The search is over

On any project there are milestones. Sometimes you meet them and you feel unalloyed relief. But other times you feel a twinge of sadness alongside relief. Yesterday had one such moment for me.

For the last three years I have slowly made my way through the Newspapers database, compiling thousands of newspaper clippings through the years of Dave Garroway’s life. And it was yesterday that my search carried me through the year 1982, when Dave’s life ended.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a chore, tedious at times. Although I do have to say it’s nowhere near the chore that going through newspapers was in earlier times. Until not that long ago, going through newspapers meant spending days on end at libraries spooling through countless microfilm reels, with no real search assistance for most newspapers. You had to know what to look for and where to find it. It took forever. My master’s thesis involved a lot of crawling through microfilm, and even though it was a single newspaper over a period of three months, it was a chore. Which makes me thankful for Newspapers.com and how a single search string can return thousands of matches from hundreds of newspapers in an instant.¹

Be that as it may, it adds up in a hurry. The pile of clippings from the 1950s alone is overwhelming. What’s worse is that every time I have saved a clipping, I have logged it on notebook paper, and that log fills a binder. ² I have conducted the search in my home, my work office, in countless hotel rooms during my travels the last three years.³ At times it’s been a chore that never seemed to end; in other times it’s been a welcome distraction from whatever was troubling me. And now it’s done, mostly.

There’s still the years after Dave’s death to look through, and I am making my way through those. But as the years pass, the mentions become fewer. You also see mentions of his name when his colleagues and contemporaries pass away. In time, his name fades, brought up only in mentions of anniversaries of Today‘s debut. You do get a feeling of a story ending and fading.

Going through all these articles has given me a great sense of the arc of Dave’s life, and I feel I understand him that much better. It’s closed some open questions, put time stamps on moments that seemed to float in history, and knocked down a myth or two along the way. But it’s also had moments of sadness, as he goes from rising-star DJ of the 1940s to white-hot television icon of the early ’50s to serious presence of the late ’50s…and then his world falls apart, and he vanishes. Oh, he pops up every so often with a new gig, but those don’t take root for whatever reason. Every so often someone interviews him, and his views on television become less hopeful with every interview in each successive year. And then it’s over in a moment, and with each year that passes since, it seems he becomes more a trivia answer than anything else.

I can’t rest too long, because now it’s time for me to take those 3,000-plus clippings and put them to work, and that’s going to be a chore in itself. I can’t say I’ll miss the hours of clipping and logging. But I will miss watching Dave’s story unfold, and I’ll also miss the little discoveries I made along the way.

A lengthy chapter has closed. But many more remain to be written. Let’s do that now.

1. It’s not an inexpensive membership, but for the work I do, it pays for itself many, many times over. It’s one of the last things I’d give up if I suddenly had to economize.
2. A typed version of that log, single-spaced, of my clippings from 1913 to 1961 runs 62 pages.
3. By a quick count, I’ve done this work in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Wisconsin and Maryland.