Dave Garroway

I loved Dave Garroway.  I discovered him for myself during my religious period, when I was in my early teenaged years.  During those years, I would not only attend every Holy Day of Obligation  without fail, but I also felt drawn to attend Mass every day during Lent.  The service was held at the Valley Falls Church at 6:30 a.m.  That's the way it was then, so people could make the service before work, or in my case school.
     It would be fairly dark those mornings and I could see the lights in the Sacristy  from the kitchen window of my house.  My mother would be awake: I never saw her asleep until well into my adulthood.  She would have just finished making breakfast for my father who left for work at just about 6:30.  I would put off breakfast until later, and would take a more or less straight-line path to the church:   out the back door, climb over the harmless (neither electrified nor barbed-wired) fence at the top of "our" hill, through the first pasture, then around the wide farm gate that Patsy, Dr. Sproat's hired hand, would obligingly leave loosely chained, so all the River Road kids who took that shortcut to upstreet would not put undue wear on that large wooden gate.  On past the area next to the main barn, where there had been some chicken coops, through the other yard next to the pond, which could be soggy if it had rained.  Out the last gate, also chained slightly ajar, and straight up to the church.
     Mass would not be very long; we had a pastor who could speak Latin faster than I'd ever heard anyone talk.  I would be home by seven a.m., and  while waiting for school to  start, would do what my mother would not do:  turn our recently acquired television set on during the daytime hours.   That is when I discovered Dave Garroway.  I was his sole audience in the house, father had left for work, mother busy getting things ready for the day, brother and sister still upstairs in bed.  Morning TV was fairly new then, and completely new to me, and for the 30 days after morning Mass, I would be drawn in to Dave Garroway, and his personal style of reaching out to his audience, and his friendly conversational demeanor.  I was still probably infused with some of the holy atmosphere I'd been bathing in, so when he would close with his usual, "The world stands out on either side...." I felt a sense of comfort and peace, different from anything presented on television before, or since, for that matter.
    I don't remember the last time I watched the show, or recall when Dave Garroway left the air.  When very young, you tend to think things will always remain the same, yet you hardly notice when they change, barring any direct impact on you. The status quo seems everlasting.
    I do recall viewing Dave Garroway's  guest appearance at the 30th anniversary  of the Today Show.  I hadn't thought of him in a long time, and  though older-appearing, he seemed the same.  He seemed glad to be back on the show, was eager and animated, his usual cheerful persona.  I believe he even signed off with his trademark recitation.  But, I noticed one thing that disturbed me a little, a slight embarrassment that I did not want to admit even to myself because I had admired him so much.  As he spoke, a slight bit of spittle lodged on his lower lip, and maybe no one on set noticed, or maybe they lacked the technology (though it wasn't that long ago), but the camera did not pan away so someone could remedy the situation.  I wondered at the time what he, who had always seemed so in control, would think if he watched himself on the show.  I never heard a word about it, and didn't think of it for a while.
    Only about 6 or 7 months later, Dave Garroway committed suicide by gunshot. Sources said he'd had surgery,and  was depressed for family reasons.  That may well have been true, but I thought I knew the real reason, or at least the final impetus.  He had been a pioneer in the media and an innovator of completely new programming, and his creation, in the end, turned on him and devoured him.  He had aged out.