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Lowell Thomas

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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.

Cover of Thomas's 1976 autobiography Good Evening Everybody.
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Cover of Thomas's 1976 autobiography Good Evening Everybody.

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.

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Early career

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 travelogue--movies about far-away places. When the United States entered World War I, he was part of an official party sent by President Wilson--the 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.)

Lawrence of Arabia

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 Lawrence--and himself--household 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.

Later career

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."

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.

Books

Among Thomas's books are:

External link

 

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