Archival finds – Page 5 – Garroway at Large

“I Lead a Goofy Life”: Dave Garroway, 1956

My colleague Brandon alerted me to a nifty flashback item on the Saturday Evening Post‘s website. In February 1956, the Post published an article under Garroway’s byline (well, an “as told to” byline, at least) titled “I Lead a Goofy Life.” In it, Dave talked about the strange occurrences that happen when you host an early-morning program, set in a big fishbowl of a studio, in which your assistants include a Miss America and a young chimpanzee. Better still, there’s a link to the entire article, viewable in its original layout, at the bottom of the entry. It’s a fun article. Go check it out.

Dave Garroway for Watkins Products, 1960

We’ve mentioned from time to time how Dave Garroway was much in demand as a spokesman. But while much has been said and written about it, you don’t often get to see him practice the salesmanship skills that made him so appealing to sponsors. There’s just so little surviving material from those times.

Thanks to the Internet Archive (and also with thanks to Brandon for bringing this film to my attention!), we now have a few minutes of Dave displaying his unique style of one-on-one messaging. From 1960, here’s a film from Watkins Products introducing its newest salesman, one with a remarkable ability to call on thousands of homes at once. More than anything else I’ve seen, this really captures just how good Dave was as a spokesman. Watch it, and enjoy.

What we have, and what we’ve lost

One of the pleasures of a big and protracted research project is that you meet some really good people along the way who are engaging in interesting projects of their own. It’s always fun to compare notes and share leads, and it’s always therapeutic to commiserate about the various obstacles any researcher must overcome (time constraints, writer’s block, footage or recordings that are inaccessible, etc.). Writing and researching can be such a solitary endeavor, and it’s incredibly helpful to be reminded that you’re part of a community.

I was reminded of all this last weekend, when I had a lengthy and very enjoyable phone conversation with a fellow historian. He’s presently engaged in a highly ambitious piece of research about a topic both of us are fascinated with (and there are times I can’t figure out if I’m encouraging his efforts because I enjoy helping other researchers, or if it’s my selfishness wanting him to finish this project because I can’t wait to read it!). He’s likewise been following my work on Dave Garroway, and has frequently sent along some very helpful items his own research has uncovered.

During our conversation we often found ourselves talking in the past tense. Not necessarily because of history, mind you, but because of people important to our stories who are no longer with us. My friend had an advantage in this regard, because starting many years ago he was able to track down and get interviews with a lot of people who have since passed on. This was important, since so many of those people were carving that particular realm of the television realm out of the wilderness. I often found myself thinking, “How I would have loved to sit in on that conversation.” My friend knows how much I love this stuff, and he’s frequently shared portions of those interviews with me, and it’s fascinating to read. But it’s not the same as being there.

And it once again got me thinking about a topic I explored in a guest piece over at It’s About TV last year, or that I briefly touched on in this post some time ago. It’s how much of this history is carried around inside the minds of the participants – and how much of it we lose when those people fall ill or pass away. I think about how much I wish I’d started this project a few years earlier so I could have talked to Beryl Pfizer. Or how much I wish I had a time machine so I could sit down with Jack Lescoulie or Jim Fleming or Pat Weaver – or Dave himself – for some really long conversations. Or so many others.

Fortunately, some stories aren’t lost forever. The Television Academy‘s series of interviews is nothing short of a gift to us all – in my instance, the extended interview they did with Dave’s best friend and favorite writer, Charlie Andrews, is a gift that never stops giving. And there are so many others there, too.¹ Jeff Kisseloff’s book The Box is also indispensable, and I understand there’s a ton of material he gathered that just couldn’t fit in the book. There are also archives and repositories out there – broadcast collections like those at the Paley Center, university archives where the papers from notable figures and corporations are now held, and sometimes you’ll find some great surprises there too. But without that human touch, without those interviews, without the ability to see someone’s face light up as they recall a great moment or their eyes glower as they remember some kind of executive meddling, or to hear them laugh as they recall a moment when things went horribly wrong…there’s something missing. It reminds me of a review I once read about a biography: the writer’s extensive use of archival materials meant he had done a great job covering the story of his subject, but the reader came no closer to knowing the man.

Those stories are out there. I’m grateful for the ones that have been preserved, but I genuinely grieve for those that are lost forever. It’s my hope that along the way, I’m able to capture some of those memories in my work on Dave Garroway, and that I’m able to both tell you his life story and, by the time I’m done, make you feel like you know him. It’s a big job, but our Dave is definitely worth the try.

The Television Circus

Much of the fun of research comes in the happy accidents. You may set out looking for a certain piece of information you’ve targeted, but I guarantee you’ll end up finding something else along the way that will delight, amaze, charm, amuse or astonish. Today’s entry is about that kind of discovery.

