First of all, today we not only celebrate the 112th anniversary of Our Dave’s birth, but the eighth birthday of our website. (Sorry – there’s no way for me to supply cake and ice cream via the Interwebs, so you’ll have to do that part yourself. I’m working on it.) At any rate, happy birthday, Dave – and I hope this little research project of the last few years has been to your liking.
This birthday, however, brings a particularly interesting announcement, and it’s directly related to Dave Garroway’s time at NBC. On July 1, I became the new proprietor of the Monitor Tribute site. Dennis Hart, who literally wrote the book about Monitor, created a website that over the last quarter-century has become a priceless repository for all things related to NBC’s marvelous kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. Dennis felt the time was right to hand it off, and decided I was the right person to take over, not only given my interest in Dave Garroway but also because he knew how much I care about Monitor. I’m deeply honored to take it over, and it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.
What’s to come for the Monitor site? Immediately, probably not much. It is working well and I’m not inclined to mess with things that work. If new audio comes in, of course, I’ll add it to the collection, and if time and interest allow maybe I’ll add some new features (I’d love, for instance, to build some things out about Pat Weaver, about whom I would love to write a book if I could ever get the time and access to materials). Maybe over time, some things may change. But I don’t like change for its own sake, and I also don’t like when a website’s familiar flow gets turned upside down and it makes the website frustrating to use, so anything I do will be thought through.
As for this website, it’ll continue on, and maybe there will be some material cross-posted every so often. Even though the book has been published and I’m working on other things, I am always keeping my eyes and ears out for anything new related to Dave Garroway, and I still want this website to be a reasonably one-stop shop for those who want to know more about him. It may be slow here these days, but it doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring, and when something new comes along I’ll have it for you here. Don’t go far.
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
NBC photo
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.
