In 1962, NBC was nervously looking around for a replacement for Jack Paar on the successful Tonight Show. Programming chief Mort Werner went scouting and came upon a young comedian who worked with a pliant sidekick named Ed McMahon. Back in New York, he announced his discovery: “I’ve found an unknown.”
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Tom Snyder and the Tomorrow Show greeted America on October 15, 1973. Late-night TV never recovered. There’ve been other smart talk-show hosts–Paar, most notably, though Dick Cavett also qualifies–and of course there have been funnier ones. But Snyder faced a single guest for an hour-long chat, and while walking a fine line between journalism and schlock, he often erred on the side of journalism.
Snyder was a midwestern boy–on his show he once listed some midwestern “greats,” and the litany included himself as well as Cavett, Johnny Carson, and Orson Welles. (Welles, the guest that night, took the compliment calmly.) He grew up in Milwaukee and attended Marquette University; stardom knocked when he’d been a TV vet of nearly two decades.
Crusades and TV are both out now. “You can’t go back. Mary Tyler Moore tried to go back, and you just can’t,” he notes. Hardest for Snyder for a long time was even accepting the Tomorrow Show for what it was. “People talked to me about getting the tarnish off of Tom Snyder,” he says, referring to the publicity that accompanied his parting of the ways with NBC. “There was a feeling that everything having to do with NBC was flawed and not good, and had to be removed.” Back on the radio, Snyder found his old early-morning viewers coming out of the woodwork, and he was touched by their memories. “I came to realize,” he says, “that it was flawed and that it wasn’t perfect, but it was OK, and I could take some pride in it.”
