Dave Garroway: Today and Yesterday

Few people in show business have enjoyed such a huge impact in the daily lives of millions of Americans and then vanished from the public consciousness so utterly Dave Garroway (1913-1982). Those readers above a certain age (rather an advanced one nowadays) will instantly know who he is; most others will draw a blank. So we hasten to impart his important role: among other things, he (along with chimpanzee companion J. Fred Muggs) was the original host of NBC’s Today Show from 1952 to 1962.

Garroway had started out as an NBC page in 1938, attending the network’s broadcast announcer school. This led to jobs in local radio at stations around the country. After WWII, he had achieved success with jazz related programs in Chicago and he built up a large regional fan base. In 1949 he launched his first television show Garroway at Large, the first episode of which was for the local market, but the balance of which was broadcast nationally through 1954. Garroway’s highly informal, intimate style (in contrast with the majority of high energy, artificial radio announcers of the classic era) convinced NBC’s Pat Weaver that he was precisely the right man to anchor his new morning talk/news/variety show, and he proved correct. In addition to that daily grind at Today and Garroway at Large, he also had two other programs: a prime time variety production called The Dave Garroway Show (1953-54), and the documentary news program Wide Wide World (1955-58), all while maintaining his presence on radio.

By the early ’60s Garroway, who already suffered from depression, was also showing symptoms overwork. He began taking unplanned absences from broadcasts. In 1961 his wife passed away, and this pushed him over the edge. He quit his TV jobs, took some time off, and then gradually began to increase his activity on radio again, but never returned to television outside the occasional guest appearance, usually related to his legend as the man who launched the Today show (much as the similarly spectacled Steve Allen was always feted for creating The Tonight Show. Though Garroway was more like Allen’s successor Jack Paar in terms of staying out of the limelight in later years).

But Garroway did miss his former prominence. A couple of weeks after his 69th birthday, having undergone recent heart surgery followed by post-op infections, in the depths of depression, he took his own life with a shotgun. This despite his huge broadcasting legacy — and something else. Garroway was an enormous astronomy enthusiast. In 1980 he married astronomer Sarah Lee Lippincott, a pioneer in the investigation of binary stars and extrasolar planets. When he passed, she established the Dave Garroway Laboratory for the Study of Depression at the University of Pennsylvania.

To learn more about show biz history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and stay tuned for my next book Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.