This just in: I’ll be presenting at this year’s Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, in mid-September in Hunt Valley, Maryland. My friend Kevin Doherty will be sharing the stage with me as we talk about the Today/Home/Tonight programming concept Pat Weaver brought to NBC. I’ll be talking more than a little about Dave Garroway, while Kevin will be sharing some insights into Jack Paar and Steve Allen. And we’ll both share the honors in talking about the delightful Arlene Francis.
(And as if that’s not enough fun, a couple hours later, my friend Mitchell Hadley of It’s About TV will be giving a presentation about TV Guide. As a fan of his weekly posts about vintage issues of TV Guide, I’m really looking forward to that one.)
The latest research-related trip is now in the books. It wasn’t as ambitious as last year’s Wisconsin adventure, but it was valuable just the same, and yielded some pieces that will fill in some blanks (and provide the basis for an upcoming post or two that you may enjoy). And when I was in my room for the night, the time I might otherwise spend watching television was instead spent going through a couple more months in the ongoing search through Newspapers.com. It’s tedious work, capturing articles and logging them in the notebook I keep for such things, but it needs to get done.
As does the daily work of adding to the manuscript, which got done even on the road. It’s now been worked on in three states. By the time this project is finished, I wonder how many different locations I’ll have written it in. All I can say is that laptop computers are splendid things for writers.
Photo by the author
Yesterday morning as I was scouring the stacks at a large university library, I was reminded again that the real fun in the process is in the discovery. It’s a feeling I’ve had any time I am lost in the stacks, and especially when the stacks are deep and the library is quiet. Before you and around you are what seem like miles of bound volumes, millions of pages from the past, and you can’t even begin to wonder what stories lie between those covers and what knowledge lies there waiting for somebody’s mind. To think about that vastness is to instantly boggle yourself. There’s just so much there in wait. And it’s yours, if you want it. All you have to do is reach out and take down a volume or two and sit at a table, and take it in. Voices of those long gone still carry on. Minds long dormant come back to life. Eras leap out of history books and sing electric, bringing you along for the ride.
Libraries are treasures. A good library needs to be cherished. It’s why I have what borders on an emotional reaction when I’m in a big library that keeps so much available, that’s held out against the ongoing movement to move material off-site or, worse, gut the holdings. Three libraries close to my life – one of them at my undergraduate institution, one at my graduate institution, stacks where I spent many an hour back in the day; the other at the institution where I now work – have had this happen. Now research at my grad school’s library is a complicated process that requires me to request material in advance, because material I once could go down to the stacks and get now needs to be brought over from an off-site storage facility. (But, hey, you can now get an expensive cup of trendy coffee at the big coffee shop on the main floor.) The other libraries? They are shadows of what they once were, and I can’t think about them too much lest I weep.
I love a good library. I worry about what’s going to become of them. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to find a library like the one I was in yesterday, where I can go into these huge, endless stacks and feel lost in the most wonderful way possible. It’s so much of what drew me into the historian’s trade, and a feeling I can’t get enough of. I hope it’s a feeling that future generations will get to experience, too. But my fear is that feeling may itself become a part of history.
It may seem we’ve gone dark (or at least a little dim) here. Not the case. The lack of activity on the blog instead reflects industry behind the scenes. There has been travel in connection with the Garroway project, one trip a couple weekends ago to meet with my research associate, and another that begins in a few hours. If all goes as planned this newest will involve a couple hours or so spooling through some difficult-to-find microfilm. And in my off hours in the hotel room, I’ll also be working my way through more journalism of old via the good ol’ Newspapers account.
Best of all, the manuscript continues to grow, even if by only a hundred words a day. Making it part of my daily routine means this huge writing assignment has instead become a series of bite-size tasks. It’s one of the best pieces of advice I could give any writer: just write about 100 words a day and the words will add up on their own.
There are other things percolating and some of them I can’t report just now, but know that if and when they materialize, it will be a good thing indeed. In the meantime, stay tuned and I’ll have more finds here soon.
My search through old newspapers has just led me through January 1952. As you can imagine, there was a lot of coverage and a lot of reviews related to NBC’s new early-morning experiment. Some of them are pretty famous (notably John Crosby’s review, which asked “what hath God and NBC wrought?”), some are pretty critical, some are generous and optimistic. But one stood out for me, one by H.I. Phillips that was carried widely in the days following Today‘s debut, and it takes the cake.
