Category: Really Important Things

A new home for some old friends

I’ve written on here before about the importance of preserving television history. That’s not just in writing books about people like Dave Garroway, but also in preserving the things that remain. Some of those things are easy to preserve, like books and documents. Other pieces are a little more substantial, but still manageable. And then there’s some that require some effort. That’s what led to an adventure last week.

I’ve been friends with Bobby Ellerbee for several years, and on a few occasions I’ve visited him and his dogs at his home in Georgia. Over the years Bobby amassed a collection of television cameras that spanned a good half-century of the medium’s history. The first time I visited, two rooms were awash with just about every studio camera you could imagine, and his garage had just about enough surplus equipment to start a network.

Over the years, some of Bobby’s collection found new homes at museums or with film prop companies, but his camera room was still nicely populated. Recently, though, he bought a new house. It’s a nice house, but it doesn’t have the display area of the house he’s vacating. Bobby had to make some hard choices. To make a long story short, I got a phone call, and last week I rented a box truck and drove over to his house.

The more the truck filled up, the more I realized this was real, and I started to think about the two happiest days in the life of a boat owner.

In the space of about two and a half hours that Thursday, Bobby and three movers and I loaded four cameras and pedestals, a few boxes of equipment and books, and some other stuff we could put to work in our building. Bobby had told me to rent a truck with a lift gate, and it’s a very good thing I did. Camera pedestals are heavy. By 11 that morning the truck was loaded up and I was headed back home. I spent the afternoon and evening unloading the truck at the office, and that night I drove it back and reclaimed my car.1

The brave rental truck at the end of its travels with me. This was a happy moment, likely for both of us.

So, let’s see what we have.

Longtime readers will be familiar with this: the RCA TK-47. I already had one, but I certainly was not going to pass up another. Unlike mine, the internals of this one are still intact, and as I was cleaning it up I was interested to look inside.2 Bobby had installed vinyl lettering on either side to honor NBC’s flagship stations in New York and Los Angeles. Inside is a property tag from WISH-TV in Indianapolis. Part of me thinks it would be fitting to restore the WISH-TV livery, but I’m awfully fond of the genuine NBC stickers on there, especially since I associate the TK-47 with Saturday Night Live and David Letterman’s late-night NBC show.3 Fortunately, I’ve got a while to decide what to do.

A contemporary of the TK-47 is the Ikegami HK-312, which Bobby had decorated as an ABC camera of the 1980s. It’s appropriate, because ABC used Ikegamis a lot. The Ikegami doesn’t get recognized a lot but it was one of the workhorse cameras of its day, and you’ve watched a lot more television that was brought to you through these machines than you may realize. This particular one has some interesting labels inside about its history, and the box lens has an ABC property tag on it.

Now, here’s a rarity: a Marconi Mark VII. This one actually did belong to Tele-Tape Productions back in the day, which meant it spent a couple years at work in the early days of Sesame Street. What looks like sheet metal damage in the photo is really the reproduction logo, printed on vinyl, separating from the side of the camera. I’m going to replace that as soon as I can get the printing done (the design is pretty much done, but I just need to find someone who can print it to my specifications). In the meantime it’ll wear a rare and very interesting livery that a few Mark VIIs wore for a short period.

No, that’s not the pedestal they used under these when they were in service. Although, given their weight, you can sort of understand it.

And this stylish beast is the RCA TK-42. I’ve seen it described as RCA’s attempt to combine the color of the TK-41 with the sharpness of the monochrome TK-60. Unfortunately, ambition didn’t match execution and the TK-42 was not a hit. NBC itself really didn’t want anything to do with them, so TK-42s and TK-43s were often what brought local stations into the color era.4 The TK-42 was soon superseded by the great and durable TK-44. This one somehow made it to modern times, and even has the proper RCA pedestal and head most often seen beneath them. Unfortunately, it’s missing a few of its internals and has to be balanced with some weights inside, but from the outside you couldn’t tell. The black-and-gold RCA logo disappeared from the right side somewhere along the way, but a very helpful designer with a 3D printer was able to print up a replacement that looks just like it’s always been there, and I’m very happy.

We look much happier wearing the General’s lightning bolt. Now imagine how we’ll look once we’re back on our big ol’ pedestal and we can get a good all-over clean-up and shine.

