The Last Sign-Off to the Many Voices of Ray Goulding

There were probably one o’clock classes in astronomy, Greek history or physical geography that, if I had taken them, would have changed my life. But, when I went back to college after a khaki interruption, you didn’t take one o’clock classes if you could humanly avoid them, because that was when you listened to “Matinee With Bob and Ray” on WHDH in Boston.

The Ray was Ray Goulding, who died the other day after a long battle with kidney disease. In 1946, he was a newscaster at the station and Bob Elliott was a disc jockey.

Their show’s theme was a peppy tune called “Collegiate,” more recognizable for its melody than its title. What followed had the same appeal to inquiring minds, I suppose, as Mad magazine, the National Lampoon, Pogo, Stan Freberg and Li’l Abner. It saw the world and its ways as fit material for silliness, the nonsense that lurks just half a step beyond solemnity.

One of their creations was a cooking hostess named Mary McGoon, and few will now remember that she was based on the pioneer radio kitchen person Mary Margaret McBride. Their Mary ran for President (“Racing With McGoon”), trading on the popularity of her Half-Baked Indian Pudding and her quince and kumquat jam.

They once did a small-businessman’s seminar (“I’m Waldo Sturdley and I’m three inches tall; please pass the grape drink”), filling a whole table with their apparently endless supply of voices.

Ray was Steve Bosco, their sportscaster who signed off with “This is Steve Bosco, rounding third and being thrown out at home”) and whose frequent message to headquarters was “Everything’s gonna be all right, send more loot,” a catch phrase that had a special appeal to dollar-short scholars.

Bob was Wally Ballou, their adenoidal on-the-spot reporter who got everything crisply and authoritatively wrong, as, most famously, when he described a brick wall because he inadvertently faced the wrong way at a parade.

It was radio poking fun at radio. And, as always with radio, what Bob and Ray did invited the imagination to see those small tycoons passing the grape drink and never getting around to discussing much of anything.

Their continuing feature was “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife” (“the story of a young girl from a deserted mining town out West who becomes the wife of handsome Larry Backstayge, the idol of a million other women”). It was a parody of a successful soap opera, “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife,” whose own premise was not greatly different.

Then, in late April, 1954, television began live coverage of what has gone into history as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of Communists and Communist influence in the government and in the Army. It was reality television at its most watchable, and millions of us set everyday chores aside to follow the proceedings.

In what I think was their finest hour, Bob and Ray mirrored the hearings in a long sequence on “Mary Backstayge,” in which Larry tries to get zoning permission to build a 12-story summer skyscraper home on his Long Island estate. This brought him dead against Zoning Commissioner Carstairs, whose low, mocking and insinuating voice (Goulding’s) was extraordinarily like McCarthy’s. The other principals in the hearings found their counterparts in the zoning case. One of the defense attorneys became “our beloved dogcatcher, Roy Perkins.”

Television had already taken a whack at Sen. McCarthy, in the form of Edward R. Murrow’s courageous “See It Now” program a few weeks before the hearings began, so the Bob and Ray effort was not unprecedented. Two generations later, it is also probably impossible to convey the apparent power and the real fear (not of disclosure but of malign destruction) that the senator represented, and the courage it took to challenge him, not least as farce on a heavily sponsored morning radio program.

But the reduction to absurdity by Bob and Ray of the acrid infighting of the hearings was indeed its own brave and lethal whack at McCarthy. The combination of fact and foolishness and the daily revelations by television of the senator in action proved a kind of one-two-three punch. The Senate shortly thereafter voted 67-22 to condemn its colleague from Wisconsin for his irresponsible tactics.

By the time of the hearings, Bob and Ray had left Boston and were doing the morning show on a New York station. They were also en route to becoming a national treasure, through their commercials and later on NBC’s “Monitor” program.

They tried television early, but it was not their medium, any more than it had been Fred Allen’s. You couldn’t make visible what the mind’s eye saw as you listened to their vast and varied company of voices. (I do remember Ray as Mary McGoon in an apron giving a recipe at a serving window between kitchen and dining room, the arrangement tactfully serving to conceal his round and jovial, distinctly masculine face.)

A Broadway show in more recent years worked better--mostly, I suspect, because a couple of generations (at least) of Bob and Ray fans wanted at long last to see what their heroes really looked like.

They had a fine run, Bob and Ray, more than 40 years of inventive, clever and gentle humor. (Their send-up of the hearings was probably the more telling because it was so deceptively gentle.) I hope that their kind of unabrasive, uncaustic comedy is not lost to us, although we’ve lost one of its masters.