Lowell Thomas - Later Career

Later Career

During the 1920s, Thomas was a magazine editor.

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 Merian C. Cooper to exploit Cinerama, a movie format that used three projectors and an enormous curved screen. Cinerama features were well-received but with the enormous costs and technical difficulties in film production and presentation, the company discontinued three-projector Cinerama in a favor of a single-camera 70mm system, which lacked the visual impact of true Cinerama. A quarter-century later, Thomas was still raving about Cinerama in his memoirs and wondering why someone wasn't trying to revive it.

In 1930, he became a broadcaster with the CBS radio network, delivering a nightly news and commentary program. After two years, he switched to the NBC radio network but returned to CBS in 1947. In contrast to today's practices, Thomas was not an employee of either NBC News or CBS News. Prior to 1947 he was employed by the broadcast's sponsor, Sunoco. When he returned to CBS to take advantage of lower capital-gains tax rates, he established an independent company to produce the broadcast which he sold to CBS. He hosted the first-ever television-news broadcast in 1930 and the first regularly scheduled television news broadcast, beginning on February 21, 1940, on NBC. But television news was a short-lived venture for him, and he favored radio. Indeed, it was over radio that he presented and commented upon the news for four decades until his retirement in 1976, the longest radio career of anyone in his day (a record later surpassed by Paul Harvey). "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 is also known for his television series of the 1950s entitled High Adventure and television's Lowell Thomas Remembers in the 1970s.

"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 gaffe occurred during one of his daily broadcasts in the early 1960s. He was reading a story "cold" (going on the air without pre-reading his copy, which Thomas usually did). This had the phrase "She suffered a near fatal heart attack" in it. The line came out of Thomas's mouth as "She suffered a near fart..err fatal heart attack". Realizing instantly what he had said, he tried to continue but eventually collapsed into gales of roaring laughter, which continued into - and beyond - his announcer's chuckling sign-off for the day.

Thomas' long time friend and ghostwriter, Prosper Buranelli, wrote the nightly newscasts. The day's script was sent by teletype to Thomas' home in Pawling, NY from which he usually did his broadcast. One evening, Buranelli had as the final item a story about an actress going into a Los Angeles hotel with a great dane. The dog's tail got caught in the revolving door and she sued the hotel for $10,000. Buranelli added a comment to the story to give Thomas a laugh before going on air, but Thomas read the story as written with Buranelli's comment, "Who ever thought a piece of tail was worth 10 grand."

Another example of one of Thomas' on-air mishaps had Thomas reading a story about President Eisenhower's visit to Hershey, Pennsylvania "where he was greeted by the folks who make chocolate bars, with and without nuts." ("Nuts" is a slang euphemism for "testicles.") As Thomas read the next story, he could hear the announcer back in the New York city studio on his headphones breaking up with laughter, which caused Thomas to break up, as well. Air checks of some of Thomas' gaffes (as well as recreations of his "bloopers") are available to collectors.

Thomas was a successful businessman. In 1954, he and his long-time business manager/partner Frank Smith bought a small Albany New York-based broadcasting company and turned it into 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 National Radio Hall of Fame in 1989.

In May 1955, the board of directors of the Lancaster and Chester Railway of South Carolina appointed him Press Agent, in N.Y.C.

His wife of 58 years, Fran Ryan, who often traveled with him, died in February 1975. He was married a second time in 1977 to Marianna Munn. True to form, he embarked with her on a 50,000-mile honeymoon trip that took him to many of his favorite old destinations. Marianna died in Dayton, Ohio on January 28, 2010 after a long battle with renal failure.

Thomas died at his home in Pawling, New York in 1981. He is buried in Christ Church Cemetery.

His son, Lowell Thomas, Jr., was a film and television producer who collaborated with his father on several projects before becoming a State Senator, and later the Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, in the 1970s. Today, Lowell Thomas Jr. remains an active bush pilot and environmental activist in Alaska.

Lowell Thomas has the communications building at Marist College (in Poughkeepsie, New York) named in his honor after receiving an honorary degree from the college in 1981. The Lowell Thomas Archives are housed as part of the college library.