There’s plenty left to do on these cameras. I’ve done some initial clean-up on them, but when I have time I want to give each one a good going-over to make them look as good as they can.5 There’s also a few things I may do as I find period-correct hardware for these machines. But all that’s down the road. Right now, what matters is that these old machines are safe in their new home, where young eyes will be able to see the equipment that helped make possible what they now take as a given.

The things that matter most

You spend years working on a project and you learn a lot of things. There are times you look at what you’re doing as a fun challenge. Other times you look at the project as a goal to be met. Other times, you curse the day you took the project on and wonder if you’ll ever get it finished. On a handful of occasions you want to assume a new identity and pretend the project never existed.

If you’re lucky, though, the day comes when you realize the project has given you gifts beyond what you ever imagined, and you’re thankful you decided to follow the path. You get to meet some interesting people, go new places, see new things, have new experiences. If you’re lucky and if you keep the right mindset about it, the project becomes this amazing adventure. Maybe not something on the order of an Indiana Jones adventure, of course, but one that’s fun and fulfilling and exciting in its own way.

And if you’re really lucky, you make friends. I have already. It’s how I met Brandon, who has been with me on this project since long before the website began. It’s how I came to know Mitchell and Judie Hadley, and how I came to know Carol Ford and Dennis Hart and some other genuinely good people who have added so much color and fun to my life.

Sometimes, though, you can’t believe who you get to know. I’m presently working through that right now, because two weeks ago I had the privilege of spending a few days visiting Dave Garroway’s daughter Paris. She’s retired to a sunny part of the American West, and there’s lots of cool things to see and do out there. Although we’d talked on the phone every so often, we hadn’t seen each other since 2018, and it was therefore a lot of fun to have the chance to be together again.

It was a long trip there by air, and it wasn’t helped by bad weather complicating my connection at O’Hare, and then turning my connection at Denver into a sprint through a busy concourse.6 One bumpy flight over the Rockies later, I was there, and there was Paris waiting for me at the airport.

We packed a lot into our time together. There was a road trip or two, some hiking, a wine tasting, some photography in some of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in the Lower 48, some really good meals together, visits with her friends and members of her family. And, of course, we talked about her life and her memories of her dad, and we also reminisced about dear Dave Jr. What mattered most of all, though, was the time we shared talking to each other as friends. We weren’t a biographer and the daughter of the biographer’s subject. We were two women sitting on the back porch, watching the sun set while we had some good wine and listened to some fine music, talking about life and what had gotten us here and what we’d learned along the way, sharing insights and hard-earned wisdom from our lives, because both she and I have had some adventures along the way.7 There were moments when we laughed, other moments when I felt my eyes get a little damp, but all of it was good. And, too soon, it was time to come home. It was time well spent.8

All too often it’s easy to think of a book project as this clinical, self-contained thing. It’s not. If you do it properly, you are essentially absorbing another person’s life story into your own life. That’s why you have to be careful to choose someone it’s easy to live with, because the subject of that book is going to be very, very close to you for however long it takes. And, beyond that, the people who were special to that person are probably going to become names you will come to know and sometimes care about. They become part of that story within your life, too.

But if you are extraordinarily lucky, some of those people will become part of your own life, and although you met them because of their relationship to the subject of your project, the relationship you build with them becomes independent of that. That’s certainly what happened here, and that friendship is one of the true blessings of this whole project.

I have so much to be thankful to Dave Garroway for. Most of all, I’m thankful to him because through this project, so many neat people became part of my life. That’s maybe my biggest piece of advice for anyone who wants to be an author or researcher. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open, because the chances are good that this whole enterprise is going to change your life in unforeseen, and often wonderful, ways.

The hardest thing

NOTE: In this post I make mention of suicide. It is a difficult topic to write about and I realize some of you reading this may find it difficult to read about, and if it is troubling you may want to avoid this week’s post. Most importantly, if you are having thoughts of suicide, whether or not you are in crisis, there is help and there is hope. You can find help through the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988 to get help.

You face a problem when you’re a biographer. It’s not unlike any movie you’ve ever seen that involves a dog as a major part of the story. You know how the story’s going to end, and you know it will probably break your heart. Both life stories I’ve written thus far ended abruptly. In the case of Ben Robertson, it was with a plane crash. In the case of Dave Garroway – and there’s no easy way to say this – it was suicide.

