Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning (for review only)

Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning When Charles Kuralt Gave Us the Real World

E.S. Lamoreaux III

Headline Books Terra Alta, WV

Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning When Charles Kuralt Gave Us the Real World

by E.S. Lamoreaux III copyright ©2024 E.S. Lamoreaux III All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any other form or for any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage system, without written permission from Headline Books, Inc. To order additional copies of this book or for book publishing information, or to contact the author: Headline Books P.O. Box 52 Terra Alta, WV 26764 www.HeadlineBooks.com mybook@headlinebooks.com ISBN 13: 9781958914359 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023952186

P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S O F A M E R I C A

For my beloved wife Susan, it has been my greatest joy to share this life with you.

For our remarkable daughters, Sheri, Melissa, and Denise. For our two loving and caring sons in law, John and Jonathan. For our grandchildren Katherine, Sarah, Ian and Emma, and our great grandson Cameron, who have enriched our lives beyond words. And for my co-conspirators who created the best 90 minutes of television, every Sunday morning

Foreword

by Robert Lipsyte

My stay in television Eden began with what I thought was a prank call. An aggressively hearty voice that announced itself as “Bud” invited me to lunch to discuss my future in television. I was still trying to make my future in print. I hung up.

He called back, unfazed. It would be a swell lunch, said “Bud,” and we would be joined by no less than “Shad.”

Well, it was a swell lunch, and by the end of it, my future in print was in the past. Shad turned out to be the brilliant, mercurial Robert Northshield, who had fine-tuned much of the best on NBC and CBS en route to creating Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. He was its executive producer. Bud was his deputy and successor, the dangerously affable Ernest S. Lamoreaux III, the steady, hard hand on the tiller of the best show on television.

And I became a stranger in Paradise.

My mistake that summer of 1982 was thinking that I had been wrong about television, that this smart, principled, compassionate, literate show was what television had become while I wasn’t watching. But being wrong was also my salvation; had I any inkling of how much better this show was than any other, I would have been too intimidated to even pretend I had any right to be there.

My role on the show was to offer sports stories that non-sports fans could enjoy, a kind of comedy relief from the deeply-reported news stories by trenchcoated aces like Richard Threlkeld, Ed Rabel, and David Culhane, classical music and jazz stories from acclaimed performers like Eugenia Zukerman and Dr. Billy Taylor, witty essays by Ron Powers and Heywood Hale Broun, not to mention engaging narratives on nature, art, theater, and books. And, of course, Kuralt, warm and beguiling.

As challenging and thrilling as it was just to be among all that talent and high standards, what was truly scary – after 25 years as a solo act at The New 5

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York Times and writing books – was to learn to work collectively to connect the picture to the word. I might want to think it was my 10-minute essay, but if I wanted it to work, I would have to allow myself to be just one piece of the entity and trust the other parts, video editors like Pam McDonough, Al Baliski, Bob Shattuck, Robin Skeete, and most of all producers like Larry Doyle, Jim Houtrides, Bill Moran, Kathy Sulkes, Roger Sims, Brett Alexander, and even Bud, brisk in style, who once in spring training thought I was taking too long on an interview and unplugged my mic. I kept jabbering away until I figured out why the ballplayer I was talking with had fallen down laughing. I have almost forgiven them.

The most humbling lesson was the obvious – how much more resonant words are when word and picture are truly joined. In the final scene of a piece about Tracee Talavera, a teen gymnast who left home for elite training, we see her with her famous coach while her father, 500 miles away, says, in a voice-over, “Yeah, she’s gone,” and then, just before a fade to black, “If you lose a child, you go on and do the best you can.”

Here is Roger Maris, the retired, embittered Yankee slugger who never got his due, ruminating over his current life as a Budweiser distributor. How could he keep criticizing his kids for smoking pot when he deals alcohol to college kids?

And where else but this show would I ever have gotten the time and ambiance for my boyhood sports hero to say, “’Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’ I still don’t know what the song means, but I’m very flattered that they would think of me.”

After four years at Sunday Morning, standing on the shoulders of Bud, Shad, and all those magical editors and producers and camera and sound operators, I made the mistake of thinking I was a television stud, ready for prime time and its money. I jumped to NBC News for two years, hated it, and then on to my own nightly public affairs show on PBS’s Channel 13 in New York, which I loved until the wasteland spread and it was canceled. Soon after, I resumed my future in print.

So it’s no wonder I’m happy to be here right now, an opening act for a wonderful book filled with the stories and insights and charm of television’s Eden, its Paradise, its Camelot. But I have to go now. Bud is unplugging me.

Editor’s Note: Robert Lipsyte was an award-winning New York Times journalist and is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Contender and a biography of Muhammed Ali. 6

Chapter 1

“The Birth of Sunday Morning” The office of the president of CBS News had a rather austere look to it. A visitor was hardly comforted by the heavy, beige drapes drawn to block the unsavory view outside. This was the West Side of Manhattan in 1978, where a new mayor was trying to remove the stink of garbage and the criminals were seemingly running rampant in the streets. More startling were the bodies surfacing regularly in the nearby Hudson River, courtesy of the Mafiosi. But in the nearby CBS Broadcast Center where the “Tiffany Network” ruled, a new day full of sugarplums was dawning.

Bill Leonard, who began his broadcast life as a CBS News reporter eons before on those same mean streets, had just proclaimed that Sunday morning would soon become Sunday Morning on CBS, something like 60 Minutes, which he helped develop a decade before, only this new program would take its 90 minutes like a stroll in the park. It would be a Sunday newspaper wrapped in a tube, not all critical news, mind you, some just for the soul, he told us.

The “us” were the two producers, E. S. “Bud” Lamoreaux III and Robert “Shad” Northshield, both veterans of the network news wars. I was a product of the CBS mailroom 20 years before, and the much older Northshield had spent most of his storied career at NBC, our arch-rival that CBSers liked to refer to derisively as the National Biscuit Company. He was the boss, and I was his lieutenant. In a corporate sense, he was the chairman, and I was the CEO. Before the emergence of cable news and the internet, the “Big Three” network news divisions were fiercely competitive and the only game in town.

The CBS Broadcast Center where the program aired was a red brick edifice that took up most of a city block on West 57th Street, barely a short walk from the ocean liners in the dark and melancholy waters of the Hudson River. It had begun life as the Sheffield Farms milk delivery center with an assortment of flies and horse-drawn carriages. Insiders used to joke that a certain anchorman with 7

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a big enough mouth and the initials D. R. — we called him “the inhaler” — was the only thing that saved us from being bitten to death by those ever-present pests.

“You have 90 minutes,” boss man Leonard loudly proclaimed, “and all the time in the world to become a success. Ratings are not an issue.” Maybe for the immediate future, but how long will they really give us, I thought skeptically. My worries were unfounded because Sunday Morning was a minor success in its first year, winning a Peabody Award and a Columbia School of Journalism citation as we began gathering viewers. Need I mention that Charles Kuralt might have had something to do with that, both his onair presence and his skillful way with words?

His supporting cast were no slouches either when it came to turning a phrase — CBS longtimers Heywood Hale Broun, Charles Osgood, Richard Threlkeld, who filed 50 of our 52 “cover stories” from every corner of the world in our first year, a monumental feat for news gathering in that era.

But it was Charles—he was never a Charlie—who gave us the instant credibility to be as eclectic as we wanted. Millions of viewers Charles Kuralt with cameraman Izzy knew him as the “On The Road’’ guy who Bleckman, cartoon by John Holladay appeared most every Friday night just before Walter Cronkite signed off for the week, usually with a bemused smile on his face, as Kuralt said “bye-bye” from Dannebrog, Nebraska, or Stamping Ground, Kentucky, or Sopchoppy, Florida. That motor home of his was a GPS magic machine for Kuralt and his long-time cameraman Isadore Bleckman.

Unspoken before our debut, but standing squarely in our way, was the issue of station clearances: what to do about getting the CBS affiliates out in the hinterlands to carry us?

Charles Kuralt cartoon by John Holladay Only a thimble full of the local stations were on board, not enough to stay on the air very long, when at precisely 9 a.m.. Sunday, January 28, 1979, after the trumpets sounded, came this, “Good morning.

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Here begins something new. I’m Charles Kuralt, and this is Sunday Morning, a 90-minute CBS News program that starts right now.

“Every Sunday morning, we are going to bring you the news, of course, but we’re going to spend most of this hour and a half trying to explain what’s happening to ourselves and to you.” At that moment, an old Kuralt friend from his travels to the frigid outpost of Watertown, New York, must have lit on his shoulder and whispered, “And not to worry, Charles, leave the station problem to me.” How did we get so lucky? I will report back on that later on.

That initial program set the tone for what was to follow. The news headlines of the day were Pope John Paul’s visit to Mexico, the hijacking of a United Airlines jetliner, and the death of former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Our first “enterpriser,” from correspondent Lem Tucker, was about the EPA denying permission for a Maine refinery because of its threat to the bald eagle. Richard Threlkeld’s cover story was on the tumultuous welcome of the Pope in Mexico City and the task before him in spreading Catholicism in Latin America. Ray Gandolf told us about Willie Mays being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Critic-at-large Heywood Hale Broun provided an essay on “Feelings: Our Vital Signs,” a book by Dr. Willard Gaylin, a leader in clinical psychiatry. Morton Dean reported on a Vietnamese refugee success story in Phoenix. TV critic Jeff Greenfield surmised that in television commercials, everything counts. A rich stew, as Charles might have put it, to ponder.

As the first year played out, we began to build a solid trust among the three of us – Shad, Bud, and Charles. So much so that one wag nicknamed us “The Maverick Trio.” We earned that tag by constantly pushing the envelope on topics that were taboo on television news broadcasts, subjects like “America’s music,” jazz, and the huge personalities in the classical genre in sharp contrast to the “Rat Pack’s” obsession with following the daily news calendar. In retrospect, that is what stands out to me, our unorthodox way of looking at news in general. CBS News soundman, producer Bud Lamoreaux, and Heywood Hale Woodie Broun, well-known on CBS for “Woodie” Broun, Budlam Productions his metaphorical flourishes, had honed his Archive reportorial skills at various Olympic venues. At the 1968 Mexico City games, his often-quoted phrase, “Sweat is the cologne of accomplishment,” could have easily been attached to his reporting on a bitter women’s volleyball match 9

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between Czechoslovakia and the Russians. “A packed house,” he wrote, “shouted approval at every Czech success as if it was the six Soviet girls that had driven tanks into Prague.”

At the infamous Munich Olympics, a Woodie interview with Mark Spitz revealed that the star of the games was exhausted and glad it was over. And when the very next day, Arab terrorists killed nine members of the Israeli team, Woodie thought it was time to go home, too. “Weirdly and unforgivably,” he reported, “the Olympic Committee decreed that the games should continue… those who let their games be invaded by merchandising and murder…had decreed that joy had no place in sport, that sport instead was service to one’s country.”

In later years, we introduced a series called “Postcards from Nebraska” from the then-nationally unknown Great Plains philosopher and humorist Roger Welsch. His voluminous writings about his state made him a beloved figure to his fellow Cornhuskers. Here’s a sampling from Sunday Morning: “The single most important social institution in rural America today is the ‘Big Table.’

Roger Welsch in Dannebrog, Nebraska, courtesy Linda Welsch Photos, Budlam Productions Archive In taverns, grocery stores, cafes, and grain elevators, groups of folks get together in town every day to conduct the business of the elders. That’s the real ‘Congress of these United States,’” including Roger Welsch’s Dannebrog, Nebraska.

With Kuralt’s urging, this series of unorthodoxy from the small hamlet of Dannebrog was the major force in carrying us through some difficult times with management in later years. Decked out in his trademark overalls, Roger Welsch opened America’s eyes to the significance of the rural Nebraska population. At his death, as this was being written, the little-known “Guy in the Overalls” had earned bountiful obituaries in both The New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times story read, “Author, humorist and tractor buff, he quit academia and found fame as a rural correspondent for Sunday Morning.” The Post posited, “The tales, always true but maybe just a tad embellished for flavor, won him acclaim as a poet of the Plains.”

In our debut year of 1979, network news primarily centered on coverage of the political action in Washington, weather phenomena, pocketbook issues, tragedies, and overseas events that affected U.S. foreign policy. That left a huge 10

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landscape for the coverage we had in mind. All three of us in the “Maverick Trio’’ were out-of-the-box thinkers, looking to mine the gold of ‘flyover country’ that added to the American experience. We were so obsessed with this uniqueness that our producers, sent to cover an event that had run the course of daily media interest, had a standing order from us: “If there are any other cameras on scene, come home immediately.”

We wanted our interviewees in Oshkosh or Bowling Green or Apalachicola to be more introspective, having had time to sift through the trauma they had just gone through, be it days or months later.

In the next couple of years, Sunday Morning would reach near-unanimous acclaim from the critics: “Charles Kuralt and Sunday Morning instill in the viewer a sense of wellbeing,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer; “It may be the most intelligent news program that television has ever produced,” the Louisville Courier Journal; “It could be argued that Kuralt gave us the real world and the regular newscasts just gave us the news,” the Washington Post.

Local print columnists had a lot of clout before the internet reduced their newsrooms to rubble. Folks paid attention when some out-of-towner earned five stars, so those newspaper reviewers in Manitowoc and Norfolk and San Diego became our lifeline in spreading the Sunday Morning word. We will share more of those accolades as we proceed because of their importance in spreading our grassroots movement.

Charles was raised in eastern North Carolina, a small-town kid. But you had already figured that out, I assume. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father, who earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at the university, became a social worker for the state, and they were constantly moving from town to town. His father’s job was to visit the local welfare offices, and he took young Charles along in his pre-school years. That was the beginning of his discovery of America. As he wrote in his autobiography, “A Life on the Road,” “We stopped for suppers of pork chops, sweet potatoes, and collard greens at roadside cafes. And rolled on into the night bound for some tourist home down the road, my father telling tales and I listening in rapture, just the two of us, rolling on, wrapped in a cloud of companionship and smoke from his five-cent cigar.”

During his early school years, he wasn’t much interested in math or science, but he was good at reading because of all those Burma Shave signs he practiced on during those road trips with his dad. The message signs, numbering a half dozen or fewer, were stretched out sequentially along America’s rural highways, often created with a good deal of poetic license, such as: 11

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“Within This Vale— Of Toil And Sin — Your Head Grows Bald — But Not Your Chin —Use Burma Shave.” Old-timers who remember the days before and after World War II can probably recite chapter and verse about those leisurely Sunday drives with the folks and those Burma Shave signs, probably the most exciting event of their week. Look, here comes another one: “If You Don’t Know — Whose Signs — These Are — You Can’t Have — Driven Very Far — Burma Shave.

When Charles was twelve, he entered a baseball writing contest in the Charlotte News. The reward was a road trip with the Hornets, the Washington Senators farm team, whereby he would file reports by the Western Union wire about what it was like hanging out with a bunch of rookie baseball players. The Hornets took an instant liking to him, dubbing him “Flash Kuralt, our traveling, big-time sports writer.” He took his first journalism course in junior high and wrote a column, “The Kaleidoscope,” for the school newspaper.

