When Dave Garroway came back to Chicago after serving in World War II, he found himself occupying the midnight slot on WMAQ.1 He turned what seemed like a dead-end assignment into an unusual program of music, patter and whimsy that gained a following everywhere WMAQ’s signal could be heard. And he named this unusual program The 11:60 Club.
It even had membership cards, sent to fans who wrote in. (Author’s collection)
As it happens, The 11:60 Club took its name from a popular song of the time, which I’m happy to share here.
And as a bonus…notice how Garroway is listed as “Eagerest Beaver” of the 11:60 Club? That’s a reference to….
You can say many things about Dave Garroway, but there is no disputing that the man knew good music.
I must have been 13 or 14 when a friend told me about a book he’d stumbled across at his grandfather’s house. It was a paperback called The Brothers MAD, and it contained material from MAD magazine from the 1950s. My friend let me borrow it. I loved looking through it, because it was a time capsule from a long-gone era. But one piece in particular fascinated me: a spoof of Today called The Dave Garrowunway Show, which – through the magic of drawings by Jack Davis – was a completely madcap look at the early days of the morning show, and the lurking threat of mayhem from the hands (and feet) of J. Fred Muggs. It is a dead-on spoof of early Today, and even Dave Garroway loved it, putting in a plug for the issue on Today.
Ever since this blog began I’ve wanted to bring The Dave Garrowunway Show to you, because it’s sublime. But the version in The Brothers MAD is chopped up to fit the paperback book format and the resolution of the pictures suffered in the printing process. And copies of the November 1955 MAD go for more than I’m willing to pay right now. Fortunately, the Internet can be a very handy thing every now and again, and while looking for something a couple nights ago I stumbled across an incredible online archive.
It is with pleasure that I can finally bring you, in its entirety and in its original format, The Dave Garrowunway Show. The first page is here; please page through to enjoy the rest. (And I mean that – enjoy.)
Sometimes you run across neat stories and you picture in your mind how they must have played out. Long ago I was sent the notes from an interview Garroway’s longtime associate Lee Lawrence conducted with commercial coordinator Lou Bradley, and it had this neat story in it. I wondered how it must have come across. As luck would have it, I found some photos from this very tale today, so you can both read it and see it unfold.
In mid-1960, Dave’s wife Pamela put her Ford Thunderbird up for sale. Bradley worked out a deal to buy the car from her. On June 7, he brought an envelope with the cash sealed inside and handed it to Dave, who put it in a pocket of his jacket. Bradley suggested he at least count it, but Dave went on about his business.
That day, the show’s guests included comedians Henny Youngman and Milton Berle. Berle, of course, was being full-on Milton Berle.
NBC photo
At one point he told Garroway, “You couldn’t pay me to do this interview.”
NBC photo
Suddenly, Bradley saw Garroway look at him and smile “this big, huge Garroway smile that no other human being ever had.” And out came the envelope.
NBC photoNBC photoNBC photo
As Bradley recalled, “It devastated the whole studio.”
I am remiss. There, I’ve said it. I won’t bore you with the personally-related reasons for my silence2, though given my line of work you can imagine it’s been an interesting time. But the semester is over and I can think about other things for a little bit (well, I think I can, anyway).3
By way of making up for it a little, here’s a king-size treat for you: an episode of Wide Wide World from 1958, in which we take a look at westerns. By this point, Wide Wide World was no longer doing what it once did, which was hopscotching around to show amazing sights that live cameras picked up as they happened.4 Plus, the program’s founder, Pat Weaver, was long gone from NBC by this point and his “going places and doing things” philosophy had given way to what would become more traditional forms of program content.5
There are other changes you’ll notice if you’re a Wide Wide World enthusiast. David Broekman’s lush, elegant theme is preceded by an otherworldly series of notes as a crude animated globe forms.6
And, as it turned out, “The Western” was the final installment of Wide Wide World. General Motors, which had sponsored the series since its debut, proposed altering the format to 15 one-hour installments. But those plans never took, and no other sponsor took the show over. Wide Wide World was gone, and with it went some ambitious plans for the fourth season, including a visit to Europe and possibly a trip into the Soviet Union to interview Russian leaders within the Kremlin.
That said, when you’re able to get the likes of Gary Cooper, James Arness, Gene Autry and James Garner7 on your program, it’s not a small way to say farewell. So, even though it’s a blurry copy of the program, enjoy the final Wide Wide World, from June 6, 1958.
Our second installment of rare Garroway footage8 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.9
Here is some rare footage of a sports car race at Andrews Air Force Base (yes, that one)10 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.
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 make11, 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.12
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.
As I work industriously on bringing you the finest in Dave Garroway-centric literature13, 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.
On any project there are milestones. Sometimes you meet them and you feel unalloyed relief. But other times you feel a twinge of sadness alongside relief. Yesterday had one such moment for me.
For the last three years I have slowly made my way through the Newspapers database, compiling thousands of newspaper clippings through the years of Dave Garroway’s life. And it was yesterday that my search carried me through the year 1982, when Dave’s life ended.