In a review titled “The Great Shaving Hazard,” Phillips called Today “a sort of global cafeteria of dissa and datta,” and wondered what Dave Garroway had done to “bring the heavy sentence down on his head…if he is not a superman he will petition the governor for an early pardon.” Phillips said that no program should go two hours, unless the idea is to make it tougher to take than the commercials, in which case “either Garroway will have to give up the program or we will have to give up shaving, bathing, dressing and getting ready for work with the video on. The human system can’t absorb so many things so early in the day.”
Phillips said the program, which he called “Attaway with Garroway,” had everything but wrestling and cooking recipes. “We wouldn’t be surprised to see the trend wind up with a six-hour video program in which Jimmy Durante would give the weather forecast, Helen Traubel deliver a message on the state of the union, and Vishinsky, Anthony Eden and Harry Truman alternate in giving the correct time at one-minute intervals.” He said Today “is like a trip on a flying carpet in your pajamas, with no time for orange juice and with frequent stops at a madhouse to change pilots. The plot is by Joe Cook, the settings by Rube Goldberg and the direction by Abbott and Costello.”
Of Garroway, Phillips said his personality “combines the features of Peter Lind Hayes, Jules Verne, Ed Wynn, Aladdin, Puss-In-Boots and the Forepaugh Brothers,” and that “when he stops you know you are late for work. We listened for four mornings. Now we get the same effect by playing a harmonica, doing a toe dance and studying maps of Formosa while we drink our coffee.”
While Phillips felt Today was a noble effort, it left him exhausted. “To see all those video people working in the studio all snarled up in wires, gadgets, etc., so early makes us depressed. We just can’t feel global before noon.”
A few posts ago I wrote about the research and writing tasks that any historian or biographer faces. But yesterday, while watching The Best Years of Our Lives (which, for my money, is the greatest movie ever made), I remembered that its director William Wyler was one of the five filmmakers profiled in the book and miniseries Five Came Back. And that led me down a web search that helped me find this great interview with Mark Harris, who wrote the book. In the interview Harris talks about the process he went through, how you gather every scrap of material you can get because you never really know just what will end up providing a key insight, and the little discoveries a researcher makes that can throw unexpected light on the process. Give it a read, because it gives such great insight into what a historian and author must do, and it hits on so many points familiar to my present task.
In 1960, with the 100th anniversary of the Civil War coming up, Alec Wilder put together a work inspired by the works of Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The piece, titled Names From the War, featured a pair of New York quintets and a choral group. Narrating it was none other than Dave Garroway. Thanks to the Wilderworld Podcast, you can listen to it here.
On this weekend, when we remember those who gave their lives, take the time to listen to this beautiful piece…and as you listen, remember.
As work continues on the manuscript (now more than 14,000 words, by the way), sometimes it’s useful to take a break and watch a video or two. In that spirit, here’s a little offering of interest: a clip from the 1948 film I Surrender, Dear. The entire clip is interesting because it gives you a glimpse into what radio was like in the immediate postwar years, but the last minute or so is really interesting for our purposes. Take a look and enjoy.
As the manuscript very slowly starts taking shape (and I’m pleased to report it’s now past 10,000 words), I’m coming to appreciate how much material is out there and how much I’m constantly discovering, and how all of it is making the job a lot easier. Garroway’s uncompleted autobiography, for instance, exists in two drafts and one of them includes supplemental material, and as much as I wish he had brought the story current before he put the project aside I am grateful those drafts exist, for even incomplete and with their imperfections and occasional inconsistencies (and even with their occasional assertions that don’t match the historical record) they lend an awful lot of insight.
Be that as it may, there are times when I will scour through other materials and find tantalizing hints of things that either never happened, or that have fallen through the cracks and are probably gone forever. For one, many “where are they now?” pieces about the original Today gang mentioned what they were up to. In 1977 one such story mentioned the forthcoming publication of Frank Blair’s memoir, but also mentioned that Jack Lescoulie was writing a book about his days in television. What became of that project, I wonder? I can’t begin to imagine what kinds of insight that would have lent.
The same goes for a couple of women who worked with Garroway. One of them was Lee Lawrence, who was entrusted with Garroway’s materials from his memoir project. She tried to get interest in a book about the early days of Today, but to no avail. That’s a true shame, because she knew the subject, knew the principals in that story, and would have written an awesome book. The other was Beryl Pfizer, who was briefly a “Today Girl” in 1961 and wrote a couple of articles about working on Today with Garroway. She wrote that she kept a journal of the odd things he did each day. I really wanted to interview her for this project…only to find that she died a few months before I decided to take the project on. What became of her papers, I wonder?
