history does not transmit. You can copy a script and a format clock and a jingle package. You cannot copy the thing that made the copy land, because that thing was never an object sitting somewhere available to be moved.
Arthur fused because two long-habituated professionals calibrated to each other over a long time. Barkley fused for the same reason and faster, a man who had run a morning interlock with Al Lohman for twenty-five years and brought a set of dispositions already trained to adjust, so that when he sat down with Minyard in 1990 the mutual calibration found its fit. Then Peter Tilden ran cold, and the romance reaches again for the loss of magic. Turner needs no magic and no loss. Tilden’s habits, built for satire, angled at the listener and primed for the sharp turn, never settled into a mesh with Minyard’s habits, which were built to run alongside the listener and to soften. Two histories that did not interlock. No blame in it and no mystery, only the contingent failure of two separately formed habit-sets to fit. The pairing with his son ran colder, and the same account holds without any judgment of the men. There was no shared craft that the son failed to inherit, because there was no shared craft to inherit. There were only Minyard’s habits, his own, fitting some partners and not others, the way one man’s gait falls into step with one walking companion and not the next.
EGBOK gives the romance. The slogan looks like tacit social knowledge made audible, a reassurance Minyard performed by following rules he could not state. Turner denies the rules. Minyard followed no buried code that told him how to comfort a city. He had a habit that produced a reassuring effect, laid down by years of doing the morning and noting what came back, and the listener met it with his own habit of uptake, formed by his own years of listening. The meaning they are said to share is an imputation laid over two separate habituations that happen to fit. Minyard’s everything’s gonna be OK was his. The listener’s was the listener’s. Nothing passed between them but sound, and the fit between his habit of saying it and their habit of hearing it did the rest.
The blank record turns useful one more time, and against the grain of every prior reading. The childhood undocumented, the start in radio unconfirmed, the origin a hole in the page. The romance treats such a gap as a lost key, the missing biography that would explain the gift. Turner treats it as beside the point. Even a full record of the feedback that built Minyard’s habits would show a unique causal path and not a transferable content. Knowing exactly how the dispositions formed would not let anyone install them in a second man, because the knowing and the having are different things, and only the having does the work. The missing childhood hides no secret, because there was no secret of the transmissible sort to hide.
So the format’s end reads without elegy. The standard account mourns a lost art and a man no one could replace. Turner removes the art and keeps the man. Nothing was lost when Minyard left the chair on October 15, 2004, because there was no stored possession to lose, no skill-object that died with the practitioner. There were habits, his, exercised for thirty-five years in a particular room against a particular clock beside particular partners, and when FM fragmented the audience and the format dissolved, those habits had nowhere left to interlock. They did not die. They stopped being exercised, the way a key stops turning when the lock is gone. The competence the obituaries call irreplaceable was never the kind of thing that could be replaced or kept, because it was never a thing at all.
One item did pass on, and the contrast carries the whole argument. EGBOK survives. People who never sat in the booth say it to each other still, and they can say it because a phrase is a copyable object and travels with no trouble at all. The phrase moved through a city and outlived the man. The skill that made the phrase land moved nowhere, sat in no store, transferred to no successor, and ended when its conditions ended. Turner tells us why the slogan lives and the craft does not. The slogan was always an object. The craft never was.
The We Without the They
A city wakes in the dark to a sound that should not be there, the ground gone liquid under the bed, the power dead, the phone dead, and a man reaches for the one thing in the house that still works, a radio running on batteries, and turns the dial toward a voice he knows. Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) gives us the apparatus to see what happens in that moment, when a frightened man in the dark finds Ken Minyard already talking, already calm, already telling him the city is still there. The moment is the high payout of this frame, and it also marks the frame’s edge, because Minyard spent thirty-five years performing the thing Alexander says a society reaches for only in crisis, and he performed it without the engine that Alexander says drives the reaching.
Alexander begins from a refusal. An event does not carry its own meaning. Facts do not speak. A break-in at a hotel sits inert for two years and then becomes the gravest peacetime crisis in the republic’s history, and the facts barely change across that span. What changes is the telling. Society tells the event, and the telling runs along a ladder Alexander takes from Parsons. At the bottom sits the level of goals, the mundane traffic of interest and power, the profane in Durkheim’s sense. Above it sit norms. Above those sit values, the sacred and elemental commitments that hold the order together. Routine life stays at the level of goals, and stays there precisely when no one feels the goals threatening anything higher. A crisis begins when attention jumps the ladder, when a man stops thinking about his goals and starts fearing for his values, and the whole public climbs with him. Alexander calls the climb generalization, and he names it the center of the ritual process.
Set Minyard’s ordinary morning against that ladder and the craft comes clear. He keeps the morning at the level of goals on purpose. Traffic on the eights. The chopper over the pass. Food, the kids, the small repairs of the day, the auto man and the traffic man and the weather. He keeps it profane, in the exact technical sense, because a city that feels its values threatened every morning cannot merge onto the freeway and go to work. The deliberate smallness of the ordinary morning is the gift. He holds the talk at the bottom of the ladder so the listener does not have to climb.
