One of the blessings of the Internet era is that many archives have opened up and a lot of material has become available. Today’s post is about one such archive, available for endless hours of enjoyment.
Maybe you know the name Studs Terkel from his books, such as Working or The Good War. Maybe you’ve seen him in the occasional film role. Maybe you’ve seen him pop up in documentaries. It doesn’t matter, because the man could do anything and, through his long life, often did. But he had a particular talent for conversation, the ability to talk to anyone about anything, which he parlayed not only into his best-selling books but also into a radio series on WFMT in Chicago.1
And, as it happens, our man Dave Garroway stopped in to talk with Studs one day in 1974. Dave and Studs had known one another since the late 1940s, both as up-and-coming disc jockeys, and subsequently as television stars in the Chicago School firmament (Dave on Garroway at Large, Studs on Studs’ Place). Thanks to the wonderful Studs Terkel Radio Archive2, you can listen to the two old friends talk about a number of things: broadcasting, jazz, race relations and more. Take about an hour and let yourself be entranced by a master communicator and a master conversationalist.3 (Then when you’re done listening to that interview, take a look at the other interviews available in this magnificent collection and enjoy them, too. There’s only about 5,600 shows to go through, so make some time.)
Our second installment of rare Garroway footage1 involves his well-known love of sports cars. We’ve talked about this on the blog before, especially in terms of his beloved Jaguar. Garroway was a keen amateur racer, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But even though he put aside racing as a driver, he never lost his love for watching car races and supporting the sport through other means.2
Here is some rare footage of a sports car race at Andrews Air Force Base (yes, that one)3 in the 1954 season, probably the President’s Cup race. This 20-minute silent film is a feast for sports car lovers, but of interest to us here is who you start to see about 17 minutes in, and then popping up at the end to interview the winning driver.
Some years ago I made reference to a 1953 Esquire article by Richard Gehman. This article captured what it was like when Today was young and everything seemed brand-new, and cast and crew were coping with life at an hour that still seemed far too early for television. Back when I wrote about it, the best I could do was give you a summary of the article, for the Esquire archive was paywalled.
Several assignments are competing for my attention this coming week, so in lieu of a new post I will instead refer you to this item about Monitor, the weekend radio service NBC launched in 1955.1 In particular, click on that picture of Radio Central and see if you don’t spot someone we particularly love around here.2 (Radio Central and that big window are long gone, alas; when you take the studio elevators to the fifth floor lobby these days, you see a wall flanked by two locked doors. So that picture makes me ache.)
As always, when mention is made of Monitor around here, it’s worth reminding everyone to visit one of my favorite places on the Internet, the wonderful Monitor Beacon website, with its hours upon hours of wonderful listening.
In this screengrab from the July 16 webstream of the CBS News coverage of the Apollo 11 liftoff, Arthur C. Clarke talks with Walter Cronkite. (CBS photo)
As I write this, we’re observing the fiftieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11. There’s a list of on-air commemorations as long as your arm, airing on all kinds of channels. Some of them are good, even if some of them have hit the same beats that every documentary already has. A handful have been truly excellent, unearthing new material and new perspectives (see the wide-ranging, unexpectedly moving Chasing the Moon or the outstanding Apollo 11).
But one media organization did something truly spectacular. On July 16, CBS streamed its live coverage, as originally aired that day 50 years before, of the launch of Apollo 11 (and made it available afterward on YouTube). It wasn’t just the highlights, either – the stream began with the start of that morning’s coverage, at 6 a.m., and carried you through until the astronauts were in Earth orbit. It was nearly four and a half hours of coverage. Better still, you truly saw it as it aired – with network commercials still there (a young Ali MacGraw wearing a paper bikini in an ad for International Paper; a bizarre minimalist ad for Maxim freeze-dried coffee; a really mod commercial for Corn Flakes with a multi-picture montage straight out of Saul Bass; Western Electric musing that this new innovation called a laser could revolutionize communications). Not only that, but the CBS Morning News from that morning was also included, and there you could find glimpses of what else was going on in the nation and the world that historic morning. And since the recording originated at the CBS O&O in New York, you even got local breaks and station IDs from WCBS-TV. All in about as good a transfer from the original videotape as you could ask for, looking vivid and colorful.
To me, what CBS did was like Christmas morning. It hit so many sweet spots for me: my love of spaceflight history, my love of broadcast history, my love of those little time-capsule moments that let you experience how a moment must have felt. It lets you realize that even in historic moments, life isn’t a highlight reel. There’s a lot of waiting. Sometimes the most interesting thing is Wally Schirra, retired astronaut who’s there as the color guy, pointing out to Walter Cronkite that a clock in the little studio at the Cape isn’t working. Sometimes it’s dull. But so did it happen in real time, in 1969. There’s no narration, no editing beyond what the director called during the broadcast that morning.
