I remember seeing a couple Lowell Thomas books on my mother's shelves when I was quite young, but I never knew much about the pioneering broadcaster and world traveler until my recent visit to the Garst Museum in Greenville, Ohio.
I vaguely knew Thomas as a globe-trotting journalist, but the museum's gallery dedicated to him gave me a new appreciation for his career as a multimedia pioneer. Considering Thomas' life-long fascination with emerging media and experimenting with it, I'm thinking he would be all over today's "new media", just as he was ubiquitous across multiple media platforms throughout his long career.
Lowell Thomas was born on April 6, 1892 in nearby Woodington, Ohio. The museum moved Thomas' birthplace, a two-story Victorian house, to its campus during the late 1980s. Visitors can tour it during summer weekends, although we were there too early in the year to do so.
The museum's Lowell Thomas gallery has plenty of photos and mementos from Thomas' travels, and visitors can watch video footage of Thomas in a pocket-sized theater.
The Thomas family moved from Ohio when Lowell was 8 years old, heading to Victor, Colorado, where his father was a doctor in the gold mining community. The Victor Lowell Thomas Museum celebrates Thomas's life and time there.
Lowell started working for the Victor Daily Record as a newsboy at the age of 10, becoming an editor for the paper by the age of 19.
Thomas earned degrees from five universities, including the University of Northern Indiana at Valparaiso and Princeton.
Thomas continued working as an editor with dailies in Chicago and several other cities, but wanderlust soon kicked in and he began traveling the world in earnest by the late 1910s, filming and writing about his experiences in a nationally syndicated newspaper column.
Thomas set out for Europe in 1917 with his new bride, Frances, and cameraman Harry Chase to report on World War I. He tired of harsh conditions and drab film footage he got at the Western Front, so his wife worked with the Red Cross in Italy while Thomas and his cameraman went to the Middle East.
It was there that he met T.E. Lawrence, a young British Army officer who wore Arab robes as he helped lead Arab forces during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule. The colorful Lawrence captured Thomas' imagination, and the broadcaster's arguably romanticized accounts of the exploits of "Lawrence of Arabia" made Lawrence a star and made Thomas millions of dollars.
Thomas created what was, for the time, highly original multimedia presentations where he narrated his travels from a podium in sync with photo slides and film clips. Lawrence's story intrigued 1920s audiences, and Thomas' presentations played to as many as four million people throughout the world.
Thomas' 1924 book about the subject, With Lawrence of Arabia, became the first of over 50 books Thomas authored during his lifetime.
Thomas began doing daily radio newscasts for NBC in 1930. His authoritative and impartial manner was a distinct departure from other popular radio newscasters of the time. Thomas decided to end each of his newscasts with a light-hearted story, a format that nearly every newscast since that time adopted.
Movie audiences became familiar with Thomas' voice from the many short newsreels he narrated that ran in theaters to accompany feature films during the 1930s.
Over the years at NBC, and later at CBS, he became the first newscaster to report from a ship, an airplane, a submarine, and a coal mine. In 1939, he simulcast his radio broadcasts on television, becoming the first to have a televised nightly newscast.
Thomas appreciated the flexibility radio offered to broadcast from wherever he might be in the world, and he continued his nightly radio broadcasts until he was 85 years old in 1976.
He produced and starred in television series during the 1950s and 1970s and became a Cinerama (3-D movie) producer. Check out the Internet Movie Database site for a listing of Thomas' work in movies and television.
Thomas became rich working as an independent contractor with his own sponsors, buying his own time on networks, and retaining ownership of his material.
Thomas' first wife, Frances, died in 1975, and the widowed Thomas married Marianna Munn of Darke County in 1977.
In 1980, Thomas visited Ohio for the last time, to speak to the local Business and Professional Women's Club.
He died in 1981 at his New York home at the age of 89. His widow Marianna returned to live in Dayton, Ohio, until her death at the age of 82 in 2010.
Many of Thomas' books are out-of-print, but you can still readily find his first book, With Lawrence of Arabia, online.
Want to learn more about Lawrence of Arabia? Check out Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda.
© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved
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