The 90-year-old Harvey died Saturday at the Mayo Clinic Hospital near his winter home in Arizona. He had remained on the air until recently, delivering commentary in that distinctive staccato style.

In his heyday, audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations to listen to Harvey personalize news items with his own trademarks: A hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around Aunt Betty's dinner table.

Here is our original story about his treatment of the Dixie Chopper Xtreme Mowchine from the March 8, 2006 broadcast...

You might say March 8, 2006, was a "good day" for Dixie Chopper.

During his national radio broadcast at noon, famed commentator Paul Harvey said "hello, Americans" to Dixie Chopper, extolling the virtues of the "World's Fastest Lawn Mower" in an unsolicited 45-second news story.

"Keeping a big lawn mowed, or a golf course or an estate, or the grounds of an industrial complex is a labor-intensive chore," Harvey began.

"Keeping a large area of lawn looking good takes a lot of gardeners ... costs a lot of money -- until, along comes the Dixie Chopper, a lawn mower like none other."

"It's a riding mower that can go 15 miles an hour, and can cut an entire football field in 10 minutes," Harvey continued, alluding to Dixie Chopper's Xtreme Mowchine.

"It cuts either a 60- or 72-inch swathe. It'll work all day or all night," Harvey told his national radio audience, "turning grass into lawn -- 8.7 acres an hour."

Harvey concluded his tribute with an approximate price for the Dixie Chopper Xtreme.

"And at $10,000," he said, "it will soon pay its way!"

And now, the rest of the story ...

After the segment aired on Paul Harvey, Dixie Chopper received a number of telephone calls about it, and Media Marketing Manager Rick Judy did two on-air interviews with radio stations in Michigan the next morning.

"The interesting thing," Dixie Chopper Public Relations Director Eric Bernsee said, "is that people starting telling us, 'We heard your ad on Paul Harvey's show.' Of course, we knew we hadn't placed any ad and wondered what they were talking about. It wasn't until we listened to the broadcast on the Paul Harvey website that we knew the extent of what his national audience had heard."

Harvey is heard on more than 1,200 radio stations, as well as 400 Armed Forces Network stations that broadcast around the world.

Harvey apparently learned about Dixie Chopper from Gizmag.com, which featured the Xtreme Mowchine after the Dixie Chopper Media Department sent information and a photo of the mower to the Australian website that likes to feature odd or extreme products.

So now you know the rest of the story ...