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Who is
Lowell Thomas?
New documentary released....
View intro
“So long until tomorrow....”
That closing statement was a familiar one for radio listeners until
August of 1981 when the golden voice of radio, Lowell Thomas, died,
just two weeks after he had visited his boyhood town of Victor.
At the age of 8, in August of 1900, Thomas moved to Victor with his
family where at age 19 he got his start in journalism - as editor of the Victor
Daily Record. At the age of 10, dreams of becoming a
newsboy began to circulate in his head and late that summer he
joined the newsboy’s union - one of 35 members.
Hired on to work at the Victor Daily Record by owner George Kyner,
Thomas folded and delivered the morning paper to the businesses and red light
districts of Victor and Goldfield. In addition, Thomas took up delivering the
Denver Post to saloons and gambling houses, and made it to school in time each
morning. Like many small town newspapers of the day, being editor
meant being the one-and-only-man show at the paper. He covered prize
fights, brawls, shootings and operas.
With promise of more pay, Thomas switched jobs in 1912 and took over
editorship of the Victor News and, after leaving for law school, was
hired as a reporter for The Chicago Evening Journal.
In the mining district, he lived through the labor strikes, the
tensions mounting over unions and non-union miners; and through the
boom times in Victor when mines were producing millions of dollars
of gold a year. He climbed Pikes Peak before age 14 and in 1916, he
left Victor to attend college in Indiana (in two years he had a
Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts degree.) At age 24 he was a
student and professor at Princeton, by then already well traveled In
March of 1925 he spoke for the first time on radio and Thomas, in
1940, became one of the first television news broadcasters. He set many
firsts, broadcasting first from underground in a mine, from places
far and wide to which he ventured.
The challenges of the early day mining district fueled Thomas’s
hunger for adventure and in 1949 he and his son were among the first
Americans admitted to Tibet, the “forbidden land.” Three books later
he was off and running to other parts of the world.
In 1976 President Gerald Ford presented Thomas with the Medal of
Freedom and on April 30,1976 Thomas told the world, from Victor,
that he would retire from broadcasting on May 14 of that year.
He paid a visit to Victor and posed with his with his son, Lowell
Thomas Jr, and Ralph Carr, one-time Colorado governor, in front of
the vacant Record building.
His last visit to his boyhood home of Victor was in August1981.
Less than two weeks later he died, August 29, at his estate in New
York. He was 89 years old when he died. Thomas left a legacy for all
journalists.
His first work place as a journalist, The Victor Record building,
still stands on south Fourth St. The Lowell Thomas Museum houses
memorabilia from his illustrious career. The Museum also houses
artifacts from Victor’s past.
His son, Lowell Thomas Jr., passed away on Oct. 1, 2016.
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