It's Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, and the day of the week when I reprise quotations intended to be uplifting or elucidating. This morning's line comes from "Today" show co-anchor Hoda Kotb, with an assist from television pioneer and onetime NBC President Pat Weaver.
"Today" turned 70 years old at precisely 7 a.m. Eastern time this morning. It all began on Jan. 14, 1952, from a street level studio at Rockefeller Center in New York where the legendary Dave Garroway opened a live broadcast with the words "Well, here we are."
Sporting a large lavalier microphone draped around his neck, Garroway walked around the studio, which was visible from the street, and said, "Good morning to you -- the very first good morning of what I hope and suspect will be a great many good mornings between you and I. … And if it doesn't sound too revolutionary, I really believe this begins a new kind of television."
He was right about that, although no one could have predicted the show's enduring appeal. "Our beginnings were humble," Bryant Gumbel noted on an earlier anniversary. "Dave Garroway and a staff of 35, working in a storefront with people looking in the window. The critics all laughed and said it wouldn't last even 13 weeks."
That's a bit of an overstatement, but the NBC anchors, reporters, camera operators, technicians, and corporate suits can all take pride in the success of "Today."
With his bowtie, horn-rimmed glasses, and everyman looks, Dave Garroway was an unlikely television star. His secret sauce was an amiable manner and preternatural calmness -- on live television, no less, amid a clattering newsroom -- along with his love of the subject material, whatever that happened to be.
Television critic Tom Shales has ruminated that the medium's early performers and producers were creators in the truest sense of the word. "Inventing TV -- the machine -- was not that hard," he wrote. "Dave Garroway helped invent what you put on it once you've got it."
Again, that's something of an exaggeration, but "Today" did showcase what television could be. Before it came on the air, as Hoda Kotb pointed out this morning, most local stations in small markets (and some large ones) showed a test pattern at 7 a.m. In one South Dakota town, a place called Yankton, a restless teenage later saw the new show and felt a calling.
"I grew up with Dave Garroway; it was a revelation," Tom Brokaw once recalled. "I lived in such a remote part of the country that we didn't get television until 1955, and for that to come into our living room -- I was going off to school, my mother to work -- and we would sit and watch Dave Garroway, who was a maestro at what he was able to do."
At first, television writers didn't know what to make of this mishmash of news and entertainment, but "Today" made money for the network, and as Bryant Gumbel noted, Garroway's relaxed persona won over the critics.
In 1965, "Today" was first broadcast in color with its now-famous peacock logo -- at a time when most Americans owned black-and-white sets. In 1974, Barbara Walters became its first female anchor. In 1982, Gumbel became its first non-white host. So the show wasn't breaking new ground, but it did keep up with the times. And from the start, it offered an eclectic combination of hard news, feature stories, and pure entertainment. In the early years, Dave Garraway appeared with a pet chimpanzee. But he also interviewed President-elect John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Because the show was produced by human beings, not saints -- and because network television is a cutthroat business -- there have been the usual staff intrigues over the years, along with firings, resignations, controversies, even tragedies. Dave Garroway died of his own hand two decades after leaving the show. Matt Lauer instigated another kind of self-inflicted wound.
Through it all, the show has persevered. In the early 1950s, prolific memo writer Pat Weaver wrote a kind of mission statement for "Today."
"We want America to shave, to eat, to dress, to get to work on time," he wrote. "But we also want America to be well informed, to be amused, to be lightened in spirit and in heart, and to be reinforced in inner resolution through knowledge."
Hoda Kotb read part of that mantra on the air this morning. "So look at us, 70 years later," she added. "That is still our goal."
A noble goal, too, and it's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.