The book that (inadvertently) launched a career

In the early 1930s Dave Garroway held some jobs that weren’t in broadcasting. His first was as a piston ring salesman, arranged through a connection of his dad’s. For two months Garroway went from garage to garage to sell Chance Piston Rings, but he found he couldn’t even give away the samples. But another connection of his dad’s led to another job, and through that connection came the lucky break that led to Radio City.

Fred Tilden, a Schenectady native, had known Garroway’s father since childhood, and had served together in the National Guard. Garroway would remember that his dad and Fred Tilden played basketball together during their Guard service. Indeed, basketball was a theme through Tilden’s life; he and his brother George played together, and George served for several years as a tournament referee.

Fred Tilden eventually got into the publishing business. He compiled a list of 550 words that were commonly mispronounced, and used them to create a story of a young Amherst graduate who embarks on a sea voyage. Scattered throughout the story were the 550 words. On the left-hand side of each spread was a chapter of the story; on the right-hand side, a list of the commonly-mispronounced words, along with a pronunciation guide. Though Tilden admitted the style of the story was “rather stilted,” he reminded the reader that the story was of secondary importance, merely a vehicle for these tricky words.

Tilden published all of this in a booklet he titled You Don’t Say! …Or Do You? The little book, bound in paper and stapled, sold for fifty cents. Tilden set out to sell copies of these booklets to schools and other educational organizations, and had received some praise from educators and civic leaders. A professor in public speaking at Harvard congratulated Tilden “in your scheme for making improvement in pronunciation both useful and entertaining,” while the chair of history and English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called the project “novel and interesting” and said Tilden had “worked it up in a very ingenious way.” Boston’s school superintendent said Tilden’s efforts were needed more than ever “because of the spoken word on the radio.”

Tilden had managed some success in getting schools to buy his book. As Garroway recalled, Tilden would visit a school and ask to meet with the principal, who many times didn’t have that much to do and welcomed a visit from someone “who was literate and attractive, as Fred was.” Tilden would take out a copy of the book and offer a free copy to each of the principal’s teachers…that is, if the principal could read a sentence on a certain page without mispronouncing any of the words. The principal would accept the challenge, but seldom if ever passed. But that wouldn’t stop the sales pitch. Tilden would then explain how the book worked, and then hand the principal a box of the books. Each teacher was to get a copy and take it home for a few days. If they liked the book, they could bring in the fifty cents for it. If they didn’t like the book, they could return it. As Garroway remembered, “That seemed very easy to the principal, because he didn’t have to do any of the work. He could assign that to the girls in the office outside.” By Garroway’s recollection, Tilden was selling about half the books he offered.

Hiring young Dave Garroway allowed Tilden to cover an entire city more quickly. They would arrive in a town together, Tilden in his car and Garroway in his dad’s 1932 Buick, and work through the schools, often 15 in a day. They covered most of the cities in New England. Garroway remembered the profits running about $100 per week. “I’d been used to making that much playing golf, you see,” he later remembered. “And you do get spoiled, don’t you?”

In 1935 they got permission from the New York City superintendent to visit the schools in all five boroughs. Tilden and Garroway found lodging at the Y on 63rd Street and prepared to spend the next two years or so touring the schools and selling books. They were about three months in when fate turned on a dime. Garroway was leaving the Y when he happened into an acquaintance from about a decade before.1 In the course of their conversation, the old acquaintance asked, “Do you play bridge? We need a fourth.” Garroway accepted.

It was about 1:30 the next morning that the game’s hostess said she needed to shut the game down because she’d have to go to work in the morning. She said she had to fire 20 pages at NBC and hire 20 more. It turned out her job was in guest relations at NBC. Garroway remembered, “When she said NBC, those three letters came out as though they were gongs…they resonated through my skull.” He quickly told her, “You have nineteen to hire. You just hired me.” And from that, a book salesman was on his way to a broadcasting career. Garroway later remembered that his sudden abandonment of the bookselling career meant Tilden had to go back to all the schools Garroway had covered. “Poor Fred Tilden broke his back,” he said, but no money was lost. “It was the last of Fred’s many kindnesses to me because a couple of weeks later he suffered a heart attack in the Y in New York.”2

Garroway wouldn’t forget the little book, or how it helped make his career. A few years later, while working at KDKA in Pittsburgh, he came up with a quiz program that happened to be titled “You Don’t Say.”

Our hero, in a 1938 KDKA publicity still, holds a copy of the book that helped get him there.

A Pittsburgh radio columnist wrote that Garroway had written the booklet under the name of F.F. Tilden. Which, of course, wasn’t so, but it made a good story in the days before it was easier to check these things out.

And that’s how a little booklet helped make a broadcasting career happen.

  1. It’s a long story, to be told in the book, but this old acquaintance had been the beau of a girl Garroway had a powerful crush on many years before. No, I’m not going to tell you the full story here – I’ve got to save some stuff for the book.
  2. Which checks out with the historical record: the April 27, 1937 Glens Falls, NY Post-Star has an obit for Tilden, noting he had died after a heart attack the previous Tuesday in New York.