Lowell Thomas
Lowell Jackson Thomas (
April 6,
1892 –
August 29,
1981) was an
American writer,
broadcaster, and traveller best known as the man who made
Lawrence of Arabia famous. So varied were Thomas's activities that when it came time for the
Library of Congress to catalog his memoirs they were forced to put them in "CT" in their
classification--biographies of subjects who don't fit into any other category.
He was born in
Woodington, Ohio, in
Darke County, the son of Harry and Harriet (Wagner) Thomas. His father was a doctor and his mother a school teacher. In
1900, the family moved to the mining town of
Cripple Creek, Colorado. There he worked as a gold miner, a cook, and a reporter on the newspaper.
In
1911, he graduated from
Valparaiso University with bachelor's degrees in education and science. The next year he received both a
B.A. and an
M.A. from the
University of Denver and began work for the
Chicago Journal, writing for it until
1914. While in Chicago, he was a professor at the
Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching
oratory. He then went to
New Jersey, where he studied for a master's at
Princeton University (he received the degree in
1916) and again taught oratory at the university.
A relentless self-promoter, he persuaded
railroads to give him free passage on their roads in exchange for articles extolling rail travel. When he visited
Alaska he hit upon the novel idea of the
traveloguethe former president of Princeton--to "compile a history of the conflict". In reality the mission was not academic. The war was not popular in the United States and Thomas was sent to find material that would encourage the American people to support the war. Thomas did not just want to write about the war, he wanted to film it. He estimated $75,000 was needed for filming which the US government thought was too expensive, and so he turned to a group of 18 Chicago meat-packers. (He had done them a favor by exposing someone who was blackmailing them without the damaging material becoming public.)
He, and a cameraman called
Harry Chase, firstly 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. With the permission of the British
Foreign Office as an accredited war-correspondent, Thomas met
T. E. Lawrence, a colonel in the
British Army in
Jerusalem. Lawrence was spending £200,000 a month encouraging the inhabitants of Palestine to revolt against the Turks. Thomas and Chase spent several weeks with Lawrence in the desert, though Lawrence said "several days".
Thomas shot dramatic footage of Lawrence and after the war toured the world narrating his film,
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia making Lawrencehousehold names. The performances were highly dramatic. At the opening of Thomas's six-month run in London, there were incense-braziers, exotically dressed women danced in front of images of the
Pyramids and the band of the
Welsh Guards played to provide the accompaniment. Lawrence saw the show several times, and although he later claimed to dislike it, it generated valuable publicity for his own book. However to strengthen the emphasis on Lawrence in the show, Thomas needed more photographs of him than Chase had taken in 1918. Lawrence therefore agreed to a series of posed portraits in Arab dress in London, though he claimed to be shy of publicity. Thomas later said of Lawrence that "He had a genius for backing into the limelight". Thomas and Lawrence's initially friendly relationship grew colder as Thomas's show grew in popularity, with Thomas ignoring several personal requests from Lawrence to stop the show.
The shows gave Lawrence a degree of publicity that he had never previously experienced. Newspapers became 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. However Lawrence said that he never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, and called him a 'vulgar man'.
About four million people saw the show around the world and it made Thomas $1.5 million. Thomas would also later write a book,
With Lawrence in Arabia (1924), about his time in the desert and Lawrence's exploits during the war. It would be the first of fifty-six volumes.
During the
1920s, he was a magazine editor. In
1930, he became a broadcaster with the
CBS radio network. After two years, he switched to the
NBC radio network but returned to CBS in
1947. He hosted the evening news for four decades until his retirement in
1976, the longest radio career of anyone. "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 he would use in titling his two volumes of memoirs.
Thomas 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
Louis B. Mayer to exploit
Cinerama, a movie format that used three projectors and an enormous curved screen. Because of both the cost and technical issues in synchronizing the projectors, Cinerama never caught on, but a quarter-century later, Thomas was still raving about it in his memoirs and wondering why someone wasn't trying to revive it.
"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.
Thomas's most amusing on-air gaffé occurred during one of his daily CBS news broadcasts in the early 1960's. He was reading a story "cold" which had the phrase "She suffered a fatal heart attack" in it. The line came out of Thomas's mouth as "She suffered a fatal fart attack". Realizing instantly what he had said, he collapsed into gales of roaring laughter, which continued into - and beyond - his announcers chuckling sign-off for the day.
