Tom Snyder, 71; kept viewers wide awake

Tom Snyder, 71, the beetle-browed Philadelphia news anchor whose passionate and pointed interviewing style carried him to late-night network fame, died Sunday in San Francisco of complications from leukemia.

"He was the greatest interviewer I ever met," said comedian David Brenner, who worked with Mr. Snyder making documentaries at KYW in the 1960s.

Guests who sat for interviews with Mr. Snyder ranged from John Lennon, in one of his last television interviews, in 1975, to mass murderer Charles Manson.

With his imposing 6-foot-4 physique, booming laugh and piercing eye contact, Mr. Snyder, wreathed in the smoke of one cigarette after another, seemed ready to surge through the camera lens.

"I thought he was absolutely brilliant on the air," Brenner said. "He had a rapport with the individual sitting in front of the television set. The person felt like he was talking to them at home. You swore he was talking directly to you. His delivery had that kind of intimacy. You can't buy that."

With his combination of "high-velocity wit and high-voltage personality," Mr. Snyder seemed too big for the small screen, said Paul Gluck, a longtime Philadelphia television executive.

Gluck recalled how Mr. Snyder's TV presence affected a live telecast of the 1984 local Emmy award presentations.

"He was absolutely electrifying," said Gluck, now executive director of the Kal and Lucille Rudman Institute for Entertainment Industry Studies at Drexel University.

"He was bigger than life. That night, we discovered that no television screen could hold him."

"He projected off the screen," said Kal Rudman, the institute's patron, founder of the music-industry trade journal Friday Morning Quarterback, and a frequent Snyder guest.

"He had extraordinary pipes. His ego went around the block a little bit, but that goes with the territory."

So outsize a figure was Mr. Snyder that he became a frequent target for satire, most memorably by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live.

Born in Milwaukee, Mr. Snyder attended Marquette University and got into the news business as a radio reporter in the Midwest, the South and Southern California in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

By the mid-1960s, he was in Philadelphia, working in television at Channel 3.

In 1965, Mr. Snyder and Marciarose Shestack became coanchors of the city's first noon news show. It was also the first program in the Eyewitness format, soon to be the industry standard, with an anchor team introducing on-camera reports by the station's news staff.

"He was brash and he was loud and he was funny," Shestack said yesterday. "He loved what he called the biz."

Mr. Snyder stayed behind the Channel 3 desk until 1970 while also hosting a morning talk show, Contact.

In 1970, Mr. Snyder decamped for California, where he became a news anchor at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles.

Three years later, he became host of a late-night show, The Tomorrow Show, which followed Johnny Carson on NBC.

It was at Tomorrow that Mr. Snyder made a national name for himself.

In the opinion of former Philadelphia anchorman Larry Kane, Mr. Snyder "hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for changing the genre of talk television." He cites Charlie Rose as one of the current broadcasters who carries the Snyder influence.

Mr. Snyder's approach to interviewing was certainly inimitable.

"There was a lot of derring-do in his interviews," Gluck said. "He would go places more traditional interviewers wouldn't."

Interviewing the likes of Manson, punk rocker Johnny Rotten, and Plasmatics singer Wendy O. Williams, who famously blew up a TV on the show, earned Mr. Snyder some criticism.

"The Tomorrow Show was often derided as being a tabloid program," Gluck said, "but in actuality [Mr. Snyder], like Mike Wallace, found a way to penetrate really interesting people who kept their guard up."

By the early 1980s, Tomorrow was running out of gas, and NBC canceled it in 1982, putting a new show with a young host named David Letterman in its place.

Mr. Snyder returned to the East Coast for an anchoring stint at WABC-TV in New York. Then, it was back to Southern California for a talk-radio show. He returned to TV with a cable show on CNBC in the early 1990s before Letterman brought him back to late-night network TV by installing him as host of the new Late, Late Show on CBS.

Mr. Snyder departed The Late, Late Show in 1998.

In 2005, he announced on his Web site that he had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

"When I was a kid, leukemia was a death sentence," he wrote. "Now, my doctors say it's treatable! With pills or chemotherapy or a combination of both. Lemme pause here on this word 'treatable.' "

Despite his relentless probing, Mr. Snyder wasn't unfair to those he interviewed, according to Brenner. "He wouldn't try to suddenly make you sit there in your underwear" with his questioning, the comedian said.

"And he had that laugh, which wasn't fake. He was one of a kind, truly one of a kind, but in a masterful way."

He is survived by a daughter, Anne Mari Snyder; two grandchildren; and his longtime companion, Pamela Burke.

Plans for services were not immediately available.

See video and more from Snyder's former Philadelphia TV home via http://go.philly.com/snyder EndText