Remembering Jim Fleming

The Dave Garroway story is not only the story of Dave himself, but also of the people he worked with. Some of them are well-known, but others have fallen through the cracks of history. From time to time I hope to highlight some of those forgotten stories here.

Let’s begin with Today‘s first news presenter. This is a role that’s kind of gone with the times on some programs, but once it was commonplace for the hosts to throw to someone at the top of every half-hour for the news. John Palmer, for instance, was who I remember from when I watched Today in the ’80s, and of course Frank Blair’s long tenure as newsman is never far from our minds here. But it all had to begin somewhere, and in the beginning it wasn’t just the job of reading news on the air: the news editor was literally the news editor. And the first news editor of Today is all but forgotten.¹ So let’s take some time to remember Jim Fleming.

James F. Fleming, a native of Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 1938. He moved to New York with the intent of going to law school, but accepted a job with CBS as a radio announcer. The announcing gig ended up becoming a role as a correspondent. Fleming reported from the Middle East, covering the Cairo and Teheran conferences, and also reported from the Soviet Union. On the first Today program, as Garroway gave a summary of Fleming’s credentials and mentioned his issues with the Soviet censors, Fleming said with a chuckle, “They ejected me, Dave.”

In 1949 NBC hired Fleming, and he worked on projects for television and radio. One of his duties was serving as editor of the radio series Voices and Events, a half-hour summer replacement program that highlighted events in the news. Fleming was eyed early on as news editor for Today, being discussed in mid-1951 before Dave Garroway entered the picture, and it was Fleming’s role to get together a staff and everything the program would need to bring the world’s happenings to the broadcast each morning. Fleming’s staffers included a young Phi Beta Kappan named Gerald Green, who had been reporting for the International News Service. Another of Fleming’s helpers was a young production assistant named Estelle Parsons, who remembered him as “wonderful…so brilliant” and “a wonderful intellect.” According to her, Fleming had the ability to take something that had come off the wire and know all about it no matter what it was or where it had happened.²

Fleming’s tenure at Today was brief, and there are varying accounts as to why.³ Regardless, in March 1953 he was replaced by Merrill (“Red”) Mueller. Fleming worked on various projects⁴ until he was tapped by Pat Weaver to be the executive producer of an innovative weekend programming service for the NBC Radio Network. This project, which became Monitor, ran for nearly 20 years.⁵

Not long after the debut of Monitor, Fleming was off again. CBS hired him to work on one of its many efforts to counter-program Today in the early morning hours. He also produced documentaries for CBS, including the Peabody-winning The Hidden Revolution, which he co-produced with Edward R. Murrow. In 1962 and 1963 he worked with David Susskind to present Festival of the Performing Arts. Later in the decade he worked with six crews to film a four-hour documentary about Africa for ABC. The resulting documentary, Africa, was narrated by Gregory Peck and aired for four straight hours on ABC prime-time in 1967. Fleming’s efforts resulted in an Emmy award.

In later years Fleming stayed out of the spotlight, although he did make a too-brief appearance on the January 14, 1992 Today program, where Faith Daniels (who was then on the news desk) interviewed him about the early days.⁶ Married and with four children, Fleming made his home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in August 1996 at age 81.

There’s much more to the story of Jim Fleming, and I look forward to finding it out as we continue the research process.

1. He’s not only forgotten, but with his somewhat common name he’s nearly impossible to do a decent web search for. Much of this entry is constructed from his 1996 obituaries carried by the Associated Press and by the New York Times.
2. You can see her speak about working for Jim Fleming in her Archive of American Television interview.
3. In his appearance on the 1992 Today anniversary program, Fleming told Faith Daniels that he left when Pat Weaver asked him to head up the effort behind NBC Radio’s Monitor service. There have been stories that Fleming was displeased by the addition of J. Fred Muggs to the program. However, a memorandum from late 1952 in the NBC papers at Wisconsin states that they would not be keeping Fleming on Today past his current term, and that Merrill Mueller would take over for him. The tone of the memo indicates there were considerable differences between Fleming and management. Fleming was no shrinking violet when it came to standing up for himself, as some marvelous correspondence in the Wisconsin papers reveals. At any rate, the date of this memo indicates regardless of Muggs (who was months away from joining the program, anyway), the decision had already been made. Since Fleming himself has been dead for 22 years, we’ll probably not know the full story.
4. Including being newsman on Dave Garroway’s weekend radio series Sunday With Garroway.
5. Without question, Dennis Hart’s site is the best resource you’ll find anywhere about Monitor. Look on the audio page and you’ll find a couple of early sound clips that feature Jim Fleming, including the special closed-circuit broadcast to affiliates prior to the program’s debut.
6. I owe special thanks to my collaborator Brandon Hollingsworth for reminding me of this interview. Thankfully, I recorded the program that morning and transferred it to DVD, so I was able to get the screengrab seen to your left. Thanks, Brandon!