A tribute to the original Master Communicator
…but it’s especially embarrassing when you’re a highly-regarded young announcer who’s only a few weeks into your new gig as a director of special events broadcasts for a large radio station.
And it’s even worse when it involves a local hero. As the Pittsburgh Press of July 14, 1939 was not about to let our Dave Garroway forget.
You can see more about the July 13, 1939 Billy Conn-Melio Bettina match here.
:: Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!
All too often radio history seems to end in about 1950, when (as popular culture would have you believe) television roared from the cradle to the living room and never let go. Not only is that overly simplistic concept inaccurate in a lot of ways (and oh, how I could bore you to tears describing those inaccuracies), but it also sells way short some truly innovative attempts to keep radio vital and relevant. And one of those efforts involved our very own Dave Garroway.
On this blog you will often see me sing the praises of Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the visionary NBC executive whose mind and clout shaped so much of what we now know – the Today and Tonight programs, magazine-style sponsorship of network programming (allowing sponsors to buy small segments of ad time during a show instead of sponsoring the whole thing, which opened up television sponsorship to dozens of smaller clients), and so forth. But while Weaver’s vision for television is often discussed, it’s sometimes forgotten he had concepts for the radio division as well.
Network radio was still going in the early 1950s, but it was obvious that within a few years television was going to dominate the landscape, as more stations signed on and as television receivers became more affordable. Radio had to adapt or die. It was against that backdrop that in 1955, Weaver – now NBC president – ripped apart the NBC Radio model1 to inaugurate a weekend radio service called Monitor.
This new concept called for NBC to provide 40 continuous hours of programming, starting at 8 am on Saturday. During those 40 hours, the program would hop from story to story, event to event, depending on what was going on. One moment you might hear a live remote from an airplane crossing the Atlantic. A few minutes later the program might have an interview with an author. A few minutes after that, you might hear a live band performance from a Manhattan night spot. At the top of each hour, there would be a news update. Holding each block together, your guide as the program hopscotched from feature to feature, was someone who wasn’t called a host, but styled in Weaver-ese as a “communicator.” And the program’s signature wasn’t a piece of music – or, at least, not music in a conventional sense. Instead, it was a distinctive, layered series of beeps, blips and boops performing their own strange tune – the tones of the Monitor Beacon.2
And who should be one of the first Monitor communicators? None other than our own Dave Garroway. When Monitor started, Dave was coming off a long-form weekend radio program called Sunday with Garroway (later in its run, Friday with Garroway). Dave’s easygoing style wore well in long-form programming, and thus he was brought in on the new Monitor concept early on. He hosted a run-through of the concept that was shared during a closed-circuit pitch to affiliates in April 1955. And Dave was also there on the very first Monitor segment on June 12, giving the latest news headlines.3
Garroway stayed on Monitor during its first five years, most often occupying a Sunday night slot. He was an excellent, easygoing choice for Sunday evenings. And sometimes he had some memorable moments – for instance, his famous 1955 interview with Marilyn Monroe. But as easygoing as Dave sounded, his Sunday night duties on Monitor added yet another layer to his complicated, over-scheduled life, which included hosting Today and another Weaver innovation, the high-concept Sunday television series Wide Wide World.
Monitor adapted with the times. It cut back on its hours as the industry changed. Its content became less ambitious; although live remotes could still happen, by the mid-1960s its staples were recorded segments and the pop hits of the moment.4 By the 1970s it was fairly well removed from what it had been, and in an effort to find new life NBC brought in such on-air personalities as Wolfman Jack and Don Imus.5
In 1975 NBC pulled the plug on Monitor, and on that final weekend the program looked back on nineteen and a half years of memories. Among the moments recalled on that final program were some involving Dave Garroway, who took part in a farewell interview. Monitor is long gone, but its influence lives on – for instance, I can’t help listening to NPR’s All Things Considered without noticing some of Monitor in its DNA.6
Happily, Monitor also remains with us in a vibrant online tribute. Dennis Hart (who literally wrote the book on Monitor) maintains the terrific Monitor Tribute Pages website. There, you can not only see some neat photos and read terrific recollections from Monitor‘s staff and listeners, but you can listen to dozens and dozens of preserved Monitor segments. And luckily for us, there’s a few clips from Dave Garroway’s reign as a Monitor communicator. Do yourself a favor and spend some time there – but if you end up spending hours on end enjoying all that splendid audio, consider yourself warned.7
:: Manuscript progress: you’ll be happy to know the manuscript is approaching 54,000 words. And I haven’t even started digging into the really big sources of information! But even with what I have done so far, I can promise that this book will give you a perspective on Dave Garroway unlike any you’ve ever before read. It’s a tale that’s well worth the effort to tell, and I believe you’re going to enjoy it – and you’ll be puzzled why it hasn’t been told before. Stay tuned.
