§ 5.5. Adoption and Influence

Dave Garroway

Questar counted the American broadcasting personality Dave Garroway as one of its most colorful owners. Born in 1913, he ascended from a childhood during which he moved thirteen times by the age of fourteen, a failed career as a salesman, and an uncertain future in radio. By the late 1930s, he finished second-to-last in his 24-member class of graduates from NBC’s school for announcers. Once he reached the field, however, Garroway became known for his tenacious pursuit of interesting stories that appeared in unusual places. He later worked his way up to become special events director at KDKA in Pittsburgh by 1941, when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Working as a disc jockey on the side during his service in Honolulu, he continued his career in Chicago and eventually rose to prominence on television. In contrast with the authoritative tone that most on-air personalities used, Garroway developed a lighter and more conversational style that lent itself well to the new talk show format that he helped pioneer for television. In 1952, he and his colleagues founded NBC’s Today show, and he served as one of its hosts until 1961.^[1]

But his gregarious projection and his beaming smile which seemed to be made just for television masked his deeper struggle with depression. In 1961, Garroway lost his second wife to suicide, which sent him into his own deep state of despair. Numerous false starts that included failed television shows and business ventures in the 1960s and 1970s did not help matters.^[2]

As he tried to manage his chronic depression, Garroway’s personal interests—he raced his beloved 1938 SS Jaguar 100 in his spare time, and he enjoyed listening to jazz music—brought him a modicum of serenity. His deep love for astronomy was another source of peace for him,^[3] and his Questar telescope was one means to that end.

In his account of witnessing the total solar eclipse at Lake Rudolf in northern Kenya in June 1973, Owen Franken recalled his encounter with Dave Garroway, who had become addicted to chasing solar eclipses. “All you need is one and you’re hooked,” Garroway said to Franken. “It’s as indescribable as sex.” During the event, Garroway stood chest high in the lake with his Questar in order to benefit from the steadier seeing one often gets while looking over water. “All I have to worry about is the crocodiles,” he joked.^[4]

In the summer of 1975, Garroway traveled with his Questar at his side throughout Great Britain and Russia on a 25-person observatory tour organized by Sarah Lee Lippincott, an astronomer at Swarthmore College. After meeting each other on the expedition, the two fell in love, and they married in 1980.^[5]

Not long after returning home after the tour, Garroway sent his Questar in for service. In its spring 1976 issue of its Questar Observations newsletter, the company included a passage from a letter Garroway wrote thanking Questar for “the exquisite refurbishing of my favorite object d’art.” He continued to say that “I really wish there was another single thing in this old world whose design, function, operation, and servicing policy was the equivalent of Questar’s, but I have never found it for any amount of money.”^[6]

But Garroway could never shake his chronic depression, and his Questar telescope also served as an unfortunate prop for the unfolding of his mental deterioration. In an article entitled “Remembering Dave Garroway,” which appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of Television Quarterly magazine, playwright and screenwriter Loring Mandel recalled a visit to Garroway’s 10th Street apartment in New York not long after he left the Today show in 1961. “He was obsessive about his Questar telescope,” Mandel wrote. “He insisted that I look at a dollar bill tacked to his mantel from across the room, through the Questar. He described his evenings in Central Park with the Questar, prone on the ground and looking into the apartment windows above Fifth Avenue with the kind of magnification meant to view the planets. His personality seemed to have congealed into eccentricity.”^[7]

Only two years after marrying Sarah Lee Lippincott, Dave Garroway succumbed to his mental illness and committed suicide in 1982. He was 69 years old.^[8]

Hugh Downs

Over time, a network of television personalities came to own Questar telescopes. Like Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs (1921-2020) built his career as a conversational television host in Chicago during the early 1950s. A year after Garroway left the Today show, Downs co-hosted the program until 1971.^[9]

Whether by means of that connection or his own action, he eventually became a Questar owner, too.^[10] His telescope was but one indication of his deep interest in science and in astronomy in particular. Over the course of his life, Downs served as an elected member of the National Academy of Science, the board chair of the National Space Society and its predecessor, the National Space Institute. Asteroid 71000 Hughdowns is named in his honor.^[11]

Durward Kirby

Durward Kirby (1911-2000), another television personality, received his Questar telescope as a gift from the humorist and television entertainer Garry Moore (1915-1993).^[12]

The connections between Kirby, Moore, and Garroway are suggestive: in addition to his frequent appearances on Moore’s shows between 1950 and 1968, Kirby worked as a staff announcer for NBC’s Red Skelton Show, which the network began airing as the replacement for Garroway at Large in December 1951. Not long after that, Dave Garroway moved to New York to begin work on the Today show.^[13]

