Garry Moore in Old Time Radio

HOLLYWOOD.

GARRY MOORE is a calm, pleasant, normal acting young man who does the weirdest things. He plays golf in his bare feet because “it’s more comfortable that way.” He has surrounded himself with several hundred dollars’ worth of tropical fish because they’re “fascinating, dreamlike, and soothing.” He also owns two parakeets and two lovebirds which he can’t bear to cage and which are liable to make dive bombing attacks on visitors from the curtain rod.

Garry also earns a handsome living—more than $100,000 a year—by working just an hour and a half once a week, on Sunday evening. He’s the new emcee of the quiz show “Take It or Leave It.” Garry confesses, “I feel a little guilty, having such an easy life, and may take on a daily show too.”

He’s known as “The Haircut” because he wears his unruly dark thatch in a brushlike stubble—it’s either that or plaster it down with goo. I found Garry in the green walled study of his Brentwood home, where he lives with his wife and two children. He has brown eyes, a somewhat longish, tanned face, and a quiet way rather than the show-offishness you learn to expect in a professional wisecracker.

GENE HANDSAKER.

Biography

Garry Moore CBS Radio and TV Star

When Garry Moore’s face first appeared on CBS-TV’s network, a million faithful fans gasped. Since 1939, his loyal coterie throughout the country had been hearing self-descriptions of the comedian via radio but had no idea he would look so “different.”

Actually, Garry has been aptly described as a young man with an elfin quality and a million expressions to his mobile face. Better known as “The Haircut” because of his extreme, crew-cut, bristling coiffure, Moore is endowed with a brash, urban, tongue-twisting flair for mocking pseudo culture. But the last thing in the world Garry ever expected to become was a comedian.

Ever since leaving high school in his native city of Baltimore, Moore entertained a strong ambition to be a writer and even became a contender for the professional title by collaborating on an unpublished play with the late F. Scott Fitzgerald.

After a taste of the literary life, Moore thought it would be anticlimactic to return to school. On the strength of his illustrious affiliation, he got himself a job as a continuity writer with Station WBAL.

One day, when the comedian of the station’s variety show failed to appear. Garry was rushed in as a last-minutes substitute. At first he was annoyed because it took time away from his writing but before he was able to again take pen in band, the executives decided to put him on the air as a full-fledged comedian. Everyone was thrilled with the new discovery except Garry Moore.

From Baltimore (where he was born, Jan. 31, 1915) Garry went to St. Louise where in 1938 he became announcer and sports commentator for Station KWK. Word got around that he possessed the ingredients of a comic and once again Garry found himself coaxing laughter from his listeners. At the end of seven months, he was convinced he was not made of the stuff that makes for a good comedian. A few weeks later, a casual stranger called him “the funniest feller on the air.”

This description prompted Garry to accept his Fate and in 1939, he left for Chicago where for three years he was comedian and writer of the “Club Matinee” show. Until then, he was known as Thomas Garrison Morfit. He decided to hold a contest to change his name and the appellation. Garry Moore, was recommended by a Pittsburgh woman who won the $100 award for her selection.

In 1942, Moore came to New York to take over a new morning show that eventually developed in “Everything Goes.” He had a several guest appearance on the CBS “Comedy Caravan” where officials spotted him and decided that his smooth delivery could be advantageously paired with the ruffled naiveté of Jimmy Durante to form a new comedy team. The combination was on the air until the fall of 1947. Then Moore signed as emcee and quiz-master for “Take It or Leave It.” When Tom Breneman suddenly died, Moore took over “Breakfast in Hollywood.”

Moore is married to Eleanor Little of Richmond, Virginia, whom he met at a Baltimore Halloween party when she was 14. “I was wearing a false face at that time,” Moore recalls. In 1939, they were married. They have two sons, Mason, born March 29, 1940, and Garry Jr., born May 8, 1943.

On August 10, 1945, the star of CBS radio and television “Garry Moore Show” which is heard and seen every weekday, remembers the playing a show in the island of the Luzon when the premature surrender of the Japanese was announced. The GI’s celebrated by ripping off the corrugated tin roof of the make-shift theater and taking all of Garry’s clothes for souvenir. This most memorable experience, he swears, is naked and unadorned truth.