#5 The Beaverlick Gazette: "WBVL Celebrates Another Year Entertaining Beaverlick and Letters To The Editor"
Fud Nucklebick had a vision, and that vision was sound.
In 1932, Nucklebick built and brought onto the airwaves WBVL, also known in town as “Radio Beaverlick”, which is just past the end of your AM dial. You just have to turn the knob a little harder than usual. Maybe give a good smack to the side of the radio.
Nucklebick was driven to entertain and inform just the right amount of people, and he decided early in the century that the town of Beaverlick had just the right amount of people: slightly bigger than a crowd, but smaller than a riot.
At first, Nucklebick bought a megaphone and screamed out the window of his home; performing skits, singing the hit songs of the day, doing some commercials, and, of course, the news: every hour on the hour. After he recovered from his injuries incurred when his neighbors beat him senseless, he tried a new tack: A one man show performed at what used to be the Florence and Ethel Twinkleslink Memorial Theatre that Fud Nucklebick wrote, produced and directed, called: “Some Skits, A Little Music, And News Every Hour On The Hour”.
It was going to take three days to perform the entire play. He was beaten senseless after the first five hours, by two old ladies who were the only people left in the theatre.
In 1895, Marconi first broadcast a long-range radio signal, and later the sound of wireless communication via radio waves spread like a virus around the planet, except for one place in South America and quite a lot of Africa, and for reasons no one really knows, Beaverlick.
It was Fud Nucklebick that brought the world of radio to our little town.
When WBVL first hit the airwaves, Fud was doing all the work himself: reading the news (every hour on the hour), playing his Aunt Gertie’s old 78 rpm records, and writing and performing odd skits involving a rotating bunch of characters with weird names who were all supposed to be citizens of some made up town. I didn’t really understand it.
However, no matter what Fud Nucklebick did, it was fine with his fellow Beaverlickers because no one in town owned a radio until a few years later, when by then Fud hired a D.J. by the name of Herm “Uncle Jimmy” Manwaist to play the music. He also hired Colleen Bint and Lou Cratz, two writer/ performers who could really write and perform, as opposed to an anvil, or a centipede, a Kindergarten teacher, or Fud himself.
I interviewed “Uncle Jimmy” Manwaist, who is now retired from working 30 years in a retirement home, and after a long stint in showbusiness with magician and prognosticator Oomad The Omnicent as his assistant “Sierra”, and asked him to talk about his memories of Fud Nucklebick and of working in the early days of radio at WBVL:
“Fud Nucklebick was, in many ways, one of the most disgusting and repulsive human beings I ever met. He was always dropping stuff out of the huge sandwich he always had stuffed in his left hand, and he always had corned beef sticking out of the sides of his mouth. He would eat and smoke his cigar at the same time. He would always talk with his mouth full of sandwich and he would spit stuff at you while he talked,” explained Uncle Jimmy. “Fud was not as keen as he could have been regarding his personal habits. He smelled like a cross between sweat socks, whiskey and cigars, and whatever they can scrape off the walls in the bowels of hell and bring back up into daylight. His eyes were crossed and his nose was pushed over to one side of his head because of the amount of times his fellow townspeople beat the snot out of him. He also walked funny because he had both of his legs broken, again by his fellow Beaverlicker’s. He even used to lisp on his “v” sounds,” he exclaimed incredulously. “How do you even DO that?”
“Let me just say this, however,” said Uncle Jimmy, “Fud Nucklebick was a genius! A visionary! He had a heart of gold…AND he PAID well!”
I asked Uncle Jimmy what it was like working at WBVL in the beginning.
“I was hired on just as Fud was about to transition the station from his kitchen table to the shed he built in his backyard, right beside the brand-new transmission tower, almost 2000 ft. of tower that he built himself after he had gathered and used all the step ladders in the county to build it. Interestingly, just as soon as Fud had gotten all the station’s equipment out of the kitchen, his wife Flip came home after three and a half years, claiming that she couldn’t find ‘that one store’ she was looking for,” Uncle Jimmy remembered. “and she started vacuuming the floor. She was a lovely lady!”
