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This is a quick note, because my week is about to be consumed with meetings and other chores, but it contains good news: Peace is now available through Amazon’s publishing program, in a case-laminated hardcover ³ and in paperback, too. This provides you with new options to get the book at a little bit lower price, and I also hope it’ll provide quicker delivery too.

We’re not ready with an e-book version just yet, because that will require negotiating some image rights for electronic book use. We’re working on that, though, between other chores. Stay tuned.

I wish I could tell you there were super-exciting reasons why there’s been no posts of late. Instead, the photo of our Dave up above sums it up: a cluttered desk and some sort of business captured in midstream. February has been a diabolical month and the demands on my time and brainpower have been ceaseless, but it’s an occupational hazard in my line of work. It has also involved a lot of getting up way too early and staying too late, and in a weird way those goofy hours have made me feel a kinship with what our Dave went through during his years on Today.

The manuscript’s first draft, however, remains complete (what, you thought I was going to un-complete it, maybe?) and I’m sort of letting it rest until things settle down here. Then I will go through a paper copy of it and do my usual mark-up process before getting into revisions, and once everybody in the process is happy with how things are going I will begin shopping the manuscript. But things here have been so busy that it hardly seems it’s only been two months since that first draft was completed. A lot has happened, and when it’s appropriate I may talk about some of it, but not right now.

I hope to be back with some new content soon, and if things will ease up at work, it may be sooner rather than later. That’s my hope, anyway. Regardless, stay tuned and thank you as always for stopping in.

A couple weeks back, the search through Newspapers.com came to its end. Now it’s time for me to sift through those thousands of clippings, get the good stuff out of them, and organize everything. That goes not only for the newspaper clippings, but also for magazine articles I’ve found, paper documents I have from the Garroway family, the hundreds of images I have of documents from the NBC papers at Wisconsin, passages from books, and so many other things. And then there’s the audiovisual evidence – kinescopes, several interviews from the Archive of American Television that I have yet to go through thoroughly, and a couple of lengthy audio interviews with Garroway that I’ve happened across.

All of this may sound daunting, and it is a big task. But it’s helped by knowing that a good many of those clippings, I saved because of only one or two sentences. A good many of them are brief mentions, for instance in an Earl Wilson column or some such. Others are alternate versions of the same wire service story, which I clipped just to be thorough. It’s easy to open a hundred documents at a time in my preview program, transcribe what I need and create a brief citation (which I will finish out later), and then move ahead. The work goes much faster than you may imagine, and it’s splendid busy-work.⁴

Years ago I developed a system for handling these kinds of huge projects, and it’s much like how, in the days before computers, an author might write individual facts or ideas on index cards, then sort that stack of cards into whatever sequence was appropriate, and then write the manuscript. In my case, I am transcribing the relevant items from each article, in chronological order, into a master document. Once that’s done, I will cut-and-paste those items into the order that seems appropriate for the story I have to tell. Then writing the finished manuscript just becomes transforming those facts and ideas into readable prose. It’s a method that served me well 19 years ago when I was working on my dissertation; once I had everything in the sequence I wanted, it only took me about two days to complete the first draft of my dissertation.⁵

As I write this in the wee hours of a Monday morning, this master document stands at 123,710 words. By the end of today, it’ll likely have grown to more than 130,000. I haven’t even gotten into the Today years, so this thing’s going to be a monster, maybe even 400,000 words when I’m done transcribing. A whole lot of it will get cut down, because there’s a lot of fluff in there, I know, and the finished manuscript will likely be in the 100,000-word range. But it’s always best to have too much material, instead of having to stretch out too little. As a friend said the other day, first you create the block of marble, then you pare it down to David. (And in my case, that’s certainly apt.)

One more thing that helps any author is a good research assistant. And that, I most certainly have.

This is Gilda⁶, my faithful helper⁷. She’s very good at making sure none of my papers go anywhere – that is, when she and her big brother aren’t getting into mischief.⁸

With help this good, there’s no way I can fail.

Taking a week to finish some projects and organize new material. (I’ve also been working outside in 90-degree heat and humidity, so the photo above hits home.) Back soon.

It’s currently an embarrassment of riches at Garroway at Large World Headquarters: not only busy with the day job (and a few other collateral items from the business of living), but a couple days ago a very large and heavy box of Garroway documents arrived in the mail, and untold discoveries await. Let me get things in order and I should be back with something new for you next week.

You may wonder why there was no update last week. I can only attribute that to the exquisite agony of being lower-middle management at my workplace, and in particular to a project that involved outside contractors and a firm start date. And, since my job involves generally being in charge of a lot of things, I was the one caught in the middle. But it got done. Oh, and final exams and so forth were taking place the same time, too, and there was also a negotiation with a third party about a very intriguing alliance that could mean great things. So life didn’t want for action or variety the last week and a half.