Then there are other things that, by all accounts, don’t exist. A few months ago I came across a tantalizing mention that in January 1977, Garroway appeared on Dr. Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power telecast, and on it spoke of his newfound faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve found a couple of promotional-style clippings and advertisements, and eBay has yielded one press photo of Garroway with Schuller (the same one that’s in the ad).
You can imagine what a recording of this program would mean for our project. My heart leapt when I came across the Schuller papers, and when I saw it included some recordings I got really interested…only to find that the recordings don’t include anything from January 1977. Nuts.
Some finds in this project have come from careful planning. Others have come from being in the right place in the right time. And some of them have come from people who have contacted us out of the blue. And this, as much as any post, is a reminder that if you knew Dave, if you or a family member worked with him, if you’re related to him, if you have something that belonged to him that has a story to it, if you have a recording of any of his appearances on anything like Hour of Power or The CBS Newcomers or anything of the sort…we’re all ears, and we’d love to hear from you. This project will be only as good as the information we uncover and the assistance we’re able to get, and we’ll certainly be grateful.
I’m not sure how many of you reading this have ever tried to write anything of significant length, let alone anything like a book. What’s it like to write one? My first inclination if you ask that question is to recommend you see a doctor, or at least lie down until the urge to write a book passes. But if you really want to know what it’s like, let me see if I can provide some insight from my own experiences writing about history and the people who made it.
First off, do you need any specialized training? Not necessarily. Some people benefit from a degree program or courses in writing history. But I’ve read some really well-done pieces of history written by people who had no formal training in the historian’s trade, and in some cases they didn’t have a degree. By the time I got into a degree program, all it did was help me refine what I’d learned from years of reading the works of historians I admired. If you look at what the pros do and learn from their methods, that’s an education in itself.
Before any of it begins, you have to figure out if your subject is something you can live with for a long time. You may not realize it, but the subject, be it a person or something else, will become your constant companion in a way you may not appreciate at first. It’ll happen not just in the interviews you conduct or the research you do through old newspaper files or in archives, but in the quiet moments. You’ll be driving somewhere, for instance, or out mowing the yard, and in those moments when your brain is sort of freewheeling you’ll catch yourself thinking about your subject, fitting together the pieces in your head or making sense of something. I drove to the supermarket a couple hours ago and, sure enough, at some point came thoughts of the writing I was doing earlier this morning about Garroway’s role during the run-up to the first Today program.
That’s why your choice of subject has to be done with care. In a sense, you’re adopting a new friend or family member for the next few months or years. Is it a good fit for you? There are stories of biographers who get all excited about the subject of their next work, only to get 50 or 100 pages in and realize they can’t stand the person they’re writing about. You’re talking about a major investment of your time, money and effort into a project, so why make it something you’ll dread?
In my own case I’ve written one biography already and am currently working on this one, and in both instances I’ve been fortunate to discover subjects who have worn easily and with whom I have shared some common elements. Ben Robertson was a fellow South Carolinian who had a hundred interests and whose circle included several people with whom I was already familiar, notably Ed Murrow. The more I got into his work, the more I felt I understood him, and it became easy for me to explain him. As for Dave Garroway, my almost-lifelong fascination with him has driven me to find out more about him, to go past the droll figure you see in the kinescopes and try to find the man himself. I have found things that are disturbing, certainly, and other things that made me sad. But I have also found a man of a hundred interests, a man with whom I would love to have had a conversation, and a man who was something other than what some of the cartoonish accounts would have you believe. And, again, the more I get into his story, the more I feel I understand him somehow.
Now that you have a topic…is there material? Google may well be your first friend, or even Wikipedia (although, as always, use that with caution). If you find an article on your subject, look at the endnotes. Sometimes a source note will tip you off about the availability of archives, or where that person’s papers might be. For Garroway I not only located two archives that had some of his papers (both of which had versions of his uncompleted autobiography project), but I also happened across the NBC papers at Wisconsin, which are vital.
