As one of my (many) duties where I work, I oversee the campus radio station. That means I have to deal with a lot of technical equipment. Most of the time it works fine. Sometimes, things go wrong. Seriously wrong. And one of those instances happened over the weekend. We had a very serious storm blow through town. It did some damage and took out the electricity for a good long while. One casualty was our radio station, which remained off the air even after power was restored. A component in our studio console had gone kaput, and the soonest we could get a new one was today. Fortunately, the new component solved the problem and we’re back. (And because of this, I’ve not only ordered in a second one of those components as a backup, but I also did some mild system reconfiguration to provide further safeguards.)
All of this got me thinking about some times in Dave Garroway’s career when things didn’t go exactly right, either, and it made me think it might be time to share one of those moments with you.
In mid-1938 Dave reported to KDKA in Pittsburgh, having worked hard to make himself an announcer while working as a page at NBC in New York. KDKA had hired him not only because he was a good announcer, but because Dave could ad-lib like few others. In his audition, Dave had been asked to imagine he was on the 18th green of a golf tournament, and ad-lib what he would be seeing. Garroway (who happened to be a very good golfer) ad-libbed for more than an hour. The next day, he learned he wasn’t going to be an announcer, but would instead become Director of Special Events – when something interesting was going on around town, Dave would be sent out with a remote unit and his reports would be sent back to the station.
For Dave’s first remote, he was sent out to the Allegheny River to interview two men who were following the Lewis and Clark Trail. They had built a large dugout canoe, and Dave was to interview them while they were out on the river. Unfortunately, the portable transmitting equipment was so large that they had to empty the equipment out of one half the canoe so that Dave could get in with the equipment on his back. One of the two men also had to stay behind. While all this was happening, Dave had to keep transmitting back to KDKA on a live basis.
Finally, the canoe was ready. Dave got in and he set off down the Allegheny, interviewing the one man who was still in the canoe. The man who was left behind paddled on the left, so the poor guy still in the canoe had to paddle on both sides while being interviewed. And all of this was happening in the midst of a swift current. “We finished in the middle of the river because he didn’t have the ability to have the canoe steered adequately over to the side,” Garroway remembered in a draft of his unpublished memoir. “He had to paddle and dig like murder to get that thing to shore on the far side of the river, the wrong side of the river.” Before it was all over with, a tugboat had to come out to pull them to the correct side of the river.
As if that wasn’t enough, Garroway remembered, he flirted with a momentary temptation that could have been memorable for the wrong reasons. “I was tempted to make a great splash on my first broadcast by falling overboard,” he said, imagining it would be a big sensation…until he remembered that the river was deep and he wouldn’t be able get that heavy transmitter off his back in time to save himself. Thankfully, temptation vanished as fast as it occurred, and Dave lived to broadcast many a new day.