Category: Awesomeness
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.
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.
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.