If you’re fortunate, you can find some people to interview. With this I’ve had only limited success. Many people who worked with Garroway are now gone. Others may not want to talk (I’ve thus far had no success making contact with his family, for instance). But some television pioneers have given extensive interviews. The most notable (and valuable in my case) has been the Archive of American Television. I’ve located close to a dozen interviews with people who knew Garroway and worked with him, and they lend priceless insight into the man.
Another resource that’s been invaluable has been online newspaper databases and publication collections. This includes free resources like Google Newspapers and paid databases such as Newspapers.com. In those you can find all manner of items large and small, from obituaries and news stories to daily television listings, and everything in between. Even the gossip columns are useful, even if they’re not quite reliable, because you can get a feel for the moment. As always, you must treat newspapers as the rough first draft of history, but with care you can find items you wouldn’t find anywhere else, and sometimes you’ll find a key piece of evidence to debunk a myth or two.
If you have a good library nearby, spend some time there. Even a local library will have a few books that will provide some information on your subject area, and larger libraries may have periodicals that go back a ways. A large university library is a potential gold mine. With many libraries freeing up space by moving some material to off-site storage, this may require some advance coordination. But libraries have helped me find many articles, some of them obscure, that have lent a ton of insight.
The most expensive option is to buy whatever materials you can find – books, recordings, old magazines, artifacts, and so forth. Used copies of books can be had fairly inexpensively (unless it’s something truly rare). And even eBay can surprise you, not only with books and magazines and wire service photos, but occasionally there’s a true surprise or two (for instance, it’s how I found my “11:60 Club” membership card, along with four letters Garroway sent the fan whose name was on the card).
Once you’ve gathered your material, what do you do? To some extent, you have to sift through it and let things ferment. You also have to make sure you understand the documents and fill in the information you need to understand the information in context – in context of the times, in context of the larger picture. For instance, you can’t really write about Today unless you understand something about how television programming worked in the immediate postwar era, or unless you understand about Pat Weaver’s concept of “Operation Frontal Lobes,” or so forth. The same is true for personal matters; to write about Dave’s mental health struggles, you have to make sure you’ve sought good sources to help you understand depression and addiction and so forth. You have to be careful to let the information help you build a conclusion, not start with your conclusion and work backwards from there. You’re writing a history, not a tract.
And then at some point, you have to get started. I have found the best thing to do is take the task in bite-size servings. For instance, I’ve set myself a goal of writing about 200 words each day. Each day I’ll choose a document or two from the files, read through it, and try to write something from that. I then place that day’s writing into an appropriate point in the narrative. If you do 200 words a day, after 30 days you’ve written 6000 words. I’ll let you do the math, but you can see how it adds up.
(Note that the above paragraph does not really apply if you’re on a tight deadline. In that case, my approach is “type up all your notes as quickly as possible, cut-and-paste them into order, and then write the connecting words you need to string them together.” That’s how I wrote a doctoral dissertation in a big hurry when I was told “your next job depends on defending by X date” and “your committee chairman is about to retire and really wants to finish this up.” Deadlines are incredible motivators.)
Now, how much to write? That’ll vary depending on your subject and how much information you can get, but you also have to remember that not everything you come across needs to be in the book. It’s better to overwrite and edit things out than end up with a manuscript that’s too brief. For the Garroway book I’m looking at the 85,000-word range: long enough to provide a detailed portrait, but not so long that it overstays its welcome.
When you get your first draft done, it will need review. What works for me after the first couple of on-screen reviews is to get a paper copy of the manuscript (I send out for this, since paper and ink cartridges can get pricey) and then mark it up with a pencil. There’s something about a physical copy of the manuscript that gives me a different perspective, and lets me find little things I missed the first few times around.
Having a good editorial assistant is important. (Photo by the author)
After that initial revision, it’s important to get some outside views. If you have a couple people you really trust, let them look through it. You don’t want people who will automatically say “oh, that’s great!” – you want somebody who will look at it impartially, who will not be afraid to call out inconsistencies or errors or other areas where you fell a little short. Remember, the goal is to make the manuscript stronger.
Once all that’s done and you’ve polished it? Then it becomes a matter of getting it published. If there’s an academic angle or an alumni-related tie-in, sometimes a university press might be interested. Other times, a small specialty publisher is your best hope. You can even go the self-publishing route. But unless you’re extremely lucky, or motivated, or have a good agent, don’t count on the big publishers beating a path to your door.
