Dave’s life – Page 3 – Garroway at Large

Get lost!

After the past few months, curbing how much we go out or canceling travel plans or doing whatever we need to do to stay safe, I think all of us have a pretty pronounced case of cabin fever. I know it’s bitten me pretty hard of late. It hasn’t been helped any when I look back on the calendar and remember it was three years ago this week I went to the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention for the first time. It gets even worse when I remember it was two years ago this week I was there, gave a presentation with my friend Kevin Doherty, met up with some great people I’d befriended the year before (Mitchell, Judie, Carol…I’m looking at y’all). And along the way, what started out as a fairly straightforward trip to Maryland for a conference got altered by a hurricane, and I ended up having the most unexpectedly amazing adventure, beyond anything I could have set out to do.

So with all that going on, and all those memories, it’s awfully tempting to throw my cares to the winds, throw a few things in a bag, get in the car and head for the mountains or something. But that’s not yet a good idea. The day will come when it will be safe to do so again, and it will be Good indeed. But instead, I’ve stayed here, done my work, and I’ve begun the long (but, thankfully, swiftly-moving¹) process of taking all those newspaper clippings and extracting the vital information from them. All to bring you, the reader, the most thorough treatment of Dave Garroway’s life and times that I can. Because I care.

And it happens that one item I’ve recently written about in the draft has something to do with throwing cares to the winds, loading up the vehicle and heading out. Only, in Dave’s case, more so.

After he left Today, Dave set out to be the best dad he could be, and he was especially fond of spending time with his youngest child, Dave Jr. In 1965, Garroway told a reporter about something that his son called “Get Lost.” The elder Garroway owned a Chevrolet Greenbrier van, which he enjoyed because the utilitarian vehicle gave him some anonymity, and it also doubled as a handy camper van.² And sometimes they took advantage of that latter function. The two Daves would load the Greenbrier with a supply of food and other necessities, sometimes pack a Questar telescope, and then get in. Dad would give Junior a map and tell him to get them “as thoroughly lost as possible.” And fun would ensue. “In ten minutes, we really are lost,” Garroway told the reporter.

Sometimes Dave Jr. would find a road that looked interesting and direct his dad to follow it. Other times, he’d tell his dad to follow a truck or go down a random road. Sometimes Dave Jr. would be so thorough that they couldn’t figure out how to get out; they’d have to backtrack. Decades later, Dave Jr. remembered how they would often end out spending the night out in the countryside, eating soup from cans and looking at stars through the Questar. Sometimes, if it got really late and they couldn’t find a place that looked like a good camping spot, they might check into a motel.

The getaways provided valuable father-son bonding time. And for Garroway, it provided something else. “We spend the weekend in complete anonymity. People go right by your face without recognizing you when you are in a situation that is unexpected.”

Here’s to the day – and let’s hope it’s soon – when we, too, can have getaways of our own, and build new memories. (Just try to remember how to get out of where you end up.)

The search is over

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.³

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. ⁴ I have conducted the search in my home, my work office, in countless hotel rooms during my travels the last three years.⁵ 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.

A priceless response to a miracle

As we’ve gone through this present health crisis, historian that I am at heart, I’ve often thought about various scourges from the past and the effects they had on people in those days. One in particular has come to mind on several occasions, and for as much as I may have overdosed on back issues of Life magazine and started having idle daydreams about life in the 1940s and 1950s, all it takes is the mention of one particular affliction to make me come back to the present. And it’s that terrifying affliction⁶, and the miracle that helped end its reign of terror, that figures into a story Dave Garroway never tired of telling on television programs or sharing in interviews – because it was a story that drove home just how meaningful a miracle it was.

One evening in the 1960s⁷ Dave was getting ready to go to a testimonial dinner for Dr. Jonas Salk. Young Dave Jr.⁸ asked his dad where he was going.

“To a dinner for Dr. Salk,” Garroway replied.

“Who’s Dr. Salk?” Dave Jr. asked.

“He’s the man who found the vaccine for polio.”