We know the name Bil Keane from The Family Circus. But the success of that strip obscures his other efforts through the years. One of them was a look at television, Channel Chuckles, which ran from 1954 to 1976. And sure enough, in my search through newspaper archives, I found the subject of this blog sometimes came up:

Read more about Channel Chuckles in this Comics Kingdom post.

The view from the morning after

On this date in 1952 – also a Monday, no less – Today made its debut. Some 67 years later, it’s one of the most-watched programs on television and has gone on to great popularity and acclaim.

But what did they say about in January 1952? Well, they didn’t quite know what to make of it. I thought it might be fun to collect some of the more interesting comments about that first day, as found in some of the reviews I’ve located.

“If one-fifth the money spent on cameras and technical crews and long distance phone calls and telephoto machines, had been spent instead on writing, research and editing, NBC might have something of value to say between 7 and 9 each morning. I ought to add that Garroway is a very winning, personable and intelligent ‘communicator’ – a title NBC had best just forget – and it seems a shame he has nothing to get his teeth into. If he wants a place to sink his teeth, I suggest Sylvester L. ‘Pat’ Weaver, who dealt this mess, who is largely responsible for ‘the big television’ theory with which NBC is now obsessed, and which may wind up squeezing all the common sense and humanity out of NBC television.”
— John Crosby, New York Herald Tribune

“Big, sprawling, confused, shallow and not quite satisfying…it looked like a command post for an invasion, or where one might be staved off. It was a maze – not a mess. Despite the crowded movement and skein of wires, Buck Rogers whirl of wheels and striking array of electronics, it seemed fairly well orchestrated. Meaning no one fell over anyone else’s feet. It was not so much that this mountain of communications brought forth a TV mouse. Rather, it fostered a whole parade of mice; or maybe ant hills would be the better analogy. Certainly it had all the ant marks – the hurry and scurry visible, the real purpose buried somewhere in the purposeful confusion.”¹
— Jack O’Brian, New York Journal-American

“Personally, I liked the show, but I’ll be darned if I’ll look at it – except occasionally. First, it takes about 30 minutes after I get up before my eyes are open wide enough to see anything. Secondly, my morning ablutions usually consume another 30 minutes, and I refuse to lug my TV console into my bathroom’s limited space. Even if I could, it would be too dangerous. I splash around a lot, and if some water hit my cathode tube I might short-circuit myself.”
— Bob Lanigan, Brooklyn Daily Eagle

“NBC has Garroway under contract for TV and they haven’t had a sponsor. So they moved him to New York to put him to work to earn some of their tv money.² And what did Davey do? He showed the top of the RCA Bldg. in the rain and fog – the parent company of NBC, ‘blowing its top’ because NBC was spending its money so foolishly. The program proved that people like Garroway and his associates can get up at 4:00 a.m. and go to work if the boss says so.”
— Si Steinhauser, Pittsburgh Press

“Dave Garroway will have to pull something better out from behind his glasses than the opening early morning ‘Today’ show if he wants to lure viewers out of their beds or away from their breakfast foods….the program will have to rely considerably on those viewers who won’t be dashing off to work. The persons who only have a few minutes to wash, dress and eat won’t be able to spare much time at the TV set anyway. Offhand, I’d say that the capable Garroway has found the nice, warm beds to be a worthy opponent. I hope not, but don’t be surprised if Dave is kayoed.”
— Art Cullison, Akron Beacon Journal

“When a television program announces you don’t have to watch it, I suppose, reviewers should go into the other room and just listen….It seems to me that this is a fundamental weakness in ‘Today.’ If a program isn’t designed to be watched, it isn’t a TV program. It is more for radio or a party-line telephone….The studio is jammed with teletype machines, long-distance telephone and radio connections, television remote screens, wirephoto machines and at least 7,000 people milling around, mostly in each other’s way. Garroway, who still has his master’s hand at casualness, stands in the middle of this business attempting to keep things under control….Maybe – and just maybe, because it is so unwieldy – the program will work out some of its problems. But my best advice as of yesterday was to follow their advice and not look at the show.”
— John Caldwell, Cincinnati Enquirer

Looking back at 2018

For whatever reason, the image above – a classic Chicago School photo – just feels appropriate for looking back at the end of a year. Especially one as productive as 2018 was for the Dave Garroway biography project.

During this trip around the Sun, we’ve accomplished a lot. The manuscript crossed the 30,000-word threshold. I received Garroway’s FBI files. Cooperation with Brandon has gone on wonderfully, and in June we met up for a most enjoyable working lunch. Another relationship, with a researcher working on a related project, has resulted in a lot of good things. In September I gave a presentation at the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. And best of all, thanks to some help from a couple of very good folks, I finally established contact with some members of Dave’s family, and that has gone very well and already yielded some great discoveries. There have been other little victories along the way, too, and they’ll pay dividends as we move ahead.

