Dave’s life – Page 3 – Garroway at Large

A high note for the year’s end

As we come to the the end of this full-grown, adult-size bang-a-roo headache of a year, we could use some good news, right? Well, here it is:

The manuscript is finished.

That’s right. The manuscript is finished. All 135,513 words of the first draft, covering from the arrival of the Garroways from Scotland to the 1983 memorial concert after his death, and everything in between.

The manuscript is now in the hands of my partners on the project, who are reviewing it and will get back to me with corrections and suggestions, which is what you need. For now, though, I’m still in a state of disbelief that it’s actually done – and a week ahead of schedule, no less.

There’s a lot left to go. I’ll have to make revisions, then edit those, and do a dozen other things before it’s all polished out. That’s not to mention finishing the endnotes, locating illustrations, finding a publisher who’s interested, and all of everything else. But those worries can wait. For now, it’s the relief of a huge task accomplished. Not a bad way to end a dumpster fire of a year, no?

This also will have some implications for the blog. Now that I have the manuscript done, and now that I know what fit the narrative and what had to be cut as seeming like trivia, I can write some posts based around those “cool items that had to be cut” and not worry so much about spoiling the book. So look for some interesting posts here soon.

In the meantime, thank you all for following along here, and thank you for your support of this whole effort. May all of you have a happy and healthy 2021 – and may this new year be infinitely better for all of us.

Season’s greetings

There is a reason I haven’t posted lately, and I believe it’s a reason that will meet with your approval: The first draft of the manuscript is coming very close to completion. The promise date¹ to my reviewers is January 1, and when I make a promise, I do my very best to keep my word. There is not a whole lot left for me to do before it’s a complete narrative, ready for review.

Now, this first draft is kind of rough, but that’s why you do a first draft. In any event, it’s a coherent story, and as I have worked on the narrative the connections have clicked into place. When this thing is polished up and ready for press, you’ll really be happy, I think.

I hate repeating content, but in the spirit of the season, I’ll refer you to this piece of seasonal reading – which, by the way, still makes dandy Christmastime viewing.

Whatever you celebrate or observe, make it a good one, and please make it a safe one. Don’t endanger yourself or others.

“The Man Who Came To Breakfast,” 1953

Some years ago I made reference to a 1953 Esquire article by Richard Gehman. This article captured what it was like when Today was young and everything seemed brand-new, and cast and crew were coping with life at an hour that still seemed far too early for television. Back when I wrote about it, the best I could do was give you a summary of the article, for the Esquire archive was paywalled.

Happily, the Esquire archives are now open to one and all, as I discovered while looking for something else last week. It is therefore my pleasure to present to you “The Man Who Came To Breakfast,” so you may enjoy Richard Gehman’s unique take on early Today for yourself. Please enjoy.

When you can’t go home again

All of us, at one time or another, have the urge to go back to places we remember. Sometimes we wish we hadn’t. Last December, after the last day of classes, I took an overnight trip to North Carolina just because I needed to get away. As part of that trip, I retraced the route we’d take to visit my grandfather’s summer home. There are so many memories I have of that old house, full of neat stuff he’d accumulated over the years, where time seemed like it had stood still since about 1965. It was full of neat books and gadgets and stuff from an age slightly older than mine. In an odd way, I felt at home in that time capsule of a house.²

There have been times the last few years when I’ve daydreamed about striking it rich³ and buying my grandfather’s old place, fixing the house up and making my own memories there. And last December, there was a “for sale” sign in front of the house. That night, in my hotel room, I looked up the listing. It didn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t. Very little of the interior of that house was still as I remembered it. Everything that made it special had been gutted at least 20 years back and replaced with stuff that looked identical to what you’d find in any other house anywhere else. Some parts of the house appeared to have been damaged. Much of it had been renovated to the point that I couldn’t recognize which room was supposed to be which. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it hurt regardless.⁴

This kind of heartbreak happens to all of us, in time. It’s the nature of the world. As Dave Garroway was reminded in 1954. During a summer respite, he happened to be near his hometown of Schenectady, New York, and decided to drive through for old times’ sake. He found his maternal grandparents’ old home place and drove out to see what it was like now. Garroway rang the bell, met the family that lived there now, explained that he had grown up there and asked if he might have a look around. It didn’t take long for the realization to hit him, either. “The deer stag’s head was off the wall, and the lamp with the beaded fringe was gone,” he recalled. “Grandfather’s rose garden was now a concrete garage…which all goes to show, you can’t go home again.”