When he was fourteen, he won another contest. He had to give a speech about democracy, and this one took him to Washington, D.C. Edward R. Murrow was one of the judges. He got to meet President Truman and shake hands with him in the Oval Office. As he later wrote, “I knew I wasn’t a White House correspondent yet because the woman holding my arm and smiling nervously back at Mr. Truman — was my mother.”

His father became his chauffeur when Charles got his first job in radio as the “color” announcer for the local minor league baseball team, the Charlotte Hornets. According to his longtime CBS cameraman, Izzy Bleckman, “Charles told me he wasn’t old enough to drive a car, so his father had to drive him to the games and then pick him up when the game was over.

Cameraman Izzy Bleckman and Charles Kuralt in He said that way, he was certain to have front of “On The Road” Bus, Courtesy Bleckman Family Archives one listener, his father, who had to tune in to find out when the game was going to end.”

Izzy Bleckman spent most of his 40 years at CBS News as Kuralt’s eyes and ears, first in the “On The Road” bus and later on Sunday Morning. His prolific photo-journalism career began in Chicago as a cameraman for Movietone News. When President John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Izzy was ordered to Dallas. And when Lee Harvey Oswald was being taken 12

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to his arraignment, Izzy’s nose for news put him in position to take the only moving pictures of Oswald being shot to death by Jack Ruby. The CBS News Chicago bureau took notice and soon after that, he was working for the CBS Evening News — and soon after that, he joined Kuralt for their 25-year odyssey across America. A lifetime devoted to the Kuralt imprint made Mr. Bleckman an irreplaceable member of our team.

Just before Charles turned 16, he took a banged-up ’38 Chevy on a road trip that was intended to take him to the Rockies and maybe further west, but it got him as far as a summer writing program at Northwestern just north of Chicago.

He dug the big city and its jazz music before hitching a ride home, sitting on his suitcase in the back of a pickup truck. He wrote glowingly of the things he saw, “I returned the wave of a man who stood in his vegetable patch to watch us pass.

I saw a barefoot woman in a calico dress pinning sheets to a clothesline. I saw a cluster of old men studying the moves in a game of checkers on the front porch of a one-pump gas station.”

His next stop was Chapel Hill, where he studied history at the university and became the editor of the Daily Tarheel, the student-owned newspaper.

He fashioned himself as a crusading journalist, taking on the North Carolina legislature to end segregation at his school. After graduation, he spent the summer as a disc jockey on WAYS radio in Charlotte. Then it was on to the Charlotte News, where he got his first byline as a junior sportswriter and was given his own column called “People,” about the working folks of the city, the cops and cab drivers. And then — the phone rang. It was CBS News in New York, offering him a job as a radio news writer on the overnight shift. It paid $135 a week. He was 22 years old. It was 1956.

Advertisers hadn’t discovered television news yet, so it was not a very lucrative calling. Actually, the staff announcers, who would introduce the newscasts by reading short bursts of copy written for them, were better paid than the correspondents. They were all old radio guys who had joined the actors’ unions and were used to being compensated for voiceover commercial work, which was verboten in the news business.”

Being on the graveyard shift was not a place where you got noticed very easily at CBS. But that faint Murrow connection paid off when Charles got to fill in as his writer for a week and then received a recommendation from him for a job in television. It seems that because they both had North Carolina smalltown roots, Ed had taken an interest in Charles’ career.

A couple of years later, I landed a job in the TV newsroom armed with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and not much else, assigned 13

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as a Desk Assistant to the overnight crew in the building attached to the north end of Grand Central Station where the CBS News broadcast studios were. I had spent the last two years fighting the “Battle of Cape Cod” as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army-guided missile defense system surrounding Boston, but my attempt to use that humorously gained me nothing.

Kuralt had by then moved up from a writer’s slot on the Evening News with Douglas Edwards and was back on that graveyard shift running the TV Assignment Desk. There were limited black-and-white film stories on the Edwards broadcasts and a paucity of real news. Harry Reasoner, who would help get 60 Minutes up and running, worked there occasionally, and so did Marvin Kalb, the future eminence grise of State Department correspondents.

Kalb’s brother, Bernard Kalb, was a journeyman reporter. Besides answering the phones, my jobs were to go check the wire machines and keep the copy collated.

And, of course, like all so-called “gofers,” Lieutenant Lamoreaux would go for coffee down to Nedicks in Grand Central.

New York was known then as “the city that never sleeps,” but you wouldn’t know it from the poor souls I ran into. One night, the phone rang upstairs, and the voice on the other end said, “Hello, this is Marvin Kalb’s mother. Is his brother Bernie there?” Ah, the little things that make you laugh after the clock tolls midnight.

The daytime newsroom was not heavily staffed, with a small production team and technical crew working on the fifteen-minute Evening News with Douglas Edwards, run by Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes fame. Hewitt was always in a rush, inventing television news with technical innovations like supering names under faces and places and running double-projector pieces, whereby directors could switch back and forth between a reporter’s on-camera work and narrative scenes over the subjects they were covering. The voiceover scenes became known as “B-roll.”

But Hewitt was not universally respected in that newsroom because of his bent toward mixing real journalism with show biz. His unspoken nickname was “Sammy Glick,” the lead character in the Broadway musical, “What Makes Sammy Run.” His idea of a “great story?” “Elephants on water skis” was an answer you might get in the newsroom. Kuralt described Hewitt this way. “He was not a writer, but he knew what he liked, and what he liked were snappy beginnings and amusing endings. His innovations became conventions of television news programs everywhere. The evening news was being invented, and Don Hewitt was its Edison.”

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There wasn’t much breaking news to deal with overnight, so a rookie had a chance to talk to some of the writers and deskmen and have an opportunity to learn the business from the inside. Kuralt was one of the generous ones.

Somehow, 20 years later, our paths crossed again when Sunday Morning was conceived. It was, undoubtedly, due to both of us using the intervening years to immerse ourselves in flyover America and its customs. The mandate for this revolutionary Sunday morning venture was to be different, to think out of the box, and try to avoid being “negative Nellies.’’ And that’s where the chemistry between Shad Northshield and me came into play.

He was more of a “big show” guy who played to the viewer’s emotions.

He managed our weekly “cover stories” and “the arts.” And he contributed the opening trumpets, a seventeenthcentury call to worship by German composer Gottfried Reiche called “Ablassen” (just in case you always Lamoreaux, Shad Northshield (Co-Producer), wondered about its origin). Once we Bud And Charles Kuralt, George Smith Cartoon established our audience, we would Commissioned By Bud Lamoreaux do occasional entire broadcasts on Picasso and the sculptor Henry Moore and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. I managed the rest of the content. We worked a sports piece into every show, which was my expertise, as was jazz. I was also the “little story” guy, always digging behind the headlines by scanning a Chinese menu of out-of-town newspapers from the newsstand at Times Square, looking at the editorials, too, to gauge the human interest stories and the issues in every corner of America. We were inventing a new genre aimed at those viewers in their living space — personal journalism, if you may, where the viewer was never taken for granted. It was Charles Kuralt’s vision from “On the Road” to Sunday Morning and beyond.

Northshield favored cellist Yo-Yo Ma; my tastes ran to Wynton Marsalis and his trumpet. Pretty soon, we were doing jazz or classical profiles nearly every week. Civil rights, human rights, and immigration were also major subjects. We both grappled with handling these major American issues by producing a wide 15

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array of network news programs and magazine broadcasts. So far, so good. But temperament plays a big role in running a demanding 90-minute production every week — and that’s where we parted company. Northshield believed that intimidation kept everyone in line, a flaw that would eventually prove to be fatal. I believed that keeping all the producers busy was the best course. So, if I kept them on the run and out of the office, he wouldn’t see them until the first screening. By then, the cart was pretty much in the barn, and producers and correspondents were only criticized for story content and not personal behavior.

It was a “good cop/bad cop” scenario that seemed to work.

For the first month, neither one of us took a day off until we had our Mercedes purring. Charles chose to have no part in story selection or other production details. Small but critical graphic decisions were established early by our astute director, Ken Sable. To keep the clutter to a minimum, we decided to eliminate any superimposed information on the pieces themselves so as not to distract from the storyline. Today’s newscasts give you so many graphic choices crawling and screaming at you that it’s hard to decide which story to follow: the one the graphics tell or the one the moderator tells. We decided simpler is better in every case that the story, not the headline, always wins the day. We would only use closed captions to allow the viewer to better understand questionable audio.

Ken Sable was also responsible for the hundreds of sparkling suns that became our signature throughout our Sunday Mornings as we went to commercial. Faithful views helped him build his database and never asked for credit in return. It was almost as if they were contributing to “their’’ program that they had a vested interest in. The plexiglass, with its index board, did duty as a modernized Burma Shave sign for Charles.

Sets for television news programs almost always change when a new anchor with a “hair helmet” moves in, but the Sunday Morning feeling has undergone only small cosmetic changes over time. The story board, those signature suns, and the trumpet opening have lasted for more than 40 years. No other television news broadcast from that era has stuck to its original formula, with the exception of 60 Minutes. The marketing people have undoubtedly warned management, “mess with the Kuralt aura, and you will be messing with trouble.” I’d like to think that Charles is having a good chuckle over that one.

He once told the Washington Post, “We may be the only news program on Earth that doesn’t have a rear screen — you know, whatever they call that — we don’t use any of the gimmicks of television at all. I think the faces of the people telling you the news is enough. It’s like putting out the college paper, in a way.”

And that did not include, I might add, splitting the screen a dozen different ways 16

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with experts frantic to get their voices heard or exhorting the viewers to stay tuned for Armageddon. If you stayed alert and listened for the tranquility was Charles’ message, you might uncover hidden gems inside the quiet — or as he told The New York Times, “People talk too much on television, and things just go too fast. Our viewers on Sunday morning aren’t rushing off somewhere, and we can get away with a more unorthodox TV format.”

Kuralt’s early experience as a globe-trotting correspondent for the CBS News of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite gave him exposure to the wider world, where news coverage usually involved calamity and crisis. His “On The Road” series that followed doted on calmness and consideration of others.

That’s how he developed his unique philosophy of what news should be: that calamity should be reported in sober tones; that most every crisis has a rather short news cycle and, therefore, is not the beginning of the end of the world; that the world of the everyman needs to be heard, too. Most “breaking news,” “this just in,” and “we have this exclusively” have a rather brief shelf life. Charles believed viewers shouldn’t be given what they “want” to hear but rather what they “need” to hear. For those who might consider that an elitist view of news, Kuralt’s viewers couldn’t get enough of it.

Of the three mavericks, Northshield carried the biggest stick. He was an NBC producer of documentaries and the Today show and NBC Nightly News.

His hiking boots took him into remote parts of America to photograph birds and other creatures in the nation’s wildlife refuges. His penchant for looking for the unusual got him into trouble at all three network news divisions, and his outspokenness caused him to move around a lot.

Kuralt was absolutely a maverick because he accomplished something the rest of us only dreamed of – being his own boss. He was handed the freedom to travel across the country without having to answer executive phone calls or dictums from the national assignment desk.

That perk meant he could develop his own stories on his own time. He took that to mean that his expense reports weren’t a big deal, either.

Two years into this newfound freedom, a full-time accountant had to be assigned to dig Charles Kuralt discusses script ideas through boxes of receipts, many of them handwith Roger Welsch in Nebraska Tavern, written in pencil, from every sort of diner, cafe, Courtesy Welsch Family Album 17

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and tavern that dotted the small town landscape from Missoula to Mineral Springs, where townsfolk often pitched him story ideas, including our own Roger Welsch in Dannebrog.

I cut my teeth as the creative producer for the wordsmith Heywood Hale Broun, going on the road to produce a decade’s worth of sports essays, which appeared without fail Charles Kuralt in “on the road” bus alone after long day, courtesy Bleckman Family archives every Saturday on the CBS Evening News with Roger Mudd and later Dan Rather. We covered everything from Super Bowl I and Vince Lombardi — to Nicklaus’ reign at the Masters — to the legacy of Joe DiMaggio when baseball was king — but mostly, we traveled down the back roads where the American spirit lived. I eventually became the broadcast’s executive producer. I think that qualifies me for maverickhood, too.

Our modus operandi was original reporting on the not-so-famous and the famous subjects that weren’t part of the regular news cycle, like jazz and opera and the environment and art.

There were sports essays from wordsmiths Robert Lipsyte and Ray Gandolf. There was original commentary on television itself by Jeff Greenfield, Ron Powers, and long-time New Roger Welsch and Charles Kuralt on Sunday Morning set in front of America’s York Times and Sunday Morning editor and small towns, including Dannebrog, contributor John Leonard and, of course, Roger courtesy Welsch Family archive Welsch.

Look ’em up, folks; they were among “the brightest and the best” at their craft, individuals who honed their skills by practicing the written word and were quick to adapt to the picture tube. And then there were the battle-tested CBS News correspondents, who gravitated toward us, as did prominent broadcast Roger Welsch, Bud Lamoreaux, and John Leonard, New York Times Book Editor and Sunday Morning figures like Bill Moyers of PBS. Television Critic, courtesy Budlam Production Archive 18

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We took our lead from the reporting of Ed Murrow and his legion of radio correspondents who brought WWII in Europe into America’s living rooms, from Walter Cronkite and the first half-hour nightly news broadcast on network television, which featured weekly reports from the American heartland by a young story-teller, last name Kuralt, and from all the other contributors with maverick backgrounds who helped create the Sunday Morning style.

Of the three mavericks, Northshield was the grizzled veteran. His career included stints as an NBC News documentary producer, and he ran the Today show and the Huntley and Brinkley Nightly News for a time. It was a major undertaking for our small team: five minutes of television every week, shot on film, which was much more time-consuming than the electronic version. But mostly, we traveled down the backroads looking for those local stories that belonged on national television. Original reporting was our meat and potatoes. I eventually became the executive producer of what we referred to as the Saturday News, which was the first network evening news broadcast with a magazine format.

The one major obstacle we faced early on was the general sentiment within CBS News that we weren’t really a news program but some kind of hybrid that didn’t quite fit. Some of the “hard news” bosses, who had come up through the ranks fighting for two minutes for their stories, resented what they considered our “back of the book” soft features as a waste of precious air time. Top management, Bill Leonard, and his deputy, Bud Benjamin, Walter Cronkite’s longtime producer and an old friend, were solidly behind us but nearing retirement age. It was some of their management underlings and some newsroom staffers who silently seethed that we were getting good early reviews from the critics at the expense of the regular news broadcasts, especially the Dan Rather Evening News team.

Dan’s producers were having ratings issues as successors to “America’s Anchorman” Walter Cronkite, and Dan was the most competitive of all the anchormen I dealt with. He was unyielding, like the old commercial about having a tiger in your tank, and he began noticing that Northshield was constantly crowing about our success. A rift developed between the Rathers and the Kuralts.

