Opinion: Remembering Tom Snyder
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I am just old enough to remember back when Tom Snyder was just an ordinary Joe on Channel 4 newscasts here in the Southland. (Also, I’m just native enough that the word ‘Southland’ doesn’t set my teeth on edge, unlike some of my colleagues, partly because at the height of Latchkey Nation I was raised at least in part by the Tom Snyders and Jerry Dunphys of the world.) There are some good remembrances of Tom’s breakout ‘Tomorrow Show’ triumphs on the Internet, including a bit of thanks from Mickey Kaus and a delightful little anecdote by the Huffington Post’s Bill Barol. Excerpt:
I met Snyder and his crew in a gigantic suite at the Waldorf, and we waited for [Jimmy] Carter. And waited. And waited. Snyder grew visibly more restive. Carter finally arrived, something like 30 minutes late, and introductions were made. The ex-president sat on a couch, Snyder in an armchair. ‘Are you sensitive, sir, about the glasses in your breast pocket?’ Snyder asked. ‘You might want to do something about that.’
Read the whole thing. Also fine are the various videos flying around, including this interview with The Clash. As that latter link aptly demonstrates, Snyder was just about the last of an era (actually, early David Letterman, to whom Snyder played John the Baptist, has some claim on that, too); when popular culture and news felt like it had been all shaken up, and Establishment-looking types like Tom Snyder and Mike Douglas enthusiastically sifted through the pieces, trying to figure out punk rock, Charles Manson, and campus radicals gone wild, not in any particular order. People any younger than me will probably have a hard time understanding that there was a time when people genuinely cared what a New York Jets quarterback thought about politics, the best novelists of a generation could be found at the same heavyweight boxing championship in Africa, and the pop charts could be topped by a song that celebrated jogging in the nude. It took a while before the promoters and the professionals not named Bill Graham realized that there was money in them thar counterculture, and that intimate journalistic access was a pointless risk of untold millions. I’m not saying that life was any better then, but the celebrity journalism? You betcha.