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.
Category: Archival finds
Through the cracks
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.
Inside the historian’s craft
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.
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.
FOIA and You: Partners in Research
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.
The article that started it all
In the ninth month of 1951 Dave Garroway was feeling lost. His television program had lost its sponsorship and time slot, and he didn’t know what was ahead for him. One morning, the story goes, Dave was having breakfast at the Pump Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago (Dave was then living in the Windy City, remember). He happened to see a copy of Variety that someone had left behind, and inside was an article that outlined this new early-morning show that Pat Weaver was planning for NBC. Dave would later say the more he read, the more he felt the show was made for him. He contacted his agent, Biggie Levin, some meetings with NBC took place, and the rest is history.
I wondered how much stock to take in all this. Fortunately, the Internet Archive and its tremendous cache of periodicals came to the rescue, and after much searching I believe I’ve found the article that so transfixed Dave over that fateful breakfast, and changed his life forever. You can read that very article (and the rest of the issue) here.
Are you a vision delinquent?
Dave Garroway’s glasses were one of his trademarks, but he’d worn glasses since he was diagnosed with a vision problem at age ten. In 1960, he used his status as one of America’s most famous eyeglass-wearers (as did some others, including Steve Allen) to appear in a series of ads for the Better Vision Institute, promoting the cause of professional eye exams. “Believe it or not, more than 50,000,000 Americans are vision delinquents,” the copy in one ad warned. Another ad promoted eye exams for children, pointing out that the eye exams used in schools often could not catch serious problems. (As someone whose myopia was not caught by in-school exams and wasn’t diagnosed until I saw an optometrist when I was 16, I concur. I just thought everybody had a blurry left eye.)
Take Dave’s advice, and get an eye exam if you haven’t already.
Peace!
Since it’s Easter Sunday, what better time to explore the beautiful word that was Dave Garroway’s benediction?
Charlie Andrews, who was Dave’s favorite writer and best friend, told the Archive in his lengthy interview that “peace” came from a preacher out of Philadelphia that Garroway took to listening to. This preacher would give these energetic sermons and would use the benediction, “Peace! It’s wonderful.” Garroway took a liking to “peace!” and adopted it as his own.1
But who was that preacher? The second clue comes from Richard Gehman’s 1961 TV Guide profile of Garroway2, which cites the benediction’s origin as borrowed from “Father Divine.” A little search engine magic does the rest, and you soon learn of the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, who indeed ran his ministry from Philadelphia starting in 1942 and employed the exhortation “Peace! It’s wonderful.” His story is much too interesting and wide-ranging for me to try to encapsulate here, so maybe it’s better if you consult this rundown of Father Divine’s life and times. Don’t miss his many interesting connections to other cultural phenomena, including a famous Johnny Mercer composition inspired by one of Father Divine’s sermons.
One of a kind
One of the strange sidelights of my research is that it’s led me to examine the Playboy Magazine archive, since Playboy carried a couple of pieces about Dave Garroway during its early years. Since I was born in the ’70s, there’s a certain image I have of Playboy, so it’s interesting to go back to the magazine’s early years and see when it was about a lifestyle, about being a cool and swinging man, and the girlie pictures play less of a role than you might think (and are also fairly tame by modern standards – if anything, early Playboy makes me think of Esquire in the ’80s and ’90s).
In the ’50s Dave Garroway symbolized several things that fit in with the Playboy ideal. He was a cool character who talked cool. He liked fast cars. He dressed and groomed himself in a unique style. He loved jazz music. “Watching him, you get the idea he doesn’t care one way or the other if he has an audience or not,” a 1954 profile of Garroway in Playboy read. “He’s just taking it easy, doing what he wants to be doing, and if a few million people happen to be looking at him, OK. If they’re not, OK too.”
One other aspect of the Garroway lifestyle that fit with the Playboy lifestyle: Garroway’s skill with card games. Long nights with card games had led to a lot in Dave’s life – and helped launch his career in broadcasting. Even into the Today years Dave kept on playing cards, and in the November 1957 Playboy John Moss wrote about the qualities of a good poker player, hoping to inspire those wanting to improve their game. As an example of the skills a first-rate poker player would possess, Moss cited Garroway as a particularly adept opponent, saying that the master communicator “has won entirely too much of my money.”
Moss wrote that Garroway’s overwhelming characteristic was self-discipline, that he never did anything without a reason. “Calculating, unemotional, a realist, a convincing dissembler – he never beats himself.” Although Garroway had his bad nights, Moss said he never caused his own downfall. “With Garroway you have the sense that everything is going along just fine and your queens-up are going to win with ease, and then about the time you’re counting the pot for the third time and imagining yourself sweeping it in, there’s Dave with a neat little straight he had on the first five cards.”
Moss said Garroway wasn’t being modest in not raising. “He waited until his fourth up-card seemed to wreck him and everyone was relaxed. Then he was set. Then there was the bland, casual, slightly bored, slightly confused manner and the harmless, diverting small talk – all designed to soothe you, quiet your suspicions, rock you to sleep – and the next thing you knew Dave was dragging in your pot.”
According to Moss, Garroway demonstrated that the best poker players were amateurs. Pros played a cold and calculated game that avoided risk, “but their play lacks boldness, flavor and imagination – the very qualities with which Garroway’s game abounds.”
One week in: “Gutenberg’s reputation is not threatened”
We spend a lot of time here talking about the early days of Today, and there’s a couple reasons for that. The first, obviously, is because when you look at the career of Dave Garroway you find a ton of material about his years on that program, and to not talk about it is sort of like talking about Neil Armstrong without mentioning that whole Apollo 11 thing. But it’s also interesting to look at those early days because Today was such a departure from anything else that had come before, and it’s worth seeing how a program we now take for granted brought such responses when it was new. In this installment, we’ll look at how Broadcasting looked at the first few days of Today in its January 21, 1952 issue.