Sure, on occasion I have dreams of a major publisher picking up the Garroway manuscript, of getting some kind of really good contract and having a full publicity push and maybe even ending up on some morning programs talking about the Dave Garroway story. But I am just as quickly reminded of how unlikely this is. Besides, what’s the real motivation behind this project? It’s not fame, and it’s certainly not money (although I do hope to at least recoup a little of what I’ve invested in all this). It all comes down to telling a story that needs to be told. Somehow, this story went untold for so long, and through circumstance it’s ended up in these hands. My goal is to tell it. And if we can tell it honestly, with insight and compassion, then that will be a reward in itself.
It’s now the summer break for me, and with it comes time to process some of the information I’ve gathered and scout around for more new material. This is more than a little overdue – you’d be surprised, for instance, how little I’ve done with all the documents I gathered from my trip to the Wisconsin Historical Society last year, but between the demands of work and the sudden need to get another manuscript in shape by last December, I just hadn’t the time or brainpower to spare.
Sometimes, though, a little distance between gathering the materials and going through them is useful. I’ve certainly found that to be true as I begin sorting through the documents I hurriedly photographed during that whirlwind visit eleven months back. There are treasures to be found, and already I’ve unearthed some really nifty revelations from the NBC files that I don’t believe anyone else has reported.
But other incredible finds haven’t required me to go on the road. Some of them have been as close as my computer, even if they meant I had to wait a while.
About a year ago I had a hunch. With the Federal Bureau of Investigation posting files on on popular culture figures via the Bureau’s website, why not see if there was a file on Dave Garroway? I didn’t expect there to be much, if anything, but you’ll never know unless you ask. So I used the handy online system to put in a FOIA request.
Anyone who’s ever dealt with FOIA (and I did, back in the pre-internet days) knows it can be a glacial process. Not only do files have to be located, but they have to be scanned, reviewed, redacted (with rationale provided)…the whole process. Not to mention, this is subject to the staff’s ability to handle these requests in between official business. (There are also times when you deal with agenices or FOIA offices that get happy with the redactions or exemptions, but that’s a story others can tell better than I can, as I’ve been fortunate in that regard.) If I were still a working journalist, my patience with FOIA would be different from what it is as someone working on a project with a long lead time. But since I’m not on a deadline yet, I found it oddly helpful that I’d forgotten I made the request – it kept me from agonizing or getting impatient, and since my expectations were so low anyway I figured even one or two documents would be a win.
That’s why it was a surprise the other day when an e-mail arrived from the Bureau’s FOIA office telling me I had four document files ready for download…and when I saw that one of those files was pretty substantial. I don’t want to give away too much, because there has to be a reason for you to buy the book when it comes out. I will tell you I got a lot more from my request than I expected. A good portion of the file was taken up with a controversy over a 1949 episode of Garroway at Large, in particular a musical number that ribbed the FBI’s investigations during the Red Scare. In response, the FBI wanted nothing to do with Garroway’s programs for several years after, refusing requests for FBI personnel to appear on Today and so forth. Not until a 1956 segment on Wide Wide World did the ice begin to thaw.
As with all FBI files, you have to be careful not to take the information as gospel; some elements of the files contain what’s obviously rumor, gossip, hearsay, and other unreliable information, but even if it’s bad data it’s useful nonetheless because you can gauge what was feeding the Bureau’s perceptions.
Be that as it may, there is one section in these files that is heartbreaking to read, and it’s a section dating from the spring of 1961. It’s an account of a conversation Garroway had with an FBI investigator, and in those notes you really get an idea of Garroway’s condition at that point. I’m still sorting through it all, but even on a quick review it’s truly sad and haunting reading.
My thanks to the FBI FOIA office for getting these documents to me. It’s one more element of my quest to not only tell the Dave Garroway story, but to tell it as thoroughly as I’m able, with as few stones unturned as possible.
Then there are other things that, by all accounts, don’t exist. A few months ago I came across a tantalizing mention that in January 1977, Garroway appeared on Dr. Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power telecast, and on it spoke of his newfound faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve found a couple of promotional-style clippings and advertisements, and eBay has yielded one press photo of Garroway with Schuller (the same one that’s in the ad).
Sometimes, though, a little distance between gathering the materials and going through them is useful. I’ve certainly found that to be true as I begin sorting through the documents I hurriedly photographed during that whirlwind visit eleven months back. There are treasures to be found, and already I’ve unearthed some really nifty revelations from the NBC files that I don’t believe anyone else has reported.