This is a hard topic to talk about, for many reasons. For some folks, it’s deeply personal. Maybe others have lost loved ones or neighbors or colleagues this way.9 In the case of Dave Garroway, it was something I knew I’d have to handle because of how I remembered the coverage of his passing in 1982. The more I learned, though, and the more I researched and the more I talked to people in the know, I found that it was nothing new in his life, and that it had been something on his mind for a long time before he finally did it. (Depression sucks, and depression can indeed kill.)

But even though it’s a horrible thing to talk about, I’m doing no one a service if I avoid the topic. My job is to report the bad alongside the good and great, not to burnish an image, because that’s public relations and not biography. My problem then becomes, how do I tell it? The way he went was not gentle, but I have to find a way to tell it without getting lurid.10 I also have an obligation to the Garroway family to treat it with sensitivity. The event was traumatic enough; the last thing I needed was to even accidentally inflict new trauma in the retelling.

I knew what the newspaper stories said about his last observed moments. But I had nothing in between the time his wife left the house to go to an appointment, and the discovery of his body. In my first draft, I wrote what seemed plausible as a sequence of events leading up to that last second, and I tried to write it with as much discretion as I could, because the reader could piece things together. But it just didn’t feel right somehow. Then, as will happen, I made a discovery that changed things.

One of my long-standing interests is aviation history and accident investigation. One specific long-standing interest is the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 in May 1979. It’s the first aviation disaster I remember in detail, and even though I was a child when it happened I was fascinated by the story and have been since.11

The Flight 191 disaster was especially painful for the staff of Playboy magazine, because four people affiliated with the magazine were killed in the crash. Out of the grief came an assignment to writer Laurence Gonzales to conduct an in-depth investigation of aviation safety in the United States. In June 1980, Playboy published the first part of Gonzales’ two-part investigation. All these years later, it remains deep and bracing reading, and I regret that it’s paywalled and hard to access, because it’s seriously good investigative reporting that is written so well.12

Gonzales was out there among the cops and firefighters and reporters and everyone else on the scene that horrible afternoon, and three months later he came back out to survey the scene once more. He began his report with a description of the scene three months post-crash, and made mention of strands of white electrical wire that still stuck through the mud in this field where nothing could grow.

As the first installment concluded, he briefly described a visit to the McDonnell Douglas factory in Long Beach, where DC-10s were being manufactured. He noticed the wire harnesses, with hundreds of miles of electrical wire in each aircraft, and felt there was something eerie about it. Then he realized why. The first installment thus ended with a callback to all those strands of wire still sticking out of the mud near O’Hare.13

And it’s from Gonzales that I got the idea of how to handle Dave Garroway’s final moments. When you read the book, you’ll recognize a similar callback. It allowed me to handle a horrible moment with, I hope, the best available sensitivity.

For that, I must credit Laurence Gonzales. Thank you, sir, for helping me get better at what I do. I’d like to shake your hand.

Remembering Barbara Walters

A post I regret needing to make: Barbara Walters has died at age 93. I can’t say I’m surprised, as I knew she was not in the best of health, but it doesn’t make the news any less of a punch to the gut. There’s no way to calculate what women in journalism, and women in broadcasting, owe her. It’s better for others to cover that ground, as they will, and so I shall leave that to others better qualified than I am.14

Instead, it’s worth remembering that someone who helped her get her career started was Dave Garroway. It was while he was host of Today that she was hired as a writer, and she spoke often of how important that was in helping her get her start.15 As part of this hastily-assembled memorial post, here’s a clip in which she talks about Dave Garroway, what she remembered about him, and what made him special.

The Starmaker returns

You may recall that several years ago I wrote about one of my most cherished artifacts, my RCA BK-4 “Starmaker.” The Starmaker, you may recall, was that unusual foot-long microphone that Dave Garroway and his fellow on-air staffers on Today used for the first few years.

Dave wearing a BK-4 on a harness for hands-free operation. (NBC photo)

My Starmaker was in excellent condition, with only one weird scar across the front below the RCA emblem. I figured it was just something that happened while it was being used. From time to time I toyed with the idea of sending it to a microphone specialist for a checkup, but figured it would be one of those “someday” things when I had fewer pressing needs.

