I am a broadcasting nerd. Which means I have watched a LOT of old TV and listened to a LOT of old radio. Even more in the last, oh, let’s say 11 months or so. So I thought I’d write a post about Garry Moore. He was a radio comedian in the 1930’s and 40’s, spending quite a few years as “straight man” for Jimmy Durante (best known to modern audiences as the narrator of the Rankin-Bass classic “Frosty The Snowman”).
We’re going to concentrate on Garry’s television years. Moore had a successful daytime talk-variety show on CBS from 1950 to 1958. Starting in the Fall of ’58 he transferred into a prime-time variety series. This was the series that introduced Carol Burnett to a large American audience. Carol, Garry and announcer Durward Kirby acted in sketches and musical numbers with special guests.
In June of 1952 Garry took on a second prime-time TV show, acting as host of the Goodson-Todman panel show “I’ve Got A Secret.” The concept was simple: contestants whisper their secret to Garry and the panel tries to guess it by asking yes-or-no questions. The show featured secrets ranging from the ridiculous to the stunning:
Sometimes the stunning parts of the show were not intentional. Here, a plainly drunk contestant has a secret that he is supposed to demonstrate. The panel’s looks of concern, combined with Garry’s genuine reaction after the spot is finished, is a good reminder that shows like this were 100% live.
At the conclusion of the 1963-1964 season, Moore (who had been working essentially non-stop for over three decades) decided to end his variety show and depart from the host chair on “I’ve Got A Secret” for some R & R. In 1966 Moore came back to primetime but had the rotten luck to be scheduled against NBC’s powerhouse “Bonanza”. (The series that replaced Garry, and finally hog-tied the Cartwrights–for a while anyway–was “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”)
In 1969 Garry Moore got back in the Goodson-Todman family as the panel moderator of a new, first-run syndication version of “To Tell The Truth”. Nowadays, syndicated programming is delivered via satellite or digital download, and every station plays the same episode each day. But back then, syndicated programs were physically delivered on tape to stations in a method called “bicycling”. The stations in the largest cities would get tapes of a certain episode, then ship them to the next television station on the list.
Now why did I tell you that?
Because in 1976, with the syndicated “To Tell The Truth” still going strong, Garry Moore was diagnosed with throat cancer and immediately left the series. Panelists Bill Cullen and Joe Garagiola filled in for Moore the remainder of that season. Because of the “bicycling” method there was no way to tell all of the viewers at once about Moore’s departure. So viewers in some areas kept seeing Moore months after he’d left, while for viewers in other areas, he simply disappeared from the series with no explanation.
For the first episode of the 1977 season, Garry Moore returned to host the show one final time. In a sign of their love and respect for Garry, the show’s producers gave him the entire second half of the program to explain his “disappearance”:
This time, after handing the reins of the series to Garagiola, Garry Moore retired for good, making only very rare appearances thereafter.
Garry Moore is that special kind of talent they call a “broadcaster.” He was just incredibly good at ad-lib situations, always having something funny to say, yet able to handle more serious situations as well. He was willing to do whatever crazy things “I’ve Got A Secret” threw at him (well…almost everything; he refused to stick his head in a lion’s mouth); he was a great practitioner of live television. Even when it was taped. Or…uh…not taped: