Author: Jodie Peeler

A high note for the year’s end

As we come to the the end of this full-grown, adult-size bang-a-roo headache of a year, we could use some good news, right? Well, here it is:

The manuscript is finished.

That’s right. The manuscript is finished. All 135,513 words of the first draft, covering from the arrival of the Garroways from Scotland to the 1983 memorial concert after his death, and everything in between.

The manuscript is now in the hands of my partners on the project, who are reviewing it and will get back to me with corrections and suggestions, which is what you need. For now, though, I’m still in a state of disbelief that it’s actually done – and a week ahead of schedule, no less.

There’s a lot left to go. I’ll have to make revisions, then edit those, and do a dozen other things before it’s all polished out. That’s not to mention finishing the endnotes, locating illustrations, finding a publisher who’s interested, and all of everything else. But those worries can wait. For now, it’s the relief of a huge task accomplished. Not a bad way to end a dumpster fire of a year, no?

This also will have some implications for the blog. Now that I have the manuscript done, and now that I know what fit the narrative and what had to be cut as seeming like trivia, I can write some posts based around those “cool items that had to be cut” and not worry so much about spoiling the book. So look for some interesting posts here soon.

In the meantime, thank you all for following along here, and thank you for your support of this whole effort. May all of you have a happy and healthy 2021 – and may this new year be infinitely better for all of us.

Season’s greetings

There is a reason I haven’t posted lately, and I believe it’s a reason that will meet with your approval: The first draft of the manuscript is coming very close to completion. The promise date1 to my reviewers is January 1, and when I make a promise, I do my very best to keep my word. There is not a whole lot left for me to do before it’s a complete narrative, ready for review.

Now, this first draft is kind of rough, but that’s why you do a first draft. In any event, it’s a coherent story, and as I have worked on the narrative the connections have clicked into place. When this thing is polished up and ready for press, you’ll really be happy, I think.

I hate repeating content, but in the spirit of the season, I’ll refer you to this piece of seasonal reading – which, by the way, still makes dandy Christmastime viewing.

Whatever you celebrate or observe, make it a good one, and please make it a safe one. Don’t endanger yourself or others.

Dave Garroway, sports car enthusiast

Our second installment of rare Garroway footage2 involves his well-known love of sports cars. We’ve talked about this on the blog before, especially in terms of his beloved Jaguar. Garroway was a keen amateur racer, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But even though he put aside racing as a driver, he never lost his love for watching car races and supporting the sport through other means.3

Here is some rare footage of a sports car race at Andrews Air Force Base (yes, that one)4 in the 1954 season, probably the President’s Cup race. This 20-minute silent film is a feast for sports car lovers, but of interest to us here is who you start to see about 17 minutes in, and then popping up at the end to interview the winning driver.

Please enjoy this trip to a different time.

“Wide Wide World,” June 9, 1957

One of the tragedies of the early years of television is that comparatively little of it remains. There were technical reasons – in the days before videotape, the only real way to preserve a show was through kinescopes, which looked crude by comparison and took a lot of effort to make5, often done mainly at the behest of program sponsors – and, honestly, there was a belief that once something aired, there wasn’t much value in holding on to it. The idea of television programs as something worth saving wasn’t a thing in a lot of circles then. Once it was done, it was gone. It’s understandable (think, for instance, of the logistical nightmare it would have been to preserve every single Today program that ever aired), but it means a lot of things are lost forever.6

That means when there is a new discovery, it’s a treat. And courtesy of my trusty associate Brandon, who found this recently and shared the good news with me, I’m happy to bring you another rare-as-hen’s-teeth segment of Wide Wide World, from June 9, 1957. There’s so much to enjoy here, including correspondent Charles Van Doren interviewing the great John Houseman, and a look at the efforts to put a satellite into orbit.

More rare footage will come next week! In the meantime, please watch, and enjoy.

“The Man Who Came To Breakfast,” 1953

Some years ago I made reference to a 1953 Esquire article by Richard Gehman. This article captured what it was like when Today was young and everything seemed brand-new, and cast and crew were coping with life at an hour that still seemed far too early for television. Back when I wrote about it, the best I could do was give you a summary of the article, for the Esquire archive was paywalled.