A few weeks ago, somebody contacted me about something and, in that way conversations go, the topic of the BK-4 came up. It occurred to me I should pay the little one some attention, so I got it out of storage. What I saw broke my heart. I’d spooled up that super-long cable and placed the microphone atop it. Bad idea, it turned out. The old cable jacket had eaten into the paint, leaving two big and ugly scars across the front of the microphone. The microphone itself was not damaged, but the paint was ruined. I felt kind of sick about it, especially since my own negligence had done this. (I think that weird little scar I mentioned earlier, the one that was already on the microphone, was the result of a similar cable jacket burn.)

I’m going to spare you pictures of the microphone with the paint damage. Instead, here’s a photo of Gilda silently reproving me for being such a doofus with a priceless artifact.

Now, I could have fixed this myself with some careful sanding and a can of spray paint, but I didn’t feel right doing that. An artifact like this deserves the best treatment I could find. And that’s what I decided to do.

I boxed the Starmaker up and sent it off to New Jersey. That’s where Clarence Kane runs ENAK Microphones and Repair Service. Clarence worked for RCA back in the day and, when RCA got out of the microphone business, set up his own service center to keep microphones going. Clarence is now assisted by Luke Petersen, who has been very busy the last several years learning the ins and outs of dozens of microphone types. But instead of telling you about these two, maybe I should let this neat little film speak for me:

I sent my Starmaker off a few weeks ago, and I expected it to take a while. But early last week I got an invoice, and last Thursday UPS brought me a box, and with my heart wedged between my adenoids I cracked the thing open. Inside, very carefully packaged, was my beloved Starmaker…

Complete with a neat little thank-you from Clarence and Luke. I appreciate that, gentlemen…but it is I who should be thanking YOU.

…looking better than it’s looked in forever. Not only had the paint been accurately redone (while preserving the NBC-TV rollmark on the back!), but at my request they had also given it a check-up and installed a new cable with a standard XLR connector (and, also at my request, returned the old cable for historical purposes). All I need is a good pre-amp, and I could put this little one back to work, which is what I think it wants to be doing anyway.

To say I’m happy is an understatement. I was positively giddy over it. And while the reconditioning job was not inexpensive, I have absolutely no regrets. I owed it to that microphone, not only for what my carelessness had done, but also to make sure that microphone will be in good shape for its next 70 years.

If you have an old microphone that needs service, give the folks at ENAK a call or send them an e-mail. I highly recommend them.

:: Things are quiet on the book front, which is much of why you haven’t heard much from me in a while. Right now the main thing is waiting for some paperwork to come down, and waiting for the recommended edits from the copy editor. Things are in work, though, so stay tuned.

Remembering Dave Garroway Jr.

I have never talked much on this blog about my dealings with members of the Garroway family. There are reasons for this. One is that I respect their privacy. It took a while for me to establish contact – they weren’t exactly easy to get hold of, and I believed that was for their own reasons, and I have a great deal of respect for that. Heaven only knows how many times over the years they’ve been contacted by various people who had some idea for a book or some other project, or some other reason involving their famous relative.

It’s a long story that involves connections that helped make connections, but in 2018 I had success in making contact with two very important people in Dave Garroway’s life, his daughter Paris and his son Dave Jr. From the very first time we talked on the phone, Dave Jr. was open, friendly, full of stories and memories that he freely shared.

As it happened, they were on the East Coast to see after some family business a few months later, and they wanted to meet with me. They drove down and spent a weekend in town, and to say it was a marvelous time is an understatement. Of course, hearing them tell stories about their dad, and seeing the photos and artifacts from the family’s collection, was a lot of fun. What I didn’t anticipate was that we would have fun just being together for lunch and talking about anything and everything. For my part, it was a chance to show them how seriously I took this project, and that I was going to see it through with dignity and respect.

That weekend passed too quickly, but every few weeks I would get a phone call from Dave Jr. If it was 15 minutes, it was a long conversation. Part of it was to check in on how the book was coming, and inevitably he would mention a story or two about his dad. But he would talk about other things he was doing. He might be about to work on one of his alternative-energy projects, or he might be about to take his van on a long road trip to see sights and visit friends, or he might be off to do something else. It was whatever was on his mind at that moment, in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style, but always with some mirth beneath.