The former WBVL D.J. continued: “So-we were broadcasting from his kitchen and the broadcast was in the air by virtue of a fifty-five-watt transmitter that barely covered a two-block radius. Still, the people who lived in houses closest to the transmitter would hear the radio coming from their house plumbing. Radiation was also a problem. One day Ida Fft (pronounced “Evelyn Goosebaiter”) was working in her kitchen when she heard this horrible “CLANK!” right behind her. She turned around only to find out that her ASS had fallen off, so it was a good thing that Fud got the tower built to get the transmitter farther up into the air.”
I asked him if the heyday of the original employees of WBVL, which was on a Thursday in 1952, was as good in reality as it is currently remembered.
“It was wonderful being live on the air and entertaining Beaverlick,” answered Jimmy. “It was so exciting! Of course, I never did understand what was going on with Bint and Cratz and their weird and disturbing stories about the people who lived in that town… I never did get that. After a while, Aunt Gertie’s 78’s were getting pretty worn, too. But I was GREAT and, of course, we also had Tremelo and Gravel doing the news every hour on the hour! (They are) quite possibly the two biggest names to come out of Beaverlick!”
This reporter had a personal connection to WBVL. Fud hired me as the station’s first official newscaster. I spent quite a few years working a tough beat here in Beaverlick for the Gazette, known at that time as the Beaverlick Express. An interesting side note: The name of Beaverlick’s Newspaper was changed from the Express to the Gazette when Alden Giles Whoopsie, the former owner of The Express, got drunk one night and put the key of his 1927 Studebaker Dictator in the front door of the newspaper offices and the building started up, so he sat down in his chair, hit the gas, and slammed the Express into the City Hall Building.
I really enjoyed the three full days I had to work there before Dan Gravel and Tom Tremelo were hired to do the hourly news, and I went back to work for the Gazette. Gravel and Tremelo both went on to have huge success on “Gravel and Tremelo Today”, and following that the even more popular “Tremelo and Gravel’s Got News” before separating and getting the Anchor jobs in the big national cable stations of the regional Mid-West and parts of Canada. They are both wonderfully talented, sharp, intelligent men who sounded as great on the radio as they look great now on the television and I hope they both die in a fire.
Even at that time, I had stomach ulcers older than those two yahoos.
For almost a decade, WBVL stayed on the air entertaining and informing Beaverlick successfully until the rise of Rock ‘n Roll in the 1950’s. Most of the people in town viewed Rock ‘n Roll music as something that came from Satan’s posing pouch. Fud didn’t play any Rock music on WBVL for a while, but the kids in town, and especially Furn and Fragile, Fud’s two daughters, convinced him to open up an hour of programming on Saturday Night for “Jumpin’ Uncle Jimmy’s Jungle Juice Jam”. After Fud was beaten senseless by the angry townspeople, he relented and didn’t play rock music again on WBVL until 1975, when the people of Beaverlick heard Fud’s Aunt Gertie’s record of Benny Goodman playing “Sing, Sing, Sing!” one too many times and beat him senseless.
Today, the main job of keeping WBVL on the air falls to Fud’s grandson Freem, a former child prodigy nose-harp player and ambassador to Cuba. WBVL has changed its programming over the years, and now the station plays the latest Rap and Hip-Hop with “Swedish Death Metal Suicide Saturday Nites” for two hours on the weekend and the “Beaverlick Church Rodeo”, where commentators The Rt. Reverend Gormless Parsnicket (ret.) and Weathergirl Tina Bumps get hammered and critique the day’s services from all the churches in town.
Freem Nucklebick also broadcasts an hour of “Primal Scream Therapy” every Tuesday at 4:17 PM, sponsored by Landly Tink’s “Scream It Sane” in which Freem (a lifelong advocate of this form of therapy_ and Landly (a lifelong purveyor of frauds and cons) lead an audience through an hour of…screaming. No one knows if this technique is at all helpful, but Freem insists that the hour of screaming is what pays his electrical bills and keeps WBVL on the air.
