Lowell Thomas

Lawrence of Arabia

Thomas in Arabia 1918

Thomas and cameraman Harry Chase first went to the Western Front, but the trenches had little to inspire the American public. They then went to Italy, where he heard of General Allenby's campaign against the Ottoman Empire in Palestine. Thomas traveled to Palestine as an accredited war correspondent with the permission of the British Foreign Office, where he met T. E. Lawrence, a captain in the British Army in Jerusalem. Lawrence was spending £200,000 a month encouraging the inhabitants of Palestine to rebel against the Turks. Thomas and Chase spent several weeks with Lawrence in the desert, though Lawrence said "several days." Lawrence agreed to provide Thomas with material on the condition that Thomas also photograph and interview Arab leaders such as Emir Feisal.

[Lowel Thomas] went to Jerusalem where he met Lawrence, whose enigmatic figure in Arab uniform fired his imagination. With Allenby's permission he linked up with Lawrence for a brief couple of weeks ... Returning to America, Thomas, early in 1919, started his lectures, supported by moving pictures of veiled women, Arabs in their picturesque robes, camels and dashing Bedouin cavalry, which took the nation by storm, after running at Madison Square Gardens in New York. On being asked to come to England, he made the condition he would do so if asked by the King and given Drury Lane or Covent Garden ... He opened at Covent Garden on 14 August 1919 ... And so followed a series of some hundreds of lecture–film shows, attended by the highest in the land ..."^[3]

Thomas shot dramatic footage of Lawrence and, after the war, toured the world, narrating his film With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia and making Lawrence—and himself—household names. The performances were highly dramatic. At the opening of Thomas's six-month London run, there were incense braziers, exotically dressed women dancing before images of the Pyramids, and the band of the Welsh Guards playing to provide the accompaniment. Lawrence saw the show several times; he later claimed to dislike it, but it generated valuable publicity for his own book. To strengthen the emphasis on Lawrence in the show, Thomas needed more photographs of him than Chase had taken in 1918. Lawrence claimed to be shy of publicity, but he agreed to a series of posed portraits in Arab dress in London. Thomas later said of Lawrence, "He had a genius for backing into the limelight."

Thomas and Lawrence's initially friendly relations became more prickly as Thomas's film grew in popularity and as Thomas ignored several alleged requests from Lawrence to end it. In fact, the film gave Lawrence a degree of publicity that he had never previously experienced. Newspapers were keen to print his attacks on government policy, and politicians began to pay attention to his views. At the end of 1920, he was invited to join the British Colonial Office under Winston Churchill as an adviser on Arab affairs. Lawrence said that he never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, and called him a "vulgar man."

For his part, Thomas genuinely admired Lawrence and continued to defend him against attacks on his reputation.^[4] Lawrence's brother Arnold extended Thomas an olive branch and allowed him to contribute to T.E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), a collection of essays and reminiscences published after Lawrence's death.^[5]

About four million people saw the Thomas film around the world, and it made Thomas $1.5 million. He later wrote the book With Lawrence in Arabia (1924) about his time in the desert and Lawrence's exploits during the war. It was the first of fifty-six volumes.

Thomas' first photo of T.E. Lawrence, taken in Jerusalem as they were introduced in the office of the Military Governor, February 28, 1918.

Cinerama

During the 1920s, Thomas was a magazine editor, but he never lost his fascination with the movies. He narrated Twentieth Century Fox's Movietone newsreels until 1952. That year, he went into business with Mike Todd and Merian C. Cooper to exploit Cinerama, a movie format that used three projectors and an enormous curved screen with 7-channel surround sound. (He produced the first movie/documentary in Cinerama: This is Cinerama, the third: Seven Wonders of the World, and the fourth: Search for Paradise) in this format in 1956, with a 1957 release date.^[6] Cinerama features were well-received, but the company discontinued the three-projector system by 1963, with the enormous costs and technical difficulties in film production and presentation, in favor of a single-camera 70mm system which lacked the visual impact of true Cinerama. A quarter-century later, Thomas was still raving about Cinerama in his memoirs and wondering why someone wasn't trying to revive it.

Newscaster

In 1930, he became a broadcaster with the CBS Radio network, delivering a nightly news and commentary program. After two years, he switched to the NBC Radio network but returned to CBS in 1947. In contrast to today's practices, Thomas was not an employee of either NBC News or CBS News. Prior to 1947, he was employed by the broadcast's sponsor Sunoco. He returned to CBS to take advantage of lower capital-gains tax rates, establishing an independent company to produce the broadcast which he sold to CBS. He hosted the first-ever television news broadcast in 1939 and the first regularly scheduled television news broadcast (even though it was just a camera simulcast of his radio broadcast) beginning on February 21, 1940 over local station W2XBS (now WNBC) New York.^[7] It is not known whether all or some of the radio/TV simulcasts were carried by the two other television stations capable of being fed programs by W2XBS at the time, which were W2XB (now WRGB) Schenectady and W3XE (now KYW-TV) Philadelphia).^[8][9]

Thomas with FDR in 1936

In the summer of 1940, Thomas anchored the first live telecast of a political convention, the 1940 Republican National Convention which was fed from Philadelphia to W2XBS and on to W2XB. Reportedly, Thomas wasn't even in Philadelphia, instead anchoring the broadcast from a New York studio and merely identifying speakers who addressed the convention.

