Dave’s life – Page 5 – Garroway at Large

What we have, and what we’ve lost

One of the pleasures of a big and protracted research project is that you meet some really good people along the way who are engaging in interesting projects of their own. It’s always fun to compare notes and share leads, and it’s always therapeutic to commiserate about the various obstacles any researcher must overcome (time constraints, writer’s block, footage or recordings that are inaccessible, etc.). Writing and researching can be such a solitary endeavor, and it’s incredibly helpful to be reminded that you’re part of a community.

I was reminded of all this last weekend, when I had a lengthy and very enjoyable phone conversation with a fellow historian. He’s presently engaged in a highly ambitious piece of research about a topic both of us are fascinated with (and there are times I can’t figure out if I’m encouraging his efforts because I enjoy helping other researchers, or if it’s my selfishness wanting him to finish this project because I can’t wait to read it!). He’s likewise been following my work on Dave Garroway, and has frequently sent along some very helpful items his own research has uncovered.

During our conversation we often found ourselves talking in the past tense. Not necessarily because of history, mind you, but because of people important to our stories who are no longer with us. My friend had an advantage in this regard, because starting many years ago he was able to track down and get interviews with a lot of people who have since passed on. This was important, since so many of those people were carving that particular realm of the television realm out of the wilderness. I often found myself thinking, “How I would have loved to sit in on that conversation.” My friend knows how much I love this stuff, and he’s frequently shared portions of those interviews with me, and it’s fascinating to read. But it’s not the same as being there.

And it once again got me thinking about a topic I explored in a guest piece over at It’s About TV last year, or that I briefly touched on in this post some time ago. It’s how much of this history is carried around inside the minds of the participants – and how much of it we lose when those people fall ill or pass away. I think about how much I wish I’d started this project a few years earlier so I could have talked to Beryl Pfizer. Or how much I wish I had a time machine so I could sit down with Jack Lescoulie or Jim Fleming or Pat Weaver – or Dave himself – for some really long conversations. Or so many others.

Fortunately, some stories aren’t lost forever. The Television Academy‘s series of interviews is nothing short of a gift to us all – in my instance, the extended interview they did with Dave’s best friend and favorite writer, Charlie Andrews, is a gift that never stops giving. And there are so many others there, too.¹ Jeff Kisseloff’s book The Box is also indispensable, and I understand there’s a ton of material he gathered that just couldn’t fit in the book. There are also archives and repositories out there – broadcast collections like those at the Paley Center, university archives where the papers from notable figures and corporations are now held, and sometimes you’ll find some great surprises there too. But without that human touch, without those interviews, without the ability to see someone’s face light up as they recall a great moment or their eyes glower as they remember some kind of executive meddling, or to hear them laugh as they recall a moment when things went horribly wrong…there’s something missing. It reminds me of a review I once read about a biography: the writer’s extensive use of archival materials meant he had done a great job covering the story of his subject, but the reader came no closer to knowing the man.

Those stories are out there. I’m grateful for the ones that have been preserved, but I genuinely grieve for those that are lost forever. It’s my hope that along the way, I’m able to capture some of those memories in my work on Dave Garroway, and that I’m able to both tell you his life story and, by the time I’m done, make you feel like you know him. It’s a big job, but our Dave is definitely worth the try.

Little friends

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.

A Christmas prayer

A couple months ago, Dave’s daughter Paris gave me a little souvenir, a tiny envelope and acknowledgment card that her dad would send out. It was a curious little item, but it was pure Dave Garroway, and beautiful in his understated way:

At this time of year, as we all come together, I can’t think of a more appropriate sentiment. Whatever you observe or celebrate, may it be the best you can make it.

Lt. Garroway, USNR

Over the weekend we observed Veterans’ Day here in the States and took time to remember the service and sacrifice of all those who have worn the uniform. Our own Dave Garroway was no exception, so let’s take a few moments to honor his service.

When the United States entered World War II, Garroway expected he’d get a summons to service. A few months after Pearl Harbor, that arrived. He was ordered to Cambridge, Massachusetts for Navy officer training, which he completed in early July. When that was done, he waited around for orders to a unit. A month later, he was ordered to Alameda, California, where he would join the crew of a ship.

Garroway couldn’t wait to go to war. The name of the ship he was assigned to – USS Devastator – no doubt helped fuel the images in his head of combat glory, the fantasies he harbored as he traveled across the continent. But his initial hopes were dashed when he arrived at the shipyard in Alameda, only to find that his ship – a minesweeper – was only two weeks into being constructed. With the war going on without him, Garroway grew bored waiting around with little to do. Before long, he requested to be put to work helping build the ship, buying a set of tools and safety gear and even joining the shipbuilders’ union.