(Before we go any further, it’s only right to thank the amazing online archive at the incredible American Radio History website, where this and a ton of other issues of Broadcasting, along with many other titles, are available for research. Folks like these make historians’ jobs so much easier, and they really deserve an award or ten for doing this stuff.)
The review begins by noting the immense buildup NBC had created around the program, “suggesting that the program would be of greater historical consequence than the invention of the printing press.” After the first few days, however, the review noted “Gutenberg’s reputation is not threatened” – and that the early-morning radio programs Today was meant to rival should not yet be thrown out.
Its main problem, Broadcasting noted, was that it tried to do too much too quickly and set an impossible mission for itself. “No one television show can deliver the contents of the Library of Congress to America’s living rooms and that is just about what its originators envision Today as attempting.” As a result, it reduced news stories to brief headlines, three-minute songs were truncated to a minute’s play, and book segments didn’t go into any appreciable depth. Even the trans-Atlantic reports seemed to do little more than just demonstrate such communications were possible.
Broadcasting was not impressed with the busy studio, noting its array of clocks (“one showing the time in Calcutta, a hot-bed of interest to Indian viewers”), flashing lights, recorders and other gadgetry “as to suggest it was designed by the producers of Captain Video or Space Cadet.” The busy set with its many occupants milling about would resemble “St. Vitus’ dance brought to the screen were it not for the restorative presence of the man who now saves the show and can, with proper support, establish it as an important television feature.” Broadcasting praised Garroway as “imperturbable” and suggested Today would be successful only if the rest of the program were tuned to more closely match Garroway’s calm demeanor.
The review noted a moment from the January 15 edition that suggested a path Today could take. That morning, Garroway had interviewed New York Daily News drama critic John Chapman about a play that had opened on Broadway the previous night. Chapman told Garroway he hadn’t cared for the play, and explained why. After Chapman expressed his views, Garroway presented a recording made the night before in which theatergoers’ opinions differed from Chapman’s. “This was imaginative,” Broadcasting noted, “and an example of the kind of foresighted thinking that it will be necessary to employ consistently to make this program a success.”
Broadcasting noted that NBC had put a lot of resources into making Today a success, and “it remains only for production genius to figure out how to use it.” The review suggested that Today limit its mission to what it could do well within its allotted two hours, for at its current pace, “it will succeed only in being a costly what-is-it, running a poor second in music and news to radio in the competition for the morning audience.”
In a separate item below the review, Broadcasting noted that on its first day Today claimed a newsbeat, with NBC publicizing that a bulletin on a Northeast Airlines plane that crashed in the East River “scooped all networks and stations.” Broadcasting noted that the “scoopees” presumably included NBC’s New York flagship station WNBT-TV, since East Coast stations left Today at 9:00 AM, while the bulletin was seen only on the additional hour for Central Time Zone viewers.
One final note: In a sidebar, the basic facts about Today included an approximate cost of $35,000 per week. In January 2018, that translates to $327,371.51 per week, which…I somehow doubt would cover the week’s expenses these days.
The King Is Dead (Part II)
A couple weeks back my co-author provided an excellent precis of what happened the morning of February 6, 1952, as Today had to throw out its planned program to cover the death of King George VI. As it happens, Billboard had been publishing ongoing reviews of Today (“because of its importance in opening up additional morning hours in television,” the publication promised it would continue to offer critiques “as long as it believes significant improvements may still be made”), and the program’s coverage of the King’s passing was a major component of its February 16 review.
Joe Csida’s review began by noting the program had improved in its second and third weeks, losing the “frantic, disorganized atmosphere” of its first week and slowly discarding ideas “which no doubt sound great on paper but come off just short of ludicrous on the air,” including a bowling match between players in Chicago and New York and a knitting contest. But the February 6 program, which had to deal with two major stories that broke before air, made Csida believe “the show really seemed to come into its own.”
The King’s death, obviously, dominated the morning. Csida noted that the program’s tribute included newsreel footage of the King’s life, a telephone report from London correspondent Romney Wheeler, and an in-studio visit from H.V. Kaltenborn, “who was shaken out of the hay for the event [and] contributed interesting sidelight and background data in interviews with Garroway to round out the picture.” Csida called the program’s coverage “dignified yet exciting” and that it “left little to be desired,” summarizing it as “knowing and beautifully-handled.”
(One casualty of the story was a plan to have a group of Boy Scouts take over the program that morning. Garroway had them come on camera, where he apologized to them and explained that in view of what had happened, the Scouts would need to come back the next day.)
As if that wasn’t enough, Today dealt that same morning with word that President Harry Truman, who had earlier called the state primaries “eyewash,” had decided to enter the New Hampshire primaries after all. The program carried a pickup from Washington with NBC’s Richard Harkness and newspaperman James Reston discussing the move. Their conclusion that Truman’s announcement was meant to counter the rise of Sen. Estes Kefauver, riding a wave of popularity after his well-known hearings into organized crime, prompted Csida to praise them for “a nice piece of ‘inside’ reportage.”
Csida concluded his review by noting that Today would rise and fall on how stories broke, and that the inevitability of dull news days meant that producers needed to bring together “sound thinking on the feature-type stuff,” and that other elements of the program needed improvement. However, he noted, “Garroway gets better every day. The guy is a great performer, and his development on this tough job is something to be marked in TV’s history books. Jim Fleming and Jack Lescoulie continue, too, to make solid contributions.”
Csida concluded his review with these words: “If the program’s planners and thinkers don’t let up, Today is a cinch to make it, and make it big.” (Wonder how that turned out?)