Here's a rarity…a brief chunk of The Morning Show, which ran on CBS starting in 1954 as that network's unsuccessful attempt to compete with NBC's Today show. The Morning Show featured news, interviews, games, songs, cooking demonstrations, the Bil Baird marionettes and just about anything else they could think of to throw in there. It was done live from a studio in Grand Central Terminal in New York and was originally hosted by Walter Cronkite before Jack Paar, who you'll see in this clip, took it over.
Paar always loved to tell the story of how after he replaced Cronkite, the network kept a running tally of letters — how many wanted Cronkite back, how many preferred Paar. One day, one of the talliers came to Paar and said, "We don't know how to score this one. It says, 'I wish you hadn't gotten rid of Walter Cronkite.'" Paar said, "Well, that's easy. Put it in the pro-Cronkite pile." The staff member replied, "Okay, but it's from your mother."
We've been talking here about the problems of doing TV out of New York in those days. The Morning Show aired for two hours a day but it wasn't the same two hours in every time zone. Cronkite and then Paar actually did three hours every morning. The Eastern Time Zone got Hours 1 and 2. The Central Time Zone got Hours 2 and 3. I have no idea what they did out here on the West Coast. In the third hour, the host would repeat much of the material from Hour 1, including re-interviewing people he'd interviewed in the first hour. Paar used to say he got very confused at times when he'd refer to something that occurred earlier in the program…then realized the time zone he was currently addressing hadn't seen that segment yet and it was coming up later.
Paar did it for a while, then CBS moved him to an afternoon show and tried other hosts including John Henry Faulk and Dick Van Dyke. In October of '54, CBS cut the show to one hour and gave the other hour over to a new show for kids, Captain Kangaroo. The Good Captain had his own problems with the time zone thing. He would do his show live every morning for the East Coast and at the conclusion, they would have two minutes — the length of the station break — to reset everything so they could perform the entire show again for the Central Time Zone. They actually did it twice every day for several years before tape became feasible…and again, I have no idea what they did for other time zones.
So here's a little sampler of The Morning Show from back when Jack Paar hosted it. I don't know how typical this is but it does look like they were trying to beat Today at its own game…and Today already had its act together and a tremendous head start…