One of the secrets of our early success was that a metric for our correspondents was they had to have extensive reporting experience from the world’s “hot spots.” And, if they developed a rapport with their connections for a lifetime, our theory went, we could present a vivid picture of how those lifetimes played out. So, for example, in a lifetime of world travels for various TV networks, correspondent Mort Dean is still in touch with those American servicemen he 19

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profiled 50 years ago. Dean’s reporting from Vietnam for the Cronkite News won him an Emmy. Cameraman/producer Greg Cooke, who was an untested battlefield cameraman when he first joined Dean in Vietnam, has been along for the whole ride, including their award-winning documentary American Medevac, which first appeared on PBS. Bob Brady from Washington Township, Pennsylvania, was a medevac pilot transporting Mort to report on the wounded GIs and those who had been killed in action on a dusty hilltop near firebase Hawk Hill in Quang Nam CBS Vietnam correspondent Mort Dean, Province. Dean lost track of Brady and the GIs courtesy of Mort Dean photo archives and Greg Cooke photo archives who made it out alive, but those memories of resolve and loss caused him to seek them out again about ten years ago for a documentary he made with Greg Cooke about Vietnam and its continued aftereffects. Dean has been in touch with them or their families ever since.

Richard Threlkeld, our “cover story” correspondent, covered every war from Vietnam until the Arab assault on the Twin Towers at the turn of the 21st century. In addition, for Sunday Morning, he made sense of stories from every major capital in the world. And, even after leaving for a bigger ABC paycheck, he was Mort Dean’s CBS producer/cameraman always checking in to see how “his” program Greg Cooke in Vietnam combat scene, was doing. Robert Lipsyte, a social critic and courtesy of Mort Dean photo archives and Greg Cooke photo archives prolific writer of teenage fiction, fit our pattern by embracing my idea that our sports stories were more than just about sports, that they dealt with a wider net of longevity and human accomplishment.

All of our contributors embraced the opportunity to do longer, more soul-searching interviews and get all that extra exposure for their work. But, while the correspondent Greg Cooke photo of Mort Dean coverage corps thought we were the cat’s meow, their of medevac documentary battle scene, colleagues in the newsroom, who referred to us courtesy of Mort Dean photo archives

and Greg Cooke photo archives 20

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as “the show with deer running through the woods,” would take convincing, too.

We were the Sunday guys, and we would have to find a whole new audience to sample our wares and a new generation of news managers who believed in our mission. That’s when I first began thinking it might take a series of miracles to become as established as 60 Minutes, the only untouchables in the news division.

That Kuralt imprint may be indelible for many now, but let’s face it, Charles died more than 25 years ago, and viewers drift on. Yet, it seems like only yesterday we were shining up a new plexiglass set, tuning up the trumpets, and practicing the art of saying goodbye without saying it, with just nature’s sounds — and silence. From the first day onward, we would begin experimenting with subject matter, making it more eclectic, less likely to appear in the headlines of your Sunday newspaper, but more likely to resonate in more thoughtful conversations later.

Charles was the one broadcaster who could make all that work, make every picture and word count, and what words they were. Anyone running into him on the road got that “aw shucks” greeting, a welcoming smile, and then the punch line, “So, where ya from,” — ice broken, conversation started.

That’s how you get folks to tell you things that they hadn’t thought to tell anyone else. It didn’t hurt that he looked like an everyman: a little rumpled, a bit overweight, with thinning hair.

He explained those advantages once, “I’m dealing with people who have never been on television before. My appearance puts people at ease. They don’t want to deal with big-city, hotCharles Kuralt “On The Road” to his next shot Adonises. They think, If that guy destination, courtesy of Sheera Bleckman Family Album can look like that, I can talk to him.

The early days of Sunday Morning produced abundant surprises. Charles’ gift of weaving the program into a fine quilt was a given. Shad Northshield was a birdwatcher who had done a coffee table picture book that was the inspiration for the nature pieces at the conclusion of each broadcast, something he had tried once at NBC to buffer the harshness of the tragic news events of 1968. There was the short introduction, then a brief voiceover, then nothing but the sounds of America’s natural habitats that struck a chord with the viewers. One I especially remember was about some woodpeckers looking for lunch in a Tennessee forest.

Kuralt wrote, “Red-headed woodpeckers being out and about may not be news 21

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to you, but if you’re a bug in a Tennessee tree — that’s a bulletin!” For the next minute and a half, those birds never stopped pecking. Viewers told us this was now sacred territory, never to be tampered with. Once, we mistimed the last segment and were forced to run the credits over the end piece. The audience didn’t like it, and they weren’t shy about telling us so.

Before we ever went on the air, our marching orders were pretty clear. It should be the best-written news program on television. We were, in every sense, a laboratory, mixing and matching to find the right formula. We dug deep to find talent that perhaps had never been on television before, like raconteur George Lang, owner of the landmark New York restaurant Café des Artistes, who became our food critic. Dr. Billy Taylor, the jazz pianist and historian, lent his expertise on a much-neglected American art form. Jeff Greenfield, a political wonk with a sharp sense of humor, was hired to do our television reviews. For a weekly “sports essay,” we grabbed Ray Gandolf, a reporter who could turn a phrase, from the CBS Morning News. The bosses chipped in by giving us one of their most seasoned correspondents, Richard Threlkeld, to do our “cover stories,” which all the other stuff rotated around. By the way, Ray Gandolf was no scoresquawking jock-world graduate but a gentle spirit with an acting background, typical of our unconventional new hires.

Ninety minutes is a lot of time to fill with access to a sole anchor who came in from the road on Saturday and left for the road on Monday morning, so in the beginning, we tried everything — business news, lifestyles, and even religious news, since that was the network programming we were replacing.

Pretty quickly, we discovered that we didn’t need to provide weekly coverage of a whole universe of subjects, that pieces could run longer if they “breathed” a lot, and that a slower pace was a better fit for Charles. We would be about the customs, culture, and people of America — almost all of the time.

As our blank piece of paper began to fill up, we reached another milestone.

It was really too simple: If our brainstorming sessions caused one of us to shout, “That’s a good story,” that was usually the key to getting it approved. It was our zeitgeist moment. All long-form news programs or “magazine shows” need a “bank” of stories so they can be a little ahead of themselves, and we were breathing hard those first few months. There wasn’t enough room for us in the Broadcast Center, those who doubted our authenticity claimed, so we were exiled to temporary space across Eleventh Avenue and heading for the Hudson River. Actually, we were situated fashionably above the Goodyear Tire Store, right next to a Greek fast food joint, The Madison, which would send up appetizing cheeseburger aromas. One morning, the first arrival opened our 22

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men’s room door and was met with a strong blast of “weed” that overwhelmed all other senses. So, we nicknamed our new headquarters “The Top Of The Tire.”

We were a rebel band that loved our non-conformist label.

Charles’ vision that we be accountable for everyday life in America is not the only diversion from the “real” news we will celebrate in the following pages. He was an ardent basketball fan of his North Carolina Tar Heels. He loved it when I went to the local off-track betting shop and included him in my wagers on the Belmont. He gave a big thumbs-up on thoroughbred racing stories Woodie contributed on Secretariat and Saratoga, and he was almost starry-eyed when I took him to Gates Mills, Ohio, to interview the legendary pitcher Bob Feller.

Baseball heroes in our time were real people who, for the most part, stayed in the city where they made their fame. It was the perfect sport for an unhurried America, without a clock ticking and with small-town heroes. It really was the game that ruled the Kuralt/Lamoreaux curiosity about sports as a sort of metaphor for life. All of the sports segments supplied by Ray Gandolf, Bob Lipsyte, and Woodie, and those I produced for Kuralt to narrate, were at the top of Charles’ list of weekly contributions by our specialists. Thus, there will be a variety of baseball tales to chew on during the ensuing chapters. Charles would have liked that, too.

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Chapter 2

“Growing Up With The News” I had been a “news Junkie” beginning when I was the kid known as “Little Buddy.” As an only child, the radio was my best friend. That got me imagining what the pictures might be. On December 7, 1941, I was practically glued to the RCA box, listening to my New York football Giants take on the Brooklyn Dodgers on their way to the NFL championship game against the hated Chicago Bears. My two favorites, wingback Ward Cuff and tailback Tuffy Leemans were not faring very well against their crosstown rivals from Brooklyn when the announcers were cut off in mid-sentence: “We interrupt this program,” boomed a strange voice, “to bring you a bulletin from CBS. Scouts in the Pacific report that the Japanese have attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.” I remember yelling to my father, “Dad, did you hear the news? What does it mean? Are we going to war?” I was seven years old.

Myworld,andthatofmillionsofAmericans,wasabouttochangedramatically.

I began listening to Edward R. Murrow, who opened each broadcast with, “This is London.” His report was peppered with the sounds of Hitler’s bombs and rockets going off and concluded with his signature, “Good night and good luck.”

And there was: “This is H.V. Kaltenborn with the news at this hour,” both the straight talk, bad news of the Nazi blitz, and the terrifying German march across Europe. I found kernels of hope by tuning in occasionally and hearing Gabriel Heatter proclaim, “Good evening, everyone. There is good news tonight,” which became his catchphrase when the U.S. Navy sank its first Japanese destroyer.

(The destroyers Hayate and Kisaragi were sunk by the US on Jan 15, 1942, at the Battle of Wake Island - one by coastal batteries and one by Marine aircraft.)

And I listened sparingly to the most popular broadcast of them all. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.”

That was the signature, staccato opening of Walter Winchell, a New York gossip columnist who preyed on the vulnerable, won the praise of FDR for his support 24

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of entering WWII, then picked the wrong horse when he went to bat for Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. They didn’t call it “fake news” then, but whatever it was, Winchell was a master at it. He was clearly more showman than newsman, and he commanded more than 50 percent of the listeners in his time period. In the end, innuendo and vicious rumor-mongering lost out to factbased journalism properly sourced when Ed Murrow’s reporting proved a major factor in bringing down Joe McCarthy and Walter Winchell with him.

Murrow was a revered figure when I joined the news division, and Jim Mackay, the eventual voice of ABC Sports, was just getting started at CBS with an evening sports show. He lived in a condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when, one day, his wife sent him down to the basement to do the laundry. With time to kill, he went up to the sidewalk for a smoke and discovered one of the huge CBS remote production trucks fired up and ready to go. Some of the tech guys were milling around outside, and Mackay wanted to know what was going on. One of them told him that Murrow was upstairs across the street waiting to do an interview with Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the UN, that he was getting a little antsy and would Jim maybe have time to go upstairs to jolly him up a little bit. When he reached Murrow’s suite, Hammarskjold, who was not exactly warm and fuzzy, was just arriving, and Murrow asked Jim to stick around for the pre-interview chit-chat to help him break the ice. When Mackay finally looked at his watch and suddenly realized how long he had been gone and that he hadn’t finished doing the laundry, he hurried downstairs. By the time he got back to his apartment, his wife wanted to know where the hell he had been. And Jim Mackay reportedly replied, “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

The baseball play-by-play guys were another source of my early education, from the seductive southern deliveries of the Yankees’ Mel Allen — “Mantle swings and there’s a long drive going deep to right field….going...going..it is gone, a Ballantine Blast.” — to the Dodgers’ Red Barber — “Folks, Jackie Robinson is tearin’ up the pea patch.” Allen was a smooth, unabashed “pitchman,” while “The Old Redhead” was a true reporter who put a “Dixie” touch into his calls while at the same time failing to acknowledge the huge racial barrier that Robinson was attempting to hurdle. His sponsors, “and that home run folks is an Old Goldie” (Old Golds was a cigarette), would have undoubtedly had Barber fired. Late in his career, Barber moved over to the Yankees broadcasts when the Dodgers let him go. On a warm summer day in the cavernous 73,000-capacity old Yankee Stadium, Barber used to big crowds there, “reported” that the place looked strangely half empty. Yankees management, concerned about its image, called 25

Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning

him on the carpet and scolded him that he should stay away from talking about all those empty seats. “We need to be more positive in your approach,” they said. Barber didn’t like their interference with his judgment and went home to Tallahassee. Barber later appeared on NPR every Friday in conversation with Bob Edwards in 1981-1992. All of the above proved to be lessons that helped me find balance in my news judgment, which I carried with me throughout my 40 years at CBS News.

Not long after Pearl Harbor, my father, Ernest S. (Bud) Lamoreaux Jr., was drafted into the Army, and my beautiful mother, Trudy, bought dark shades for our rented apartment so we could turn on the lights at night. We practiced air raid drills in school by hiding under the desks. But I never really got used to the sirens going off, always wondering if it was the real thing. Much to my mother’s relief, my father never shipped out.

Oddly, my memories of my dad involve the movie stars that he idolized — Jimmy Cagney, Judy Garland, John Barrymore, complicated, larger than life, characters all. And his story that sticks to me is Barrymore’s deathbed statement to his biographer Gene Fowler in “Good Night, Sweet Prince.” Before he drew his last breath, Barrymore pulled Fowler in close and uttered these final words, “Gene, is it true that you’re the bastard son of Buffalo Bill?”

My parents had a passing relationship with Nelle Lee, an aspiring writer who had come to New York from Monroeville, Alabama, to find her literary voice. However, it wasn’t until Ten-year-old Bud Lamoreaux and his later, when the ground-breaking novel “To Kill father, and as a young man with his parents, Bud Lamoreaux family photo a Mockingbird,” a satirical look at bigotry in collection small-town America, was published in 1960, that I discovered that the author was Nelle Harper Lee. I never asked Nelle much about Monroeville. That was surely an opportunity lost for a young, aspiring journalist.

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Another news milepost for me was June 6, 1944, D-Day on the Normandy beaches in France when Allied forces stormed ashore, with thousands of GIs giving their lives for freedom while launching the offensive that would, in little more than a year, bring down the brutal reign of Adolf Hitler. I saved a letter that my mom wrote to my dad on D-Day. “My darling,” it begins, “This is a momentous day, my sweet, and as the bells tolled as I lay safe and snug in my bed, I said a silent prayer for our boys over there. In my heart, I thanked dear God that you, who mean everything in the world to me, are safe and sound on this side of the Big Pond. Can you imagine how excited Junior was when news of the invasion was broadcast? He just had his ear glued to the radio, trying to get ready for school and yelling all the new reports to me in the kitchen. What a youngster.”

I was bedridden with rheumatic fever in the summer of 1941, and it was then that I developed a voracious appetite for books. My parents were of modest means, but they more than satisfied my reading habit. First, they got me a library card, then books by Steinbeck and Hemingway — and sports writer Red Smith and boy’s book legend John R. Tunis. I found that I heard those writers, and others too, singing their cadences and styles as I pored over those thousands of scripts as a television producer for 40 years.

Small-town America has been part of my life almost from birth. When I was a kid, growing up just north of the Bronx, I enlisted a couple of friends in a “publishing venture” called the Mount Vernon Junior News— nothing heavy, just stories that interested us and, we foolishly thought, a lot of other folks too.