Memorial ad from the July 27, 1982 Hartford Courant.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a chore, tedious at times. Although I do have to say it’s nowhere near the chore that going through newspapers was in earlier times. Until not that long ago, going through newspapers meant spending days on end at libraries spooling through countless microfilm reels, with no real search assistance for most newspapers. You had to know what to look for and where to find it. It took forever. My master’s thesis involved a lot of crawling through microfilm, and even though it was a single newspaper over a period of three months, it was a chore. Which makes me thankful for Newspapers.com and how a single search string can return thousands of matches from hundreds of newspapers in an instant.14
Within seconds, a search string pulls up 21,000 results from the year 1953, from dozens of papers around the nation (and in some instances, other countries). Can you imagine the work this would have been in the microfilm era? Sigh.
Be that as it may, it adds up in a hurry. The pile of clippings from the 1950s alone is overwhelming. What’s worse is that every time I have saved a clipping, I have logged it on notebook paper, and that log fills a binder. 15 I have conducted the search in my home, my work office, in countless hotel rooms during my travels the last three years.16 At times it’s been a chore that never seemed to end; in other times it’s been a welcome distraction from whatever was troubling me. And now it’s done, mostly.
There’s still the years after Dave’s death to look through, and I am making my way through those. But as the years pass, the mentions become fewer. You also see mentions of his name when his colleagues and contemporaries pass away. In time, his name fades, brought up only in mentions of anniversaries of Today‘s debut. You do get a feeling of a story ending and fading.
Going through all these articles has given me a great sense of the arc of Dave’s life, and I feel I understand him that much better. It’s closed some open questions, put time stamps on moments that seemed to float in history, and knocked down a myth or two along the way. But it’s also had moments of sadness, as he goes from rising-star DJ of the 1940s to white-hot television icon of the early ’50s to serious presence of the late ’50s…and then his world falls apart, and he vanishes. Oh, he pops up every so often with a new gig, but those don’t take root for whatever reason. Every so often someone interviews him, and his views on television become less hopeful with every interview in each successive year. And then it’s over in a moment, and with each year that passes since, it seems he becomes more a trivia answer than anything else.
I can’t rest too long, because now it’s time for me to take those 3,000-plus clippings and put them to work, and that’s going to be a chore in itself. I can’t say I’ll miss the hours of clipping and logging. But I will miss watching Dave’s story unfold, and I’ll also miss the little discoveries I made along the way.
A lengthy chapter has closed. But many more remain to be written. Let’s do that now.
I’d imagine we are all feeling spent in too many ways to count, with so much going on that’s been terrible or that otherwise has just left a sense of gloom around. I certainly am, and that’s in part why there was no post last week. So this week I thought we could do with a little whimsy, courtesy of some friends who always cheer me up.
Burr Tillstrom and Oliver J. Dragon with our Dave. (NBC photo)
I’ve written on here before about Kukla, Ollie and the Kuklapolitan Players, their friend Fran Allison, and the gentle world created by Burr Tillstrom. And since Kukla, Fran and Ollie originated from NBC in Chicago, it meant they were never far from some people we consider dear, including Studs Terkel, Hugh Downs17 and our own Dave Garroway. Our Dave sometimes dropped in to visit the Kuklapolitan Players, and fun ensued.
But what prompts this post – aside from the need we all have for a little whimsy – is the happy news that the Burr Tillstrom Copyright Trust is uploading the surviving episodes of KF&O to a YouTube channel, one episode per day. Having fallen in love with the show thanks to the DVDs released a few years ago, this was terrific news. But what makes it even more fun is that our Dave is in a few of these episodes. Here, for instance, he narrates and referees a boxing match between Cecil Bill and Fletcher Rabbit.
Then, in an episode no doubt dear to Dave’s heart, he gets to teach the Kuklapolitans a little about astronomy.
There’s lots of fun on the Kukla, Fran and Ollie channel, so go check it out. And if you’ve never watched the show before, give it an episode or two. Chances are it’ll put a spell on you.18
You’ve read my musings before about how I wish more of the video and audio treasures of yesteryear would be preserved and made available through the Internet for those of us who care. And in that regard, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting is working miracles at a steady pace. But a few weeks ago, I found something that made me very happy, and I think it will make you happy too.
In 1962 Dave Garroway, seeking a new mission after leaving Today and NBC, became host of a series titled Exploring the Universe. This series, produced for National Educational Television (the forerunner, of sorts, of what we now know as PBS) with a grant from the National Science Foundation, explored different realms of the scientific world, explained various scientific concepts to viewers, and featured in-studio visits from renowned scientists who talked with Garroway about science.
I could try explaining it, or I could just let you see it for yourself, as the AAPB has brought us a collection of episodes, for you to watch at your pleasure. And what better way to begin than at the beginning? Enjoy.
— It has not been my intention to disappear as I have of late. Unfortunately, I have been suffering from something called “demands exceeding available time and attention,” a condition not uncommon to those in my line of work, especially at this point in the academic year. Be that as it may, I am happy to report that new research materials have been coming in great quantity, thanks in particular to a reader who has been extremely helpful. The materials are here, as are the ideas – I just need to free up some time to turn them into something tangible. But it will get done. As Frank McGee would say, “Don’t go far.”