Thomas in 1939

The television news simulcast was a short-lived venture for him, and he favored radio. Indeed, it was over radio that he presented and commented upon the news for four decades until his retirement in 1976, the longest radio career of anyone in his day (a record later surpassed by Paul Harvey). "No other journalist or world figure, with the possible exception of Winston Churchill, has remained in the public spotlight for so long," wrote Norman R. Bowen in Lowell Thomas: The Stranger Everyone Knows (1968). His signature sign-on was "Good evening, everybody" and his sign-off "So long, until tomorrow," phrases that he would use in titling his two volumes of memoirs.

Television

Thomas is also known for two television programs: High Adventure, a series of travelogue specials filmed in the late 1950s for CBS; and Lowell Thomas Remembers, a 1970s PBS series that reviewed major news events from 1919 through 1975 on a year-by-year basis using newsreel footage, including some that Thomas originally narrated for Movietone.

"The world's foremost globetrotter" took his radio show on his travels, broadcasting from the four corners of the globe. Once on the Spanish Steps in Rome he was asked by a fellow American, "Lowell Thomas, don't you ever go home?" He was a fanatical skier, helping develop the Mont Tremblant Resort in Quebec and skiing near Tucson, Arizona.

Gaffes

Thomas's most amusing on-air gaffe occurred during one of his daily broadcasts in the early 1960s. He was reading a story "cold" (going on the air without pre-reading his copy, contrary to his usual practice) which contained the phrase "She suffered a near fatal heart attack". The line came out of Thomas's mouth as "She suffered a near fart … err fatal heart attack". Realizing instantly what he had said, he tried to continue but eventually collapsed into gales of laughter, which continued into – and beyond – his announcer's chuckling sign-off for the day.

Thomas' long-time friend and ghostwriter Prosper Buranelli wrote the nightly newscasts. The day's script was sent by teletype to Thomas' home in Pawling, NY from which he usually did his broadcast. One evening, Buranelli's final story was about an actress going into a Los Angeles hotel with a Great Dane. The dog's tail got caught in the revolving door and she sued the hotel for $10,000. Buranelli added a comment to the story to give Thomas a laugh before going on air, but Thomas read the story as written with Buranelli's comment, "Who ever thought a piece of tail was worth 10 grand?"

Another on-air mishap had Thomas reading a story about President Eisenhower's visit to Hershey, Pennsylvania "where he was greeted by the folks who make chocolate bars, with and without nuts." ("Nuts" is a euphemism for "testicles.") As Thomas read the next story, he could hear the announcer breaking up with laughter in the New York City studio, which caused Thomas to break up, as well. Air checks of some of Thomas' gaffes (as well as recreations of his "bloopers") are available to collectors.

Other activities

Thomas was a successful businessman. In 1954, he and his long-time business manager and partner Frank Smith bought a struggling UHF TV and radio station based in Albany New York and turned it into Capital Cities Communications, which took over the American Broadcasting Company in 1986. They also developed the Quaker Hill community in Dutchess County, New York, near Pawling where Thomas resided when not on the road. Thomas E. Dewey was among his neighbors, one of a huge circle of friends that included everyone from the Dalai Lama to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In May 1955, the board of directors of the Lancaster and Chester Railway of South Carolina appointed him Press Agent in N.Y.C.^[10]

Lowell Thomas Awards

Since 1980, the Explorers Club, where Thomas was a member, has annually presented the Lowell Thomas Award to "honor men and women who have distinguished themselves in the field of exploration". The awards are presented at a yearly dinner to a select group of people having made particular contributions in the specific area chosen to be that year's focus. Past recipients include Edmund Hillary, Isaac Asimov, David Doubilet,Emory Kristof, Ralph B White,Anatoly Sagalevitch^[21] Mary Cleave, Buzz Aldrin, Bertrand Piccard, and Rosaly Lopes.^[22]

Since 1985, the Society of (North) American Travel Writers (SATW) has held an annual Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for outstanding print, online, and multimedia works, for travel photography, and for audio and video broadcast. Past recipients included Elisabeth Eaves, Jeff Biggers, Peter Mandel, and National Geographic Traveler('08^[23] and '09^[24]).^[25] The 2008-9 awards were judged by faculty members of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, coordinated by Monica Hill. There were 1,191 entries and awards in 25 categories.^[24] In the 2007-8 awards, faculty members of the Missouri School of Journalism judged the competition in 24 categories.^[23]