Peace, Old Tiger

TV hardly seems to miss Howdy Doody, Fulton J. Sheen, Milton Berle or Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. But then there is Dave Garroway. Rising out of Chicago in the late 1940s, he blazed the interview show trail with a questing curiosity, melodious baritone voice, quiet manner, and a mind like spun glass--intricate but clear. Plus, of course, thick-rimmed glasses that gave a whole generation of imitators that owlish look. After 1961, when he felt compelled to quit because of his wife's death, he became just a memory. Yet even today, when a videophile hears a few bars of Sentimental Journey, Garroway's theme, the response can only be the Garroway greeting ("Hello, Old Tiger") or farewell ("Peace").

Now his fans no longer have to rely on memory. The man who became his era's favorite radio disk jockey, then gave television Garroway at Large and launched the Today show is back at work in a 90-minute, late-morning local show in Boston.

Music, Demo, Talk. Although he hopes to be syndicated and eventually perhaps make a network comeback, he is starting in modest style. Instead of yesterday's Today army of 116 staffers, Garroway gets along with just six in Boston. The format, in TV jargon, is "music, demo, demo, talk, talk"--guest singer or jazz group, a visual demonstration of something like glassblowing or astronomy, and the inevitable circuit-riding horde of authors promoting books or public figures pushing causes. Garroway calls it the "desk and sofa concept," and he certainly should know. Yet his taste, often waggish, brings in such atypical guests as the proprietor of an ant colony, the mother of 23 children, a pewtersmith, a psychiatrist discussing transvestites and an 88-year-old barbell buff.

His scientific prize so far is a dummy of the late Albert Einstein, borrowed from a local wax museum. Garroway sat the dummy down, leaned over cozily, and began a conversation: "I remember that once you wrote on a blackboard a little equation--E equals me squared--and there were, I think, just eleven men in the world who were wise enough to understand it at the time. You'd be glad to know that my son quotes it frequently, and other schoolboys do too. He and others remember some of your other words. What you said about God, for example: 'I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the world. Nature is subtle, but never malevolent. Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.' "

Best of all in the prefabricated world of television, Garroway's Tempo/Boston is done live. His devotion to live TV is but one of many personal penchants picked up in the course of a broadcast career that began shortly after he got his college degree from Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in abnormal psychology. He was visiting New York City in 1937, as he tells it, when "some gal got me drunk and I woke up next morning as an NBC page."

White Mouse in the Sky. The climb to star convinced him that he is most effective when "I talk right to the camera as if it were the one other single person who is here with me and is also interested in the world." An audience only distracts: "Did you ever try to kiss two girls at one time?" An obsessive amateur astronomer and encyclopedic hobbyist, he spent a recent afternoon trying to send a white mouse soaring into the sky from a New Hampshire field in a do-it-yourself two-stage rocket. Other interests over the years have included gem cutting, watch repairing, owning 60 sports cars, writing a novel he now hopes will never be published, and training talking birds to say: "Birds can't talk." Throughout, Garroway never really lost his appetite for his intellectual brand of video fun.

Now his 6-ft. l 1/2-in. frame looks trim at 195 lbs. (the result of a three-month Duke University rice diet), and his hair is gray and thinning. As he happily addresses Boston's late-morning housewives, he refuses to talk down to them, and insists on "informing as many people as possible, by whatever wiles we have, so that they can understand the nature of reality." His competition consists of Hollywood Squares, Concentration, The Art Linkletter Show, Beverly Hillbillies reruns and, inevitably, The Loretta Young Show. Reality being what it is, that line-up may defeat his efforts. But so far, despite occasional camera bobbles and other evidences of a somewhat amateurish crew, Tempo/Boston is far more interesting than most of Boston's local programs --and, for that matter, the network competition as well.

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