Category: Why we’re doing this

Pre-flight checks

There come times when you have to make big decisions. A few weeks ago, I made one. For a variety of factors, a deal I thought I’d made to get the book published wasn’t progressing as I’d hoped. I’ll spare details on this, but some thoughts came to mind, and they were provoked by people I admire.

The first was from the subject of my previous book, who had struggled to get his first novel published. One night, talking about the frustrations he’d suffered, he suddenly had an inspiration: “Hellfire, we’ll publish it ourselves.” And so he did, raising some money and getting it privately printed.1

I also thought of an observation Natalie Merchant2 made in a recent interview. When she went solo she could have become a big-time pop star, but that’s not what she wanted. What mattered to her was doing the work she wanted to do, and doing it her way. One of her projects3 took a long time and required her to spend a massive amount of her own money, which took her nearly a decade to recoup. But it mattered that much to her to stay true to her vision, so she took charge, spent the money and did the hard work, and has never regretted it.

That kind of thing chewed at me as I thought about Peace. I’ve spent this long working on the book, rounding material up, doing all the things one must do in order to write a biography. I’ve been through it before, how it feels to turn over the product of a very intimate and personal process to a publisher, who will then turn it over to people you don’t know and who don’t know you, and then your work becomes subject to their vision. I had a vision of how I wanted Peace to look, how I wanted the cover to look, how I wanted the interior to look. I couldn’t be guaranteed of that if I went with an outside publisher. I wouldn’t have the control I wanted. I knew what I wanted, I knew how I wanted it to look, and I didn’t want to sacrifice that. This had to be done my way.

As it happened, I had the tools and know-how already. I have InDesign and Photoshop and Illustrator. I have close to 35 years of experience with document layout and design. I’ve got more than two decades’ experience with Photoshop and Illustrator. Why not see what I could do? One long weekend4, that’s what I did. I had Brandon give the text a very careful read, and he caught a lot of things that got past me and made the whole thing much stronger.

A scene I know very, very well. But it’s an amazing tool.

The other bonus is that it’s really easy to self-publish these days, especially if you can supply press-ready PDFs. And, as it happened, that’s what I know how to do, and IngramSpark could do the rest. And, last Friday, the result came in the mail:

And here it is, almost ready for your shelves.

Mind you, this is the printed proof. The moment you send something off, you find a whole lot of things got past you, and I have spent the last several days fixing those last little things. Some of them were fairly important, and others of them were tiny. I knew, though, if I didn’t fix them I would kick myself every time I saw them. As the great Dan Gurney once observed, “If you have the chance to make something beautiful, and you don’t…well, what does that say about you?”

Even then, even with all its imperfections, I was impressed by how it looks. It’s a solid book. The dust jacket is even more gorgeous than I imagined it would be. The paper inside is bright and opaque. The binding and cover feel nice and solid. This book looks and feels the way I hoped it would, and I am happy with it. It’s not the deal I would have gotten had I been able to interest a big-name publisher, but I’ve more than made that up by the fact that I have been able to this my way and make the book, in appearance and in substance, the way I wanted it to be.

The final revisions will be sent to Ingram in the next few hours. Once that file is properly in place and I’ve approved the e-proof, expect the book to go on sale really soon after. You’ll be able to get your local bookstore to order it in, and I’ll also be setting up a link here for you to buy it through this website.5 There’s also a chance I may have a limited supply of signed copies later on, too.

Stay tuned. It’s almost here, at long and blessed last.

Why we do this

As will happen when you’re an author, I’ve been asked what my next book will be about. “Oh, about 300 pages, give or take” is a tempting response, but that’s not a terribly social thing to say. Instead I reply with a certain degree of pride, “It’s about Dave Garroway.” That gets me one of two responses. One – typically from people past a certain age – will be a gleam of recognition, followed by memories of how that person loved to watch Dave back in the day.6 The other typical response is a polite version of “…who?” And that prompts my short answer, that he was the first host of Today, and that usually satisfies the person asking the question even if it reduces Dave to one role.7

Then there are the other types of responses. Sometimes they’re fun responses. There are the inevitable wags who will make jokes about J. Fred Muggs, as if Dave’s life can be reduced to those three or so years. Then there are the people who focus on Dave’s bad habits, on the tantrums he was reputed to have thrown off-camera, on the tales of drug use (and the type and amount of drugs will vary, depending on which rumors are being repeated).8 And, of course, there are those who will focus on the way he died and suggest there were bats in his belfry all along.9

It all gets wearying after a while. I’ve been digging into Dave Garroway’s life for more than four years now. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on. I’ve had lengthy conversations with his children, talked to people who worked with him and to people whose parents worked with him. I’ve read through his FBI file. I’ve traveled hundreds of miles to dig through box after box of archival material. I’ve scoured a half-century of newspaper archives and read through thousands of articles. Whatever I’ve been able to find, I’ve read. And something in the back of my mind, somehow, keeps waiting to find that big dark secret that’s going to ruin him forever. I keep thinking of the story that David McCullough told of wanting to write a book about Picasso, only to get a hundred pages in and realizing that even though Picasso was of monumental importance as an artist, he couldn’t stand Picasso as a person, so he decided to write about someone he found likable, and that’s how his Pulitzer-winning biography of Harry Truman came to be.

