Missed connections

In the couple months since I was last with you, much has happened. A whole lot of it has to do with the day job, mainly that I have become executive producer of a television program that, while it’s a complete gas to work on, has consumed much of my time and nearly all of my brain. That said, it’s going well and everybody seems to be happy with it (well, thus far, anyway), so there’s that.1

Life hasn’t been completely all that, and my perambulations the last few months provided some connections with Our Dave, fleeting though they may have been. In mid-July, a chance opportunity to visit the ocean liner United States fell in my lap, and so I made a very quick weekend trip to Philadelphia.2 My plan had been to stop in Bala Cynwyd and visit his gravesite first thing that morning, and I’d timed everything out and planned my route and everything. Well, everything went well except the execution. Since everything went well except the part where I relied on dead-reckoning and memory instead of, you know, programming a route into my phone and letting the thing guide me there, I missed the exit off I-763 and didn’t realize I’d missed it until it was too late. I’d have tried to turn around, but since my report time for the visit to the Big U was fairly well set, I had to press on. I’m sorry, Dave. But since Philadelphia is one of my favorite cities (and since there are family connections in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area), I’m pretty certain I’ll be back.

There was a consolation prize on the way back, though: I spent the night in Durham, which meant a visit to another friend in Chapel Hill the next morning was a quick hop away.4

It turned out the Philadelphia adventure wasn’t the only adventure ahead for me with a Garroway-themed sidelight. In early September a throwaway comment on a pal’s Facebook post led to an invitation I couldn’t refuse. Three weeks later I was on an overnight trip to New York City, and early on a Sunday morning I walked over to the ABC broadcast center and spent three hours watching my friend and his colleagues overseeing the production of that day’s Good Morning America and inserting updates, fixes and other edits into each hour’s feed.5 Plus my friend gave me the grand tour of ABC’s studio facilities on 66th, which now means I’ve done the behind-the-scenes trifecta.6

I had gotten into town on Saturday afternoon, which meant I had to use up a lot of time and had no particular plans. After I’d spent a little time resting in my hotel room, I went on a little amble around Midtown and visited some familiar haunts.7 But I decided while I was out that I should try to find something else. A rather vigorous walk northward took me right to it.

And there you are: 48 East 63rd Street, also known as “Garroway’s Narroway.” This was the house where Dave moved after he married Pamela, the house that was supposedly haunted by poltergeists that were driven away in an exorcism. I don’t know who lives there now, and I didn’t want to do the “look, tourists!” thing, so I paused only as long as it took to get these quick photographs. It’s been renovated inside, but the outside looks much the same, right down to the gargoyle by the front door that Dave reportedly hid a microphone inside.8

After all these years, to finally see this place (if only fleetingly) was neat.9

— Thanks to our friend Mitchell Hadley, I became aware of the Random Access Television podcast a week or so back. And while there’s several episodes on which I really need to get caught up, one is of immediate interest: their longform examination of a Garroway at Large episode, which captures their sense of discovery and wonder. Give it a listen – it’s really sweet. (And there’s also a mention or two that certainly caught my ear and made me happy. But, I digress.)

  1. The program is called Wolves Weekly, and it’s a weekly series that’s mostly about our college’s athletics teams, but we’re broadening our scope to consider some non-athletics angles too. Our program is available on YouTube, if you want to take a look – just search for “Wolves Weekly” and ours are the episodes uploaded by FloFootball.
  2. The organization that owned the ship and was trying to save the entire vessel offered guided tours in mid-summer in an effort to raise money. As it happened, a long-simmering dispute with the pier owner flared up, and to make a long story short, the ship’s now been sold to a Florida county that plans to turn the ship into the world’s largest artificial reef. Not the outcome any of us had hoped for, but…I’ll just say that being aboard the Big U drove home just how much work would have been ahead. I need to find an outlet where I can write up what my experience aboard the ship was like. While I was grateful to finally get aboard after being fascinated by the Big U for more than three decades, seeing the effects of plunder and deterioration broke my heart, and the decision to reef the ship almost seems merciful.
  3. I did the time-tested I-77 to I-81 route, spent the night in Chambersburg, and then got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike early the next morning. I took 95 much of the way home, which was…interesting.
  4. Others in this beautiful old cemetery include Kay Kyzer – there’s a name that will take some of you back – and former UNC president William Friday, who was a beloved, avuncular presence on North Carolina educational television for a long time. Just before Charles Kuralt died he wrote to his longtime friend Bill Friday, asking if he could help find a place for him to be buried at this cemetery. How it came to pass is kind of a sweet story that drives home how beloved Kuralt was.
  5. If you’re interested in such things, my friend made these videos a couple years ago. We were in the room next door to this one, but what you see here is almost exactly what I watched him do that morning. It was artistry.
  6. And it was just in time, since ABC is moving out of the 66th Street facility next year. Like my visit to the Big U, it was an “if you don’t do it now, you probably won’t get to” occasion, but it mattered. ABC’s studios don’t get talked about the way NBC’s studios at 30 Rock are, or even as much as the studios at the CBS Broadcast Center, but a lot of history was made there. In any event, it ended up being a wonderful visit – not only seeing my friend again, but we then went to lunch with a mutual friend who retired from CBS after more than 50 years there. It was wonderful. It all reminded me how lucky I am in this life of mine, to know wonderful people like these.
  7. Most notably 30 Rock, and of course I had to take a moment or two to pay my respects to the former RCA Exhibition Hall, which is now the Christie’s showroom. I also walked over to see the Waldorf-Astoria, which on previous visits had been my home away from home, but it’s been torn up the last several years for renovation. It broke my heart.
  8. There’s some real estate sites that have interior pictures and details of the building from when it was on the market a few years back, and while it’s not difficult to find them, linking them here would make me feel like I’m invading the current tenants’ privacy. I know, it’s weird of me to feel that way, but I’m the one who runs this blog and what I say goes.
  9. A stop I made on the way back to my room gave me one more opportunity to commingle with Dave’s memory. I stopped at a Duane Reade on 52nd and got some snacks to take back to my room for the night. The building it’s in once was a CBS radio studio building, and it’s where Arthur Godfrey’s radio program originated in the 1960s and 1970s. If you’ve read the book, you know that Garroway filled in for Godfrey for a couple weeks in 1962, and that Carol Sloane fondly remembered her experiences during Dave’s guest residency. It also happens to be across from the old CBS Building, at 485 Madison Avenue – or, as those of us who grew up with MAD Magazine think of it, “485 MADison Avenue.”