I have to write a little something here about Tom Snyder, the longtime broadcaster and newsguy who died yesterday at the age of 71 from "complications from leukemia." I'm not sure why it isn't just that he died from leukemia — he had it and that's what killed him — but that's how they phrase these things. You'll see that given as the cause of death in the obits like this one.
As I noted in this piece over on our sister site, oldtvtickets.com, Tom Snyder was the last of the single local news anchors, at least in the major markets. For several years on KNBC here in Los Angeles, he was the local news and he was darned good at it. I don't know how much of his own copy he wrote but he was the direct antithesis of the kind of "rip and read" newsman parodied by Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Snyder did not read you the news. He told you the news. He was a smart guy who knew the news business and, more importantly, knew the world on which he was reporting.
Shortly after I posted those tickets and the article, I got a very nice e-mail from Mr. Snyder, thanking me for the compliments and for "nailing" (his term) what went wrong with the Tomorrow Show once it expanded to ninety minutes. He then wrote…
It's tough when the suits get involved with egos involved. I've never minded getting notes from the suits if they've actually watched the show but that is rare.
That was written from retirement. Back when he was doing the Tomorrow Show, I had a memorable encounter with him in what was then Hampton's Restaurant on Riverside out in Toluca Lake. It was a favorite lunch place for folks working down the street at NBC and one day, I was part of one such group and he was part of another. Table-hopping between the two was a man named Bruce McKay, who had worked for Snyder but at the time was an NBC exec associated with a show I was writing. After we finished our meal, he said, "Tom would like us all to join him" — and join him, we did.
But even before that, I felt like I was having lunch with the guy. He was a tall man — taller than me, I think, and I'm 6'3" — and loud and boisterous and when he was in a restaurant and in that mood he was in, you felt like you were eating at his table even when you were across the room. He "held court" in the nicest of ways, conducting a mass talk show with everyone at his table and those that were adjacent. He was interested in everyone. He had an intelligent question to ask each person…and did, in what struck me as an actual curiosity about everyone around him. He had something interesting to say about any topic that happened along. And most of all, he had that wonderful laugh that so many impressionists got wrong because they made it sound forced and phony. It wasn't. It was the genuine article and so was he.