He was a successful businessman, helping to found
Capital Cities Communications, which in
1986 took over the
American Broadcasting Company, and developed the Quaker Hill community in
Dutchess County, New York, near
Pawling, where Thomas resided when not on the road. Among his neighbors there was
Thomas E. Dewey, one of a huge circle of friends that included everyone from the
Dalai Lama to
Franklin D. Roosevelt. In
1976, President
Gerald Ford awarded Thomas the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has two stars on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the
Radio Hall of Fame in
1989.
Thomas was fictionalized in
David Lean's film
Lawrence of Arabia as American journalist Jackson Bentley, played by
Arthur Kennedy. When he heard this film was being produced, Thomas offered to give producer
Sam Spiegel a large amount of documentation about Lawrence to use for the film, but was rejected. He was also fictionalized in two
Warner Brothers cartoons,
She Was an Acrobat's Daughter (as Dole Promise) and
The Film Fan (as Cold Promise). Both Dole Promise and Cold Promise were billed as newsreel "prevaricators."
His wife of 58 years, Fran Ryan, who often travelled with him, died in February 1975. He was married a second time in 1977 to Marianna Munn. True to form, he embarked with her on a 50,000-mile honeymoon trip that took him to many of his favourite old destinations. Thomas died at his home at Pawling at the age of eighty-nine.
His only child,
Lowell Thomas, Jr., was
lieutenant governor of Alaska in the
1970s.
Among Thomas's books are:
*With Lawrence in Arabia,
1924*The First World Flight,
1925*Beyond
Khyber Pass,
1925*
Count Luckner, The Sea Devil,
1927*European Skyways,
1927*The Boy's Life of Colonel Lawrence,
1927*Adventures in
Afghanistan for Boys,
1928*Raiders of the Deep,
1928*The Sea Devil's Fo'c'sle,
1929*Woodfill of the Regulars,
1929*The Hero of
Vincennes,
1929*The Wreck of the Dumaru,
1930*Lauterbach of the
China Sea,
1930*
India--Land of the Black Pagoda,
1930*Rolling Stone,
1931*Tall Stories,
1931*Kabluk of the
Eskimo,
1932*This Side of Hell,
1932*Old Gimlet Eye: The Adventures of General
Smedley Butler,
1933*Born to Raise Hell,
1933*The Untold Story of Exploration,
1935*Fan Mail,
1935*A Trip to
New York With Bobby and Betty,
1936*Men of Danger,
1936*
Kipling Stories and a Life of Kipling,
1936*Seeing
Canada With Lowell Thomas,
1936*Seeing
India With Lowell Thomas,
1936*Seeing
Japan With Lowell Thomas,
1937*Seeing
Mexico With Lowell Thomas,
1937*Adventures Among the Immortals,
1937*Hungry Waters,
1937*Wings Over
Asia,
1937*Magic Dials,
1939*In
New Brunswick We'll Find It,
1939*Soft Ball! So What?,
1940*How To Keep Mentally Fit,
1940*Stand Fast for Freedom,
1940*Pageant of Adventure,
1940*Pageant of Life,
1941*Pageant of Romance,
1943*These Men Shall Never Die,
1943*Back to
Mandalay,
1951*Great True Adventures,
1955*The Story of the
New York Thruway,
1955*
Seven Wonders of the World,
1956*History As You Heard It
1957*The Story of the
St. Lawrence Seaway,
1957*The Vital Spark,
1959*Sir
Hubert Wilkins, A Biography,
1961*More Great True Adventures,
1963*Book of the High
Mountains,
1964*Famous First Flights That Changed History,
1968 (ISBN 1592285368)
*
Burma Jack,
1971 (ISBN 039308647X)
*
Doolittle: A Biography,
1976 (ISBN 0385064950)
*Good Evening Everybody: From
Cripple Creek to
Samarkand,
1976 (ISBN 0688030688)
*So Long Until Tomorrow,
1977 (ISBN 0688032362)
*
Radio Hall of Fame biography, with photo