“What’s polio?”
—
May the day come, and may it be soon, when children will ask the same about our current scourge – and so many other health afflictions we have yet to conquer.⁹

Why we do this

As will happen when you’re an author, I’ve been asked what my next book will be about. “Oh, about 300 pages, give or take” is a tempting response, but that’s not a terribly social thing to say. Instead I reply with a certain degree of pride, “It’s about Dave Garroway.” That gets me one of two responses. One – typically from people past a certain age – will be a gleam of recognition, followed by memories of how that person loved to watch Dave back in the day.¹⁰ The other typical response is a polite version of “…who?” And that prompts my short answer, that he was the first host of Today, and that usually satisfies the person asking the question even if it reduces Dave to one role.¹¹

Then there are the other types of responses. Sometimes they’re fun responses. There are the inevitable wags who will make jokes about J. Fred Muggs, as if Dave’s life can be reduced to those three or so years. Then there are the people who focus on Dave’s bad habits, on the tantrums he was reputed to have thrown off-camera, on the tales of drug use (and the type and amount of drugs will vary, depending on which rumors are being repeated).¹² And, of course, there are those who will focus on the way he died and suggest there were bats in his belfry all along.¹³

It all gets wearying after a while. I’ve been digging into Dave Garroway’s life for more than four years now. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on. I’ve had lengthy conversations with his children, talked to people who worked with him and to people whose parents worked with him. I’ve read through his FBI file. I’ve traveled hundreds of miles to dig through box after box of archival material. I’ve scoured a half-century of newspaper archives and read through thousands of articles. Whatever I’ve been able to find, I’ve read. And something in the back of my mind, somehow, keeps waiting to find that big dark secret that’s going to ruin him forever. I keep thinking of the story that David McCullough told of wanting to write a book about Picasso, only to get a hundred pages in and realizing that even though Picasso was of monumental importance as an artist, he couldn’t stand Picasso as a person, so he decided to write about someone he found likable, and that’s how his Pulitzer-winning biography of Harry Truman came to be.

I’ve often wondered when my Picasso moment was coming with Dave Garroway. So far, it hasn’t. Instead, the more I read about him, the more I process what I’ve learned about him, the more I like him. The more I understand him. Yes, there are times he did things I wish he hadn’t. I wish I could go back in time and tell him to ignore the advice of that dentist at that card game, that Dexedrine was going to do horrible things to his mind and lasting damage to his body. I wish we knew then what we know now about how to treat chronic depression. I wish I could tell him to not sign away five years of his career when he left NBC in 1961. And, of course, I wish I could have kept him from doing what he did that day in July 1982.

But I can’t. All I can do is tell the story of his 69 years the best and most honest way I can. Which, for me, is not going to be that hard to do. I haven’t uncovered any deep or dark secrets. Eccentricities? A lot of those, but harmless. But I haven’t uncovered a life of dirty deeds, of sociopathy, of crime or vice. I haven’t unveiled anything that’s really uncommon for anyone of his times.¹⁴ Instead, I’ve discovered the life of a man who was little different from the rest of us, only he led his life in the public eye, and from that came benefits and disadvantages that were magnified because of his fame. But, viewed in scale, how different was he from the rest of us who live in privacy?

Carol Ford is someone I have become blessed to know.¹⁵ Years ago she took on a most formidable task: writing a biography of Bob Crane. That word “formidable” is because Bob Crane is known as much for certain aspects of his private life, and the circumstances of his murder, as he is remembered for Hogan’s Heroes. It wasn’t helped by a rather scurrilous major motion picture that took great liberties with the historical record. It was a task I wouldn’t dare to take on. Where would I begin, and how far up the wall would the inevitable jokes and comebacks and unkind comments drive me?

But Carol and her co-authors, made of stronger stuff than I, set out to correct that record. They talked with everyone they could locate, including people who knew Bob Crane really well. They did the hard work and research. And out of it came a truly massive volume¹⁶ that will tell you everything you want to know about the real Bob Crane. Not the Bob Crane that you think you know, not the Bob Crane from the sick jokes, not the Bob Crane from that hit-job of a movie, but the real and complicated and human Bob Crane who actually existed. Not just the Hogan’s Heroes Bob Crane, but the up-and-coming DJ, the white-hot star of KNX Radio, the sensation of a top-rated television comedy, and then Crane’s efforts after Hogan’s Heroes ended. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult topics about his life, but it discusses them in a context that’s missing from other accounts, and debunks a lot of tall tales that have spread about Crane’s life.¹⁷ It treats Crane’s life in scale, and you learn a lot about him that you didn’t know before, because no one before had cared to tell those stories because they wanted to talk too much about sex, videotapes and murder. You never knew so much about Bob Crane being a terrific drummer or a world-class disk jockey with a quick wit and an uncanny sense of timing, or a man who was genuinely loved and is still fondly remembered by his friends and colleagues.¹⁸