There were posts about sports, especially baseball, boxing, and horse racing, which were “big time” in those days. My mother would mimeograph them, and we would take them to Mrs. Shulman’s candy store, where she would attempt to sell them for 5 cents, right alongside the New York World-Telegram, the New York Daily News, and the New York Journal-American, which also sold for 5 cents apiece.

Fast-forward to Lexington, Virginia, where I was a 17-year-old freshman at Washington and Lee University. It was a long train ride from Penn Station through Harrisburg, PA, where the car decoupled in the middle of the night and rumbled on into Buena Vista, Virginia, at daylight. I had never been away from home before. General Dwight Eisenhower was running for president in the winter of that year and I had attached myself to the local commercial radio station, WREL, as a weekend newsreader and disc jockey.

The school is famous for holding a mock political convention in presidential election years for the party out of power. The tradition began in 1908, and in 27

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1952, I wangled a spot on the WREL broadcast team. It just so happened that Edward R. Murrow’s CBS documentary program See It Now was doing a piece on the Ike nomination and sent a film crew down to pick up some of our audio coverage.

The Murrow producer was one of those pioneering newsmen who helped bridge the gap from print to Mock GOP convention radio team, Washington & radio to television. Joe Wershba was an Lee University student newspaper photo of radio broadcast team, Bud Lamoreaux in foreground unforgettable character, much like the with glasses, Budlam Productions archive hard-charging newspaper editor played

by Cary Grant in the 1940 film, “My Girl Friday.” Years later, Joe and I would have offices on the same floor at CBS, he as a producer at 60 Minutes, me as the executive producer of Sunday Morning. As Casey Stengel once told his baseball writers, “And you could look it up.”

I transferred to the University of Missouri School of Journalism and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Journalism in 1955. I do remember my Mizzou days fondly. The copy editor for The Missourian, Mr. Bill Brickley, taught me how to write headlines. The news editor, Frank Sharp — he was Mr., too — taught me to edit myself and, more importantly, that everybody, and he stressed everybody, needs an editor. He sent me out once to an elementary school to cover a measles vaccine mass inoculation. It was my first byline, and Mr. Sharp’s headline read, “First Came the Shot and Then Came the Lollipop.” I also did the early morning newscast on KFRU, the commercial station in Columbia, where I learned some of the basics of putting a newscast together.

One night, after my girl-of-the-moment and her sorority sister gave me a hard time, I warned them that I would be mentioning them the next morning and that they should tune in. The hog reports always came just before I signed off, so here’s what they heard. “Prices on the Kansas City livestock markets this morning are as follows: canners and cutters 4.60 and 5.80 (pause); barrows and gilts 5.20 and 5.60 (longer pause); and Hattens and Stowells (even longer pause) 3.80 and 4.60.” I just happened to pass by Jane Hatten and Elaine Stowell on their way to class that morning, surrounded by their sorority sisters, who were teasing them mercilessly.

But back to CBS and the real world, Kuralt was on duty at midnight on February 3, 1959, when an American Airlines Lockheed Electra inbound from 28

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Chicago crashed into the East River with 73 aboard. First reports from the wire services were of survivors spotted in the water. The Assignment Desk swung into action, ordering camera crews to the watery scene and to LaGuardia Airport, where apprehensive friends and relatives would be waiting. Kuralt yelled at me to start calling the hospitals and set up contacts for information on any of the passengers and crew. “And remember,” he said, “we want the story ahead of all the wire services and newspapers.”

Charles had company that night on the desk, Robert Schakne, who later became one of those all-purpose award-winning correspondents we called “firemen.” I learned later that the two assignment editors had flipped a coin to decide who was to stay to coordinate the coverage and who was to leave for the scene. Kuralt called heads, picked up his tape recorder, and headed out the door.

It was a long night as ambulances kept arriving at the hospitals, almost all with grim news. The survivor list was short, but I do remember a nurse telling me that an eight-year-old boy named Bobby Sullivan had made it, but his parents and his two sisters didn’t. That hit me hard. In all, there were eight survivors.

Kuralt had hitched a ride on a motorcycle and almost didn’t make it to LaGuardia because the highways had become jammed with cars trying to get a view of the accident scene in the dark waters of the East River. He described that wild ride with a complete stranger, “He drove that thing like a stunt rider, squeezing through impossibly narrow spaces at full speed and, in no time, he banked hard right and onto the LaGuardia Airport grounds.” Once the biker reached his destination, he turned around and roared off before Kuralt could thank him or even get his name. When Charles reached the arrivals room, the sight of the stunned and weeping relatives and friends of the passengers stopped him short. He had never been involved in a tragedy of this magnitude, and he was having trouble processing it. It was only when they approached him and asked if he had any news of survivors that he was able to pull out his microphone and get some sound bites for the next TV newscast. We were in a television wasteland when it came to production values, and Kuralt had just rung the bell.

Ironically, the history books record another plane crash on that day as rivaling ours for the nation’s attention — three rock and roll legends were killed in a fiery crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The dead were Richie Valens, J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson, and Buddy Holly. The legend was cemented when Don McLean wrote his 1979 hit, “American Pie,” as “the day the music died.” What remains with me from that day was a survivor, Bobby Sullivan, the boy who lost his family in the East River crash — and that lucky Kuralt coin toss.

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When our story caught management’s eye, especially Kuralt’s reporting, he got a big promotion and in turn, wrote a letter to management recommending me for a newswriter’s job. And when the unions shut down the city’s newspapers, CBS News added programming to the daily television lineup, and the newsroom boss tapped me to be one of the new writers. Of course, I would be staying on the graveyard shift, but now I would be writing the news instead of collating it for somebody else. Occasionally, I would get to work on the Saturday afternoon program where radio veterans Robert Trout and Martin Agronsky rotated as anchorman each week.

Agronsky had been a decorated foreign correspondent for NBC covering the war in Europe and North Africa. His “Agronsky and Company,” a syndicated weekend talk show that featured Washington “movers and shakers,” lasted for almost 20 years and often drew the ire of the White House. Trout had been one of Murrow’s boys in Europe and had an eloquent gift of speech that carried him for a remarkable 70 years in broadcasting, almost all of them at CBS News. He once explained that “long life is a special gift to journalists. We can enjoy the satisfaction of closure if we live long enough to appreciate the qualities of the people we covered, long enough to understand what our stories really meant.

And ultimately, how they turned out.”

These were two gentlemen heavyweights, each with a particular idiosyncrasy.

Agronsky had a habit of talking very, very, very slowly, especially at the beginning of every broadcast, and the producer would inevitably start panicking at the thought of running out of time because some of his hard work would be lost to the clock. Someone suggested that as soon as Agronsky came on the air and said, “Good afternoon,” the stage manager should give him a “speed up,” a signal usually reserved for the end of the broadcast when time was, indeed, running out. Robert Trout was always “dressed to the nines” in his Saville Row suits and tailor-made Burberry shirts that had to be laundered just so. Every month, a basket of his shirts was dropped off with the purser of the Cunard Line’s Queen Elizabeth to be laundered in London because the New York City tailor shops were not up to his standards.

Walter Cronkite had not yet made it to the prime-time news schedule, but he had been on the network hosting the Twentieth Century documentary series produced by his old friend and mine, the revered producer Bud Benjamin. He had also hosted the Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley and anchored a nightly newscast at WTOP-TV, our affiliate in Washington. And he was commuting to a little-watched five-minute afternoon newscast at 1 p.m. above the railroad tracks in Grand Central Station. The writers were generally leery of working with 30

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Cronkite because he was considered an outsider. So, when his regular writer took a leave of absence, and the other writers declined the assignment, the newsroom boss pointed to me as the illogical replacement.

I was jammed into a little windowless back office outside the wire machines. Walter had an office behind me with a window that overlooked an Early Cronkite at microphone in radio studio, taken elevator shaft, not exactly commodious by Bud Lamoreaux during time as producer for surroundings for a rising star at the CBS Evening News, Budlam Productions archive network. When he walked in that first day, he sort of grumbled his name and walked to the back. I sort of grunted my name back and kept busy at my Smith Corona. There wasn’t much in the way of video or graphics in those days, so the copy was everything.

I still have the yellowed script. It was August 20, 1959. The steelworkers were on strike; Ike was lobbying Congress to beef up foreign military aid to two billion dollars — $2,000,000,000 may look like a big number, but it is a spit in the ocean now; Cuba’s ousted dictator Flugencio Batista was headed for a new home off the coast of Africa; Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcars would be in the air over Hawaii trying to catch the nose capsule of the Discovery Six satellite when it was scheduled to parachute out of orbit toward the waters of the Pacific.

Walter made a few scribbled changes, but otherwise, it sailed through. I gulped.

My first few days with Cronkite were pure agony. It wasn’t that he criticized my copy; he just didn’t say anything. My stomach was a wreck. I knew that he had been an ace World War II reporter for the United Press and had a sophisticated view of the world. I scanned every tidbit on the wire machines for anything that would make a Cronkite story, rolling through reams of AP and UP and Reuters copy. And then it hit me. A Reuters staffer had been filing almost daily from Laos about the escalating firefights between the Montagnard tribesmen and rebel forces. The Communist Viet Cong had begun infiltrating into the northern provinces, and there was fear that the drive would carry all the way down to the South Vietnam border. Little did we know what would happen next, but I milked that story as it began to grow legs for all it was worth. The anchorman seemed pleased, and the assignment lasted about six months until the regular guy returned.

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Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning

A decade later, when Dan Rather joined me as the new anchor of the Weekend Evening News broadcasts I was producing, a jovial Cronkite threw a party for us at his East Side townhouse in Manhattan. He was in fine fettle, toasting his former writer and his fast-track White House correspondent. Watergate was just beginning to fester, and Cronkite’s reporting would have a major impact on the resignation of President Richard Nixon. When Walter retired in 1981 and choosing the successor to his chair became an internal dogfight, a serious rift developed between Rather and “America’s Anchorman.” (More on that later.)

Not all of my early years were rosy. The Cronkite job hadn’t prepared me for the reality that another good assignment might not follow. I was still the junior writer, and the newsroom was overstaffed. A kindly neighbor put me in touch with a higher-up at CBS Sports, which had just acquired the rights to NCAA football. They needed someone to write and be an associate producer on a prime-time telecast to trumpet the new season and, if that worked out, to do the same on the pre-and post-game shows.

I figured, what the heck? It’s not news where I ultimately want to be, but it will be a new experience, and it proved to be another world. The sports guys were tied into the marketing guys, who were tied into the programming guys.

There was no longer any journalistic “separation of powers.” At CBS News, the newsroom folks had no contact with the folks who sold the soap. But sports had some terrific directors who had been inventing special effects, such as slow motion, that were revolutionizing the industry, people like Frank Chirkinian, who brought the Masters golf tournament into prominence. And there was Jack Whitaker, who had been dubbed the Eric Sevareid of sports. Jack was a gem of an essayist, and I would later work again with him on some thoroughbred racing telecasts.

But first, there was that prime-time hour to kick off the college football season.

In our first planning meeting with the sports chief, Bill McPhail, Chirkinian, Whitaker, and the marketing and salespeople, I was brought up short by a remark by the representative from college football, Asa Bushnell, the head of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, a crusty old sort, who apparently didn’t get around very much. MacPhail began by mentioning the NCAA, and Bushnell stopped him in his tracks. Bushnell said it was his belief that we should never refer to it as the NC-double-A because it might be confused with the N-double-ACP. Nobody said anything, but there were glances all around the room. Bushnell’s racial insensitivity was so noted. His was not the only boardroom, I surmised, where that kind of talk was tolerated.

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We brought in all of our talent to plan the program, and I drew the short straw. I was tasked with taking Mel Allen, who was strictly the Yankees game announcer, to West Point, where Paul Dietzel had become the new head coach and brought with him the Chinese Bandits concept from LSU. The Bandits were a third platoon of irregulars who were sent into the game to disrupt the opposition, and Allen was supposed to ask Dietzel about them and if this concept could really work at a place where discipline was a way of life.

Those were still the days of film, so every reporter knew that there were about nine minutes in each magazine loaded in the camera. I briefed Allen, who was used to talking in an uninterrupted southern blue streak, and told him he needed to ask Dietzel brief, succinct questions. As we stood there in Michie Stadium, high above the Hudson with the sun going down, the camera rolled.

I pointed to Mel, and this was when everything began to unravel, “This is Mel Allen here on the plains of West Point where Cadets have been playing football since before the turn of the century, etc., etc., etc....where Blanchard and Davis brought them national titles toward the end of World War Two... etc., etc., etc.… where the Chinese Bandits will now roam...etc...etc...etc.... This is a place where the cannons roar whenever Army scores a touchdown, etc., etc., etc... Speaking of cannons, you had a great running back at LSU named Billy Cannon...etc., etc., etc…Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

Dietzel, whose nickname was Ipana Paul (a popular toothpaste of that era) because of his smiling countenance, was no slouch when it came to logorrhea either, so before he was finished with his first answer, we were out of film. Then we put in a new magazine and ran out of sun. We managed to scrape a few minutes for the show out of his first answer. I found that you definitely learned something new every day in this business. And I still cringe when I remember my first review in Variety of our “epic” prime-time hour. It practically said the only thing good about it was that we got on and off the air on time.

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Chapter 3

“Heywood Hale Broun: Master of the Metaphor” When I finished my apprenticeship at CBS News, the bosses moved me up in the decision-making process, and the assignment was to produce the news coverage of the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. My lead correspondent was Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, a wordsmith of the first order, who had been a sports writer covering the Yankees before spending WWII as an artillery sergeant in Europe and then took to acting bit parts on Broadway and television.

His mother and father, Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale, a feminist who never took the Broun name, were part of an elite corps of writers in New York who formed the Algonquin Round Table, intellectual influencers like humorist and drama critic Robert Benchley, poet, punster and storyteller Dorothy Parker and screenwriter and director George S. Kaufman. They were indeed the talk of the town. Father Heywood was a founder of the Newspaper Guild and considered the dean of the New York columnists. Ruth Hale was an early leader in the fight for women’s rights.

They gave little Woodie a seat at that roundtable at the age of seven, and he was allowed to participate in some “grownup” talk. The Round Table exposed young Broun to a vast storehouse of knowledge and witticisms. They thrust and parried their verbal swords at each other weekly and became known as “the vicious circle.” Here is a small sampling of the sparring that young Broun witnessed: Dorothy Parker: “I demand three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”

Robert Benchley: “I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes and into a martini.”

George S. Kaufman told an actor he directed, “I watched your performance from the rear of the theater. Wish you were here.”

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There were other influencers that obviously had an impact on Woodie: Harold Ross, a founder and longtime editor-in-chief of the New Yorker and the biggest power broker at The Table; Ring Lardner, his father’s drinking buddy, short story writer, and sportswriter from the old “gee whiz” school; Harpo Marx, the pantomimist in the Marx Brothers comedy, who, like his brother Groucho, had an acerbic tongue coupled with mischievous eyebrows.

Harpo used his appearance to entertain, too.