With all that going on, there was not much time or available brainpower to think about anything else, especially about beloved master communicators. I intend to change that in the next few days. I also hope to have some interesting news soon, and once I can share that, you’ll read it here. Meanwhile, bear with us and we’ll have something for you soon.

In March 1956 Today had been four years on the air and gone from experiment in morning television to popular and profitable staple of NBC’s weekday schedule. Its success was in no small part to the easygoing style of its host, who had last been profiled in TV Guide three years before. So the magazine returned in its March 24 issue with a cover story on “Television’s Most Curious Man!”

The adjective “curious” came into play because Garroway “has never made a movie, never been in the theater, vaudeville or the Catskills, where many of the medium’s talents were weaned.” But Garroway was “as relaxed before a camera as most people are after three martinis. He understands camera shots like a member of Local 11, the technicians’ union.” He also had a knowledge of production that rivaled that of his producers and directors, “one of the few men in front of the camera who are completely attuned to what’s inside.”

By this point Garroway was hosting not only Today but also Wide Wide World, and doing a Sunday night block on NBC’s weekend radio service, Monitor. “His credo is ‘work,'” the unsigned piece notes. To get everything in, the article states, Garroway has conditioned himself to get by on five hours’ rest each night. According to one friend, Garroway’s “tremendous drive to work” must have come as a result of someone calling him a failure along the way for not wanting to work, “and he’s been disproving it ever since.”

The perks of Garroway’s professional life included “pretty girls, news flashes, publicity, the immediacy of live telecasting and just enough uncertainty to keep it exciting,” since a remote pickup during a live Wide Wide World was never a sure thing. But, the article notes, Garroway was always ready to talk “indefinitely” if something went amiss, drawing on his “encyclopedic” knowledge of anything and everything. Sometimes he wrote bits of information on little pieces of paper that he kept in his pockets or wallet. “Some are merely for my own amazement,” he said. At the writer’s request, Garroway shared a random one from the collection in his wallet: “Tomorrow is coming at us at 800 miles per hour.”

The article noted that Garroway was divorced, was the father of an 11-year-old daughter through that marriage, and now “leads a lonely bachelor’s existence” at 42. He had dated model Nancy Berg for a while, and had also dated Betty Furness and “a motion picture producer” named Pamela Wilde.⁹ He capped his long and busy weekdays by going back to his Park Avenue apartment around 5 p.m., going to the garage and working on his beloved 1938 SS 100 Jaguar¹⁰, “for which he paid $4400 and on which he has spent $13,000, despite the fact he does all the work himself.” After tinkering with the Jaguar, there usually was just time for dinner and sleep before the alarm went off at 4 a.m. The alarm, by the way, was a contraption Garroway built that he called “the horror,” which “looks like the Univac control board and does almost as many things,” controlling the phone’s bell, the phonograph, and the room’s lighting.

Tinkering with the Jaguar and building devices like “the horror” were but a few manifestations of Garroway’s many fascinations; the piece noted that Garroway “collects hobbies the way other people collect stamps.” His apartment brimmed with books, records, microscopes, and even a collection of 125 pairs of unusual cuff links. A tripod in the living room had a set of binoculars from a German tank.

The sudden fortune Garroway realized from Today left him laughing, and he confessed he didn’t know precisely how much he had made the year before. He recalled how he’d been hired as a staff announcer by KDKA for $50 a week, and had moved to Chicago because he was offered $62.50. “How would you feel,” he asked, “if you were suddenly told you were worth $300,000 a year for doing just exactly what you’ve always been doing?”

Good evening from the host hotel of the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. I’ll post a fuller report when I’m home (in the interests of traveling light, the laptop stayed home and my touch-typing skills don’t translate to an iPad at all). And even if I could only be here only one day, I’ve managed to pack a lot in: several sweeps of the vendor room, a couple or three of the seminar and panel discussions, and a few really good conversations. In particular, Carol Ford, who co-wrote an outstanding biography of Bob Crane, was especially generous both with her time and with the lessons she learned while working on that book. The other really big highlight was an incredible, wide-ranging and completely fun conversation with Mitchell Hadley and his wife. Between those two conversations alone, this trip was worth the cost – and everything on top of that is a bonus.

There will be more to come, once I’m back home and have had time to sort through everything. Meanwhile, in the morning I will have to rise when Garroway would have, for mine is the first plane back to where I’m from (or as close to it as Southwest flies direct from here, anyhow). See y’all on the other side.