Our Own Hall of Fame

LOWELL THOMAS

GREW UP IN GREENVILLE

Lawrence of Arabia Film Launched Lowell Thomas

DAYTON DAILY NEWS   MARCH 15, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

     Lowell Thomas was 38 before he ever went before a microphone.  He had already made $1 million and had vowed, 10 years before, never to speak another word in public.

     Now, 30 years later, his chatty condensation of the news is still in the same time slot (6:45 to 7 PM) and his voice has probably been heard by more people than any man in history.

     Thomas was born in Woodington, a little village four miles from Greenville, in 1892.  The family moved to Cripple Creek, Col., but Lowell was back in Greenville for his junior year in high school, by this time a swashbuckling ex-cowpuncher and gold miner in western boots and a big felt sombrero.

     AS A SHORT order cook, furnace tender and writer he worked his way through four colleges (Northern Indiana, Denver, Chicago, Princeton) and got degrees from all.

     Before he was 20, young-man-in-a-hurry Thomas had been the editor or three small daily papers and made an expedition to Alaska between college semesters.

     But it was after World War I, when he was abroad helping to prepare a history of the war that he hit his first jackpot.  Thomas befriended the fabulous Lawrence of Arabia, a shy Oxford archeologist who had united hostile Arab tribes against the Turks.

     THOMAS FILMED Lawrence’s story, toured the world for a year with the show (seen by an estimated three million people) and made $1 million.

     For the next decade, he rested his hoarse vocal cords and traveled with his wife.  (Some of Thomas’ 45 books came out of this period.)

     In 1930 he made his first newscast on CBS signing off with the words he has used almost 8,000 times since:  “So long until tomorrow.”

     THOMAS GOT to the top fast (he didn’t have far to go since there were only two or three other regular newscasters in the country at the time.

     A gregarious, neatly-built man with a pencil-thin moustache, Thomas is extremely unopinionated, never analyzes the news behind the news.  He does not write his own scripts and his critics have called him uninformative and overly folksy.

     BUT BY 1948 he was making $420,000 a year as CBS’s second-highest salaried performer. (Arthur Godfrey was the first.)

     Adventurer Thomas didn’t stick around the studio.  During World Was II he flew over Berlin in a P51 Mustang.  In 1949 he was thrown by a horse in the wild mountains of Tibet and carried on a litter for 20 days.

     FOR YEARS Thomas was the voice of Twentieth Century-Fox Movietone.  In 1939 he broadcast the first TV news program for TV.  He has had his own series, “High Adventure With Lowell Thomas,” on TV and played a major role in the success of Cinerama.

     The man who has said his only claim to fame is that he once lived across the street from Annie Oakley, has had a mountain range in Antarctica named after him and was honored (to his apparent horror) on “This Is Your Life.”

     HE LIVES in a 34-room brick colonial house set in 1,500 acres___________ farm, stables, tennis courts, an 800-foot ski run (which has broken many Thomas bones), two bass lakes, a broadcasting studio and a root cellar containing a film laboratory and potatoes.

     When he isn’t globe trotting, he frequently broadcasts from there.  At 68 his familiar resonant voice shows no signs of giving out.

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