I’ve often wondered when my Picasso moment was coming with Dave Garroway. So far, it hasn’t. Instead, the more I read about him, the more I process what I’ve learned about him, the more I like him. The more I understand him. Yes, there are times he did things I wish he hadn’t. I wish I could go back in time and tell him to ignore the advice of that dentist at that card game, that Dexedrine was going to do horrible things to his mind and lasting damage to his body. I wish we knew then what we know now about how to treat chronic depression. I wish I could tell him to not sign away five years of his career when he left NBC in 1961. And, of course, I wish I could have kept him from doing what he did that day in July 1982.

But I can’t. All I can do is tell the story of his 69 years the best and most honest way I can. Which, for me, is not going to be that hard to do. I haven’t uncovered any deep or dark secrets. Eccentricities? A lot of those, but harmless. But I haven’t uncovered a life of dirty deeds, of sociopathy, of crime or vice. I haven’t unveiled anything that’s really uncommon for anyone of his times.10 Instead, I’ve discovered the life of a man who was little different from the rest of us, only he led his life in the public eye, and from that came benefits and disadvantages that were magnified because of his fame. But, viewed in scale, how different was he from the rest of us who live in privacy?

Carol Ford is someone I have become blessed to know.11 Years ago she took on a most formidable task: writing a biography of Bob Crane. That word “formidable” is because Bob Crane is known as much for certain aspects of his private life, and the circumstances of his murder, as he is remembered for Hogan’s Heroes. It wasn’t helped by a rather scurrilous major motion picture that took great liberties with the historical record. It was a task I wouldn’t dare to take on. Where would I begin, and how far up the wall would the inevitable jokes and comebacks and unkind comments drive me?

But Carol and her co-authors, made of stronger stuff than I, set out to correct that record. They talked with everyone they could locate, including people who knew Bob Crane really well. They did the hard work and research. And out of it came a truly massive volume12 that will tell you everything you want to know about the real Bob Crane. Not the Bob Crane that you think you know, not the Bob Crane from the sick jokes, not the Bob Crane from that hit-job of a movie, but the real and complicated and human Bob Crane who actually existed. Not just the Hogan’s Heroes Bob Crane, but the up-and-coming DJ, the white-hot star of KNX Radio, the sensation of a top-rated television comedy, and then Crane’s efforts after Hogan’s Heroes ended. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult topics about his life, but it discusses them in a context that’s missing from other accounts, and debunks a lot of tall tales that have spread about Crane’s life.13 It treats Crane’s life in scale, and you learn a lot about him that you didn’t know before, because no one before had cared to tell those stories because they wanted to talk too much about sex, videotapes and murder. You never knew so much about Bob Crane being a terrific drummer or a world-class disk jockey with a quick wit and an uncanny sense of timing, or a man who was genuinely loved and is still fondly remembered by his friends and colleagues.14

Carol continues to be Bob Crane’s foremost advocate, and makes appearances in the media and at conventions and in other forums to promote the book and speak on Bob’s behalf.15 It hasn’t been the easiest task, and I know for a fact she’s tired of hearing questions about that movie, that she’d be happy if no one ever brought up Crane’s murder or those videotapes or any of that ever again. But I know why she does this. It’s because she feels a duty to tell the story of Bob Crane with honesty and dignity, to rescue him from the jokes and the caricatures and to help people remember that Bob Crane was a human being with a full and complicated life much like the rest of us. And in this, she has succeeded.16 Her incredibly detailed book restores Crane’s humanity, shows his flaws in scale and restores focus to the many good things about him. After reading it, you don’t look at his famous squinting smile as the leer of a wolf, but as the grin of a man who couldn’t conceal a quick wit. Bob Crane is fortunate to have Carol Ford and her associates as his biographers; they have told his story in a thorough manner, and they are tireless champions of his legacy, a story that is so often not told because one aspect of his life drowns out everything else.