Happily, the Esquire archives are now open to one and all, as I discovered while looking for something else last week. It is therefore my pleasure to present to you “The Man Who Came To Breakfast,” so you may enjoy Richard Gehman’s unique take on early Today for yourself. Please enjoy.

When words still pack a punch

In July 1971, Dave Garroway was hosting a summer replacement series called The CBS Newcomers. In that role, he had two duties. One was to be the master of ceremonies, welcoming the audience and introducing the young performers before each segment. The other role was to be Dave Garroway. Over the years Dave had been known for his observations on life – many offbeat, some profound, some worth a chuckle, but all were a vital part of the style that made Dave a favorite with so many.

On one episode of Newcomers, Dave began talking about how Americans lived in a disposable society. “We drink coffee from disposable cups,” he said, “and wipe our faces with disposable napkins. The airlines serve cocktails in disposable glasses.” At that point, Dave reached for his pocket and pulled out an object, holding it up for the cameras. “It saddens me to think there are those watching this show who have never owned one of these. It’s called a fountain pen. It didn’t write under water, and it didn’t write upside down, but it wrote beautifully. And then – get this now! – when it ran dry, you didn’t throw it away. You filled it again – and again – and soon it fit your hand. It got to be your pen.” It was a moment that was pure Garroway. And, in my case, it still packed a punch nearly 50 years later.

The other week, as I was transcribing all these notes, I came to this moment where Dave talked about fountain pens. Like most of you, I’m accustomed to writing with whatever ball-point pen is handy at the moment.7 At the office, I’m fond of those ball-point gel pens with the replaceable cartridges. But something about that passage knocked loose a memory in my mind, and I did something about it.

When I was in high school, I was at a drug store browsing around. In the school supplies aisle, I saw a fountain pen. It was a Parker Vector in a blister pack, the entry-level pen. It cost more than other pens in the aisle, but I got entranced by the idea of writing with something different and bought it. That pen was my best friend the rest of my days in high school. I still have pages and pages of notes written in that flowing, slightly translucent blue ink I fed it through cartridges. That poor pen went through so much – I forget how many times I bent the nib – but it worked like a champ, and it was my pen, my faithful companion. I still have it – somewhere.

And that’s what I started thinking about the other week. Where was my friend, my pen? I searched everywhere, but couldn’t find it. After a while, I still couldn’t find it. No fear; I just ordered a newer pen that came highly recommended, and then a neat clone of a classic pen. Both of them are in the bag I carry to work every day.8 But that wasn’t enough. About that time, a check arrived with some royalties for the book that was published last year.9 And I thought it would be nifty to commemorate that book with a little present to myself. Something that would last. Something I could use. Why not a pen? And not just any pen, but a pen that had fascinated me for a long time?10 So now, a few dollars later, this little beauty is in my collection, a little prize to myself for getting a neat book published after so many years. And it is my pen, and I hope it will be to the last of my days. I love this beauty, this reminder of another time. It feels solid and balanced in my hand. It writes wonderfully. I look forward to a long, happy friendship.

And it’s all because a little aside on a short-lived, little-remembered television show 49 summers ago knocked loose a recollection. There’s still power in Dave’s words. Not a bad legacy to leave.

:: No, we haven’t gone anywhere. We have just been overwhelmed of late by no end of things: a crush of demands at work, a few more demands involving outside work (some of it paying work, too, and we seldom refuse that kind of deal), as well as the overwhelming sense of unease and anxiety in the run up to (and playing out of) Election 2020. With all of that going on, I haven’t been able to spend the time I’ve wanted in Dave’s realm.

I can, however, report that all those pages of notes are steadily being woven into a coherent manuscript – as of right now, I’m up to Dave working as an NBC guide, his eye on taking an announcers’ class. So even though I’m not saying much, this thing is still happening. I do have a contractual deadline, after all, and I keep those kinds of deadlines, no matter how much oil gets burned in the wee hours of the morning to do so.11 Stay tuned, y’all.