Carol continues to be Bob Crane’s foremost advocate, and makes appearances in the media and at conventions and in other forums to promote the book and speak on Bob’s behalf.¹⁹ It hasn’t been the easiest task, and I know for a fact she’s tired of hearing questions about that movie, that she’d be happy if no one ever brought up Crane’s murder or those videotapes or any of that ever again. But I know why she does this. It’s because she feels a duty to tell the story of Bob Crane with honesty and dignity, to rescue him from the jokes and the caricatures and to help people remember that Bob Crane was a human being with a full and complicated life much like the rest of us. And in this, she has succeeded.²⁰ Her incredibly detailed book restores Crane’s humanity, shows his flaws in scale and restores focus to the many good things about him. After reading it, you don’t look at his famous squinting smile as the leer of a wolf, but as the grin of a man who couldn’t conceal a quick wit. Bob Crane is fortunate to have Carol Ford and her associates as his biographers; they have told his story in a thorough manner, and they are tireless champions of his legacy, a story that is so often not told because one aspect of his life drowns out everything else.

And in a wider sense, that’s why what we do matters. Bob Crane can’t be reduced to punchlines about videotaped sex and a gruesome murder. Nor can Dave Garroway be reduced to a caricature about drug addiction and co-starring with a chimpanzee and committing suicide. Were all of those aspects of his story? Yes, they were. But that’s not all, and the real story, in scale, tells us a lot more. Here is a man who lived and breathed and loved and lost, just as all of us have. And with the help of a lot of good people, I’m going to tell you his story, and I think you’ll learn some things and appreciate what he did.

That’s why it matters. It’s because if there aren’t people doing this kind of work, a lot of history is going to get lost. And yes, there are times when it seems it’s a lonely, thankless job. I’m under no illusions that Dave Garroway is very much a niche subject. I don’t foresee long lines stretching around corners on the day this book is released. I don’t see getting interviewed on the morning shows about him. Any audiobook version will probably be you hiring me to come to your house and read it out loud in your living room.²¹ But I am committed to telling you the Garroway story because I want to cut through a lot of the old tales and urban legends, because I’ve found the real story to be a lot more fascinating than anything you’ve read before. Because the more I go into his story, the more I find it’s worth telling. And even if I only sell ten copies of the book (and even if those copies are sold to kin folks who purchase them out of pity), this whole exercise will have been worth it. I’ll know that I helped keep the Garroway story from vanishing down the memory hole.

That’s why we do this. We do this because we care. We do this because, somehow, these stories have meaning to us. The more we come to know the people we write about, they start to matter to us the way friends or family might. Not in the sense that we defend their every action or excuse their misdeeds – that’s fandom gone awry. But, rather, in the sense that we care about making sure they are represented with truth and accuracy, but also with dignity and fairness, just the same as we hope our own stories will be told when we’re gone.

If I can do that much for Dave Garroway, it really won’t matter how many copies of the book I sell, or if it only gathers dust on library shelves. The man’s story is worth the telling, and worth the remembering. And that’s why I’m happy to do it.

Neither here Norden there

Throughout his life Dave Garroway was fascinated by just about everything. His hobbies were many, and he tinkered with everything from old cars to telescopes to gem cutting and watchmaking. And as will happen with those of us who are fascinated by what the world has to offer, he was also a collector of odds and ends that represented his fascinations.²²

One of his prized items was a Norden bombsight. In many a profile article that mentioned his collection of treasures the Norden would often get a mention. What fascinated Garroway was probably not its military implications, but its mechanical intricacy and precision – plus, as a fine optical device, it had a neat junction with his love of telescopes and similar optical items.

So it was inevitable, I guess, that Garroway would spark some level of demand for the Norden, as evidenced by this clipping from a question-and-answer column in the Feb. 29, 1972 New York Daily News.

Contrary to what the Air Force spokesman told the Daily News, a multitude of Nordens survived the war and eventually found their way into civilian hands after they were declared surplus. Some went to museums, some went into restored or displayed aircraft, and some ended up in the hands of collectors. They turn up for sale every now and then, and there are even a few folks who can restore better-preserved examples to functioning condition.

(Although it’s very likely that mother from 1972 was relieved to get that answer from the Air Force. Can you imagine the havoc a youngster could wreak with a Norden bombsight?)

Happy birthday, dear Dave

It’s Dave Garroway’s birthday today – and it’s also our birthday. This website’s, that is. Three years ago today this website officially signed on. What a journey it’s been – and what a journey it continues to be. We’ve made a lot of friends, come to know members of the Garroway family, talked to people who worked with him or whose family members worked with him, discovered new material, given a presentation or two…a lot has happened. All of it has been worth it.

