Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [67]
After 559 performances at the Winter Garden Theater, Wonderful Town closed on July 3, 1954. Apart from a brief Broadway revival in 2003, the musical has been largely forgotten. That’s partly due to the sheer complexity of the songs. Frequent and unusual meter and key changes render Wonderful Town too challenging for all but the most accomplished high school and community theater groups. (One song, “Christopher Street,” has seventeen key changes.) Absent the rejuvenating energy of summer stock productions, Wonderful Town has faded into obscurity. It was too complicated for its own good.
On Wednesday, July 1, Harry took another morning walk. This time his route took him down Park Avenue to 49th Street, where he turned west. Just past Rockefeller Plaza, he noticed a small group of people standing on the sidewalk, looking into a building through a large plate-glass window. Curious, Harry looked inside too, and, seeming a little like Mr. Magoo, he appeared as one of the faces in the background of the Today show.
The program had debuted on NBC a little more than a year earlier. Hosted by Dave Garroway, an affable disc jockey from Chicago, Today was an experiment in early-morning television, combining news and entertainment, and airing live from coast to coast. The show was broadcast from the “fishbowl,” a studio on the ground floor of the RCA Exhibition Hall that was visible from the street. The unusual studio wasn’t just a gimmick. It also helped fill the show. When a segment ran short, cameras would pan the crowd standing outside while music played, sometimes for as long as five minutes.
The early reviews of the show were bad, and the ratings weren’t much better. Who was home to watch TV at that hour anyway? Children— and their mothers, of course. After the program introduced a year-old Cameroonian chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs on January 28, 1953, ratings skyrocketed, though not everyone was amused. The show’s newsreader, Jack Fleming, didn’t care to deliver the headlines seated next to a chimp (and not a particularly friendly one, by most accounts), so he quit. Fleming was replaced by Frank Blair, who was less offended by the simian; Blair stayed with the program for twenty-two years. Today, of course, grew into a colossus. It now generates about a half-billion dollars in revenue annually for NBC. (J. Fred Muggs “retired” from the program in 1958, reportedly after biting Martha Raye on the arm. Believe it or not, in 2008 the chimp was still alive and well, living with a handler in Florida.)
Harry hated the way television turned politicians into “play actors,” but he understood, perhaps sooner than most, the power of the medium. “Television is on the threshold of great development,” he declared in a speech on August 13, 1943—when most people barely had any idea what television was. “It is true that there are many technical and commercial difficulties that must be overcome. But the day cannot be far off when our homes, schools, offices, and automobiles will be equipped with television sets. We will see news and sporting events while they are actually happening.”
Truman’s State of the Union address on January 6, 1947, was the first to be televised. Transmitted from the House chamber by coaxial cable, the speech was carried on stations in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. According to one report, the picture was “for the most part … of acceptable clarity.” Not that a lot of people were watching. Only about fourteen thousand sets were in use at the time.
Later that year, Truman installed the first television set in the White House, a $1,795 behemoth that he plopped down next to his desk in the Oval Office. In 1949, Truman’s inauguration was the first to be televised. By then there were stations in fourteen cities