You thought you had remodeling chores?

As I work industriously on bringing you the finest in Dave Garroway-centric literature12, I come across tidbits that, although they won’t quite fit in the book itself, are too good to let fall down the memory hole. Like this item, from the Sept. 3, 1953 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Wow, would that would be a lot of fun to bring home from the store in the Toyota.

And here’s that big window, with the blinds sporting a nifty logo.

When you can’t go home again

All of us, at one time or another, have the urge to go back to places we remember. Sometimes we wish we hadn’t. Last December, after the last day of classes, I took an overnight trip to North Carolina just because I needed to get away. As part of that trip, I retraced the route we’d take to visit my grandfather’s summer home. There are so many memories I have of that old house, full of neat stuff he’d accumulated over the years, where time seemed like it had stood still since about 1965. It was full of neat books and gadgets and stuff from an age slightly older than mine. In an odd way, I felt at home in that time capsule of a house.13

There have been times the last few years when I’ve daydreamed about striking it rich14 and buying my grandfather’s old place, fixing the house up and making my own memories there. And last December, there was a “for sale” sign in front of the house. That night, in my hotel room, I looked up the listing. It didn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t. Very little of the interior of that house was still as I remembered it. Everything that made it special had been gutted at least 20 years back and replaced with stuff that looked identical to what you’d find in any other house anywhere else. Some parts of the house appeared to have been damaged. Much of it had been renovated to the point that I couldn’t recognize which room was supposed to be which. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it hurt regardless.15

This kind of heartbreak happens to all of us, in time. It’s the nature of the world. As Dave Garroway was reminded in 1954. During a summer respite, he happened to be near his hometown of Schenectady, New York, and decided to drive through for old times’ sake. He found his maternal grandparents’ old home place and drove out to see what it was like now. Garroway rang the bell, met the family that lived there now, explained that he had grown up there and asked if he might have a look around. It didn’t take long for the realization to hit him, either. “The deer stag’s head was off the wall, and the lamp with the beaded fringe was gone,” he recalled. “Grandfather’s rose garden was now a concrete garage…which all goes to show, you can’t go home again.”

It didn’t get any better when he went out to the old home place of his father’s family. His father, grandfather and an uncle had worked for General Electric, and during the off-hours they ran a chicken farm that kept them engaged in what Garroway remembered as “backbreaking work.” The young Garroways had lived in a cottage on the chicken farm, and it burned down when Dave was two. “I stopped there last summer, too, and looked at the site,” he said. “Growing out of the old ruins was a poplar tree, so big around that I couldn’t even get my arms around it. That’s how old I am!”

Maybe all of us should heed the words of Thomas Wolfe.16

Cooking with the Garroways, 1959

In July 1959 Clementine Paddleford, food editor for This Week magazine, visited Dave and Pamela Garroway at their New York home for her series “How America Eats.” As part of the article, Dave and Pamela talked about how their family liked to eat.

Dave confessed that his one talent in the kitchen was making a New Orleans Remoulade, which he liked to make and serve on shrimp when they had company over for dinner and conversation.17 For years, he admitted, “I lived on salmon sandwiches, milk and bananas. I still like bananas, but now I prefer them flambeed.” The difference, he said, was marrying Pamela. “She is keeping my waistline trim, yet I have never eaten better.”

Dave gets sample of Pamela’s chili – it’s a Saturday-night favorite

While Pamela, who had lived in Paris for many years, knew French food well, it was a comparably humble dish of hers that became a favorite of Dave’s: Homemade Canned Chili, made with two cans of chili con carne and some extra ingredients.18 The article noted that on Friday nights in the wintertime, Dave loved to come home to a dinner of chili and crackers. It was also a favorite on their Sunday table at their beach house on Long Island. They liked to serve it along with a green salad tossed with thyme and tarragon wine vinegar dressing, hot garlic bread, Chianti or beer (depending on individual taste), and chilled melon balls for dessert.

Lest the Garroways’ favorite recipes be lost forever, it’s my pleasure to provide you with the three recipes from the article. Use them in all good health.