Three years into this project the manuscript is growing slowly but steadily. Much of that has been because so much time is being spent on finding new material, trawling the newspaper archives and conducting interviews in between the other chores we have to do in life. Not to mention that the current conditions have forced the postponement of a couple of research trips. But all of that is to come, and if I’ve learned anything as a researcher and author, it’s that the disappointment of a delay is often offset by discoveries you wouldn’t have made if your original schedule had held.

On this, our third birthday, we thank all of you who have been reading, who have written us, who have contributed items to the project. Thank you not only for your kindnesses to us, but also for helping make sure Dave Garroway lives on.

Happy birthday, Old Tiger.

:: Hugh Downs passed away just after I prepared last week’s post and I didn’t get a chance to acknowledge him then. I plan to write a longer tribute later, since he and Dave Garroway knew one another as far back as their days in Chicago. In the meantime, here is a lovely tribute, and I hope it will suffice until I’m able to write a tribute of my own. Suffice to say, we have lost one of the most versatile broadcasters the medium has ever known.

Where it all began…and ended

Of all the historic studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the most famous is Studio 8H. Since 1975, 8H has been famous as the home of Saturday Night Live. For that reason, it’s the studio everybody hopes to see on the NBC Studio Tour. There’s no question SNL is the chief tenant of 8H; there’s an elaborate permanent set, the corridors are lined with photos of previous hosts and cast members, and Lorne Michaels has a ninth-floor office with a glass window overlooking the studio.²³ Outside the balcony entrance there’s a display case where costumes from famous SNL characters are on display.²⁴

The Auditorium Studio in its original configuration. (NBC photo)

But that’s not all 8H is known for. If we could look at a cross-section of the big studio’s history, we’d find all sorts of history. We would see, for instance, the many times NBC News based special events coverage – election nights, space missions – from the big studio. We would see live drama and musical programs from the early days of television. Going back into the days of radio, we’d learn about stars like Fred Allen hosting their series from 8H.²⁵ We’d learn the studio has had several names over the years.²⁶ We’d learn that 8H had seen innovation, and in itself is something of a marvel.²⁷

And, of course, you cannot talk about 8H without talking about its most prestigious resident. For next to that display case near the ninth floor balcony entrance, there’s another case that preserves for posterity the music stand used by the great Arturo Toscanini. RCA president David Sarnoff persuaded Toscanini to head up a symphony orchestra for NBC, believing the radio medium needed to improve its commitment to cultural and artistic programming. From 1937 to his retirement in 1954²⁸ Toscanini headed NBC’s symphony orchestra, which performed regularly for the network, and performed for many of those years from 8H.²⁹

By now you’re no doubt asking what all this has to do with Dave Garroway. Well, I had to tell you those stories to get to this story. In a way, 8H was where Dave Garroway’s NBC career began, and ended.

As a 24-year-old NBC page, Dave got to know the RCA Building very well. As a tour guide, he had to know the studios very well in order to explain their purpose to visitors. Sometimes he was in proximity with dignitaries and celebrities; directing Lowell Thomas to the correct studio, or after a tour he led drew particular praise, being chosen by David Sarnoff to lead tours for distinguished visitors. And sometimes Garroway would watch history unfold. When Toscanini was hired to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Garroway saw the preparations that were being made to keep the notoriously temperamental maestro happy: the tour routes that were changed, the corridors that were set up, all to minimize the chances of Toscanini getting annoyed.

Sometimes Garroway would get to perform page duties during Toscanini’s rehearsals, during the months before the first concert. As the “stand-in” page, Garroway guarded the door of 8H so no one could get in or out while the great man conducted. And in time, Garroway assisted with the live broadcasts. Years later he would remember all the special considerations; for instance, the programs given to audience members were printed on silk³⁰, so the rustle of audience members turning pages wouldn’t spoil the performance or irritate the great conductor.

But not all was perfect even then. One evening, in the middle of a Brahms symphony, a woman in the audience began to retch. She could not leave; the studio was too full. Garroway remembered how the smell filled the studio. It soon reached Toscanini, who looked back just long enough to glare at the audience. During an intermission the pages brought in buckets of sand and cleaned up as best they could, while the unfortunate woman was taken away in a wheelchair, a bag over her face to hide her embarrassment. Other memories of 8H would dot Garroway’s memory, such as being there when a guest on Fred Allen’s show literally endangered his safety by flubbing his lines.³¹

Over the years Garroway’s duties would bring him through 8H. But there would be none so poignant as June 15, 1961.

