Lowell Thomas

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. In Jerusalem, he met T. E. Lawrence, a captain in the British Army stationed 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 him in the desert, although Lawrence had told them that it would be "several days". Lawrence agreed to provide Thomas with material on the condition that Thomas also photograph and interview Arab leaders such as Emir Feisal.

Thomas shot dramatic footage of Lawrence, then returned to America and began giving public lectures in 1919 on the war in Palestine, "supported by moving pictures of veiled women, Arabs in their picturesque robes, camels and dashing Bedouin cavalry." His lectures were very popular and audiences large, and he "took the nation by storm" in the words of one modern biographer. He agreed to take the lecture to Britain, but only "if asked by the King and given Drury Lane or Covent Garden" as a lecture venue. His conditions were met, and he opened a series at Covent Garden on August 14, 1919. "And so followed a series of some hundreds of lecture–film shows, attended by the highest in the land".[7]

At the opening of his 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 accompaniment. Lawrence saw the show several times. He later claimed to dislike it, but it generated valuable publicity for his 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 wary of publicity, but he agreed to a series of posed portraits in Arab dress in London.

Thomas genuinely admired Lawrence and continued to defend him against attacks on his reputation.[8] Lawrence's brother Arnold allowed Thomas to contribute to T.E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), a collection of essays and reminiscences published after Lawrence's death.[9]

Thomas' first photo of Lawrence, taken in Jerusalem as they were introduced in the office of the Military Governor, February 28, 1918

Thomas was a magazine editor during the 1920s, but he never lost his fascination with the movies. He narrated Twentieth Century Fox's twice weekly Movietone newsreels until 1952, and provided the voice-over for numerous short subject film series, including Lowell Thomas' Magic Carpet of Movietone and Going Places with Lowell Thomas. [10]

Movietone Title Card

Thomas went into business with Mike Todd and Merian C. Cooper to exploit Cinerama, a film exhibition format using three projectors and an enormous curved screen with seven-channel surround sound. He produced the documentaries This is Cinerama, Seven Wonders of the World, and Search for Paradise in this format in 1956, with a 1957 release date.[11]

Thomas was first heard on radio delivering talks about his travels in 1929 and 1930: for example, he spoke on the NBC Radio Network in late July 1930 about his trip to Cuba.[12] Then, in late September 1930, he took over as the host of the Sunday evening Literary Digest program, replacing the previous host, Floyd Gibbons.[13]

On this program, he told stories of his travels. The show was fifteen-minutes long, and heard on the NBC Network.[14] Thomas soon changed the focus of the program from his own travels to interesting stories about other people, and by early October 1930, he was also including more news stories. It was that point that the program, which was now on six days a week, moved to the CBS Radio network.[15]

After two years, he switched back to the NBC Radio network but returned to CBS in 1947. He was not an employee of either NBC or CBS, contrary to today's practices, but 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 television news broadcast in 1939 and the first regularly scheduled television news broadcast beginning on February 21, 1940, over W2XBS (now WNBC) New York, which was a camera simulcast of his radio broadcast.[16]

Thomas with FDR in 1936

In the summer of 1940, Thomas anchored a television broadcast of the 1940 Republican National Convention, the first live telecast of a political convention, which was fed from Philadelphia to W2XBS and on to W2XB. He was not actually in Philadelphia but was anchoring the broadcast from a New York studio and merely identifying speakers who addressed the convention.

In April 1945, Thomas flew in a normally single-person P-51 Mustang over Berlin while it was being attacked by the Soviet Union, reporting live via radio.[17][18]

In 1953, Thomas was featured in The Ford 50th Anniversary Show that was broadcast simultaneously on the NBC and CBS television networks. The program was viewed by 60 million persons. Thomas presented a tribute to the classic days of radio.[19]

His persistent debt problems were remedied by Thomas' manager/investing partner, Frank Smith who, in 1954, became the President of co-owned Hudson Valley Broadcasting Company, which, in 1957, became Capital Cities Television Corporation.

Thomas in 1939

The television news simulcast was a short-lived venture for Thomas, as he favored radio. 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, since surpassed by Paul Harvey. His signature sign-on was "Good evening, everybody" and his sign-off was "So long, until tomorrow," phrases that he used as titles for his two volumes of memoirs.

• With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia (1918)[40][41]
• Out of This World (1952)[42]
• High Adventure with Lowell Thomas (1957–59)

The following is a selection of films with Thomas as host or narrator.

Magic Carpet of Movietone

• Africa Speaks (1930)
• Lowell Thomas Driftin' Around (1931–32)
• The Blonde Captive (1931)
• Movietone News (1932–52)
• The Throne of the Gods (1933)[43]
• Mussolini Speaks (1933)
• Lowell Thomas' Magic Carpet of Movietone (1933–43)[44]
• Going Places with Lowell Thomas (1934–38)[45]
• Schlitz on Mt. Washington (1937)
• Killers of the Sea (1937)
• Titans of the Deep (1938)
• The Lion Has Wings (1940)
• This is Cinerama (1952)
• Seven wonders of the world (1956)
• Search for Paradise (1957)
• Winter Olympics (1960)
• World's Fair report with Lowell Thomas (1963)
• The Best of Cinerama (1963)
• Lowell Thomas Remembers (1975)[46]

The following is a list of films with Thomas as the Subject.

• Sports Parade: King Salmon (1941)
• The Big Picture: Challenge of Ideas (episode 512)
• Yesterday's witness: a tribute to the American newsreel (1977)
• Eulogy, Lowell Thomas (1981)
• Lowell Thomas: Man About the World (2000)
• Lowell Thomas: American storyteller (2008)
• The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Rise of Broadcast Journalism (2019)