CBS gave us all a wonderful gift by putting this coverage out there, as it aired. Yeah, so it has those banners across the bottom, but to me the wonder of seeing so much that I’d only heard of, but never been able to see, could make me overlook that. Streaming this coverage was, in many ways, the perfect way to observe this anniversary. It’s fun. It generated a lot of happy buzz around the Interwebs. And it makes me wish we saw this kind of thing more often.
I think, for instance, about the archival Garroway material that I’ve seen and heard. I remember how much of it was listed on the old NBC News Archives site, some of which was actually posted for viewing in screener form. There was no better way for me to understand the tenor of Garroway in any given period than to watch some of that footage. But then NBC’s archive changed its website, and its policies, and what was there is no longer accessible. A valuable resource to my research was suddenly gone.
I know that network archives can be extensive, and are understaffed. I also know it takes effort and equipment to digitize old media, and that it costs to do it. I also know that in some instances you get into various licensing issues, too. But I also know there’s a lot of it out there that’s already been digitized – and I know this because I’ve seen it, from official network sources. And sometimes that’s the rub. The material exists, but you can’t see it, and not unless you’re a documentary or feature film producer with deep enough pockets will you see it.
The archives are valuable properties for licensing. And I get that. And this footage is the property of the networks, and it’s theirs to do with as they wish. But I also think about the value to history that exists by making this stuff available for people to view and to experience once again, in all their imperfect splendor. If you want people to experience a moment, there’s no better way.
That’s why I applaud CBS for what it’s done with its Apollo 11 coverage. It was a bold thing to do, but it was the right one, and it’s an example of the flexibility the online streaming platforms allow these days. May we see more networks follow the lead of CBS, crack the doors of the vaults a little wider, and share more widely the moments from the past, exactly as they were back then.
My colleague Brandon alerted me to a nifty flashback item on the Saturday Evening Post‘s website. In February 1956, the Post published an article under Garroway’s byline (well, an “as told to” byline, at least) titled “I Lead a Goofy Life.” In it, Dave talked about the strange occurrences that happen when you host an early-morning program, set in a big fishbowl of a studio, in which your assistants include a Miss America and a young chimpanzee. Better still, there’s a link to the entire article, viewable in its original layout, at the bottom of the entry. It’s a fun article. Go check it out.
Much of the fun of research comes in the happy accidents. You may set out looking for a certain piece of information you’ve targeted, but I guarantee you’ll end up finding something else along the way that will delight, amaze, charm, amuse or astonish. Today’s entry is about that kind of discovery.
We know the name Bil Keane from The Family Circus. But the success of that strip obscures his other efforts through the years. One of them was a look at television, Channel Chuckles, which ran from 1954 to 1976. And sure enough, in my search through newspaper archives, I found the subject of this blog sometimes came up:
– 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.
A few posts ago I wrote about the research and writing tasks that any historian or biographer faces. But yesterday, while watching The Best Years of Our Lives (which, for my money, is the greatest movie ever made), I remembered that its director William Wyler was one of the five filmmakers profiled in the book and miniseries Five Came Back. And that led me down a web search that helped me find this great interview with Mark Harris, who wrote the book. In the interview Harris talks about the process he went through, how you gather every scrap of material you can get because you never really know just what will end up providing a key insight, and the little discoveries a researcher makes that can throw unexpected light on the process. Give it a read, because it gives such great insight into what a historian and author must do, and it hits on so many points familiar to my present task.
In 1960, with the 100th anniversary of the Civil War coming up, Alec Wilder put together a work inspired by the works of Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The piece, titled Names From the War, featured a pair of New York quintets and a choral group. Narrating it was none other than Dave Garroway. Thanks to the Wilderworld Podcast, you can listen to it here.
On this weekend, when we remember those who gave their lives, take the time to listen to this beautiful piece…and as you listen, remember.
Maybe you know the name Studs Terkel from his books, such as Working or The Good War. Maybe you’ve seen him in the occasional film role. Maybe you’ve seen him pop up in documentaries. It doesn’t matter, because the man could do anything and, through his long life, often did. But he had a particular talent for conversation, the ability to talk to anyone about anything, which he parlayed not only into his best-selling books but also into a radio series on WFMT in Chicago.1
Some years ago I made reference to 
