Professor Garroway of 21 -Inch U.

"Pardon me while I move the earth here," says Dave Garroway. The unhurried 'voice, with its familiar tone of deity, suggests that he could be taken literally. Actually, fingering a mobile of the solar system peering owlishly at the cameras, Garroway has come back to television--and television is the richer for it.

He will return after an absence ot 19 months, but not. for the moment, to a commercial network. An amateur astronomer and all-round science nut, he is the latest prize acquisition of National Educational Television, conducting a series called Exploring the Universe and managing the difficult feat of being entertaining without offending his subject. He is also pedagogical without offense to his audience. He explains science to adults, telling most of them what their children already know.

Forgotten Potato. He has aid. On one program he interviews Astronomer Harlow Shapley of Harvard and Physicist Philip Morrison of Cornell, expertly drawing both men into areas of their field that cannot help but fascinate laymen. Morrison thinks Shapley is hopelessly conservative when he says that there must be 100 million places in the universe that could support life. Morrison thinks there must be 100 million such places right here in our own galaxy. Shapley, for his part, seems to think the earth is a small and forgotten potato anyway. "On this little planet around a run-of-the-mill star on the edge of a galaxy," Shapley complains to Garroway, "we're out of touch."

Garroway's science series is almost completely taped and will be broadcast soon on NET stations all over the U.S., including the newly opened WNDT in Manhattan which has already proved to once skeptical New Yorkers that educational television can fill a need that commercial stations cannot afford to supply.

Educational is not quite the word it nor intellectual, nor documentary, nor esthetic, but with a subtle amalgam of these things, so-called educational television appeals strongly to what Garroway calls "a vital minority." The programs are sometimes tedious, with academic hairsplitting that would thrill a graduate seminar But from Pablo Casals' cello lessons to Photographer Ernst Haas's presentations on The Art of Seeing, WNDT is so loaded with rewarding material that many people have bought television sets for first time in order not to miss it. In its first three months, New York's Channel 13 has proved itself a 21-in. university teaching everything from Japanese brush painting to elementary Russian.

Stars & Courage. Garroway gave up his Today show (NBC) after his wife s sudden death in 1961. He spent the first months of his absence brooding aimlessly until his four-year-old son, as he relates solemnly told him to "get up and walk until you drop"--undoubtedly the most sophisticated four-year-old remark of year. He began working for the Atlantic Union a movement that wants to achieve a closer union among the world's free democracies. And he spent a great deal ot time at his country home far out on Long Island staring at the universe through his 21 telescopes. Television? "I watch the show that's on now," he says, pointing at the dead grey screen of a cold set in his living room.

Garroway used to raise his hand each morning like an Arapaho chief and sign off with the word "Peace." He now raises his hand and says "Courage." He says he is ready to return to commercial TV, and his producing company intends to package at least two shows for next year. Meanwhile he has been reading the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. He would like to do a series for NET on semantics in an effort to break down what he describes as artificial barriers to communication among specialists in various fields If he ever brings something like that on TV, he will be pulling a lot of eyes over a lot of wool.

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