I went sick in my stomach as I heard it. Yesterday on the radio. A tease at the beginning of the newscast. Something about a WHAM institution coming to an end.

It was a couple of minutes before the story ran, but I didn’t need to hear it. I already knew. Not by any inside information, but by the intuitions that sometimes come.

Doc and Katy are leaving.

Their run has come to an end.

After more than 50 years of weekly broadcasts, the “Green Thumb Program” will tape its last shows today. One will play on Saturday morning and the other will play a week later. And then they will be gone.

“Good bye, friends. We gotta grow now.”

I want to cry.

Doc and Katy are leaving. Norman Rockwell is taking the paintings off the wall.

It’s a simple show. A half an hour of laughter and patter and poetry, answers to gardening questions and odd Latin names for bugs and begonias and heartfelt lectures on mulch. Something from the 1950s and the 1850s and the heart of America. Grama and Grampa and a slice of rhubarb pie.

A man and a woman who have grown old in our service.

Doc and Katy are leaving.

His people are Lebanese and he was a kindergartner when they moved into Wayland and he still remembers the cross somebody burned in their front yard. He smiles and laughs as he tells it, just as he does when he recounts the restaurant his family ran, the one everyone loved, and how a clan of newcomers were not only taken to the town’s heart but eventually became its heart.

First in Wayland and then in Naples where they settled down – after Cornell and the war – a young couple with a greenhouse and movie star good looks. He was a short Dean Martin and she was a smalltown Lucille Ball and you gather that they lived life pretty fullbore.

Which is how you live it when you understand it. When you feel it in you and you don’t fight it and smother it.

A mom and a dad with kids and a business, selling flowers and vegetable plants and trying hard to make it go.

They must have been smart because they became pioneers, they started writing a newspaper column together, about gardening, and they peddled it across the country and they got on the radio and at their peak Doc and Katy were known to millions.

There were books and lectures and decades and from their kitchen table they touched the world. The simple miracle of growth taught with science and tradition.

But I wasn’t interested in any of that.

I’m not a gardener. I’ll plant some vegetables, and eat them if they grow. I like to see flowers in people’s yards, and I’d like to learn to prune and graft an apple tree.

But I’m not a green thumb.

I listen for them.

And have most Saturdays for 15 years. I tune in to hear their voices and feel their spirits and catch up on their lives. I tune in to be encouraged by their goodness, to be reminded of a touchstone, to hear an America we all wish we could call home.

They are my radio friends. They are my radio grandparents. They are the place I go to sit down and relax and have a bowl of bread and milk. They are the home I’ve never known.

Doc and Katy are leaving.

I went to their house a few times. Doc wanted me to help write their memoirs. He thought I was the writer for the job. But I wasn’t. It was too large a task for me. Not the writing, but the capturing. The reduction of a force of nature to words on a page.

But I got to sit with them anyway, and see their home and hear their stories. I got to put faces to the voices I had planted in my heart.

And Tuesday mornings when they come in to tape I see them pass in the hall. I see an attentive relative tending them and helping them.

But I won’t be there today.

As history is made I will be absent.

Which is OK. I will be there where it started and where it belongs. On the radio. A week from Saturday as the last 30 minutes of a half a century tick down, I will be in front of my radio, like so many others.

With tears in my eyes.
Doc and Katy are leaving.

I suspect they will go back up on their hill, and be spared the long drive into the city. No more trips through the snow on the snaking road beside the lake. No more glass booths with big microphones. No more signing on or signing off.

I suspect they will go back up on their hill, the two of them, with their teeming birdfeeders and ample plantings and fruit trees.

And the winds of winter will blow.And the garden will rest.