Maybe that was the forerunner of Woodie’s collection of colorful jackets. It took a lot of quirky things to make the Broun package succeed, and I often wondered if the biblical Joseph coat seed was planted way back when by Harpo.

His parents, who subsequently divorced, both died before World War II, leaving Woodie as their only heir. After the war, he became a Broadway and television character actor when his New York sports writing gig ran out. So, he had all the makings of a solid, if somewhat florid, television personality with his loud jackets, his merry mustache, and his suitcase full of words — oh, what words!

Woodie became a popular figure on television in the 1960s and ’70s in his crazy quilt sports coats, remembered most for his dry sense of humor and literary sensibility in a whirlwind of sports reporting, a landscape heretofore cluttered with clichés. He became “appointment” television every Saturday night on CBS News for his informative and entertaining essays that were more about America than just sports. And they were usually five minutes in length, using up a huge piece of the half-hour broadcast with lyrical, charming

Woodie Broun in his signature shocking plaid jackets, Budlam Productions Archive

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essays that broke down the mystery surrounding Joe DiMaggio, Jack Nicklaus, and Vince Lombardi, Super Bowl I, the Munich Olympics, the Ali-Frazier fight, the roller derby, wrist wrestling, and Secretariat. He told me early on, “I have a devotion to alliteration because it sounds good. I like sentences to gallop.” I bought into that sound, and we made it his trademark.

We had been at it for a couple of years, covering the human side of the stars and their understudies, to the big stories and the not-so-little ones that are sprinkled like little red, white, and blue dots all across the lower 48. Management had given us carte blanche to create what were called television sports news “enterprisers” for every telecast of the Saturday edition of the CBS Evening News with Roger Mudd. This would be a first for a network evening newscast. Mudd was a Southern gentleman, a presence in the anchor chair, and a Washington lifer. He had a strict ethos about the news being straightforward and civicminded, but he was amused by our irreverent approach. It was often the last piece in the broadcast, and a grin would appear as he signed off, “That’s the news this Saturday night….” “That’s the news” — it has resonated with me ever since.

We got lucky with the reviewers. Time magazine headlined its half-page story “The Loveable Professor,” which was effusive with its praise, “Broun’s relaxed, reflected reports are easily the best sports casting on TV.” Newsweek followed with its own valentine. But when the magazine asked CBS for a picture of Woodie on assignment, the CBS powers that be didn’t deem it important enough to send a publicity Woodie Broun in front of Memorial photographer to Baltimore, where we were Stadium, Baltimore, shot by author covering the World Series.

Bud Lamoreaux, Budlam Productions Archive So, I bought a cheap little box camera and took the picture that later appeared in the magazine alongside the valentine. I didn’t get a photographer credit, either. We still hadn’t convinced the newsroom that sports reports belonged on the evening news, but we were gaining a little ground.

Then the New York Times TV critic Jack Gould wrote a long profile entitled “CBS Man Champions the Nonexpert: Heywood Hale Broun is the bemused and amusing champion of the nonexpert in sports, a welcome antidote to the exathletes and approved play-by-play specialists who wallow in gee-whiz banality.

He has shown that there is a market for wit and substance, for a droll outlook 36

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that makes hearing about athletic competition as enjoyable as seeing it.”

We were winning converts.

After a couple of days of haggling with the Olympic authorities, it took a late-night clandestine meeting with a generalissimo bedecked with more medals than Napoleon to get us the necessary passes. First up were the opening ceremonies at the Zocalo Bud Lamoreaux with Woodie Broun, Budlam Square in Mexico City, where the Productions Archive presidential palace loomed large. I had brought along cameraman Herbie Schwartz from New York and soundman Larry Gianneschi from Chicago.

Herbie was a tough former newspaper photog who had fought his own wars on the streets of Gotham. Larry had been an audio guy for a lot of Edward R. Murrow documentaries that took him to some unwelcome places in the developing world.

Mexico City had been on edge in the weeks before the games. A student movement had been protesting against police brutality at their rallies. Then, ten days before the festivities began, all hell broke loose. Armed troops attempted to arrest movement leaders, with thousands of university students present. Heavy gunfire broke out for the next two hours. The official count issued by the authorities was four dead. Eyewitnesses reported seeing hundreds of bodies being trucked away. The first Latin country to host the Olympics was not getting Woodie Broun, Budlam Productions Archive the positive image it was seeking.

With the student unrest issue ever present, we arrived in the Zocalo and learned that a cast of thousands would be the main act. Herbie looked at me and said something like, “We need to get on the roof of that palace to get the full picture of this event.” But the palace was heavily guarded by Mexican Army troops and off-limits to the world press, so we went around to a side entrance and brandished our NYC Police Press passes, which were shaped like badges.

Herbie, carrying his camera on his shoulder with Larry hooked to him by a cable that took on all the appearances of a master leading his unruly dog, proceeded 37

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to lead the way, shouting, “Policia, Policia,” as we charged past the sentries.

We were in, but we had a lot of stairs to climb and sentry posts to pass before we got to the roof. Each time Herbie’s war cry worked, and pretty soon, we were on the roof and setting up our camera inside two of the parapets. It was only then that I looked around, and there, 20 feet away, was Mexican President Bud Lamoreaux, Woodie Broun, and his wife Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, accompanied by Jane at the Mexico City Olympics 1968, Budlam Productions Archive only a couple of bodyguards, about to review the festivities. I glanced over at the crew, and they were as agog as I was.

Woodie, whose wife Jane was a presence on many of our trips abroad, wrote furiously on the back of a used envelope and turned to the camera, “The might of mass drills like this one in the Zocalo Square is part of the colorful pageantry the modern Olympiad substitutes for the lost simplicity of classic times. There are as many Mexican gymnasts here as there were Greeks in Athens of the Golden Age.” Jack Gould took notice again in The New York Times, “The ABC staff was characteristically breathless, not because of Mexico City’s altitude but because of electronic habit, while Heywood Hale Broun, the droll observer for CBS, took a detached and sophisticated view and was much more fun to hear.”

Later, at the Olympic Stadium, we were covering a medal ceremony from, would you believe this, the empty Presidential box — Herbie said, “Hey, it’s empty, and it’s got a much better angle,” — when U.S. sprinters John Carlos and Tommy Smith raised their gloved right hands in a Black Power salute after their medals were hung around their necks. America winced, and the political fur began to fly. We had a hand in the immediate aftermath of this major civil rights event in Mexico, and we will expand on that later, along with our coverage of the massacre in Munich.

1968 was also a year of infamy for the good old USA. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the spiritual and emotional leader of the civil rights movement, and Democratic presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy were killed by assassins only months apart. The Tet Offensive laid bare America’s vulnerability in Vietnam and gave Lyndon Johnson second thoughts about running for reelection. And when Walter Cronkite decided to leave his anchor chair to visit the battlefront and returned to announce his opposition to the war, a rare editorial judgment for America’s Anchorman, the President of the United States decided, as the boxing 38

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guys used to say, to throw in the towel after Senator Eugene McCarthy’s nearwin over Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Since I had been Cronkite’s writer for a spell before he took over the Evening News from Douglas Edwards, I knew that this veteran wire service reporter was loath to ever express his own opinions on air. So, this was a big deal.

Late on the evening of that fateful broadcast, Dr. Frank Stanton, the studious, longtime CBS president and heir-apparent to chairman and founder William S. Paley, was in his Park Avenue apartment when the phone rang. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is alleged to have said, “Frank, this is your president. Are you trying to fuck me, Frank?” Later, LBJ reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.” Johnson made known his decision not to run for re-election a few nights later in a talk to a national television audience.

In reflecting back on that calamitous year, I got to thinking that there were some good things that happened — Pavarotti made his debut at the Met, William Styron wrote ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner” about a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, and St. Louis pitcher Bob Gibson, a fiery competitor whose every pitch had hitters quaking in their cleats, gave up only 1.12 runs per game, a feat not likely to ever be duplicated.

And there were some stories that Woodie and I filed that we thought were pretty special, too -- Peanuts creator Charles Schulz told us why he decided to send Snoopy to enter the World Wrist Wrestling championships in Petaluma, California. As Schulz explained it, “I think it’s because the strip has a feeling of fantasy. We’re never quite sure how good Snoopy is at these things. We know if Charlie Brown went, he’d lose, for sure. We know if Lucy went, she would probably win, see. But we’re never quite sure with Snoopy.”

Riding high in an airboat in the Florida Everglades, somewhere along the Tamiami Trail, Woodie mused about the power of nature, “Alone in the primeval swamp, man, just for a moment, faces his own puniness and the somber natural forces which threaten to engulf him. And then, with a sigh of relief, he feels beneath his feet the airboat that will take him back to his natural ambiance.” We were headed back to Cooper’s Airboats for lunch—best item on the menu: frog legs as big as pig’s feet. “Open up the throttle, Mr. Cooper.”

In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, we were intrigued by the story of the oldest minor league football franchise and its unusual alliance with the nuns at a convent school. We were also discovering tiny Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, that had become literally an Olympic gymnastics factory. And we got some tips from the kids at the National Marbles Championships on the Jersey Shore. The fun and games took on a slightly different tone in Wildwood when 39

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a college scholarship was offered to the winner, and it became, according to Woodie, “serious business under adult supervision.”

And from Saratoga, he began his essay with a fervent prayer that this old warhorse of a race track remain the same forever, “On a bright August morning, as the horses gallop into readiness for Saratoga’s 103rd meeting, one can only hope that the march of progress can be persuaded to bypass this lovely spot for — oh — let’s say another 103 years.” Then it was time for lunch at “Chicken Sadie’s,” the best fried Woodie Broun, Budlam Productions Archive chicken in the whole universe.

Woodie and I actually got a year’s head start on Kuralt and his “On The Road” series. However, we were on a different beat as the “sports guys,” although our mission was somewhat similar. Network television news was old school then and sometimes pretty bland. Never before had two wordsmiths the likes of Kuralt and Broun livened up the proceedings with their linguistic gifts, especially on the same network. But our first year was a rocky one. Dick Salant had just returned as president in a palace coup that ousted Murrow’s old producer, Fred Friendly, and he was reported to be displeased with the hiring of an out-of-work Broadway actor with a large mustache posing as a CBS News correspondent, Woodie’s Horse Racing at Saratoga Racetrack, Nyra Photo newspaper reporting days be damned. Archive, Courtesy New York Racing Association We had covered the Westminster Kennel Club show at Madison Square Garden, where Woodie compared the haircuts of some of the owners to those of some of their canines, tried a few studio pieces that didn’t work either for the new boss and then we were pushed out on the road for one last gasp.

Paul Greenberg, the producer of the Mudd News who had hired me, was a tough taskmaster under the gun to create more long-form pieces and make his signature broadcast. It was the first evening newscast to be formatted with magazine-style stories. So he called me in and told me essentially to get my butt out of town and bring back some gold. I now had two daughters, with a third on 40

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the way, and my wife, Sue, back home in Connecticut, so I could not afford to be out of work. Jack Nicklaus had won his second Masters in 1965, and he would be defending his title at Augusta the following week. I grabbed that story by the throat and started making phone calls.

Jack had an agent, but it was kind of a loose arrangement, and the agent agreed to give me Jack’s number at an Augusta motel. To my surprise, he answered the phone, and I convinced him to let us follow him around the golf course while he made notes for his title defense. I took a deep breath! I knew he had a reputation for being a little standoffish, but he couldn’t have been more accommodating.

When we showed up on the practice range, he was perfecting his five-iron: soft ones to a caddy holding a towel 170 yards away, hard ones to another caddy with a towel 185 yards away. He never missed the towel. That and a good interview, and we had some gold to take back to New York. True to form, Nicklaus won his third Masters that year in the tournament’s first back-to-back victories.

One of those Black caddies was Willie Peterson, who got his first loop at Augusta National when he was 16 years old. He’d spent more than a few years at his trade getting to know the place like an old book. The pair soon became known for their theatrics at Masters time, Willie jumping for joy when Jack made an important putt and Jack shaking his putter when the putts disappeared into the hole. Lurking in the background was the unspoken racism that existed among the tournament’s hierarchy. That will be dealt with in a later chapter.

Nicklaus’ultimatequestforperfection,ofwinningmoremajorchampionships than anyone in the long history of the game, took its toll on his relationships with a lot of the other players. But he later revealed his human side again in a locker room conversation with Woodie. Secretariat had just smashed the long Triple Crown jinx in the 1973 Belmont in a record-setting performance that should stand for the ages. Woodie recalled the conversation this way, “I watched the race in my living room all alone,” Jack said. “As that horse came down the stretch, widening his lead further and further with no urging, I applauded, and I cried.” And Woodie responded, “I told him I thought I knew why he cried.”

Invited to explain, he said, “Perfectionism is painful. You, Jack, of all the athletes I have met, are the most concentrated, the most conscious of the demands of perfection. That horse, flying over the ground like a big, wingless bird, was a kind of perfection, too. The race was won, but there was something more to do: show the speed and power that was in his blood like lightning. I cried too, Jack.”

What followed the Nicklaus Masters adventure was a dizzying array of trips across the country — to St. Louis, where Sportsman’s Park was going under the wrecker’s ball and Fred Stockstick, the Cardinals head groundskeeper who 41

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had been with the club since 1905, lamented the end of the good old days. In Baltimore, we found the Robinson boys, Frank and Brooks, who would go on to win the World Series with the Orioles. In Los Angeles, we profiled Joe Frazier, a young man of steel from South Carolina who was just beginning a journey that would take him to the heavyweight championship and some brutal showdowns with Muhammed Ali. There was still no contract for Woodie, who was working week to week.

Quite suddenly and out of the blue, persistence finally paid off during a trip to Gulfstream Park just north of Miami. The subject was Buckpasser, a regallybred thoroughbred with the looks and demeanor of a Hollywood star. He was supposed to be the first Triple Crown winner since Citation 20 years earlier. But a crack developed in one of his hooves, and he was day-to-day on the racetrack.

A colorful blanket had been thrown over his back, and Woodie began scribbling in a notebook, “So caparisoned,” he wrote of Buckpasser. My Broun education was in full gear.

Woodie was appearing in summer theater in Palm Beach, resigned to the fact he would never make it as Norman Newsman. He had brought with him a madras jacket he had worn on Broadway in his supporting role as a merry cemetery plot salesman in “Send Me No Flowers’’. His wife Jane, who was a Shakespearean actress herself and a person who was rarely at a loss Woodie Broun with wife Jane (center) Budlam for words, told him he probably wasn’t Productions Archive going to be Norman Newsman much longer anyway and that he may as well go out in a colorful blast.

“What do you think?” he asked. “We have nothing to lose,” I replied. And, voila, a star was born! For this day, the pin-stripe management’s edict that a correspondent’s dress uniform should match theirs was fodder for another time. On this day, the bosses thought the Joseph coat was perfect. Or maybe it was just the words. “Great horses have the look of eagles. Standing in his stall, Buckpasser looks a little cozy for an eagle, but on any course, at any distance, he has the pride and stride of a great one.”