And in a wider sense, that’s why what we do matters. Bob Crane can’t be reduced to punchlines about videotaped sex and a gruesome murder. Nor can Dave Garroway be reduced to a caricature about drug addiction and co-starring with a chimpanzee and committing suicide. Were all of those aspects of his story? Yes, they were. But that’s not all, and the real story, in scale, tells us a lot more. Here is a man who lived and breathed and loved and lost, just as all of us have. And with the help of a lot of good people, I’m going to tell you his story, and I think you’ll learn some things and appreciate what he did.

That’s why it matters. It’s because if there aren’t people doing this kind of work, a lot of history is going to get lost. And yes, there are times when it seems it’s a lonely, thankless job. I’m under no illusions that Dave Garroway is very much a niche subject. I don’t foresee long lines stretching around corners on the day this book is released. I don’t see getting interviewed on the morning shows about him. Any audiobook version will probably be you hiring me to come to your house and read it out loud in your living room.17 But I am committed to telling you the Garroway story because I want to cut through a lot of the old tales and urban legends, because I’ve found the real story to be a lot more fascinating than anything you’ve read before. Because the more I go into his story, the more I find it’s worth telling. And even if I only sell ten copies of the book (and even if those copies are sold to kin folks who purchase them out of pity), this whole exercise will have been worth it. I’ll know that I helped keep the Garroway story from vanishing down the memory hole.

That’s why we do this. We do this because we care. We do this because, somehow, these stories have meaning to us. The more we come to know the people we write about, they start to matter to us the way friends or family might. Not in the sense that we defend their every action or excuse their misdeeds – that’s fandom gone awry. But, rather, in the sense that we care about making sure they are represented with truth and accuracy, but also with dignity and fairness, just the same as we hope our own stories will be told when we’re gone.

If I can do that much for Dave Garroway, it really won’t matter how many copies of the book I sell, or if it only gathers dust on library shelves. The man’s story is worth the telling, and worth the remembering. And that’s why I’m happy to do it.

Remembering Phil Hymes

Last week we lost another longtime NBC crewmember. Phil Hymes, a lighting director whose NBC career began in 1951 and spanned decades, with a credits list including everything from Your Hit Parade and The Bell Telephone Hour to Late Night with Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, passed away last week at age 96.

In reading the obits for Phil Hymes you find phrases like “the best” and “creative” (mixed in, of course, with comments about how opinionated he could be – “brutally honest,” Fallon said, and that’s a recurring theme. Yes Please by Amy Poehler includes one such story of Phil being extremely candid). But as you read, you’re also struck by the span of the man’s career, how much he saw, and how many shows he worked on. Some of them didn’t last, some of them are forgotten, but some have endured. His most famous work was helping light Saturday Night Live, and as I work my way through the DVDs of the first five seasons, more often than not I see Phil Hymes among the familiar names on the credit scroll at the end of each episode.

And one of Phil’s first jobs at NBC? Lighting Today. That’s right, he would have been responsible for making Garroway and company look good from the very earliest days of Pat Weaver’s morning experiment. I don’t even want to know what had to go into figuring out how to make the interior of the RCA Exhibition Hall look so presentable on television (especially in those early days), but he somehow helped get it done.

People like Phil Hymes – and I’ve said things like this over and over, but I do so because it’s a point that cannot be overstated – are the people who helped carve a medium from the wilderness. They arrived as television was on the way up; they helped figure out how to make it work; and so much of how it’s now done, they wrote the book on. So many of them stuck around for so long, leaving their mark on generation after generation of programs. Along the way, they not only became part of the institutional history, but they retained so much of what they did and what they witnessed. Every television industry veteran with whom I’ve had a conversation…oh, the stories they can tell, the bygone eras they bring back to vivid (and sometimes hilarious) life, and what understanding they can help you reach about how it really was and how things worked back then. And every time we lose another one, we lose their stories, their perspectives, and so much more.

It’s inevitable that we will lose these people. But it also makes me thankful for initiatives like the Television Academy’s interview project, for the work of people like Stephen Bowie and Kliph Nesteroff, and all the others who work with industry veterans to record their memories and stories and perspectives. But it also makes me think about all those who vanished before we could get their contributions down for the record. And it again makes me think I need to do more than I have to help this cause.

Phil Hymes was a giant. And now, here’s hoping that what Lorne Michaels said has come true: “If God has him now, despite all the arguing, heaven will be much better lit.”

Happy birthday, Old Tiger

On this day in 1913, our Dave Garroway was born. On this day in 2017, our website went live. In the time we’ve been on the Internet, we’ve had quite the adventure. We’ve met new and interesting people, gone places and done things, and even had the privilege of befriending members of Dave’s family and enlisting their support on the book.

