Tom Snyder

Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
Name	Tom Snyder
Birth date	May 12, 1936
Birth place	Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Death date	July 29, 2007
Death place	San Francisco, California
Nationality	United States
Years active	1959–1999
Credits	The Late Late Show Tomorrow with Tom Snyder NBC Nightly News

Thomas James "Tom" Snyder (May 12, 1936 – July 29, 2007) was an American television personality, news anchor and radio personality best known for his late night talk shows The Tomorrow Show, on the NBC television network in the 1970s and 1980s, and The Late Late Show, on the CBS Television Network in the 1990s.

Snyder was also the pioneer anchor of the primetime NBC News Update, in the 1970s and early 1980s, which was a one-minute capsule of news updates in primetime.

Early life

Snyder was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His parents, Frank and Marie, gave him a Catholic upbringing; he attended St. Agnes Elementary School and then graduated from Jesuit-run Marquette University High School. He also attended Marquette University, after which he had originally planned to study medicine and become a doctor.

Newscasting career

Snyder had loved radio since he was a child and at some point changed his field of study from pre-med to journalism. He once told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Tim Cuprisin that broadcasting became more important to him than attending classes, and he skipped a lot of them. Snyder began his career as a radio reporter at WRIT-AM (unrelated to the present-day FM station) in Milwaukee and at WKZO in Kalamazoo (where he was fired by John Fetzer) in the 1950s. For a time he worked at Savannah, Georgia AM station WSAV (now WBMQ). After moving to television in the 1960s, he was a news anchor for KYW-TV in Cleveland and Philadelphia, and WNBC-TV and WABC-TV in New York City. He talked about driving cross country in an early Corvair from Atlanta to Los Angeles around 1963, where he landed a news job at KTLA-TV "Live On 5" then on to KNBC-TV also in Los Angeles, where from 1970 to 1974 he was an anchor for the 6 p.m. newscast working with KNBC broadcaster Kelly Lange, who was then a weather reporter before serving as a long-time KNBC news anchor. Lange later became Snyder's regular substitute guest host on the Tomorrow program, prior to the hiring of co-host Rona Barrett in the program's last year. Even after attaining fame as host of Tomorrow, Snyder kept his hand in news anchoring with the Sunday broadcasts of NBC Nightly News during 1975 and 1976.

Tomorrow with Tom Snyder

Snyder gained national fame as the host of Tomorrow with Tom Snyder (more commonly known as The Tomorrow Show), which aired late nights after The Tonight Show on NBC from 1973 to 1982. It was a talk show unlike the usual late-night fare, with Snyder, cigarette in hand, alternating between asking hard-hitting questions and offering personal observations that made the interview closer to a conversation.

Unique one-on-one exchanges were common to the program, notably with author Harlan Ellison, John Lydon of PiL and The Sex Pistols in 1980, John Lennon in 1975, actor and writer Sterling Hayden, and author and philosopher Ayn Rand. A one-on-one program with David Brenner as the sole guest revealed that Snyder and Brenner worked together on several documentaries.

An infamous edition of The Tomorrow Show broadcast on October 31, 1979, saw Snyder interview the rock group KISS. During the episode, a visibly irritated Gene Simmons (bass) and Paul Stanley (guitar) tried to contain the bombastic (and drunk) Ace Frehley (lead guitar), whose nonstop laughter and joking overshadowed the content and conversation taking place between Snyder and the rest of the band. Drummer Peter Criss made repeated references to his large gun collection, to the chagrin of Simmons. Some of the footage from this show was later included on the Kissology - The Ultimate KISS Collection Vol. 2: 1978-1991 (2007) DVD.

When not grilling guests, Snyder would often joke around with offstage crewmen, often breaking out in the distinctively hearty laugh that was the basis of Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of Snyder on Saturday Night Live (12 occasions, 1976–1979 and 1995).

Following a disastrous experiment with turning Tomorrow into a more typical talk show—renaming it Tomorrow Coast to Coast and adding a live audience and co-host, Rona Barrett (all of which Snyder resented)—the show was canceled in 1982 to make way for the up-and-coming young comedian David Letterman.

After Tomorrow

After Tomorrow was cancelled Snyder returned to news reporting, joining WABC in New York. In September 1982, Snyder and Kaity Tong began anchoring the 5PM Eyewitness News programs for the station. Snyder stayed at WABC for two years, leaving the station in 1984. In 1985, he returned to the talk format at KABC-TV in Los Angeles with a local afternoon show he had planned to gear up for national syndication the following year; those plans were scratched after Oprah Winfrey's Chicago-based syndicated show entered the market first and took over Snyder's time slot on KABC-TV.