Woodie later wrote a book about our travels, triumphs, and near-tragedies called Tumultuous Merriment. About that morning in Florida, he wrote, “Several important things happened, and we found a way of working together that was 42

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never to change. In terms of jazz, I would describe Bud as the trombone, building the foundation of the counterpoint, while I, as clarinet, ornamented the theme with flights around the melody line. Should you ask who played the trumpet or lead, I would say it was the eye of the camera, that recorder of actualities. We began that day to learn the process of communicating without speaking, that cerebral pas de deux that is found among good sonata players, shortstops, and second basemen.” He inscribed his first copy of the book, “To Bud, the eye in the hurricane.”

We did have one “Hallelujah” moment that battle-tested our ability to communicate. We covered a Harvard-Yale game for the Ivy League championship, and I knew it would be a tight fit to get the film processed at our Boston affiliate and get the story fed into the Saturday News. Yale was leading by 29-13 with 42 seconds to go, and we were casually looking at the film when Harvard did the impossible and tied the game. Now, we had to do the seemingly unattainable and get those pictures into the piece, or we would be without the dramatic moments.

Fortunately, cameraman Dave Marlin had showered bountiful gifts on the motorcycle messenger, who gave us his best Evil Knievel in heavy Boston traffic.

The film was rushed into the lab, and we made a plan. Roger Mudd said, “Good evening,” and we were just starting to edit the concluding scenes. The added problem was Woodie had to do his narration “live” in a small announcing booth where he could barely see the monitor showing Harvard’s breakneck finish. I told him not to look at the monitor — that I would pinch his shoulder once to begin talking and twice to stop to wait for the next scene. The pas de deux worked to perfection. The studio in New York gave us a “Good night,” and a smiling motorcycle messenger walked out of the affiliate with his chest bulging with credentials from Yale-Harvard’s game of the century in Boston. I never Dave Marlin and Woodie Broun compare Madras properly thanked you, Dave Marlin, so jackets, Courtesy Dave Marlin Family Album, from Budlam Productions Archive there it is.

We caught up that year with a variety of sports figures. Former Yankee Roger Maris, who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record and was practically run out of New York for doing so, reflected back on it as he was finishing up his career in St. Louis, “In New York, I don’t think I was one of the best-liked people up there.

It’s definitely more pleasurable playing where you’re liked.”

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In Chicago, our day was made when we met the ebullient “Mr. Cub,” Ernie Banks, who was now his downtrodden team’s elder statesman. He jumped out of the dugout exclaiming, “Beautiful Wrigley Field,” before telling us, “This is the most exciting year I have had in the major leagues,” and he finished it off by charging out onto the infield yelling, “Let’s play two, let’s play two.”

In the Yale pool in New Haven, Don Schollander, who won four gold medals and set three world records in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, said pain management had consumed him. “When you’re constantly thinking about it, it’s hard having to go through the pain thinking how you will feel when you get done. The more I swim, the more I think that psychology is more important than ability.”

In the pits at the Indianapolis 500, where one driver was killed in a qualifying round, past champion Mario Andretti told us about the revolutionary changes motor racing was going through. “This is 500 miles, and now you go flat out right from the start. There’s a certain amount of strategy, but none of this waiting game as there used to be. The equipment today is at the stage where it can take the punishment.”

And at the Essex Fox Hounds meet in Far Hills, New Jersey, where the gentry meets the gentry every fall for some rollicking steeplechase races, Woodie got this apology from a grande dame who was late for her interview, “So sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Broun; I was out feeding the peacocks.”

That first whirlwind year on the road was to end with a bang when Vince Lombardi, that powder keg of habit, grew tired of the frigid weather in Green Bay and decided to take his Packers to Tulsa where, ostensibly, in a warmer clime, they would go through those Sisyphean drills of his that would ready them for their NFL championship game against Dallas, later nicknamed “The Ice Bowl” because it was played in near-zero conditions. Ironically, Tulsa proved to be a forerunner to that game because Lombardi ran into an ice storm upon arriving in Oklahoma. We were in the bowels of the stadium, filming the team trainer, Bud Jorgenson, an amiable Swede, getting Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, Paul Hornung, and company ready for battle. The place had the look of a movie set, with lights in every corner of the room, when the power suddenly went off, bathing the entire stadium in darkness.

Fortunately, our electrician pulled out some portable battery-powered lights, and the trainer hardly missed a beat, rolling out the half-mile of tape needed for Packer wrists and ankles and adjusting the protective gear and padding. Except that, when the lights went out, Lombardi had let out a growl in the next room after hitting his head on the door of his locker and immediately thought, “those television guys” had caused the power outage. When he stormed into the training 44

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room, Woodie wrote. “To Vinnie, it seemed that the fates were showing an ugly side, and he stomped into the dressing room ready to tell the fates where to get off, his face looking like a fright mask on a Samurai warrior.” He proceeded to curse us out with words that would have made the dockworkers in his native Brooklyn blush. He ended his tirade with words no producer ever wants to hear, “and you can get out now!” The way we all read it was crystal clear: that “get out” meant get out of the stadium, get out of Tulsa and get out of Oklahoma. I tried to point out to him that we couldn’t have caused the power outage, which was not limited to the stadium, and if we left, we would have to take our lights with us. But it made no impact.

That’s when friendly Bud Jorgenson sprung into action. Sensing that if he had no light and therefore could not finish getting the Pack wrapped for practice, the coach’s wrath would land squarely on him, Jorgenson tip-toed into Lombardi’s quarters to make his case, while a terrified janitor scurried off to find some candles that would at least give Vince a little light to get dressed. I’m not sure what the harried trainer said to Lombardi, but in less than three minutes, Vince walked into the trainer’s room, calm and smiling. He said he had been out of order and thanked us for keeping our lights lit so Starr, Nitschke, Hurnung, and company could practice.

The field was a sheet of ice, and the Packers sometimes resembled Olympic skaters doing a series of pirouettes. But the storm had passed for the coach.

There were a few loud barks, but the occasional smile on his face revealed that he knew he was lucky to be having even a limited run-through. As practice ended, the publicity man took me aside and told us that Lombardi was extending a rare invitation to the daily five o’clock meeting with his coaches, where a cocktail might even be served. He made it sound like more of an order than a request, but I viewed it as an opportunity. I let Woodie do most of the talking, which was not really a deviation from the norm. He regaled Lombardi with stories about the coach’s early days in Brooklyn and the famous Nathan’s Hot Dogs and the Seven Blocks of Granite in Fordham when Vince was a 160-pound, tougherthan-nails offensive guard. I figured maybe we had gained a slight edge for some inside stuff if the Pack made it to the first Super Bowl in Los Angeles in January of 1967. It would be a decisive moment for the NFL and for our credibility inside the CBS newsroom.

A couple of my favorite stories come to mind before we put 1966 to rest.

There was lots of nostalgia and also age-related reality in seeing Ben Hogan and Jack Fleck return to the site of their celebrated duel years earlier at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, where Fleck, a driving range pro from Iowa, upset the 45

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stoic Hogan in an 18-hole playoff for the U.S. Open championship. Some of the writers at that event had already written their stories about Hogan winning a record fifth Open. He had become a national hero, having survived a near-fatal car crash where doctors told him he would never play golf again. He had been given a ticker tape parade up Broadway following a victory in the British Open.

So, when the unknown Fleck went on a birdie binge to force the playoff and sent the writers scurrying to their typewriters, it brought to mind the great Truman-Dewey election snafu in 1948 when the Chicago Tribune printed 50,000 copies headlined, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” As Woodie wrote, “A lot of vindictive Hogan idolaters (the writers) spent a lot of time in the next few years dwelling on Fleck’s subsequent lack of success. At last, discouraged and bitter, he dropped off the tour and went back to the club pro’s task of silkening sows’ ears and selling sweaters.” Neither player was a factor in the trumpeted return to the Olympic Club, a reminder that all tales can’t end in a blaze of glory. As Woodie later wrote, “Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.”

And there was the boondoggle trip to Puerto Rico, boondoggles being destinations that always have warmth and plenty of sunshine, where we made our first connection with Earl Weaver, a pudgy minor league lifer who got into more umpire’s faces and got thrown out of more games than any American League manager. This banty rooster knew what he was doing. He would become the skipper of the World Champion Baltimore Orioles. When we met him in the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, he was managing a team of off-duty big leaguers in the winter Puerto Rican league. Looking back on those carefree days, but now a World Champion, Weaver later told us, “I knew I’d always have a place in the Baltimore organization. Now, if I don’t keep producing, I’ll have a lot of time to spend in my vegetable garden.”

Another story under the radar involved Andy Robustelli, an All-Pro defensive lineman who played on the great Giants team of Frank Gifford and Y.A. Tittle. He had opened a travel agency that would send you to places that were warm with plenty of sunshine when the new Brooklyn Dodgers came calling. However, this was not a return to the big time but to a ramshackle minor league football startup holding a last-gasp tryout at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, where mostly Irish lads usually cavorted in the ancient game of Gaelic football.

Woodie dubbed it “a barren, bumpy stretch where grass dies under the blankeyed stares of old subway cars lined up on an adjacent, elevated structure.”

It was in this drab setting that Coach Robustelli bluntly told the assembled coulda-beens and shoulda-beens that it was probably a last-chance scenario for 46

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them. Out of the seventy candidates of all shapes and sizes, the only one to be asked back was a soccer kicker. But there was one other who left a lasting impression, a quarterback who, according to Woodie, “passed a spiral as tight as a coil spring and spotted his passes with the ease and accuracy of a carnival shill knocking over wooden bottles.” Unhappily, though he gave his height as fivefoot- seven, he only came to my shoulder during my interview, and I am only five-foot-eight. He would have fit nicely into a pickup game of jockeys.

And before we wave in Guy Lombardo and his orchestra and call it a year, there was that tale in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about the Holy Family College of nuns adopting the local semi-pro football team. The Manitowoc Herald Times sent a couple of reporters to check out the CBS crew from New Yawk. Here’s what one of them wrote, “I anticipated running into an English major prima donna, whose tastes ran from fine to finer champagne. But there he was, eyes twinkling, mustache twitching, wearing one of his quilted coats, sipping, of all things, a beer.”

The Charlotte Observer offered this glowing tribute, “Broun manages to catch the fleeting, shining innocence of life and hold it for a moment under glass in order to see ourselves as we seldom do.” As all these positive reviews began piling up, I asked Woodie if he finally felt he had walked out of the giant shadow his father cast. He paused before replying, “You know, I never won any prizes, and fame is fleeting. But immortality is immortality; you take it the way you can get it.”

Besides the highly praised Tumultuous Merriment, Woodie wrote a book about his days in the theater called A Studied Madness and another about growing up with the Algonquin Round Table crowd called Whose Little Boy Are You. The latter is an irreverent look at growing up as the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” of the New York intellectuals of the Roaring Twenties. All of those entertaining memoirs are still in print. As for his fellow intellectuals who disapproved of America’s love affair with athletes, Woodie had this rejoinder, “All I demand from an athlete is to show me something briefly of importance that makes me feel intensely alive.”

Looking back over the relatively brief history of television news, I would be hard-pressed to name two more talented writers than Woodie Broun and Charles Kuralt, let alone find them on the same program. They were the epitome of broadcasting sophisticates, even though one was rumpled, the other sartorially flashy. Whenever they spoke, CBS viewers sat up and paid attention. If it was an essay or profile, it seemed to go by in a series of nanoseconds, leaving the viewer gasping for more. Short stories in print can be re-read. I always felt that their 47

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work would sparkle in its retelling. And when the attic in my mind spoke to me, that’s when I knew that these verbal wizards absolutely had earned a last hurrah.

While time has marched on, the storylines haven’t changed. There are different places and different players, but the human spirit is ever alive. Woodie and I would take more risks in the future with plot lines and personalities outside the mainstream. But for now, we gave them mostly lots of meat and potatoes smothered in gravy.

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Chapter 4

“On The Road Again” At the start of his career at CBS, Charles Kuralt had the good fortune of getting a temporary assignment writing the news summary for Edward R. Murrow’s nightly radio report. Both being North Carolinians, they hit it off almost immediately, and with a quiet nudge from Murrow, Kuralt found himself in television as a writer on the Evening News with Douglas Edwards. It was his first experience writing to film. The other writer was Alice Weel, a take-charge, dynamic newsroom presence who took young Charles under her wing. He remembered her sage advice, “Don’t write captions, don’t point out what people are seeing, just write the story to flow with the film. And don’t ever let your words fight the pictures. Pictures are so strong that in a fight, they will always win.” He confessed he never knew how Alice had figured that out. They were really flying blind.

Charles was a rabid fan of his North Carolina Tar Heels, especially the basketball team. We’d have a wager anytime my Missouri team had the misfortune to play Carolina, and I’d usually have to pay up. He was also a huge baseball fan.

I dug out an old 1960 script when he was still the young wunderkind anchor of the CBS primetime Eyewitness to History. Only a real baseball devotee could write like this, “The World Series is an event in search of a hero,” said Kuralt.

“He can come out of nowhere, but he will never go back because ball fans live on memory. Out there on the field right now, there’s probably at least one player who is in rehearsal for his moment, a guy who is just hanging around, waiting for the instant, which will lift him from obscurity.

We will report later on a few who climbed out of obscurity in the World Series—Vernal “Nippy” Jones, “Sweet Lou” Johnson, and James “Dusty” Rhodes.

Every ballplayer in that era earned a nickname, like it or not. My favorite was Eddie “The Violin’’ Basinski, a utility infielder during the World War II era for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Basinski was a classical fiddle player but not a classical 49

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fit for the Dodgers clubhouse of hard-boiled Leo “The Lip” Durocher. Basinski was a career minor leaguer who also had a star turn in the Buffalo University symphony orchestra when a chance tryout won him a job with the war-year Dodgers.

Durocher was a player-manager then and didn’t expect much out of his 1944 ragtag bunch. But when he walked into the clubhouse one day and found Basinski, who was no Paganini, in his Dodger uniform playing Strauss waltzes, it stopped him dead, and he blurted out, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” thus lifting that Dodger from obscurity to the heights. Furthermore, it turns out that “The Violin” had the last laugh on “The Lippies” of this world. Before he died at 99, Eddie Basinski had outlived almost all of his major league contemporaries.

In rechecking Kuralt’s biography, it is worth noting some of the worldly knowledge he gained before he even thought of exploring the backroads of America. It was an odyssey unthinkable for such a young talent. He had been made correspondent, a title held only by Murrow, Reasoner, Eric Sevareid, and Charles Collingwood — exalted company — before his 24th birthday. He was about to test the limits of air travel and own his first trench coat, the correspondent’s uniform.

He covered one of the last lynchings in the Kuralt in ill-fitting trench coat, Budlam deep South — that of a young black Mississippi Productions Archive man, Mack Charles Parker, accused of raping a white woman. Nobody in the masked white mob that wrestled Parker from his jail cell was ever indicted for the killing.