Remoulade Sauce
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup Creole mustard*
3/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup finely-chopped celery
1/2 cup finely-chopped onion
2 tbsp. minced parsley
2 tbsp. finely-chopped dill pickle
1 clove garlic, minced
juice of one lemon
few drops hot pepper sauce
1 tbsp. paprika
red pepper to taste

Combine mayonnaise, mustard and olive oil. Add remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. Serve over shrimp. Yield: 2 cups sauce.
*Note: If a sharper type of mustard is used, the amount may be decreased as desired.

Homemade Canned Chili
6 medium onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/2 pound ground beef
2 cans (1 pound each) chili con carne with beans
1/2 cup chili sauce
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
dash of pepper
few drops hot pepper sauce

Saute onions in butter until soft; remove from pan. Cook beef until brown. Add sauteed onions and remaining ingredients. Heat, stirring until well-blended. Cover. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Yield: 4 portions.

Flounder in Sherry
1 lb. flounder fillets, cut into serving pieces
1/3 cup minced onion
1/2 cup sherry wine
1 can (4 oz.) chopped mushrooms and liquid
salt
coarsely-ground black pepper

Place fish fillets in shallow greased baking dish. Sprinkle on onion. Add sherry, mushrooms and mushroom liquid. Season with salt and pepper. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 to 30 minutes. Serve with sauce, as desired. Yield: 3 to 4 portions.
To complete the course, Pamela suggests buttered green peas and little new potatoes feathered with parsley. For dessert, a lemon ice and ladyfingers.

Project update

A couple weeks back, the search through Newspapers.com came to its end. Now it’s time for me to sift through those thousands of clippings, get the good stuff out of them, and organize everything. That goes not only for the newspaper clippings, but also for magazine articles I’ve found, paper documents I have from the Garroway family, the hundreds of images I have of documents from the NBC papers at Wisconsin, passages from books, and so many other things. And then there’s the audiovisual evidence – kinescopes, several interviews from the Archive of American Television that I have yet to go through thoroughly, and a couple of lengthy audio interviews with Garroway that I’ve happened across.

All of this may sound daunting, and it is a big task. But it’s helped by knowing that a good many of those clippings, I saved because of only one or two sentences. A good many of them are brief mentions, for instance in an Earl Wilson column or some such. Others are alternate versions of the same wire service story, which I clipped just to be thorough. It’s easy to open a hundred documents at a time in my preview program, transcribe what I need and create a brief citation (which I will finish out later), and then move ahead. The work goes much faster than you may imagine, and it’s splendid busy-work.19

Years ago I developed a system for handling these kinds of huge projects, and it’s much like how, in the days before computers, an author might write individual facts or ideas on index cards, then sort that stack of cards into whatever sequence was appropriate, and then write the manuscript. In my case, I am transcribing the relevant items from each article, in chronological order, into a master document. Once that’s done, I will cut-and-paste those items into the order that seems appropriate for the story I have to tell. Then writing the finished manuscript just becomes transforming those facts and ideas into readable prose. It’s a method that served me well 19 years ago when I was working on my dissertation; once I had everything in the sequence I wanted, it only took me about two days to complete the first draft of my dissertation.20

As I write this in the wee hours of a Monday morning, this master document stands at 123,710 words. By the end of today, it’ll likely have grown to more than 130,000. I haven’t even gotten into the Today years, so this thing’s going to be a monster, maybe even 400,000 words when I’m done transcribing. A whole lot of it will get cut down, because there’s a lot of fluff in there, I know, and the finished manuscript will likely be in the 100,000-word range. But it’s always best to have too much material, instead of having to stretch out too little. As a friend said the other day, first you create the block of marble, then you pare it down to David. (And in my case, that’s certainly apt.)

One more thing that helps any author is a good research assistant. And that, I most certainly have.

This is Gilda21, my faithful helper22. She’s very good at making sure none of my papers go anywhere – that is, when she and her big brother aren’t getting into mischief.23

With help this good, there’s no way I can fail.