Almost nine decades ago, Fud Nucklebick brought radio to Beaverlick. Fud is dead now, and he is buried under the transmission tower that bears his name. The broadcasting that is transmitted from that tower reaches almost the entire county, and despite multiple attempts by people, institutions, and governments to make it stop, Fud Nucklebick’s WBVL “Radio Beaverlick” has made it into the 21st century and will endure into the 22nd, as long as Fud’s grandson Freem can pay the electric bills.
Keep screaming, Freem!
(Mertyl Dalrumple, owner of The Beaverlick Silverware Emporium, writes this week about Beaverlicks dusty streetlamps.)
Dear Editor:
Our Mayor, Delwood Oadecker, PROMISED our streetlamps would be dusted by March! You can’t see a DAMN THING driving around this town at night! Why, I was coming home from the St. Edna of the Perpetual Guilt Ladies Auxiliary meeting last night and thought I was parking in my drive and it turns out, I was parked in Sadie Wellspring’s PETUNIAS!
Then, three days ago, my youngest son Donnie came home with a fever. It turns out my little man licked one of the lampposts on a dare. Before anyone says anything, Donnie isn’t too bright; his Daddy built him a wooden go-kart two years ago, took him to the Morris Dewberry Memorial park, and let Donnie drive the go-cart down the big Sam Milburn Memorial hill. The problem was, all Donnie had to steer with was a jump rope tied to the front axle, and he hit the Sargent Bingo Frelm Memorial Tree at the bottom of the hill. When Donnie came out of the hospital, he was a normal, healthy little boy, except every time he counted to ten he would always miss seven and he starts drooling every time he sees stripes, but he is such a good little boy, so it really disturbed me when he woke up yesterday with two large, hairy, breast like bumps on his back, and now he does nothing but moo every time he answers me.
I blame Communists, of course. Especially Ignatz Klinedecker, who lives down the street from me and has practically everything he owns out in his front yard. I haven’t seen him nor his wife Ula go to work for almost thirteen years now, and they are always at Klemshaw’s Grocery buying fish sticks and energy drinks with their food stamps, and don’t think I don’t know what goes on when you eat nothing but fish sticks and drink energy drinks: S-E-X-!
They are a complete disgrace: him with his long hair and beard, and her wearing the skimpy clothes that are trying to sell things that are past their due date by at LEAST a decade!
I swear on my Daddy’s Rip Moonshot Secret Decoder Ring that they are POISONING this town!
Mr. Mayor, we all know that your pet project: the Oadecker Mentally Hilarious Research Facility at the Hospital, but we need to divert funds to DUST THE LAMPPOSTS before we are all drinking vodka, wearing Che Guevarra beanies and singing “This Land Is Your Land”.
It is an outrage, and it is un-American to have dirty lampposts, one of which, I have on good authority, Ula Klinedecker can be found leaning against at certain times during the evening, if you catch my drift.
Yours By The Grace Of An Angry God,
Mertyl Dalrumple (Mrs.)
Beaverlick: A small town where the vast majority of the townspeople, known as Beaverlickers, spend their lives safely nuzzled in a fragrant and fastidiously manicured valley, nestled between two mountains right in the heart of the American Mid-West.
The Beaverlick Gazette celebrates the ecstasy of Beaverlick achievement that routinely judders the sleepy little valley and exposes the viruses of crime and corruption that occasionally infects the little vale.
The Beaverlick Gazette: bringing small town news to the whole wide world.
-Alvena Coldcock: Winner Of The ‘Introduce Beaverlick To Real People’ Essay Contest.
(Editor's Note: The Beaverlick Gazette Writers are: Modesty Fiona Blaise, Sparky Murphy, George Palczynski, and Kelly J Randall. Artwork by Sparky Murphy and Kelly J Randall. “Stoopid Tunes” by Psykosity)
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