Other Television Celebrities

Outside of this circle of television professionals, another celebrated Questar client likely put the idea of owning one into the mind of one of his colleagues. Ed McMahan (1923-2009), Johnny Carson’s longtime sidekick on The Tonight Show, eventually acquired a Questar himself.^[14]

And perhaps with more interest in keeping an eye on celebrity stars on the ground rather than on stars in the sky, Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017) owned a Questar telescope.^[15]

Many other less notable persons who lived in urban settings bought the fine instruments made in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Over the years, as longtime Questar associate Rodger Gordon notes, Questar sold more instruments to owners in New York City than anywhere else. Perhaps their small size made their telescopes well suited for storage in tight city dwellings, and perhaps their excellent portability made them equally well suited for frequent trips to the countryside. But, as Gordon suggested, since most apartment buildings in New York do not allow access to the roof, one can only speculate on what these individuals might have been doing with their Questars in town.^[16]

James Randi

Johnny Carson may not have limited himself to recommending the Questar telescope only to his colleague Ed McMahan. Another frequent guest on Carson’s talk show was James Randi (1928-2020), the magician who used the stage name “The Amazing Randi.” In addition to his entertainment performances, Randi also worked extensively to challenge pseudoscientific, paranormal, and supernatural claims—he called them “woo-woo”—and he helped found the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the James Randi Educational Foundation.^[17]

In her article entitled “‘An Honest Liar’ Lifts the Curtain on Some Amazing Randi Secrets,” Los Angeles Times staff writer Amy Kaufman wrote of the time that Randi met his partner, José Alvarez. At the Fort Lauderdale Public Library in 1986, Randi was doing research for an art project when Alvarez spotted him looking at books containing astrophotography. The two began talking, and before long Randi invited Alverez over to his house to look through his Questar. “So I went to his place, and he’d calibrated the telescope so that I could see Saturn with the rings,” Alvarez later said. “Then Saturn left the viewfinder, and I said, ‘It moved.’ Randi said, ‘No, the Earth moved.’ And at that moment I thought, ‘I want to get to know this man more.’”^[18]

Marlon Brando

Film actor Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was yet another celebrity client of Questar Corporation.^[19] In addition to his widely acclaimed film acting, Brando was also an amateur ham radio operator with call signs in both the United States and Tahiti. In an effort to guard his privacy, he listed himself as Martin Brandeaux in Federal Communications Commission records.^[20]

During a visit to the actor’s Southern California home in 1968, painter-sculptor Daniel Pommereulle encountered Brando’s Questar telescope for the first time. He was so intrigued by the experience that he included shots of the Moon through the telescope in his short art film entitled Vite, which appeared the next year.^[21]

Almost four years after Brando’s death, word circulated on amateur astronomy discussion forums that Marlon Brando’s Questar Seven, which he was reported to have purchased in 1986, had appeared for sale on eBay for $25,000. Included in the package was the telescope, all of its accessories, and the supporting paperwork that proved Brando was its owner.^[22]

Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Burum

Much like his fellow film director and producer Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola loved gadgets. As Susan Braudy wrote in the August 1976 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Coppola’s thirty-room house was filled with all kinds of interesting objects that complemented his wife Eleanor’s art collection. His projection room contained a Moog synthesizer and a harpsicord. He relished several signed first-edition copies of Joseph Conrad novels. And not long after completing work on the second part of The Godfather, Coppola acquired a Questar telescope which he loved to show off to his friends.^[23]

In 1976, Coppola hired Stephen Burum, who happened to be his roommate at the University of California at Los Angeles, as his second unit director in the Philippines for his movie Apocalypse Now. For a number of years, the two continued to collaborate on a number of other projects. Perhaps knowing that his friend had at least somewhat of an interest in both astronomy and precision instruments—Burum had won an Emmy Award for his special effects work on Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage—Coppola is reported to have given Burum a Questar telescope as a birthday gift after both completed work on Rumble Fish in 1983.^[24]

The next year, Burum worked as cinematographer for the steamy thriller Body Double (1984), which was produced and directed by Brian De Palma. Perhaps it was Burum himself who thought to put a Questar telescope into the hands of Craig Wasson, who played the character Jake Scully in the movie. Using one that was reported to have been purchased as a prop for the movie, the filmmakers produced scenes with Jake looking though the Questar to see what he was perhaps better off not seeing in another neighboring house.^[25]

Burum went on to earn credits for his work on St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), The Untouchables (1987), Hoffa (1992), Mission: Impossible (1996), and many other films.^[26]