As programs sometimes do, Today had shifted from its usual home in mid-June 1961. Studio 3B, the program’s usual home, needed to be vacated for a while, so Today was shifted into 8H, which was spacious and available. Framed correctly by the studio cameras, no one would really know the difference.³² But bigger changes were coming. The biggest was that on May 26, Garroway had requested his release from Today. There were several factors behind this. Dave’s wife had died the previous month. He was wearing out after years of a grueling schedule. He was at loggerheads with NBC, which wanted to move Today under the control of the news department, change the format, and greatly reduce Garroway’s role and influence on the program. The management of the news division didn’t see Garroway as a journalist, and this irked him no end.³³

For these and other reasons, Garroway wanted out of his Today obligations. And it happened that on his last week, Today was originating from the studio where some of his most memorable page duties had taken place. During one segment in that final week, Garroway donned his old page jacket and took viewers on a tour of 8H. The tour featured photographs and recordings of those Toscanini performances, of Fred Allen’s programs, and of other stars of a bygone age.

On Garroway’s last live program³⁴, he took the last two minutes to say farewell, although he insisted it wasn’t really a farewell. “I’m leaving television very temporarily,” he said, “for enough time to find out what’s going on, listen to people instead of talk – when you talk a lot, you don’t hear much, you know, and you don’t read much either when you do the Today show.” Garroway expressed his desire to learn more about the world so he could come back through television “and do more to preserve that in which I hope you and I believe, this system of government, and the human individual.” He thanked viewers for all the letters they had written and said they would each be answered, but it may take a while, “so let me thank you right now, very much, for them.” And one final time, Garroway wished the audience “much love…and peace.”

Dave’s farewell, June 15, 1961. (NBC photo)

A decade and a half later, Garroway would recall his last day as the most memorable of his career, as he walked “slowly and regretfully” from the studio…the studio that had figured so often in so many vivid memories from his career at NBC.

:: While we’re talking about NBC’s famous studios, may I please recommend you treat yourself to a copy of William Bartlett’s splendid book NBC And 30 Rock? It is thoroughly researched, well-written and lavishly illustrated, and I guarantee you’ll find some happy surprises therein. Seriously, treat yourself to one.

When the echoes disturb

There are times when the work I am doing on the life of Dave Garroway, though those events took place decades ago, has echoes of the times in which we now live. And sometimes, those echoes are for the saddest reasons.

Over the last several weeks, I have been transcribing a handwritten log of articles I’ve saved from my searches in archival newspapers. You rediscover a lot of things you’d put aside in your head when you do that. Some of the rediscovered items are funny, and some are goofy. I had planned this week to write about a few cute little pieces I’d found about Garroway, along with Steve Allen and a few others, making it cool to wear glasses.

But this week isn’t the time for that. Not with what’s going on right now, not with its raw and inescapable sadness and frustration, the vaguely sick feeling it’s provided, and the many reminders of how much we’ve fallen short and how far we have yet to go. All of this has made me think, instead, about some things that echo with disturbing similarities.

In the last few days, I have been working on the late 1950s and early 1960s. By this time Dave Garroway, having hosted Today for several years and being very successful in so doing, had very much made the show his. The program had moved into heavier content as its novelty wore off, and Garroway had not been hesitant in using the program to bring attention to things that concerned him. One of those things was the cause of civil rights.

A few years back I covered an instance when Garroway faced down a bunch of bigots who were heckling a young Sarah Vaughan. To him, such things weren’t a pose; equality, and thinking for yourself, were core values. His father had taught him to get all the facts before judging anyone or anything, and it was a lesson he never forgot.

Garroway’s commitment continued into the Today years, both on the program and behind the scenes. Prominent figures for justice such as Thurgood Marshall would be interviewed by Garroway, as would victims of injustice, such as a black applicant who was denied a job as a page in the House of Representatives. Black entertainers such as Erroll Garner were prominently featured.³⁵ On a March 1961 edition of Today, Garroway devoted both hours to Oscar Brown to help raise support for his his musical Kicks & Co.; within days the musical, which needed backers for part of its $400,000 budget, had received thousands in donations from dozens of viewers, ranging from a music teacher’s check for $5.00 to two separate donations of $5,000.

Oscar Brown with Dave Garroway. (NBC photo)

One day in December 1957, when it was learned that an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center had been the first black military pilot and a World War I hero, Garroway insisted on interviewing that man, Eugene Bullard, on Today. At the end of the interview, the crew spontaneously applauded.