Dave Jr. was very much a free spirit. He just plain thought differently. He had interesting views on science and the world. He developed scientific theories that he presented about, and hoped to turn into published works.16 It was not difficult at all to see his dad in him: not only the facial resemblance, with the eyes and the prominent chin, but the same fascination with figuring out how the world works. He was very much his father’s son.

Dave Jr. presenting at a 2017 conference. (Dave Garroway Jr. collection)

Over time, whenever the caller ID on my phone would light up with his number, it came to feel like hearing from a favorite uncle, the uncle who’s always working on something and has that goofy sense of humor and that slightly askew view of the world, but whom you love because he’s so much fun to share time with. And “boring” is a word I will never use to describe Dave Garroway Jr.17

I had great hopes for the year 2020. It was the year I was going to get out to see Dave and Paris, have long conversations with them, get some additional material for the book, and sift through family photos and scan the most interesting ones for the book. But then came the pandemic, and we had no idea just how serious it was going to be. As it grew worse I had no appetite to travel, nor any desire to put myself in a situation where I might unwittingly inflict a killer virus on someone.18 But even with travel plans out the window, I still had a mountain of material here to work with. Much of it was thanks to Dave Jr., who had not only accumulated a lot of archival material, but many years before had started writing out stories about life with his dad. They are very special stories – some of them heartwarming, some of them hilarious, one or two of them heartbreaking, but all of them provide a view of Dave Garroway that has never been presented.

For a long time I labored through all this material – organizing, then stringing things together into a narrative, much of it done in the wee small hours of morning before getting ready for work. The deadline on the agreement I had with Dave and Paris was that the manuscript would be complete by December 31, 2020. When my teaching duties ended for the Fall semester, I went at it full-bore.19

On the evening of December 25, as we watched A Christmas Story on the annual marathon, I was making final touches to the draft, preparing to export it as a PDF to send to Dave Jr. for review. The phone rang. It was Dave Jr., wishing me “a happy and a merry,” and he asked how the book was going. I informed him that he was about to get the completed first draft. My goodness, I wish I could bottle the joy that was in his voice when I told him. It was a Christmas gift unlike any other, both for me and for him. For many years he had wanted his dad’s story told. Now it was going to happen. That night, I sent him the file.

A couple weeks later I got a call from Dave Jr. He had received the file, had a couple copies printed, and was about to go through it with his sister. We talked about a few other things in our usual breezy manner, and then he said he’d be back in touch once he had done some additional reviewing. Good enough.

On January 29 I had come home after spending the morning on an errand. I was taking it easy after lunch. The phone rang. It was Paris. That was unusual, but I was delighted to hear from her. I was stopped cold when she told me that Dave Jr. had died. I knew from our conversations that he had endured a few health issues over the years, but he had seemed reasonably hale and hearty in our conversations. But now, he was gone. It sent me areel.

It has taken me close to a year to write this. I feel badly that it has taken this long. Part of why I haven’t written this remembrance until now is because I wanted to give the family some time to grieve and to deal with it all. Part of it was my belief that it wasn’t my news to share.20 But part of it was that I lost a friend, and maybe this delay was because I needed some space of my own, because it hurt a little to think about it. I came to know Dave Jr. because of my work on his dad’s life story, but I grew fond of him because he was just so much fun to have in my life.

A few years ago in a podcast series about a racer who was killed in a plane crash,21 one of his associates said his friend’s sudden passing was a reminder to “love ’em all you can, while you can.” Sometimes it takes that unexpected phone call to remind us how precious each word, each hug, each gesture can be – the regret that sometimes we take the people in our lives for granted, the reminder never to do so because in a blink of an eye they can be gone.

I didn’t know Dave Garroway Jr. that long – only a little less than three years – but what an unforgettable three years, and what an unforgettable character to have in my life. And how much do I miss those goofy, fun calls from my uncle Dave.22

Once more around the Sun

Another year has passed – much too quickly, it seems. And another year has passed in which I haven’t written as much here as I would have liked. Unfortunately, that’s a side effect of having completed the manuscript and now working on the publication side of things.23

And in that regard, though I (obviously) can’t talk much about it, that’s probably the biggest news as the year ends. We do have someone who’s interested in working with us. Once I am free to talk about the details, I will do so, but experience (as well as superstition) has taught me not to talk in detail about such things until paperwork is signed.