As I write this, we’re observing the fiftieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11. There’s a list of on-air commemorations as long as your arm, airing on all kinds of channels. Some of them are good, even if some of them have hit the same beats that every documentary already has. A handful have been truly excellent, unearthing new material and new perspectives (see the wide-ranging, unexpectedly moving Chasing the Moon or the outstanding Apollo 11).
But one media organization did something truly spectacular. On July 16, CBS streamed its live coverage, as originally aired that day 50 years before, of the launch of Apollo 11 (and made it available afterward on YouTube). It wasn’t just the highlights, either – the stream began with the start of that morning’s coverage, at 6 a.m., and carried you through until the astronauts were in Earth orbit. It was nearly four and a half hours of coverage. Better still, you truly saw it as it aired – with network commercials still there (a young Ali MacGraw wearing a paper bikini in an ad for International Paper; a bizarre minimalist ad for Maxim freeze-dried coffee; a really mod commercial for Corn Flakes with a multi-picture montage straight out of Saul Bass; Western Electric musing that this new innovation called a laser could revolutionize communications). Not only that, but the CBS Morning News from that morning was also included, and there you could find glimpses of what else was going on in the nation and the world that historic morning. And since the recording originated at the CBS O&O in New York, you even got local breaks and station IDs from WCBS-TV. All in about as good a transfer from the original videotape as you could ask for, looking vivid and colorful.
To me, what CBS did was like Christmas morning. It hit so many sweet spots for me: my love of spaceflight history, my love of broadcast history, my love of those little time-capsule moments that let you experience how a moment must have felt. It lets you realize that even in historic moments, life isn’t a highlight reel. There’s a lot of waiting. Sometimes the most interesting thing is Wally Schirra, retired astronaut who’s there as the color guy, pointing out to Walter Cronkite that a clock in the little studio at the Cape isn’t working. Sometimes it’s dull. But so did it happen in real time, in 1969. There’s no narration, no editing beyond what the director called during the broadcast that morning.
CBS gave us all a wonderful gift by putting this coverage out there, as it aired. Yeah, so it has those banners across the bottom, but to me the wonder of seeing so much that I’d only heard of, but never been able to see, could make me overlook that. Streaming this coverage was, in many ways, the perfect way to observe this anniversary. It’s fun. It generated a lot of happy buzz around the Interwebs. And it makes me wish we saw this kind of thing more often.
I think, for instance, about the archival Garroway material that I’ve seen and heard. I remember how much of it was listed on the old NBC News Archives site, some of which was actually posted for viewing in screener form. There was no better way for me to understand the tenor of Garroway in any given period than to watch some of that footage. But then NBC’s archive changed its website, and its policies, and what was there is no longer accessible. A valuable resource to my research was suddenly gone.
I know that network archives can be extensive, and are understaffed. I also know it takes effort and equipment to digitize old media, and that it costs to do it. I also know that in some instances you get into various licensing issues, too. But I also know there’s a lot of it out there that’s already been digitized – and I know this because I’ve seen it, from official network sources. And sometimes that’s the rub. The material exists, but you can’t see it, and not unless you’re a documentary or feature film producer with deep enough pockets will you see it.
The archives are valuable properties for licensing. And I get that. And this footage is the property of the networks, and it’s theirs to do with as they wish. But I also think about the value to history that exists by making this stuff available for people to view and to experience once again, in all their imperfect splendor. If you want people to experience a moment, there’s no better way.
That’s why I applaud CBS for what it’s done with its Apollo 11 coverage. It was a bold thing to do, but it was the right one, and it’s an example of the flexibility the online streaming platforms allow these days. May we see more networks follow the lead of CBS, crack the doors of the vaults a little wider, and share more widely the moments from the past, exactly as they were back then.