Today I can say it’s all continuing to be worth it. The raw manuscript is very close to the halfway point. New material is coming in on a routine basis, and I’m constantly learning things about Garroway that leave me interested and amazed and amused. He was a man of many facets, and he packed a lot of living into his 69 years. He was many things, but “boring” was never one of them.

There’s a lot to look forward to. In the coming year there’s going to be at least one, and probably two (if not more), major research trips on behalf of the book, to sift through archives and conduct some extended interviews. There’s still a ton of newspaper archives I need to sift through – although that first draft of history can be imperfect, it’s still invaluable for understanding things in the context of a moment in time. And, of course, there are always the little discoveries that come completely by surprise, and that leave one astounded.

There is a lot to be done, and it will be a challenge finding time in an already busy life to get it all done. But I find myself in a happy place with this project. For a long time I dreaded the possibility that the farther I got into researching Garroway the man, I’d find something about him that would turn me against him, as can so often happen when you dive into the life of a celebrity. That hasn’t happened – at least, not yet. Has everything I’ve learned been positive? Of course not. But none of it has put me off. I haven’t discovered any kind of weird secret life or untold stories of evil or anything. Instead, I’ve learned about an interesting man of many interests, a man who had his flaws as any of us do, but who tried hard to do his best. I’ve learned some stories about Garroway that are sweet, some that are heartwarming, some that are bizarre, some that are funny, some that are heartbreaking. And none of it discourages me from moving ahead. All these stories are vital if I am to understand Garroway, and if this project is going to give you a full measure of the man. But if where we are now is any indication, you’re going to enjoy reading about him when this book is a reality. He was quite a guy.

Mr. Garroway, this is quite the journey we’re on, but it’s never, ever a boring one. Happy birthday to you, sir.

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.18 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.

Looking back at 2018

NBC photo

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.

The questionable narrator, part II

Last week I talked a bit about unreliable narrators, the importance of verifying information, and the process a historian must go through to make sure what’s written is as accurate as possible. This week, let’s take a look at this in action with a couple of examples, one that’s kind of related to Garroway and one that isn’t. We’ll handle the non-Garroway example first as a warm-up to how these kinds of myths begin.

Ask anybody about women in 1950s television and the name Betty Furness comes up past a certain point.19 Betty became a presence as a spokesperson for Westinghouse, famously demonstrating new appliances and opening refrigerator doors and so forth on live television. That mention of “refrigerator door” will inevitably get people talking about the night Betty Furness couldn’t get the refrigerator door to open and what a fiasco that was. And it’s a great story…except that Betty Furness wasn’t in town that night, and another lady (June Graham) was filling in for her:

And just so you’ll see the difference, here’s Betty Furness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3r2uq9ulRU

Now, let’s take a look at a story more directly related to Dave Garroway. And since it’s a story involving J. Fred Muggs, I will have to tell it carefully20, but I will tell it regardless.

There is a story that involves J. Fred Muggs biting Martha Raye. Since it involves Muggs, the assumption is automatically made that the incident happened on Today, and it’s kind of become part of the program’s mythology since many stories are out there of Muggs’ less-than-likable antics as he grew older.21 But what does the evidence tell us?

Well, do a little digging in the stacks and you find the story’s more complicated. You find out that Muggs, who was often a guest on other programs, was doing a guest spot on Martha Raye’s own television program. The incident happened April 17, 1954, as this wire service story published in the following Monday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune (among other papers) outlines:

And Life magazine provided photographic evidence, as well as a write-up, in this article (there are more photos of the Muggs incident a couple or three pages in).

What’s the lesson of it all? It’s that you have to check these things out. And it’s not just in regards to television history; it’s in any form of history.22 Just because a story sounds great doesn’t mean it’s true. It is the job of the historian to sort through all the available evidence (and seek every bit of it humanly possible), then write from that.

The questionable narrator

– 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.

Where a book comes from

Since the purpose behind this whole project is the production of a book, I thought this time I’d talk a little about how books get created. It’s particularly on my mind since, last week, I delivered the final manuscript for the other book project I’ve been working on. (Which opens up my time and attention now for Garroway’s book…now at more than 27,000 words, in case you were wondering.)

NBC photo

At any rate, it doesn’t matter how many volumes you have on the shelf, or how many of them you’ve read in a lifetime. You never really understand the realm of books until you’ve written one – and even then, I’m not sure how much you really understand. From experience I can speak of this, as I’ve been there, and am going through the process twice over as I write this.