Kuralt did a series on the diminishing number of family farms on the Great Plains and had a chat with Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, who was on a much-publicized tour of America. He was shot at covering the African war in the Belgian Congo and spent some time in Havana trying to get an interview with the rebel leader, Fidel Castro. He flew to Vientiane in Southeast Asia, where he saw Russian planes bringing supplies to the Communist insurgents and American planes doing the same for the Laotian government.

But his stay as the anchorman of the prime-time program Eyewitness to History proved to be a short one. The program chief over at Black Rock, the CBS headquarters in midtown, was Jim Aubrey, often referred to by his staff as the “Smiling Cobra.” He had decreed that the ratings needed a boost and a more 50

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seasoned anchorman was needed. Kuralt was out. Cronkite was in. Kuralt was sent to Vietnam before it was an American war and taken on a reconnaissance mission deep into the jungle with a Vietnamese Army driver named Lieutenant Son of the 150th Ranger Company. The mission was to trap a small group of Viet Cong known to have been operating in the area, but it turned into an ambush.

Kuralt and his cameraman were caught in the crossfire. When the firing stopped, many casualties were counted by both sides. Later, Lieutenant Son was calmly explaining how they would return to base when a single shot rang out.

Kuralt described it this way, “It hit his helmet in the back and exited the front.

He pitched forward toward me and fell to the ground. I cradled his head in my chest. I picked up a handful of leaves and tried to stuff them into the wound to stop the bleeding.” It was the last shot fired that day, and Lieutenant Son was dead.

Kuralt covered Latin America for a few years, the West Coast while stationed in Los Angeles, then did a couple of superb half-hours for his old show Eyewitness News, “Christmas in Appalachia” where families with a lot of kids were living on $56 worth of food stamps a month. “Christmas in Vietnam” followed the next year, and again there was a firefight. Kuralt wound up holding a tourniquet around an American soldier’s leg while they ferried him back to the aid station.

The soldier lost his leg. His name was Bill Floyd, First Division, Infantry. Kuralt told me when he returned stateside, he looked up PFC Floyd at an Army hospital in Denver and again years later in a retirement community in Florida.

In the spring of 1961, as CBS expanded its foreign presence, Latin America was deemed a “hot spot.” A bureau would be opened in Rio de Janeiro, and Kuralt would be bureau chief and correspondent, they told him. Fidel Castro had a vision of Communist dictatorships dominating the whole hemisphere, and Kuralt “had better get down there and figure out how to cover it.” He had never set foot on one inch of that soil. Once established in Brazil, the foreign editor kept peppering him with cables, such as, “Think you should consider hopping over to Mexico City.” Kuralt didn’t respond, figuring that the new boss didn’t know that Mexico was nearly a five- thousand-mile ‘hop’ from where he was in Brazil.

Finally, weary of covering all those breaking news stories, hating it when the phone rang and the Assignment Desk was ordering him to another “hot spot,” he came up with a plan after a flight over middle America got him wondering about all those untold stories in the heartland below. Back in New York, he went to see the big boss, News President Richard Salant, and the conversation, as he recalled it, went like this, “Why don’t you just let me wander for three months to 51

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see what I can find — farmers bringing in their crops, first graders starting school, country fairs, town meetings — pulse of the country, you know.” “Okay,” said Salant, “but try to keep the budget low.” Walter Cronkite, whose Evening News would be the beneficiary of that decision, explained the move to New York magazine this way, “America was so terribly divided by the Vietnam war Cameraman Bleckman and Charles Kuralt shooting a story in a small-town American grocery and the racial situation, Salant thought store, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos we needed something to be reminded of the better features of American life.” Kuralt took that advice literally and made it his life’s mission: cover small-town America, including those often neglected in fly-over country. And just like that, he was set free and out there on his own to find out what really was going on.

It was an unheard-of accomplishment at CBS News not to be under the thumb of the Assignment Desk. Each day forward, when the daily list was published showing who was covering what, with a phone number where they could be reached, Kuralt’s name dropped out of sight. This is before cell phones, of course. So, if you wanted to reach him, you had to wait until he called in each time he was shipping in Kuralt carrying yellow urgent, CBS News shipping bag, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos film of an unknown offering. It would already be scripted and arrive over the transom at the Cronkite offices in a yellow onion bag, which became known to shippers around the world as “Urgent, CBS News.” Once the Cronkiters edited and screened the first “pig in a poke,” they couldn’t wait for the next one.

His first foray was in the autumn of 1967, in a motor home that had seen better days. He set out for New England, he wasn’t sure why, and ran smack into the change of seasons, a perennial pick-me-up for sightseers. His description said it better, “It is death that causes this blinding show of color, but it is a fierce and flaming death. To drive along a Vermont country road in this season is to be dazzled by the shower of lemon and scarlet and gold that washes across 52

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your windshield.” Once he got rolling, ordinary Americans got their due — slingshot artists, bean shooters, whittlers — even a swimming pig performing in a water ballet.

My favorite of the more than a thousand “On The Roads” that arrived over the transom for the Evening News was about a 92-year-old brick maker named Mr. Black from Winston-Salem, Kuralt Walking with brick maker Mr. Black, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos North Carolina.

George Black had been making bricks in his backyard since 1889 without any modern machinery. He just hitched a mule up to a mud mill, reported Charles, and then fashioned the bricks with his hands, six at a time. Charles asked him who his biggest customer had been, “R.J. Reynolds (Reynolds Tobacco), he came out on his horse...and ordered five hundred thousand.”

Next time he came out, he ordered a million.”

(Charles) ”That would be enough to scare me, I think.”

(Mr. Black) “It gave us a whole lot of work for a dollar and a half a day. Yes, siree.”

(Charles) “George Black was eleven years old when his father died, and he and his brother, fourteen, had a talk.”

Mr. Black’s brickyard with mule making bricks, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos (Mr. Black) He said, “If we don’t go to school, say if we stand up and make men of ourselves, even if we don’t know A from B, we can make somebody call us ‘Mr. Black’ someday. So that’s what we done.”

(Charles) Mr. Black cannot take a walk in his hometown without seeing the work of his hands. They are here in the bank, there in that church, there in that school. The cornerstones record more than the construction of buildings; they speak of the life of a man who had earned the right to be called Mr. Black.”

Mr. Black, true to his name, had figured out how to deal with the racism of his time. Then, he quickly learned how to deal with his new-found fame. As Kuralt reported in his book, a government official working on the Guyana desk of the Agency for International Development called Kuralt told him he had heard 53

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about Mr. Black and that he was just the man he was looking for. Apparently, the Guyanese were hoping to rebuild their poor country’s infrastructure in brick, and they wanted to make the bricks the old-fashioned way because the one thing they had plenty of was mud. Could Mr. Black come down, tour the countryside, and teach each village how to make those bricks? But first, Mr. Mr. Black talking to Charles Kuralt, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos Black had to come to Washington.

It would be Mr. Black’s first plane ride. The Guyana desk bought his ticket and 32 more for his closest relatives, who came from up and down the East Coast. When the whole contingent reached the Oval Office at the White House, the photographers snapped away as Mr. Black shook hands with President Nixon. Then he took his second plane ride to South America and taught each village how to make bricks his way: out of mud, six at a time, with Charles Kuralt at his side. Charles once claimed that he “resolutely pursued irrelevance,” but he was being modest to a fault. He chatted in the way you would talk to a neighbor over a backyard fence.

Newsday wrote this of Kuralt, “His voice wrapped a listener in a cocoon of intimacy, warmth, and humor, and he found poetry in the portraits of ordinary people.”

It didn’t take Charles long to figure out a game plan for these “people portraits” of his. In an interview with the Philadelphia Journal, he sort of laid it all out. “We don’t ever do news stories,” he told them. “In fact, I try very hard not ever to do a story about anybody you’d expect to see on the Cronkite news. We find about half of our stories just rolling down the road, looking out the window, and talking to people. A saw player in California, or a lady who makes fiddles in the Ozarks, or just kids swimming from an inner tube on a hot summer’s day: I can’t say what the ‘standard’ is for an ‘On The Road’ story except that it mustn’t be significant in any way at all. I try to keep the relevance out of ’em.”

There is also this from his book, Dateline America, “Mostly these are stories from moments from our past or about the small towns and ordinary people of our present — not the stuff of which network news is made. But if you leave such moments, places, and people out of the jigsaw puzzle of America, you cannot see the country whole. We read about scoundrels and politicians on Page 1, but it’s all those other folk who make up most of the country.”

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And the Norfolk, Virginia Pilot captured this revealing quote, “After a few days in a small town, you feel a twinge when you realize you have to leave,” Charles admitted. “You never get too deep into anything. Like a stone skipping over the water, you only get a little bit wet.” Then he gave the interviewer the Kuralt pause and blurted out, “But you can always go back.” Words of a true romantic.

Charles and Woodie Broun admired one another’s work, so much so that once, when we were doing a story with a sports theme in Wisconsin, Woodie picked up a brochure in a “mom and pop” motel and mailed it to Kuralt as a possible story idea for him. The little town of Somerset, Wisconsin, population 2300, was experiencing some new area interest in floating down Izzy Bleckman shooting footage for “On The Road” segment, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos the Apple River in rubber tubes. It was 1972, and the Raleigh family, longtime owners of the River’s Edge Restaurant, decided to take a big gamble and go into the tubing business.

Charles thought that might make a good “On The Road” and dialed the number on the brochure. “I just about fell out of my chair when I recognized the voice,” said Pat Raleigh, one of the owners of the family business in that mostly rural area of the upper Midwest. The appearance of Charles Kuralt and cameraman Izzy Bleckman was obviously an unexpected plus. “It was a pretty cold early spring day,” Izzy later wrote in his journal, “but the tubers showed up en masse in what turned out to be the biggest happening ever on the Apple River. Charles was so delighted that we returned over and over again to check in on the family’s progress.”

Izzy Bleckman’s camera was a presence Lots of tubers in background on the Apple River, Courtesy Bleckman Family Photos during our entire stay.

“I swear it felt like there were twenty thousand people on that river,” Pat Raleigh said. “There was mass confusion.” Pretty soon, people started bussing in from all over, and an estimate upwards of a million tourists a year suddenly made little Somerset a destination town. Izzy’s camera captured masses of tubers floating on the river.

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Then, in 1990, in a rare spell of whimsy, Charles decided to make a road trip for Sunday Morning to check out one of his favorite “On The Road” families.

Alice Raleigh, the mother of Pat Raleigh, was celebrating the Raleigh family and her 50th anniversary in Raleigh’s River Edge Restaurant, famous for its frog legs and their “Big Apple” tubing and tourist business. Somerset had become the self-proclaimed “Tubing Capital of the World.”

Charles had long admired Pat Raleigh’s Midwestern spirit and had decided this was the perfect time to do one last old-fashioned “On The Road” for Sunday Morning and that she was the perfect subject. She used to joke, he said, that she was only the restaurant’s “chief cook and bottle washer.” She was a lot more than that, he wrote. His Kuralt story on Sunday Morning was understated in his usual style.

Afterward, back at his desk in New York, Charles took pen and personal stationery in hand and wrote this to the family, “She was one of the rare, generous people of the world,” he said, “Everybody loved her, and I among them. I was embarrassed that she made such a fuss over me — until I realized she treated everybody that way.”

I don’t know whether Woodie sent Charles another story suggestion or not, but I do know that when I convinced Woodie to put the Joseph coats in the closet, change into a tweed jacket and become the “critic-at-large” for Sunday Morning, I could almost hear Charles chuckling with delight.

Our Sunday Morning staff was a hard-charging, merry bunch with something to prove. We hired producers, writers, and video editors looking for a new challenge. They came from the religious unit, from the overnight shift, from the weekend broadcasts, and from the documentary units. One 60 Minutes video editor defected, and Don Hewitt, its chief honcho, practically accused us of treason. We were the new game in town, and people wanted to get a piece of our action. Don was not exactly Mr. Rogers welcoming us to the Sunday neighborhood either. His testiness might have been caused by a Woodie memoir that recalled a past grievance with Hewitt’s sometimes theatrical behavior by calling him a “smartly dressed ferret.” But, more likely, it had to do with an earlier encounter I had with Hewitt during Watergate.

60 Minutes was struggling to find and would soon receive its preferred time slot of 7 p.m., which would give it the big audience that Hewitt and Mike Wallace sought. In their quest to get the bombshell exclusive stories that would put the show over the top, they began to be seen as competitors for news sources in the Cronkite newsroom. In July of 1973, when rumors began to surface that Alexander Butterfield, a former White House aide to President Nixon, might 56

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have had a dual role as a CIA point man for former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, a convicted participant in the Watergate break-in, he became a much sought-after interview. Word got out that Wallace had Butterfield sequestered somewhere and was bringing him to the Broadcast Center on a Saturday for an exclusive.

Bud Benjamin, the longtime Cronkite producer and the most respected voice in the newsroom, was furious. If CBS News knew where Butterfield was, Cronkite should have the first crack. This was a major story that needed to be shared now with the Evening News audience. And if that was not possible, it was standard practice for any “exclusive” to give a soundbite to the next showup before the full interview aired. Benjamin ordered all the domestic bureaus where Butterfield might be in hiding to canvas the hotels and ordered camera crews to stake out the airports where he might be arriving. I was producing the Weekend edition of the Evening News, and Bud asked me to join him in keeping the pressure on that it was too hot a story to keep under wraps until Sunday night. I happily joined forces. When we learned the precise time Butterfield would be coming into our building for the interview with Wallace, I ordered up our own crew from the union hall to ambush him when he arrived and get that soundbite for that night’s broadcast.

Saner heads prevailed, however, since holding a story for 24 hours is not really that big a deal. But I had the weekend news manager call Hewitt and tell him of our intentions and how the daily newsroom felt about his actions. In short order, my phone rang. It was Hewitt calling from his control room where he had an audience and, I was told, put on quite a show. In a lengthy tirade, he was going to get the bosses to fire me, he said and then slammed down the phone.

The bosses had a good laugh over that one. Butterfield would soon testify to the Senate Watergate panel that Nixon’s office had a secret taping system of all of the president’s conversations, some of which revealed his direct involvement in the Watergate burglary, which eventually brought down his presidency. The smell of that good story gets the blood rushing and can lead to unexpected conclusions.

Every “exclusive,” an overblown term in these days of instant news, now lasts about two seconds. Or, if nobody else picks it up, it could last a lifetime: horrors!

Northshield recalled the time he was a budding reporter at the Chicago SunTimes. He had been quietly working some sources for a week. The story was going to be a bombshell. After he polished it, he timidly took it to the city editor, who immediately questioned its validity. But Shad pleaded, “My sources are solid.” Okay, said the boss, who buried it in the back of the first section. There was no reaction from readers or anybody else. A couple of weeks went by, and 57

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the editor patted him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear, “That exclusive of yours, Northshield, it’s still exclusive.”