After the ship was launched, it was towed upriver and moored to a pier while the last tasks were completed. Garroway reported aboard one day. Within a few minutes, he didn’t feel so well. Moments later, he was heaving over the side of the ship. Even though the ship was securely moored, just the tiniest sensation of being afloat was enough to make him violently seasick. Things only got worse when Devastator went out to sea for the first time. As his crewmates gazed up at the Golden Gate Bridge looming over them, Garroway was again in agony. Every day at sea was misery, with the young communications officer unable to do his job. The captain tried to encourage him. “It’s all in your head,” the skipper said, and Garroway hoped he’d find his sea legs in time.

The day finally came when Devastator would leave California bound for Pearl Harbor. Any hopes Garroway had of conquering his seasickness were soon dashed. Soon he was unable to stand a watch, vomiting so much and so hard that he spat up blood from torn stomach tissue, so weak he could hardly stand. He was soon after excused from further watches so he could stay in his bunk, where he slept as much as he could and counted the hours until Pearl Harbor was in sight.

At Pearl Harbor, Garroway was taken off the ship and hospitalized, and after six weeks of recovery was reassigned to the officers’ pool. It happened that the officer in charge of the pool was someone he had befriended at Cambridge. From a list of available jobs Garroway selected a post that put him in charge of a yeoman and stenography school. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but it would keep him from having to go to sea.

As it happened, the new assignment was an easy one for him, and left him plenty of time for other things. When the night life bored him, he sought other challenges. On a hunch, he stopped by radio station KGO, NBC’s Honolulu affiliate, and asked if they needed any announcing help. The station’s program manager, desperate for good personnel, hired him on the spot. It was during that time that Garroway, given a 9 p.m. slot and told to fill it the best way he knew how, began to build his own unique style, talking to “one and a half people” between records, taking listeners on imaginary strolls through towns back on the mainland. Homesick personnel ate this up and soon Garroway had a following.

When the war ended in 1945, Garroway returned home, his life changed in ways large and small and unexpected. And while not everything he returned to was happy, the war had, in its way, been an influence on the stardom he was about to build. And had it not been for a little minesweeper and a case of acute seasickness, the world might never have known the smooth, eccentric charm that was Dave Garroway’s trademark.

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.²

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.

The divine Miss Vaughan in 1946. (William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress Collection)

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 year³ 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.

11:60 and all that

When Dave Garroway returned to Chicago after World War II, he ended up with a midnight time slot on WMAQ-AM, mainly because he was one of the few staffers who had a car and therefore didn’t have to work around local transit’s nightly shutdown. To this freeform effort he gave the name The 11:60 Club and billed himself “Eagerest Beaver” of said society, as you can see on the membership card below:

Now, you might think those are a couple of clever names that ol’ Garroway would have come up with on his own, right? But I’ve now seen the handwritten evidence that tells us otherwise. The name The 11:60 Club came from a popular record of the day by Harry James and His Orchestra, “11:60 P.M.”

As for the “Eager Beaver” title, that’s courtesy of this incredible Stan Kenton instrumental:

All this makes it that much more of a shame that so few recordings of The 11:60 Club remain. Just the few minutes I’ve heard from one of the surviving recordings was pure fun, with a young and playful Dave Garroway purring into the microphone and playing really cool music. It’s easy to understand why so many folks stayed up past 11:60 each night to hear him.

To Red

A couple years ago I was on a certain popular auction site doing one of my semi-regular searches for Garroway memorabilia. Much of what you’ll find is common – magazines, press photos and so forth. But sometimes you’ll find an item that leaves you speechless. This was one of them. I put in a bid, not expecting much to come of it. The auction ended and I was the new owner. I was glad the price was so low, and yet the price I paid seemed like an insult to what the item meant.

This is a photo Dave inscribed to jazzman Red Norvo. If you’re up on your Garroway history, you know Red was a contributor (with Matt Dennis) to Dave’s RCA album Some Of My Favorites. Something about the way Red played really moved Dave, and it’s apparent in the inscription. It’s also apparent Red cherished the photo, for he had it very nicely framed and matted (in a frame with no glass), and the wire on the back shows signs that the photo hung on a wall for a long time.

The years of display and the inevitability of time made Dave’s inscription fade, but as best I can tell, it reads:

To Red
who has brought more beauty to my life thru music than any other artist. The little appreciations we applaud loudly for. For the great ones we are silent for there are no words except, perhaps:
Peace
Dave Garroway

In the way that so sadly happens when someone passes away and their belongings scatter to the winds, somehow this particular item ended up on the auction site needing a new home. I don’t know the story of how it got there. All I know is that Red’s cherished photo is now a part of my home, and Dave now looks on from a place high on one of our shelves. My hope is that both Dave and Red somehow know how cherished it is.