The process I’m going through now is different from those I went through for my first two books. My first book was a work for hire for a local organization, and on that job I was author, editor, book designer, layout person…you name it. I had to deliver a ready-to-print file to the company that printed the books. Somehow I made it. The second book was a little more conventional in that I didn’t have to do the layout and such myself, but I still had to put in a whole raft of work.

The book whose manuscript I delivered last week involved, by far, the most formalized and regimented submissions process I’ve dealt with, and perhaps it will give you some insight into what goes into a lot of books you’ll see. I’ll say all this with the caveat that it’s a university-affiliated press (but my book isn’t a textbook; that’s a whole different realm from what I do), and other publishers will have different requirements and benchmarks and so forth, but regardless I hope it will provide some insight from the author’s side of the creation process.

The whole process began some time ago with a proposal to the press’s acquisitions department. I wrote up an outline, submitted a sample chapter (one I thought was especially strong), included a copy of my vitae, and sent all that along with a letter. Different presses will have different requirements for a proposal package, so it’s important you follow those guidelines as closely as possible. It’s easy to write something up that will end up in the reject pile, so take care to follow their instructions closely. (Also, some presses might prefer that you propose only when you have something complete, or close to it.)

It took a little time, as the press’s acquisitions department was fairly busy, but in time I heard back that they were interested in my proposal. Fortunately, the manuscript was mostly complete, and we agreed on a deadline for the first draft. It was June when I heard back, and we settled on early December for the manuscript to be done. I spent the next several months expanding the manuscript, fleshing out all the things I’d wanted to flesh out and fixing all the weak areas I’d found and some other things that had just bothered me in the original. Since the book was an expansion of my doctoral dissertation written in 2001, I had the heart of it already done, but I needed to take out a lot of academic-speak to make the book reader-friendly, and also expand some areas I hadn’t been able to expand on back then. My dissertation had also been written in a hurry (there was a job offer in the balance, as well as my graduate director wanting me to finish before he retired), so it was short. That’s not to mention that a lot of marvelous resources had become available in the decade and a half since, and I also have a perspective on things that I didn’t have then.

By late November 2017 I had expanded a 49,000-word dissertation into about 75,000 words. But that really doesn’t tell the tale, because I’d had to throw out an entire academically-themed chapter of the dissertation (because when you write a dissertation, there’s an academic aspect you have to include, even if you’re not especially happy about it because what you really want to do is tell a story that hadn’t been told), rearrange some other elements and so forth, so I started out with about a 45,000-word basis. I’d edited it and re-edited it, including marking up a paper copy (seriously, you see things differently on paper than you do on the screen, and editing with a pencil gives you kinds of freedom you don’t have with a computer), and it was ready for the next stage in the process. Per the press’s request, I delivered a paper copy of the manuscript and an electronic version.

The next several months were quiet. Why? The press sent it out for external review. In this case, two people who read manuscripts for the press reviewed it and answered some questions for the press. It’s fundamental stuff, like “do you find it original?” and “does it make a contribution to the field?” And, of course, the big one: “Should the press publish this book?”

This can take a while. It was mid-April before I heard back. Fortunately, the news couldn’t have been happier: both were positive reviews. One was glowingly so. The other recommended some areas for clarification and improvement – easy enough to fix. I was asked to write responses to the reviewers’ comments and submit them as soon as I could. So I did.

With those positive recommendations, the press decided to move ahead. We engaged in a little bit of negotiation and came to terms on a contract, decided on a delivery date, and other such terms. Easy enough. I signed the contract and returned it, then spent the next few weeks tying up loose ends: chasing last-minute leads, getting the archival photos I needed, nailing down permissions to use material from archives, and giving things one last really good read. (Which is more difficult than you’d think, especially if you tend to tweak your copy as you read. I finally had to turn it into a PDF, which I couldn’t fiddle with as I read, and made notes about edits on paper.)

So last week, I submitted the final package to the publisher: a flash drive with the final manuscript (more than 78,000 words, along with about 14,000 more words of frontmatter, notes and bibliography, and image captions) and ten high-quality image files (courtesy of a really helpful university archive), along with the permissions forms and a couple other pieces of paperwork. My part in the process, for now at least, is done.

What’s going to happen next? Well, the press has to go through its own process. They’ll check my references and other aspects, get the manuscript formally copy edited, and then I’ll have to review the edits and sign off on them. Then they’ll design the book and I’ll have to review the galleys and sign off on those. That’s also when I’ll have to create an index, since the pagination will be set. At some point, all the tasks will be done and the book will be printed and it’ll be an actual, physical thing at last.

Then, no doubt, I’ll read it and instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment, I’ll locate one little detail that I didn’t get correct, or I’ll see something I missed. It always happens. But, that’s the risk you run.