When Dave Garroway returned to Chicago after World War II, he ended up with a midnight time slot on WMAQ-AM, mainly because he was one of the few staffers who had a car and therefore didn’t have to work around local transit’s nightly shutdown. To this freeform effort he gave the name The 11:60 Club and billed himself “Eagerest Beaver” of said society, as you can see on the membership card below:
Now, you might think those are a couple of clever names that ol’ Garroway would have come up with on his own, right? But I’ve now seen the handwritten evidence that tells us otherwise. The name The 11:60 Club came from a popular record of the day by Harry James and His Orchestra, “11:60 P.M.”
As for the “Eager Beaver” title, that’s courtesy of this incredible Stan Kenton instrumental:
All this makes it that much more of a shame that so few recordings of The 11:60 Club remain. Just the few minutes I’ve heard from one of the surviving recordings was pure fun, with a young and playful Dave Garroway purring into the microphone and playing really cool music. It’s easy to understand why so many folks stayed up past 11:60 each night to hear him.