:: You may have noticed this update came a little late. There is a reason (well, there are several, but one is seriously good). I’ll need some time to roll this out, but I can say that something incredible happened a few days ago. I will share more as I can, so stay tuned!

Come see us!

In a few hours I’ll be on the road, bound for the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. On Thursday morning I’ll be giving a presentation about Today, Home and Tonight with my friend Kevin Doherty. Also on the presentation schedule is our friend (and author of a newly-published book!) Mitchell Hadley, who will be speaking about just why TV Guide matters. There will be plenty of interesting presentations, a lot of celebrities on hand signing autographs (and I’m already planning to suspend my usual aversion to autograph collecting, because some of the celebrities on the program are worth suspending it for).

Last year’s convention was my first, and I had an awful lot of fun there. This year I’ll have more travel flexibility (I’m driving instead of flying…which, given the current weather situation, means I won’t have to worry about canceled flights) and will give myself a second day on site. I will, of course, post as I can from the convention and hope to provide a full report once I’m back home.

In the meantime, if you’re in the Baltimore area, come see us bright and early Thursday morning. I think you’ll enjoy our presentation. And take some time to enjoy the whole convention. You will meet a lot of interesting people, most likely make some new friends, and you will find some cool stuff to buy. What’s not to like?

:: On a personal note, it’s funny how exactly one year ago we were dealing with the remnants of Irma here at Garroway at Large World Headquarters, and now we await whatever Florence will bring. We are prepared here (my husband, who lived 30 years in Florida, knows a thing or two about hurricanes). But since we’re really far inland, we’re preparing more for remnants where we are. Our thoughts, of course, are with the people on the coast. Play it smart and stay safe, y’all.

July 10, 1953: “Garroway Today”

As an early star of the national medium, one with a highly distinctive style, a lot of ink was spilled on behalf of Dave Garroway in television journals of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Let’s take a look at some of those pieces the next couple weeks or so, and perhaps that will help us remember just what a big deal Dave Garroway was back then.

The first full-length article on Garroway I could find in TV Guide was in the July 10-16, 1953 issue.⁴ It’s titled “Garroway Today,” and its subhead divulges, “That Chicago Touch Got Him A Penthouse On Fifth Avenue.”⁵ As was TV Guide‘s custom of the time, the article bore no byline.

The piece begins with an account of the summer day in 1951 when Garroway and his favorite writer and best friend, Charlie Andrews, were vacationing in a small Swiss town. At four in the morning, Garroway received a call from NBC informing him that the sponsor for Garroway At Large had pulled out. This brought the tour to an abrupt end. “Our sorrows melted 12 feet off the Matterhorn,” Garroway said.

But the loss of Garroway At Large opened the door for Today, which had debuted to great skepticism but was now a great success. “There’s no argument as to the reason: Dave Garroway.” The article noted that certain segments of the program even drew higher ratings than that of the wildly popular Arthur Godfrey, who was on later in the morning. The writer disagreed with those who compared the two, arguing that while Godfrey worked hard at being the “common man,” Garroway “lives in a world of discovery, of finding new things under the sun.”⁶

At the same time, the writer noted that Garroway’s more intellectual nature might be working against his wider success, that “he’s managed to build up resentment among some people who fiercely resist any idea that entertainment can be fresh and original,” and that his unusual nature may have put off some major agencies looking for more traditional fare for their sponsors.

The article makes Dave’s life sound busy but happy, noting the $2000 he made each week from Today and the additional income from the daily Dial Dave Garroway radio program, and that Dave liked how Today presented new material each day. One staffer noted that public reception was positive, and that people who thought his Garroway At Large persona was phony had changed their minds when they watched Today and saw they had been seeing the real Garroway all along. The article also notes the recent addition of J. Fred Muggs, and that Garroway was pragmatic about it. He liked that Muggs had raised Today‘s ratings two points, and “if he can help us that way, sure I want to keep him.”

Garroway and Andrews discussed each day the prospect of bringing Garroway At Large back to television, but the article noted it would be a challenge. Not only would they have to locate a sponsor, but several of the old castmembers – Jack Haskell, Connie Russell, Bette Chapel – had gone on to other things, and that only Cliff Norton was in New York.⁷

Of Dave personally, the article notes that the Garroway of television is much like the real Garroway, only that the latter is “a little shyer off camera.” It noted that Dave was divorced but had been seen in the company of Betty Furness, who had knitted “all of Dave’s present collection of loud Argyle socks.” Still, Dave was apparently in no hurry to get married again.⁸ Rather, he was more interested in getting Garroway At Large back on the air, and as part of the preparation was trying to get on a diet. “It would seem that the only way to get Garroway at Large back will be to have Garroway not-so-large.”