There’s something that’s been chewing on my mind of late. It was prompted by a minor online rhubarb that erupted the other day over a matter related to Dave Garroway’s life, and I found myself in the midst of it, and it left me…not really happy, I’ll put it that way. I had planned to have an essay about it for you by now, because in amongst my venting would have been some perspective. But not only have I not had time to string my thoughts together, I also realize my view is a little too charged still to write clearly about it. Bear with me, and I’ll have something to say about it soon.
Instead, this might be a good time to offer some updates about various things in my orbit, most of them related to this project in one way or another, and to use my little soapbox here to extend a personal note of grace to someone I’ve never met (in person, anyway), but still care about.
:: After what seems like forever, things are moving once again on the Garroway manuscript. My muse has apparently returned from sunning itself on the French Riviera (or perhaps sunning itself on the hood of a Buick Riviera; I don’t know) and I am now sorting through some marvelous recollections provided by Dave Jr., weaving them into a chapter on what life was like with his dad. I can promise you a perspective on Dave Garroway that’s unlike any other. I’m having fun going through these stories, and it adds so much substance to what Garroway was like as a person. I believe you, lucky prospective reader of the finished book, will enjoy what’s to come.
:: I’ve also just returned from a most enjoyable working lunch with Brandon, my collaborator on this project. I feel very fortunate to have him aboard, not only for his love of our subject but also for the keen perspective he brings. Plus, Brandon is just plain fun to be with and work with. It makes me think this project is headed for some truly great things.
:: I’ve made occasional reference to another biography I’ve been writing, and the process of turning it into a book. It is with great pleasure, and no small amount of relief, that I can announce it’s now listed in the publisher’s new catalog, and it’s scheduled to go on sale in October. I don’t like making sales pitches, but if you were to buy a copy of my book…well, it’d sure be swell.
:: This last note isn’t about books or about biographies or television, or any of that. It’s about the human beings you interact with, and care about, in these communities we build through the things we love. (And if you think this next isn’t appropriate for this blog, well…I’m the one who pays the bills here. You’re always welcome to get your own blog.)
Back in the day I followed the AV Club rather fondly and was among the community of commenters. There was a great group of writers at the AV Club. They’d often interact with us in the comments, and over time they went from being writers to people we cared about, and sometimes when we found out something was personally going with them, it felt like something had happened in our little family.
Time has passed and so many of those writers have gone on to other things, but you still see their names and you realize how much you still care. Which is why, when one of my favorite writers from the AV Club days shared this deeply personal essay a few weeks ago, it was…well, it was poignant. Emily, I am very happy for you, and I wish you all the luck in the world.
By early 1954 Today was doing well. Part of it came from the program finding its focus. Part of it came from the addition of J. Fred Muggs to the program. But to the executives whose decisions meant life or death for a television program, what mattered was the revenue. And thanks to a talented and motivated sales staff, Today had become a solid and successful buy for advertisers of all sorts – many of whom wanted Dave Garroway to do the commercials for them.8 And thanks to Sponsor Magazine senior editor Charles Sinclair, who was given an unusual assignment in early 1954, we have an inside glimpse into the advertising aspect of Today – and of what it was like on the inside during an average day’s routine.9
Sinclair’s boss had assigned him to spend time with the Cunningham and Walsh agency10 and write about what the average agency man went through in a week. His very first assignment? Assisting with the live spots that the E.R. Squibb company had purchased on Today. So at 5:30 on Monday morning, he was shivering outside the Exhibition Hall11, waiting for the account’s supervisor, Tom De Huff, to arrive. When he did, a few minutes later, the two entered the building. “Garroway had just arrived and was surrounded, like a Queen Bee, by a covey of production coordinators, sports writers, newsmen and technical men,” Sinclair noted.
Sinclair and De Huff walked down the long ramp to the downstairs reception room, near the control room. He noted “a long table around which sat half a dozen people drinking coffee poured by a white-coated waiter everyone called ‘Major.'” De Huff, who knew the program’s customs, explained that this was known as the “Telop One Club.”12 Over coffee and cigarettes, they discussed the spots Garroway would do for Squibb products. Dick Jackson, the network’s senior unit manager for Today, soon joined them and said the spots for Squibb appeared to be simple enough. “That’s a break for us today because we’re loaded to the top,” Jackson said, naming at least seven major clients who had booked time on the broadcast.13 “We think Garroway works best when there are no elaborate gimmicks, no tricky cues and no fancy art.”