Then the ground moves before dawn, or the city burns in the spring of 1992, and the listener climbs whether he wants to or not. Attention jumps from goals to values, from the commute to the question of whether the city itself will hold. Here Minyard’s role changes, and the morning form turns, for a few hours, into the thing Alexander studies. The voice creates what Victor Turner called communitas, a sudden shared belonging that erases the ordinary separations, and it does so through a wire, across a metropolis of strangers who cannot see one another. The hours become sacred time. The man in the dark stops being one frightened person and becomes part of a we, and the voice that assembles the we is the voice that has talked to him at six every working morning for a decade. He believes it because he already knew it. Minyard performs solidarity, and the city fuses around the performance, and then, when the aftershocks fade, he walks the city back down the ladder to goals, to the report on which freeways have reopened and which markets have power. He is a master of controlled generalization. He takes the city up only as far as the crisis demands and brings it back before the climb does harm.
The going up is easy in a crisis, because shared fear fuses an audience to a speaker on its own. The hard work is the ordinary morning, and that is where Alexander’s theory of performance pays the most. A modern performance, he argues, runs on parts that have come apart. The actor, the script, the staging, the means of production, the audience, all separated, all visible as machinery in a way they never were in the face-to-face rituals of small societies. Success means fusing the parts back together so completely that the audience forgets the machinery and reads the performance as sincere. Fail, and the audience sees acting, sees manipulation, sees a man working an angle. The morning booth is machinery laid bare. A board of faders. Cart machines loaded with jingles and sold spots. A format clock. Two men reading breaks between commercials a salesman placed. The achievement is that none of it reads as machinery. EGBOK leaves the transmitter and lands in the car as a friend’s reassurance, not as a slogan a station manufactured to sell a Cadillac dealer in Glendale. The fusion is so total the listener never suspects a performance is underway. That invisibility is the whole of the craft, and it explains the partnership ledger one more time. Peter Tilden’s satire angled at the listener rather than alongside him, and satire shows its own seams, points at the gap between the line and the truth, and the pointing breaks the fusion. The audience saw a performance. With Bob Arthur and with Roger Barkley the fusion held, and the city saw two friends.
Alexander’s civil ritual runs on conflict. Watergate generalizes because a center is felt to be polluted, because countercenters mobilize against it, because the public sorts the actors onto a grid of pure and impure and then purges the impure through a long rite. The trauma process runs the same engine. A carrier group projects a claim of injury, names the pain, names the victim, names the enemy who caused it, and broadcasts the claim until a wider public takes the wound as its own. Pollution drives the climb. The binary code, the sacred set against the profane, the clean set against the unclean, is the thing that generates the heat. And Minyard refused all of it. He performed the solidarity and skipped the pollution. He gave the city the we and never supplied a they. He called himself a Bobby Kennedy liberal and then declined to spend the label, declined to name an enemy at the center, declined to sort his audience into the pure and the impure. He ran, in effect, perpetual reaggregation, the calm that Alexander says comes after the rite, the national healing that Gerald Ford performed when he told the country its long nightmare had ended. Minyard performed that healing every morning for thirty-five years, the reaggregation with no crisis of pollution before it, solidarity at room temperature, a we that needed no enemy to cohere.
This made him decent and it doomed his form. The broadcasters who displaced him are carrier groups in Alexander’s exact sense. They perform a trauma every morning. They name a polluted center, code an enemy as impure, project a claim of injury to an audience already primed to feel it, and run permanent generalization at the level of a values war that never descends to the calm of goals. Partisan talk is the pollution ritual turned into a daily format, the binary code stamped out hour after hour, and it runs hot because pollution is the engine of heat. Solidarity against a named enemy generates more of it than solidarity against nothing. Minyard could bind a city in a real crisis because the earthquake or the fire supplied the threat from outside. He could not manufacture a threat on a calm Tuesday, and he would not. The successors manufacture one every Tuesday. Alexander ends the Watergate essay with a line that reads, against Minyard, as an epitaph for his whole kind of morning. Scandals are not born, they are made. So are the daily enemies of the talk that replaced him. Minyard made friends and refused to make enemies, and the field went to the enemy-makers, because the enemy-makers ran the engine and he had unplugged it.
He left the chair on October 15, 2004, a civil performer in a medium turning toward permanent trauma. His true civil sphere was the rare morning when the ground moved and a frightened city in the dark needed a voice to tell it the we still held. He gave it that, and the giving was real, the solidarity unforced, the communitas not manufactured but found in the shared fear of an actual crisis. The rest of the time he performed the same belonging at low heat and hid the performance inside an old friend’s warmth. He built a we that never required a they, which is the reason it was good, and the reason, once the they-makers arrived with their daily pollution and their hot binary code, that it could not hold the morning against them.