An older, slightly more mellow Snyder returned to virtually the same format on ABC Radio. The show's three-hour format was a natural for Snyder. The first hour was spent chatting with a celebrity guest, during the second hour Snyder engaged someone in the news, and the final hour was consumed chatting with his legion of fans. Occasionally the caller would be a well-known fan like David Letterman or Ted Koppel. One of Snyder's's favorite callers was Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played George Jefferson on the hit television sitcom The Jeffersons. The Tom Snyder Show for ABC Radio Networks went off the air in late 1992, in part due to the rapid rise in popularity of The Rush Limbaugh Show, which aired in the same time slot and which ABC had already been airing on many of its own stations. Snyder returned to television on CNBC in the early 1990s, adding the opportunity for viewers to call in with their own questions for his guests. Snyder nicknamed his show "the Colorcast", reviving an old promotional term NBC-TV used in the early 1960s to hype its color broadcasts. He also continued his trademark of talking to offscreen crew and made frequent reference to the studio, reminding viewers of its location in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder

Meanwhile, Letterman had moved on to CBS and was given control of creating a new program to follow his at 12:35 am. Letterman, who had idolized Snyder for years, hired Snyder in 1995 as host of The Late Late Show. The idea had actually begun as a running joke on Letterman's show, that Snyder would soon follow him on the air as he had once followed Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show; the unlikely suggestion caught on. As part of the joke, Snyder appeared as himself in 1993 in The Larry Sanders Show episode Life Behind Larry, in which talk-show host Sanders (Gary Shandling) steals Snyder from Letterman to host a talk-show in the slot immediately after his.

The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder aired live in the Eastern and Central Time Zones, and was simulcast to other time zones on radio to allow everyone a chance to call in. Snyder's CNBC show was taken over, largely unchanged in format, by Charles Grodin. One of the many memorable Late Late Show interviews was with Gloria Vanderbilt about her son's suicide, told dramatically over an entire hour. Another was a lengthy interview with Robert Blake very soon before Blake was charged with murder. In 1999 Snyder left The Late Late Show, which was then reformatted for Craig Kilborn. It has since been turned over to Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson.

In February 2000, Snyder hosted two shows of The Late Show Backstage done during the time Letterman was recovering from heart surgery.

Snyder also hosted a video production called A Century of Legendary Lionel Trains, commemorating 100 years of Lionel Trains. Additionally, he hosted another program from the same production company called Celebrity Train Layouts 2: Tom Snyder, featuring his own collection of trains.

Colortini.com

Snyder posted regular messages on his own now-defunct website colortini.com during the early 2000s. A "colortini", according to Snyder in the CNBC era, was the drink you should enjoy while watching the show ("Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."). For the CBS show, he redubbed the mythical drink a "simultini" as his show was also heard on selected radio stations.

On July 28, 2005, Snyder announced he was deleting his website after six years, stating: "The novelty of communicating this way has worn off." On August 1, 2005, his page was abruptly taken offline. The front page was replaced with a white screen with the simple phrase: "Colortini is gone. Thanks for the Memories". However, some 140 pages have been preserved at web.archive.org. The domain name has since been reused for other purposes.

Final years and death

In April 2005, Snyder revealed that he was battling chronic lymphocytic leukemia, but that his doctors had told him it was "treatable". A year later, in June 2006, Snyder sold his home in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles, California, where he had lived for almost 30 years, and headed to Belvedere, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he owned a second home.

Snyder died on July 29, 2007, in San Francisco at the age of 71 from complications of leukemia. He had one child, Anne Mari Snyder, who lives in Maui, Hawaii, and two grandchildren.

References

;Notes

External links

Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia: Tom Snyder

Tom Snyder Radio Show Episodes

Tom Snyder's trains

David Hinckley's tribute to Tom Snyder in the New York Daily News

Category:American talk radio hosts Category:American television talk show hosts Category:American Roman Catholics Category:Television news anchors in Los Angeles, California Category:New York City television anchors Category:Philadelphia, Pennsylvania television anchors Category:People from Milwaukee, Wisconsin Category:People from the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Marquette University alumni Category:Deaths from leukemia Category:KYW-TV Category:Cancer deaths in California Category:1936 births Category:2007 deaths