This is a snippet from Breaking Walls Episode 116: The Launch of NBC’s Monitor (1955)

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With Monitor announced, a huge facility was being built on the fifth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It would be called Radio Central. NBC’s next steps were to identify key personalities to be featured. Jim Fleming was named executive producer.

In a memo he detailed why the name “Monitor” was chosen. During the war, newsmen monitored the short-waves for information, now they’d be monitoring the entire country and NBC’s network. The name suggested alertness, service, vigilance, and a sense of responsibility. These men and women wouldn’t be announcers, they’d be “communicators.”

One radio veteran in the fold was Ben Grauer. Born in New York in 1908, he was a child actor who became an NBC staff announcer in 1930. Grauer covered olympic games, announced for Walter Winchell’s Jergen’s Journal, and was hand selected by Arturo Tuscani to support NBC’s Symphony Orchestra. By World War II he was a senior commentator and reporter.

Communicators would be drawn from a wide-pool of talent and paired. Some of the people suggested were Alene Francis, Morgan Beatty, Hugh Downs, Red Barber, Goodman & Jane Ace, Fred Allen, Bob Trout, Faye Emerson, Bob & Ray, Frank Blair, Burgess Meredith, Boris Karloff, Bennett Cerf, and Dave Garroway.

Garroway was a radio veteran and jazz hound who had an unusual, homespun way of talking to his audience. He’d entered TV in 1949 with Garroway At Large. As he mentioned earlier, he’d been hosting Today since January of 1952. But Garroway initially wanted no part of Monitor. However, Pat Weaver asked him personally, and Garroway trusted Weaver implicitly. He agreed.

On Monday May 2nd, the network produced a closed circuit practice hour. With the format all but set, it was time for a soft launch.