When De Huff was a little concerned how the package would look on television, Jackson took the package upstairs and the two ad men went down the hall to a nearby viewing room to watch the camera check. In the room were a couple of representatives from other agencies. One of them, a pretty young girl, said she thought the whole thing was a lot of fun. “Not if you have to come in from Westport,” grumbled the other ad rep, fighting off drowsiness at ten after six. Over the monitors in the screening room the men watched Garroway rehearse each commercial in the lineup. He soon got to the Squibb spots, and they noted with approval the way Garroway read the copy and displayed the products.
At seven the program began, and after a news break the Squibb commercial went as scheduled, with no surprises. Sinclair told De Huff that he’d hate to be up at 4:30 each day “just to play nursemaid to a minute’s worth of commercial.” De Huff replied that he only had to be there about two times a month, when Squibb had a new product or a new pitch. “The rest of the time we let Garroway do the commercial in his own style.” He then suggested the two adjourn for some breakfast. “It was 10 minutes after eight,” Sinclair wrote. “The sun was up, people on their way to work were staring through the huge glass windows at Garroway; the Telop One Club was in full swing.”
Today is Election Day here in the States, and all of us here at Garroway at Large World Headquarters are gonna go to the polls and do our civic duty. (We certainly hope you’ll do the same.) I’ll be spending the evening helping some students put some local election returns on our little radio station. My hope is that the local results will come in fairly quickly, we can wrap up our coverage at a reasonable hour, and we won’t end up with our own version of what happened on the night of November 8, 1960, when – as many of you know – things literally went all night and into the next day.
Many years ago the A&E cable network (back when you could tell the name stood for “Arts and Entertainment”) carried a two-hour highlights package of NBC’s coverage of that election. It’s really interesting to watch; you get to see Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in prime form, broadcasting from their perch above Studio 8H; you get to see John Chancellor and Sander Vanocur and Frank McGee and Merrill Mueller anchoring the regional desks; you get some really cool Hjalmar Hermanson set design, including the trademark X-shaped anchor desk; and you get all sorts of period-appropriate fun, including Richard Harkness minding a snazzy RCA computer that’s worked into the coverage as a neat bit of corporate synergy. It’s a good way to spend a slow afternoon. And as it becomes apparent the story’s not going to end any time soon, you get to see the anchors and correspondents deal with the fact they’re getting tired and nothing is happening.
But when the story stretches into the next morning, there’s a really nifty surprise, because look who stops by the aerie high over 8H:
(Bonus content! For another view from a little later, here you go.)
Enjoy! (And go vote!)
You’re familiar, no doubt, with the home game versions of popular television series, especially game shows (a natural enough tie-in). But you wouldn’t think Today would lend itself to a board game. Well, think again. Thanks to the good folks at Board Game Geek, here’s two attempts to bring the fun and excitement of America’s top-rated morning program to the family room: the original version, complete with nifty cameras and a set of chimes, and a 1960 treatment that uses cards instead. Enjoy! (And having produced a couple of television programs, if only it were as fun and exciting as a board game….)
:: We’ve been quiet here the last couple weeks. Much of it was work (and a lot’s been on my plate there), some of it was a trip that took place last weekend, and some of it has been other things not really of interest here. All of it has conspired to poke some holes in my schedule. Don’t, however, take this to mean there hasn’t been progress on the Dave Garroway project. Far from it. While I don’t want to count any unhatched chickens, some very good things may be in the works, and when it’s appropriate for me to do so, I will share. As always, stay tuned.
– We begin this week with a happy programming note: the Wide Wide Blog is now a member of the Classic TV Blog Association. Learn more about it and find links to many marvelous affiliated blogs here (and I’ll install the blogroll here as soon as I can find a way to make it play happy with the format I use here). It’s an esteemed group (which includes some friends of mine) and I’m happy to have the Wide Wide Blog in among these good folks and their work.
– Another happy note is that the manuscript continues to grow a little more each day. I set a goal of at least 100 words a day on it, and if I don’t get that done, it weighs on me (something about a work ethic that was instilled in me at a tender age). But it continues to grow and I learn new things all the time.
And sometimes, those things aren’t what they seem to be. One challenge a biographer faces is that when you’re dealing with any account, you’re dealing with a limited perspective. Memory does strange things. Four eyewitnesses will have four different accounts. (“Wow, Rashomon was an interesting movie.” “That’s not how I remember it.”)
