Thomas James 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 Tomorrow, on NBC in the 1970s and 1980s, and The Late Late Show, on CBS in the 1990s. Snyder was also the pioneer anchor of the prime time NBC News Update, in the 1970s and early 1980s, which was a one-minute capsule of news updates in prime time. Early life Snyder was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Frank and Marie Snyder, who were of German, Cornish, and Irish descent. He received a Catholic upbringing, attending St. Agnes Elementary School and graduating from Jesuit-run Marquette University High School. He then attended Marquette University, after which he had originally planned to study medicine and become a doctor. Newscasting career Snyder loved radio since he was a child and at some point he 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, now WJYI-AM 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). Snyder moved into television in the 1960s; he talked about driving cross-country in an early Corvair from Atlanta to Los Angeles around 1963. After a year-long stint in a news job at KTLA, he became a news anchor for KYW-TV (now WKYC-TV) in Cleveland in 1964. In 1965, when Westinghouse Broadcasting moved KYW-TV back to Philadelphia as the result of an FCC ruling, Snyder went along and remained in Philadelphia for five years. In July 1970, Snyder returned to Los Angeles and joined NBC News, who assigned him to anchor the 6:00 pm (Pacific time) weeknight newscast on KNBC. Snyder remained in this capacity even after NBC launched the Tomorrow show with him as host in October 1973, working alongside Tom Brokaw, Jess Marlow and Paul Moyer at the KNBC anchor desk. Another KNBC broadcaster, Kelly 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. Snyder moved to New York City in late