Garroway displays Eugene Bullard’s medals. (NBC photo)

Today‘s commitment to equality didn’t just apply to what people saw on camera; behind the scenes, for instance, Fred Lights became network television’s first African-American stage manager.³⁶

It would be comforting to think Garroway’s take on matters of equality was warmly received. But it wasn’t always. Going through the archival collections from that era, we find signs of those times in sad abundance. Some examples: a South Carolina newspaper editorial accusing Garroway of “dramatizing” the crisis around the integration of a Little Rock school in 1957, or a letter to a Florida newspaper calling Garroway “one-sided” and “out to get the MVP award from the NAACP.” When Sen. Strom Thurmond appeared on Today after his marathon filibuster against civil rights legislation, Garroway asked Thurmond if the filibuster was meant to counter the possibility that South Carolina Gov. George Timmerman might run against him in 1960; Timmerman, himself no friend of civil rights, told a newspaper that if he ran, “I won’t leave it up to a nincompoop like Dave Garroway to make an announcement for me.”

While some of that is rather ripe, nothing can match the venom aimed at Garroway from a couple of states in particular during the period from 1956 to 1961. Going through papers from Mississippi and Louisiana in particular will make you acquainted with some particularly awful editorials and opinion pieces.³⁷ For instance, a December 1956 Today story about prosecutors rebutting a story of bigotry motivating a prosecution was blasted by a Mississippi paper as being slanted. When Mississippi Gov. James Coleman was interviewed in April 1957, an editorial charged Garroway with asking “loaded questions” and displaying a “slight air of holding his nose.” A subsequent editorial accused the press of hating Mississippi and looking for angles to get that slant in.³⁸ Even an item about Lynda Mead being the second consecutive Miss Mississippi to be crowned Miss America found a way to slam Garroway as “one of those northern bigots who likes to lambast the South with innuendo” and hoped he would “change his tune after his audience rating falls off drastically.”³⁹

In May 1961, as the Freedom Riders challenged segregation laws in the South, Garroway aired a piece about one of the movement’s figures, activist James Peck, on Today. Peck, whose long tenure as an activist in several movements had seen him arrested several times, was called a felon by Mississippi Gov. James Eastland in an effort to discredit the Freedom Riders movement. The Peck interview on Today was yet another opening for segregationists to attack Garroway.⁴⁰ Subsequent editorials called Garroway a “South-baiter” and slammed his impending resignation from Today as a hypocritical act.⁴¹ Another editorial praised the mayor of Jackson “for his word duel with TV Communistator Dave Garroway, whose soon departure from the networks will cause no tears to drop in Dixie.” Yet another extended hollow condolences on the death of Garroway’s wife: “Of course we know of the terrible tragedy in his family and we offer our deepest sympathy⁴² but we believe that his leaving the air lanes will be one of the greatest aids the South could have had, by his absence.” A columnist called “Davie Garroway’s Today show” as “offensive to Dixie” and “due to lose its bigoted star…Dour Dave.”⁴³

Garroway would sometimes wonder if his outspokenness on civil rights had cost him, both in terms of his career and in his personal affairs.⁴⁴ And there were times when he was at personal risk. Dave Jr. remembered a story in which his dad went to a jazz club in the South and stepped outside for some fresh air. Garroway suddenly found himself surrounded by a group of angry bigots who called him “a (racial slur beginning with ‘n’) lover” and tried to shove him around. The band leader saw this, gave a signal to his band mates, and, still playing, they marched out of the club. Without missing a note on their instruments, they surrounded Garroway and shielded him from the bigots.

There are many things troubling us right now. I hope someday soon I’m writing on more uplifting aspects of Garroway’s life. This, however, was too uncomfortable a parallel with our current moment. As in the times Garroway lived, we’ve got some work to do.

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.)

Assorted oddities (first in an ongoing series)

As I go through the decades of newspaper clippings I’ve compiled, there’s a lot of information to sort through. And, on occasion, you’ll find things that while you can’t neatly use them, they’re too…interesting not to use somehow. From time to time I’ll share some of them.

For one, here’s an April 1948 ad from the Chicago Tribune in which a certain radio personality is trying to downsize his car collection. When you read the description (including the interesting upholstery), there’s no doubt who that car belongs to:

And then there’s this, also from 1948, right when Dave was getting noticed and starting to draw serious attention from sponsors. Now, I’ve never seen any pictures of Dave from this era in which he looked like he needed this kind of treatment. Was it really that good, or was he just that skilled a pitchman? You be the judge.

More to come!