There are other things I must get in order, including rounding up photographs and getting clearances, which is going to be time-consuming.24 But it will all get done, because I made a promise to the Garroway family, and I feel a duty to the man whose story I am telling, and I do my best to keep my promises.

In the meantime, I thank you again for being part of this journey, and I thank you for your patience as we move forward to the next chapter25 of this story. Here, too, are hopes that 2022 will be a lot kinder to all of us. And my fondest hope is for what Dave Garroway himself wished us all.

The Chicago School lives on

Some time ago, we26 here at Garroway At Large World Headquarters received an inquiry. A group near Chicago was planning a Garroway tribute. There was only so much I could do from my far remove, but I was happy to help where I could, of course.

Last week, the result made its debut. Somehow a group of very talented and creative folks put together a live, hour-long tribute to Dave Garroway and the Chicago School, and it is pure enjoyment from beginning to end. It’s a wonderful tour through Dave Garroway’s life, the good stuff as well as the more serious stuff (handled with respect, thankfully), and along the way there are some neat tributes to some of his contemporaries. There’s an interview with a television historian, who gives the context for what we’re seeing. There’s some neat musical moments, including a duet about early television that’s just plain fun (and that itself would have been right at home on Garroway At Large).

Garroway, charmingly brought back to life.

The production has a handmade feel to it. You will notice there’s not that much about it that’s fancy. A time or two it reminded me, happily so, of a school play, which only adds to its charm and makes it feel that much more heartfelt. Not to mention, it’s right out of the Chicago School aesthetic. The real Dave Garroway didn’t mind showing you that there was a stagehand above the set responsible for the falling leaves in a musical number, or incorporating a boom mic into a sketch. In this tribute, you’ll see some equipment, and you’ll see other signs that “it’s a show.”27

I’ve spent the last five years working on Dave Garroway’s life story, and yet if you’d asked me to write a show about him, I could not have captured the man’s spirit any better than this delightful show did. These folks did their homework, and what a surprise and a joy it was to watch this presentation. And from what I know about the man, I can’t help thinking Dave Garroway would have felt very honored by, and very happy with, this tribute, too.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone remembers Dave Garroway.28 I wonder if, for all he took part in that shaped the medium as we know it, he will forever be a footnote. This wonderful presentation reminded me that some people do remember Dave Garroway, and why he must be remembered. To all of those responsible for this tribute, a heartfelt “thank you.”

Happy birthday, Dave! (And happy birthday, us!)

It was on this date in 1913 that the master communicator himself, Dave Garroway, was born. In all those great photos and those interesting kinescopes from back in the day, Dave seems so young and lively. It’s difficult to grasp that if he were still here, he’d be 108.29

And it was on this date four years ago that our website officially opened. In the time since, we’ve told some stories, clarified some history, shared some neat things, and most of all we’ve chronicled the effort to finally put Dave’s life story between hard covers. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been to making that happen.30

The neatest thing of all has been meeting some terrific people along the way. I’ve had the chance to talk with people whose parents and relatives worked with Dave, with other people interested in the Garroway story, with researchers working on projects adjacent to my own. And best of all, the project has let me get to know members of Dave’s own family, some truly special people I have enjoyed getting to know. There are times the book itself seems like a happy by-product; for me, the real reward comes from the people I’ve met. Thank you all for that.

So on this 13th of July, raise a glass of something you like and remember our Dave. We didn’t have him as long as we wish we could have, but what a life he lived, and what a hard act he was to follow.

:: Yes, I know this is the first update in a long time. You can blame never-ending work issues for that. Finishing the manuscript also ran me out of gas. And in the seemingly fleeting moments I have to call my own, I have been following my own fascinations. See, like our Dave, I am an incurable collector of gadgets and curiosities, and I get too fascinated by them sometimes.31

There will be updates from time to time. I hope I find some new things to share, and of course the moment I have anything I can announce on the book’s prospects, I will share. Keep your fingers crossed…!