Automobiles – Garroway at Large

A new home for some old friends

I’ve written on here before about the importance of preserving television history. That’s not just in writing books about people like Dave Garroway, but also in preserving the things that remain. Some of those things are easy to preserve, like books and documents. Other pieces are a little more substantial, but still manageable. And then there’s some that require some effort. That’s what led to an adventure last week.

I’ve been friends with Bobby Ellerbee for several years, and on a few occasions I’ve visited him and his dogs at his home in Georgia. Over the years Bobby amassed a collection of television cameras that spanned a good half-century of the medium’s history. The first time I visited, two rooms were awash with just about every studio camera you could imagine, and his garage had just about enough surplus equipment to start a network.

Over the years, some of Bobby’s collection found new homes at museums or with film prop companies, but his camera room was still nicely populated. Recently, though, he bought a new house. It’s a nice house, but it doesn’t have the display area of the house he’s vacating. Bobby had to make some hard choices. To make a long story short, I got a phone call, and last week I rented a box truck and drove over to his house.

The more the truck filled up, the more I realized this was real, and I started to think about the two happiest days in the life of a boat owner.

In the space of about two and a half hours that Thursday, Bobby and three movers and I loaded four cameras and pedestals, a few boxes of equipment and books, and some other stuff we could put to work in our building. Bobby had told me to rent a truck with a lift gate, and it’s a very good thing I did. Camera pedestals are heavy. By 11 that morning the truck was loaded up and I was headed back home. I spent the afternoon and evening unloading the truck at the office, and that night I drove it back and reclaimed my car.¹

The brave rental truck at the end of its travels with me. This was a happy moment, likely for both of us.

So, let’s see what we have.

Longtime readers will be familiar with this: the RCA TK-47. I already had one, but I certainly was not going to pass up another. Unlike mine, the internals of this one are still intact, and as I was cleaning it up I was interested to look inside.² Bobby had installed vinyl lettering on either side to honor NBC’s flagship stations in New York and Los Angeles. Inside is a property tag from WISH-TV in Indianapolis. Part of me thinks it would be fitting to restore the WISH-TV livery, but I’m awfully fond of the genuine NBC stickers on there, especially since I associate the TK-47 with Saturday Night Live and David Letterman’s late-night NBC show.³ Fortunately, I’ve got a while to decide what to do.

A contemporary of the TK-47 is the Ikegami HK-312, which Bobby had decorated as an ABC camera of the 1980s. It’s appropriate, because ABC used Ikegamis a lot. The Ikegami doesn’t get recognized a lot but it was one of the workhorse cameras of its day, and you’ve watched a lot more television that was brought to you through these machines than you may realize. This particular one has some interesting labels inside about its history, and the box lens has an ABC property tag on it.

Now, here’s a rarity: a Marconi Mark VII. This one actually did belong to Tele-Tape Productions back in the day, which meant it spent a couple years at work in the early days of Sesame Street. What looks like sheet metal damage in the photo is really the reproduction logo, printed on vinyl, separating from the side of the camera. I’m going to replace that as soon as I can get the printing done (the design is pretty much done, but I just need to find someone who can print it to my specifications). In the meantime it’ll wear a rare and very interesting livery that a few Mark VIIs wore for a short period.

No, that’s not the pedestal they used under these when they were in service. Although, given their weight, you can sort of understand it.

And this stylish beast is the RCA TK-42. I’ve seen it described as RCA’s attempt to combine the color of the TK-41 with the sharpness of the monochrome TK-60. Unfortunately, ambition didn’t match execution and the TK-42 was not a hit. NBC itself really didn’t want anything to do with them, so TK-42s and TK-43s were often what brought local stations into the color era.⁴ The TK-42 was soon superseded by the great and durable TK-44. This one somehow made it to modern times, and even has the proper RCA pedestal and head most often seen beneath them. Unfortunately, it’s missing a few of its internals and has to be balanced with some weights inside, but from the outside you couldn’t tell. The black-and-gold RCA logo disappeared from the right side somewhere along the way, but a very helpful designer with a 3D printer was able to print up a replacement that looks just like it’s always been there, and I’m very happy.

We look much happier wearing the General’s lightning bolt. Now imagine how we’ll look once we’re back on our big ol’ pedestal and we can get a good all-over clean-up and shine.

There’s plenty left to do on these cameras. I’ve done some initial clean-up on them, but when I have time I want to give each one a good going-over to make them look as good as they can.⁵ There’s also a few things I may do as I find period-correct hardware for these machines. But all that’s down the road. Right now, what matters is that these old machines are safe in their new home, where young eyes will be able to see the equipment that helped make possible what they now take as a given.

Dave Garroway, sports car enthusiast

Our second installment of rare Garroway footage⁶ 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.⁷

Here is some rare footage of a sports car race at Andrews Air Force Base (yes, that one)⁸ 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.

Dave’s first car

Those of us who drive never forget our first car. For a lot of us, it was a car that was already in the family and handed down to us (as was the case with the cars that got me through college and graduate school). But how many of us can say our very first car was custom-made for us?

Dave Garroway – a lifelong lover of all things automotive – could.

As Dave told it, he was five years old when he spied a Chandler automobile that was owned by a neighbor, and was smitten by it. His Grandfather Tanner, who had owned a bicycle shop before getting into the roofing business, had a basement full of tools and metal-forming equipment that fascinated young Dave. So Dave enlisted his grandfather’s help in building a car from wood, parts from a wagon, sheet metal bodywork, and four wheels (depending on when Dave told the story, the wheels came from a baby carriage or a shopping cart). “It had a top speed of about six miles per hour if you fed the motor – me – two Eskimo Pies,” Garroway would recall in 1962.

Five-year-old Dave Garroway sets out on another adventure on the streets of Schenectady. (Garroway family photo)

This first car would later inspire Dave to build another one, this one pedal-powered. He would remember it as “my first automotive adventure.” And from there, a love affair was born. (And all the years he spent constantly tinkering with his beloved Jaguar can be traced back to that little car he built with his grandfather.)

A man and his Jaguar

Dave Garroway had many fascinations in life, and one of them was automobiles. Of all the cars Dave owned, none became more famous than the 1938 Jaguar SS 100 that he owned for three decades. During that time he extensively modified and personalized it, raced it, endlessly tinkered with it, and cherished it…until the day he reluctantly sold it. It’s safe to say you’ll never see another Jaguar like this one…from the bigger engine and bigger headlamps to that eye-popping alligator-hide interior, this car is truly one-of-a-kind.

In the last few decades the Jaguar changed hands a few times, and recently went up for sale again. But even if the asking price is well beyond the means of most of us (I presently drive a Toyota, so the mid-six-figures asking price was beyond my means anyway), the car’s emergence on the market has meant no small amount of the car’s history, and several photographs documenting its modifications, made it on the web – and, thankfully, the car has pretty much been left the way Dave modified it. Have a look for yourself at Dave’s prized Jaguar, and I think you’ll see more than a little of the man himself reflected in there. Let’s hope the present owner – and all its future owners – will keep it that way.