What’s ahead for 2019? For one thing, with my other book project now (mostly) the concern of its publisher, that should free up time and brain power for Dave Garroway. I’m hoping to get out and conduct a few interviews this year. There’s still two or three decades worth of exploring to do through Newspapers.com. The new year won’t have a lack of things to get done.

But the best thing? This year I felt like I started to understand Dave Garroway – that the bits of information I’d collected over the years had finally started to organize themselves, and mystery began yielding to insight. And in its own way, that’s as important as any article or document or piece of film I could unearth. If I’m going to tell his story, I can’t just rattle off the facts or repeat myths. I have to understand him. I owe it to him. And this year it was as if he said from the great beyond, “Wow. It looks like you’re serious. Come inside, kid.” (I’ll do my best to not let you down, sir.)

The new year has the potential to be a great one for this project. There’s a lot to be thankful for when I think of 2018, too. I’m grateful for everything that’s happened on this project, for all the great folks I’ve met along the way, for all the help they’ve extended me. And I’m grateful to those of you who have read along as this adventure unfolds. Stay tuned…there’s more to come.

Happy 2019 to you, and to us all.

“Mad Men” meets “Today,” 1954

By early 1954 Today was doing well. Part of it came from the program finding its focus. Part of it came from the addition of J. Fred Muggs to the program. But to the executives whose decisions meant life or death for a television program, what mattered was the revenue. And thanks to a talented and motivated sales staff, Today had become a solid and successful buy for advertisers of all sorts – many of whom wanted Dave Garroway to do the commercials for them.¹ And thanks to Sponsor Magazine senior editor Charles Sinclair, who was given an unusual assignment in early 1954, we have an inside glimpse into the advertising aspect of Today – and of what it was like on the inside during an average day’s routine.²

Sinclair’s boss had assigned him to spend time with the Cunningham and Walsh agency³ and write about what the average agency man went through in a week. His very first assignment? Assisting with the live spots that the E.R. Squibb company had purchased on Today. So at 5:30 on Monday morning, he was shivering outside the Exhibition Hall⁴, waiting for the account’s supervisor, Tom De Huff, to arrive. When he did, a few minutes later, the two entered the building. “Garroway had just arrived and was surrounded, like a Queen Bee, by a covey of production coordinators, sports writers, newsmen and technical men,” Sinclair noted.

Garroway with Charles Sinclair (center) and agency rep Tom De Huff. (Sponsor Magazine photo)

Sinclair and De Huff walked down the long ramp to the downstairs reception room, near the control room. He noted “a long table around which sat half a dozen people drinking coffee poured by a white-coated waiter everyone called ‘Major.'” De Huff, who knew the program’s customs, explained that this was known as the “Telop One Club.”⁵ Over coffee and cigarettes, they discussed the spots Garroway would do for Squibb products. Dick Jackson, the network’s senior unit manager for Today, soon joined them and said the spots for Squibb appeared to be simple enough. “That’s a break for us today because we’re loaded to the top,” Jackson said, naming at least seven major clients who had booked time on the broadcast.⁶ “We think Garroway works best when there are no elaborate gimmicks, no tricky cues and no fancy art.”

When De Huff was a little concerned how the package would look on television, Jackson took the package upstairs and the two ad men went down the hall to a nearby viewing room to watch the camera check. In the room were a couple of representatives from other agencies. One of them, a pretty young girl, said she thought the whole thing was a lot of fun. “Not if you have to come in from Westport,” grumbled the other ad rep, fighting off drowsiness at ten after six. Over the monitors in the screening room the men watched Garroway rehearse each commercial in the lineup. He soon got to the Squibb spots, and they noted with approval the way Garroway read the copy and displayed the products.

At seven the program began, and after a news break the Squibb commercial went as scheduled, with no surprises. Sinclair told De Huff that he’d hate to be up at 4:30 each day “just to play nursemaid to a minute’s worth of commercial.” De Huff replied that he only had to be there about two times a month, when Squibb had a new product or a new pitch. “The rest of the time we let Garroway do the commercial in his own style.” He then suggested the two adjourn for some breakfast. “It was 10 minutes after eight,” Sinclair wrote. “The sun was up, people on their way to work were staring through the huge glass windows at Garroway; the Telop One Club was in full swing.”