Sometimes we’re lucky in that we find documentary evidence that tells us how things actually went. For instance, one file contains a typewritten recollection Garroway wrote of that very first morning on Today, the last seconds before the show went on the air. He writes about how he “realized that I had better say something quickly of an inspirational nature, something wise and to the point, preferably with a little humor in it.” And it’s a great account…except what he says he said (“Good morning – it’s Today on NBC”) was nothing like what he actually said. And we know this because the kinescope tells us so:
But other times, we’re not as fortunate. And that’s where the biographer becomes a detective. How much can you find out about the circumstances? What was going on? Can you find newspaper clippings about whatever it is? (I’ll write next week about one particularly famous episode that took on a life of its own, one that has been incorrectly attributed to Today, that a newspaper search finally put the nails in.) Have others written about it? Are there photographs? If it involves a location, do those aspects add up? (Some claims are geographically impossible once you look at a map.) Did the building even exist then? You get the idea.
And sometimes you can’t find a definitive answer. What to do then? Well, sometimes you have to acknowledge the ambiguity. I had to do that in the book I just finished writing, when a family member claimed that the subject of my book had been involved in some covert operations. They were interesting claims and the account in question seemed oddly detailed, but I only had that relative’s claims to go on. All the physical evidence that would have nailed down the claim had disappeared decades before (and sadly, appears to have been thrown out along with other family papers when her children were going through her effects after her passing – not out of malice, not out of covering anything up, but out of one of those things that happens when effects are gone through and discarded after someone passes). The information was too good not to include, but I had to qualify it, acknowledging that it was based on a single source and that only a secondhand account backed it up, and though I found circumstantial evidence in my subject’s surviving papers, it wasn’t the more concrete substantiation I’d love to have had.
This is why history and biography are more difficult to write than they may appear. If it were easy, I could just rewrite the drafts of Garroway’s unfinished autobiography, throw in anecdotes I found from others, and call it done, and my only effort would be the time I put into typing it all up. That might be fun, but what kind of contribution would it be to history? It would be a souvenir, but I’m not sure it would be an accurate reflection of the man and his times. It would frustrate future historians, who look to these kinds of works as references as they write their own new works (and it’s amazing how hard it is to kill an inaccurate story; once it’s committed to print, it’s often taken as gospel, and I’ve seen great historians repeat long-discredited stories in their own works because the works they trusted repeated said stories).
And such a work would be filtered through Garroway’s own perspective, and thus limited – just as we limit our own perspectives when we tell our own stories. And memory being the funny thing it can be, sometimes things don’t add up. I’ve lost track of how often I could have sworn under oath that a thing I remembered went a certain way, only to go back and find irrefutable evidence that it was far different than I recalled.
And that’s part of why the historian and biographer must take a step back, read through claims and stories and verify them, and above all employ good judgment and sound thinking. Then again, that’s just good advice for life, period.
Next week we’ll take a closer look at this concept, using that story I mentioned above as a case study.
July 21 is always a somber date to anyone who knows the Dave Garroway story, for it was on that day in 1982 that his life ended. This year, it’s even more poignant given the recent loss of some notable public figures under similar circumstances. Anyone who has lost someone to suicide (and that’s more folks than not, I’m afraid; I can think of at least three people I’ve known who ended their own lives) knows how shocking and awful and final it is.
While I could list a series of essays and resources for those who are in pain (or for those who are concerned that someone they love might be in pain), I don’t think I could top this selection from The Mighty. Some of it’s practical, some of it’s poignant, all of it matters.
This just in: I’ll be presenting at this year’s Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, in mid-September in Hunt Valley, Maryland. My friend Kevin Doherty will be sharing the stage with me as we talk about the Today/Home/Tonight programming concept Pat Weaver brought to NBC. I’ll be talking more than a little about Dave Garroway, while Kevin will be sharing some insights into Jack Paar and Steve Allen. And we’ll both share the honors in talking about the delightful Arlene Francis.
(And as if that’s not enough fun, a couple hours later, my friend Mitchell Hadley of It’s About TV will be giving a presentation about TV Guide. As a fan of his weekly posts about vintage issues of TV Guide, I’m really looking forward to that one.)
Here’s the full schedule of seminars – truly something there for everybody. And once again, I’ll mention that the convention is well worth the visit. Last year’s was a lot of fun and I’m sure looking forward to this year’s. Come join us!