It didn’t get any better when he went out to the old home place of his father’s family. His father, grandfather and an uncle had worked for General Electric, and during the off-hours they ran a chicken farm that kept them engaged in what Garroway remembered as “backbreaking work.” The young Garroways had lived in a cottage on the chicken farm, and it burned down when Dave was two. “I stopped there last summer, too, and looked at the site,” he said. “Growing out of the old ruins was a poplar tree, so big around that I couldn’t even get my arms around it. That’s how old I am!”

Maybe all of us should heed the words of Thomas Wolfe.⁵

Cooking with the Garroways, 1959

In July 1959 Clementine Paddleford, food editor for This Week magazine, visited Dave and Pamela Garroway at their New York home for her series “How America Eats.” As part of the article, Dave and Pamela talked about how their family liked to eat.

Dave confessed that his one talent in the kitchen was making a New Orleans Remoulade, which he liked to make and serve on shrimp when they had company over for dinner and conversation.⁶ For years, he admitted, “I lived on salmon sandwiches, milk and bananas. I still like bananas, but now I prefer them flambeed.” The difference, he said, was marrying Pamela. “She is keeping my waistline trim, yet I have never eaten better.”

Dave gets sample of Pamela’s chili – it’s a Saturday-night favorite

While Pamela, who had lived in Paris for many years, knew French food well, it was a comparably humble dish of hers that became a favorite of Dave’s: Homemade Canned Chili, made with two cans of chili con carne and some extra ingredients.⁷ The article noted that on Friday nights in the wintertime, Dave loved to come home to a dinner of chili and crackers. It was also a favorite on their Sunday table at their beach house on Long Island. They liked to serve it along with a green salad tossed with thyme and tarragon wine vinegar dressing, hot garlic bread, Chianti or beer (depending on individual taste), and chilled melon balls for dessert.

Lest the Garroways’ favorite recipes be lost forever, it’s my pleasure to provide you with the three recipes from the article. Use them in all good health.

Remoulade Sauce
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup Creole mustard*
3/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup finely-chopped celery
1/2 cup finely-chopped onion
2 tbsp. minced parsley
2 tbsp. finely-chopped dill pickle
1 clove garlic, minced
juice of one lemon
few drops hot pepper sauce
1 tbsp. paprika
red pepper to taste

Combine mayonnaise, mustard and olive oil. Add remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. Serve over shrimp. Yield: 2 cups sauce.
*Note: If a sharper type of mustard is used, the amount may be decreased as desired.

Homemade Canned Chili
6 medium onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/2 pound ground beef
2 cans (1 pound each) chili con carne with beans
1/2 cup chili sauce
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
dash of pepper
few drops hot pepper sauce

Saute onions in butter until soft; remove from pan. Cook beef until brown. Add sauteed onions and remaining ingredients. Heat, stirring until well-blended. Cover. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Yield: 4 portions.

Flounder in Sherry
1 lb. flounder fillets, cut into serving pieces
1/3 cup minced onion
1/2 cup sherry wine
1 can (4 oz.) chopped mushrooms and liquid
salt
coarsely-ground black pepper

Place fish fillets in shallow greased baking dish. Sprinkle on onion. Add sherry, mushrooms and mushroom liquid. Season with salt and pepper. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 to 30 minutes. Serve with sauce, as desired. Yield: 3 to 4 portions.
To complete the course, Pamela suggests buttered green peas and little new potatoes feathered with parsley. For dessert, a lemon ice and ladyfingers.

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-moving⁸) 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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. ¹¹ I have conducted the search in my home, my work office, in countless hotel rooms during my travels the last three years.¹² 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 affliction¹³, 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 1960s¹⁴ Dave was getting ready to go to a testimonial dinner for Dr. Jonas Salk. Young Dave Jr.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

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).¹⁹ And, of course, there are those who will focus on the way he died and suggest there were bats in his belfry all along.²⁰

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.²¹ 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.²² 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 volume²³ 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵

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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹

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?)