The longest night, 1960

Today is Election Day here in the States, and all of us here at Garroway at Large World Headquarters are gonna go to the polls and do our civic duty. (We certainly hope you’ll do the same.) I’ll be spending the evening helping some students put some local election returns on our little radio station. My hope is that the local results will come in fairly quickly, we can wrap up our coverage at a reasonable hour, and we won’t end up with our own version of what happened on the night of November 8, 1960, when – as many of you know – things literally went all night and into the next day.

Many years ago the A&E cable network (back when you could tell the name stood for “Arts and Entertainment”) carried a two-hour highlights package of NBC’s coverage of that election. It’s really interesting to watch; you get to see Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in prime form, broadcasting from their perch above Studio 8H; you get to see John Chancellor and Sander Vanocur and Frank McGee and Merrill Mueller anchoring the regional desks; you get some really cool Hjalmar Hermanson set design, including the trademark X-shaped anchor desk; and you get all sorts of period-appropriate fun, including Richard Harkness minding a snazzy RCA computer that’s worked into the coverage as a neat bit of corporate synergy. It’s a good way to spend a slow afternoon. And as it becomes apparent the story’s not going to end any time soon, you get to see the anchors and correspondents deal with the fact they’re getting tired and nothing is happening.

But when the story stretches into the next morning, there’s a really nifty surprise, because look who stops by the aerie high over 8H:

(Bonus content! For another view from a little later, here you go.)

Enjoy! (And go vote!)

Garroway vs. bigotry, 1948

I try to keep the present out of what we do here at Garroway at Large. Most times I succeed. But the events of last week, especially what happened Saturday in Pittsburgh, cannot be disregarded. After such events you’re left struggling to make some sense of it all. To put it mildly, I’m heartsick.

Instead I have done my best to follow the Fred Rogers philosophy: when something horrible happens, look for the helpers. And I’ve also remembered that as a historian, I know this kind of thing isn’t new, not even in our country. And it was while thinking back over the history of hate in our country that I remembered a moment when our own Dave Garroway took a dramatic stand against bigotry.¹

In 1948 Garroway was well into his tenure as host of The 11:60 Club on WMAQ in Chicago. He often served as a master of ceremonies at concerts for acts his show featured. One of those acts was a young singer named Sarah Vaughan. Dave had first heard her music in 1946, when his friend Charlie Andrews played “If You Could See Me Now” for him. Garroway claimed he was upstairs when Charlie started playing the record, and was so mesmerized that he missed two steps and tumbled down the staircase. “We both knew that one of the great voices of our generation had come along.” Garroway played the song several times on his show, much to the acclaim of listeners, and he credited her songs with making The 11:60 Club so successful.

The divine Miss Vaughan in 1946. (William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress Collection)

So it was one day in 1948 that Garroway and three other deejays were emceeing a concert at the Chicago Theater. Sarah Vaughan came on stage and began to sing. Just then, some bigots in the balcony began throwing tomatoes at her. Sarah fled the stage. As an account the following year² put it:

Garroway strode to the microphone. His famous “relaxed” manner was gone. “Yes,” he told the audience, “now you know. Now you have seen in capsule form the hate which poisons the heart of America. It started the last war, and even now is starting the next. Today, hate-mongers stopped you from enjoying a great artist. Tomorrow, if you don’t halt them, hate like this, magnified into war, will kill you and your children too.”
Garroway made each person in the audience understand the attack was on them as well as on Sarah, and that it had significance far greater than a few tomatoes thrown at a great Negro artist. With shouts, the people brought Sarah Vaughan back for a great ovation, and carried home in their own consciousness new and personal realization of the consequences of discrimination.
Garroway, still burning with righteous indignation, also told his air audience about it, with the result that Sarah Vaughan was deluged with letters, telegrams and flowers. Garroway’s point of view had penetrated.

In these troubling times, may we have the same courage to speak up when we need to.

11:60 and all that

When Dave Garroway returned to Chicago after World War II, he ended up with a midnight time slot on WMAQ-AM, mainly because he was one of the few staffers who had a car and therefore didn’t have to work around local transit’s nightly shutdown. To this freeform effort he gave the name The 11:60 Club and billed himself “Eagerest Beaver” of said society, as you can see on the membership card below:

Now, you might think those are a couple of clever names that ol’ Garroway would have come up with on his own, right? But I’ve now seen the handwritten evidence that tells us otherwise. The name The 11:60 Club came from a popular record of the day by Harry James and His Orchestra, “11:60 P.M.”

As for the “Eager Beaver” title, that’s courtesy of this incredible Stan Kenton instrumental:

All this makes it that much more of a shame that so few recordings of The 11:60 Club remain. Just the few minutes I’ve heard from one of the surviving recordings was pure fun, with a young and playful Dave Garroway purring into the microphone and playing really cool music. It’s easy to understand why so many folks stayed up past 11:60 each night to hear him.