Our Sunday Morning producers were taught to think outside of the box. Our pieces should be more introspective, we instructed, and we don’t need to break down any doors, Mike Wallace-style. Case in point, Mort Dean, CBS Weekend anchorman, who distinguished himself with reporting from the world’s hot spots, including the battlefield in Vietnam and on the nation’s race into space from Cape Canaveral, discovered a story that stays with Dean to this day about a courageous young man named Louis Ciardulli. Louis was born with a rare bone disease that causes pain, blindness, and death, usually by the age of three. He was five when his body stopped growing, and he was ten when Dean caught up to him. What we saw was a stunted body but a cherubic face Ciardulli family photo, courtesy Morton Dean from The Ciardulli Family and a determined spirit that lit up the screen. The disease was called osteopetrosis or, more commonly, marble bone, where the bones grow wide rather than long. Louis had just undergone a rare and dangerous bone marrow transplant from his sister Lisa.

His working-class parents, Joe and Dolly Ciardulli, spent many years of their lives rallying around him, and they admitted to being transformed by the struggle. He was almost totally blind, seeing only shadows and dark shapes, but as we occasionally updated the story, Dean reported Louis was still full of “hope, determination, and astonishing good cheer.”

“He could stop you in your tracks with his wisdom and on the subject of miracles,” said Dean. “They say they work. I’ve heard some pretty strange stories about certain miracles,” said Louis.

The eminent television critic of his time, Tom Shales of the Washington Post, admitted to being deeply affected by the story, “You had to be moved and delighted and ashamed of every complaint you ever made about some trivial crisis that reduced you to human wreckage. I never got to meet Louie, and he never had any reason to meet me, but for years past and years to come, he has lit up my life over and over and sometimes just when it needed lighting up the most.”

For the family, it was tough going. There were nine operations and a lot of pain in those first ten years, and his mother, Dolly, was always at his side. Every 58

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time he got another infection, she said, “We just kept the faith and told each other he was going to be all right.” His father, Joe, told Mort, “One day, you’re a bus driver, and the next day, you have a decision to make that could mean the difference between life and death. It sounds ignorant, I know, but I myself was searching for a cure for him because the doctors told me they couldn’t find one. I took it badly. My wife was stronger than I was. I came home one time and put a hole in the wall with my fist.”

But, as Dean reported, Louis continued to fool the experts and kept on living. He had as normal an upbringing as possible, which meant attending public school, PS 201, in the Queens section of New York. He was in a class for the visually impaired and became the teacher’s pet.

They found common ground. We witnessed this conversation between teacher and pupil: (Mrs. Baltman) “What did you tell me to do yesterday, Louis?”

(Louis) “I told you to be calm, Mrs. Baltman.”

(Mrs. Baltman) “And what about, sharpen Louis Ciardulli school photos, courtesy my what?”

Morton Dean from Ciardulli Family (Louis) “Repertoire, Mrs. Baltman, sharpen your repertoire.”

The day came, as it inevitably would when he and Mrs. Baltman had to part company. He was graduating and moving to a new school. “Mrs. Baltman, I just feel I’m a little, you know, short for my age, and I don’t feel like having kids push me all over the place. But now I’m thirteen, and I’m still small. And I want to be taller, like my regular size.” Mort Dean was there for the graduation ceremony. “For the Ciardulli family, a day of pride, of awe, of wonder — Louis, their miracle.” Louis had another transplant and survived, but he refused to go to junior high school, afraid of what he might hear. “If they call me fat or shorty when they constantly do it, or midget, it gets annoying,” he said. “But what can I say? Smiling is better than crying. It’s better than crying.”

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Louis had eight more operations in his last 20 years of life, in pain most of the time, in and out of hospitals. On his last day of life, he asked to see Mort so that they could say goodbye. Mort wrote, “Through it all and with the future so uncertain, Louis and his family managed to maintain their sense of humor, their pride, their sense of perspective.” Mort won an Emmy for his story and gave it to Louis. At the funeral, the family put the statue on top of the casket. He was 32 years old when he died. After the funeral, there was this from Mom and Dad. (Joe Ciardulli) “With all his pain, if he could bear it, if we could, we would take him back and do it all over again. And that’s the truth.”

(Dolly Ciardulli) “He was a joy for 32 years with all of his troubles, and I would go another 32 years to take care of him.”

Mort still stays in touch with the Ciardullis.

He had become part of their lives. He told me, “I remember your marching orders when we were navigating a new terrain. You said don’t worry about the headlines; Kuralt will take care of them in his lead-in. Just give us the people angle. That freed us up to dig and find a Sunday Morning story that nobody else would have.”

Looking back a couple of decades later, Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post, “A great television show can penetrate your head and your heart and maybe even your soul and touch Louis Ciardulli before his death at the you in ways you might never have expected or age of 32, courtesy Morton Dean From Ciardulli Family been able to predict. Viewers who have been faithful to Sunday Morning probably feel more like fans than satisfied customers.

They feel like members of an extended family that extends further than they will ever be able to know.”

We alluded earlier to the major obstacle in our path, getting enough of the CBS affiliates to carry us so that we would not be a money loser for the network.

Not that any of the bosses ever raised the issue; CBS News didn’t work that way.

But we knew the clearance issue was the unseen enemy. The job of getting the stations to cooperate fell to Tony Malara, a VP in our Black Rock Headquarters in midtown. Charles had befriended Tony on one of his trips through the north country of New York when Tony worked at our affiliate in Watertown. His family had a financial interest in the station and also owned a sausage factory there.

And when Tony schmoozed enough station managers to carry Sunday Morning

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in what seemed record time, our problem was solved, and Kuralt said, “See? I told you Tony knew how to make the sausage.”

As the globetrotting Threlkeld continued to turn out cover story after cover story, some of them began to bite down hard, especially this one about what America was facing in the Persian Gulf. “It’s a fragile oilway surrounded by an assortment of monarchies and emirates, military dictatorships and theocracies, nations by definition only, created as afterthoughts a half-century ago by diplomats who never dreamed they’d become so rich or essential.” He covered the Palestinians caught in the Israeli-Egyptian conflict and the possibilities of a European Union. He never shied from stories that weren’t exactly made for television, like smallpox and PCBs. He was there when bussing became a volatile issue in Boston and when Three Mile Island sent a nuclear message into every corner of America.

And he showed up too when they buried James T. Farrell, author of the classic American trilogy Studs Lonigan, about an Irish-Catholic kid from the mean streets of Chicago who meets a tragic early death. Studs Terkel, the Chicago historian and broadcaster known for his oral histories of the not-sorich and famous, had kept the nickname alive in that city. He was a champion of the underclass, as was Farrell, who had grown up in a large Irish-American working-class family living at 57th and Wabash, and was not without controversy because of his early romance with Trotskyism. As Farrell’s casket was lowered into the grave, Threlkeld began, “They put the old boy in the ground today,” then borrowed a line from one of Lonigan’s mates, “He pulled out a little bottle and raised it aloft, saying, ‘To myself – good men are scarce!’” It was an American story, complicated as hell.

When he finished our first year of cover stories, missing only two broadcasts, a breathtaking figure for our globe-trotting specialist, we had the art department make a huge poster of Threlkeld’s face from every corner of the world. Then we hung it in the main office space for all of the producers to see. It wasn’t meant as a threat but rather as a symbol of what good, hard gumshoe reporting could accomplish.

It didn’t take that long for our modus operandi to evolve owing to our collective basic training in the great heartland of America. We would never question the intelligence of our viewers. We would never give them illustrated lectures such as sermon-like commercials that have a picture for every word. We would always honor our commitment to stories about people, not necessarily famous, who had something to add to the American dialogue. We used to argue about the perfect Sunday Morning viewer. We finally agreed; maybe it was two 61

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people watching through their toes, drinking their morning coffee. Then, when the story ended, they debated its pros and cons. Get them talking—get them thinking. It was as American as apple pie — or maybe even apple strudel.

Kuralt once told a newspaper critic that, unlike print, television had the rare ability to take the viewer inside the story. He gave as an example a drought in Texas, “We can make you feel the dryness, the thirst. It’s not a specific kind of information. It has more to do with feelings. What you do is talk to the people who are being affected.” We had a lot of theories, but in the end, it just came down to good storytelling at a leisurely pace. And letting those stories breathe.

Or, as Kuralt said so prophetically on our first broadcast, “We’re not going to hurry through it.” And, I might add, we would never tell the audience how to feel, like most bubbly anchor teams do today, acting out on orders from their fickle “eyewitless show doctors.” Just let the folks figure it out on their own and give them some silence for reflection. Charles had that rare ability to speak calmly, even while informing loudly.

Threlkeld had that gift of letting the viewer in, too. Television news was a lifetime calling after graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. He spent over three decades in network news, most of them at CBS, covering conflicts around the world: various skirmishes in the Middle East; Tiananmen Square; the fall of the Soviet Union; even the minor wars in Panama and Grenada. He was one of the last reporters helicoptered out of the American Embassy in Phnom Penh when America pulled out of the Southeast Asian conflict. He covered seven presidential campaigns and the assassination of candidate Robert Kennedy. Then he came off the road to co-anchor the CBS Morning News from 1977 to 1979 with Lesley Stahl. He had won just about every award the industry had to offer.

The Sunday Morning “cover stories” were, in fact, his idea. He sought us out and told us we needed to create something akin to what Time and Newsweek did every week, highlighting what was or could be a significant story on our cover. It would give each of our broadcasts, which were going to branch out into so many other areas, instant credibility with an in-depth look at a major issue and that he was prepared to do every damn one of them. In two years, he missed only a couple of weeks. But then Roone Arledge, the new boss at ABC News, who had been a super showman at ABC Sports, came calling with a big bag of money, and Threlkeld was gone. When asked for a comment by The New York Times, Kuralt said, “He has given us a demonstration that the news on television does not have to be cramped and constricted. It can be expansive and exalting if you make a little time on the air and ask a good man to fill it.” We would soon lose 62

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Jeff Greenfield and Ray Gandolf to Arledge’s clutches, too, but we soldiered on, finding good people to replace them.

The loss of Threlkeld did sting, though, because of the high regard all of the staff held him in. We had become a close-knit group, trusting one another’s talents even socializing outside the building. Dick Threlkeld died in a horrific accident while driving his Mini Cooper on a pleasant Friday morning in January 2012. He was 74. Jim Houtrides, one of our senior producers and my chief deputy, was moved to write a poem about his old friend. It read in part: “His picture at the memorial showed a handsome young man, Smiling, lips slightly pursed, as if savoring the irony of his death.

We remembered his coolness under fire, the clarity of his sentences, His love of wine and cigarettes, how much he distrusted poetry, Although he surely knew how close to poetry his writing was.”

David Culhane became part of our “cover story” rotation and would last as long as Kuralt. He cut his teeth in newspapers as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and then for Cronkite in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He helped keep us topical with reports on the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the Boston bussing crisis, to name just a few. He also did such standout pieces as a profile of piano stylist Dave Brubeck turning 60, and we heard the sweet saxophone sounds of Paul Desmond playing the Brubeck standard, “Take Five.”

Ed Rabel, from Charles Town, West Virginia, had lived through the racial upheaval in the South and reported on it for the Evening News. He also covered presidential campaigns, wars in Latin America and Vietnam and the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. He was another of those correspondents who took to the Sunday Morning format. He was a natural for our “cover stories.” Rabel had just returned with veteran producer Larry Doyle from covering the struggle for a united Ireland and the hunger strike of Bobby Sands when we sent them right back out to cover a reunion of the Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, and to interview Congressman John Lewis, one of Dr. King’s most trusted supporters.

“One of the things I like best about this program is we do a lot of socialjustice stories, especially about Black America.” That was Charles reacting to a New York Magazine reporter, “Last week, a poor housing project in Chicago; this week, the Freedom Riders.” The day “Brown v. Board of Education” came down in 1954, Charles was the editor of the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. “The phone rang, and it was The New York Times,” he said, “God Almighty, I was impressed. They were polling college papers for reactions to ‘Brown,’ and I said, ‘I just happen to have something for you right here. We 63

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were the only southern college to endorse the decision, I recall. My civil-rights involvement goes back that far.”

Ed Rabel also provided extensive coverage of the immigration story at the Mexican border. In 1981, reporting from a crossing point overlooking the Rio Grande, he offered, “When you have been quarreling with your neighbor for nearly a hundred years, making up is hard to do. But last week, Ronald Reagan went over to his neighbor’s house to try to patch things up, the first meeting ever between an American president-elect and a president of Mexico.” Kuralt had introduced the piece this way, “How do the United States and Mexico get along?

Disagreeably, as usual. The United States and Mexico just do not get along with each other.” In recent years, the immigration problem has transitioned to the migrants coming from countries even farther south of Mexico. It is 40 years and counting, and really still an issue of Mexican interests versus those of the U.S. — a borderline seemingly drawn in the sand — a conundrum still without a solution.

We had been preempted twice in the first six months by religious services and the religious programming that we had replaced, but then Black Rock ordered up an hour of repeats, including the Louie story, and aired it in prime time. So, maybe the programming guys who make the big bucks aren’t rocket scientists after all. But some of the daily newspapers in the more conservative areas of the country began to weigh in on whether we were actually taking church-goers out of their pews and into their TV rooms because of our more than occasional use of church music in our “cover stories.” The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times wrote, “Sunday Morning has more than taken the guilt out of missing church.

For 90 minutes each week, it takes the guilt even out of watching television.”

Northshield explained that we used church music to establish the mood of a piece rather than rudely ask those “dealing with poignancy and suffering how they are feeling.” I pointed out that we were “not arrogant enough to think we could replace church nor were we trying to compete with church — that part was all happenstance, that we did pieces we think are good American journalism.”

The Times headlined their story, “CBS bows its head to honor the human spirit.”

Scenes from some of those early Sunday Mornings flash by the memory bank: Don Kladstrup returning with the famed 84th Infantry Division on the 25th anniversary of the “Battle of the Bulge” and Belgians pouring out onto the streets to hug them; Woodie Broun reviewing the book Sally Hemmings, about a slave mistress of Thomas Jefferson, who bore them a child; balky correspondent Hughes Rudd describing the fever surrounding the King Tut exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, “Tut-tut,” said Rudd; Ray Gandolf giving a gripping 64

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account of 65-year-old Indiana swimming coach Doc Counsilman splashing his way across the English Channel, the oldest ever to do it. It was pure agony and then pure ecstasy. As Gandolf put it, “There was life in the old boy, yet.” That line may have been meant as a counterpoint to Threlkeld’s obit line at James T. Farrell’s funeral, “They put the old boy in the ground,” but I never asked Gandolf. Our contributors could sometimes be as competitive in their writing as our anchorman was.

I admit to being prejudiced about Broun’s work. No mystery there. Some of those early days on the weekend news are where we developed a lasting rapport. We arrived there from different worlds; however, his was a privileged upbringing. He was raised by schoolmasters and Mattie, the Broun housekeeper.

His mother, Ruth Hale, was the first woman movie critic and a founder of the Lucy Stone League, which fought for the right of women to retain their maiden name. Father Heywood was the most celebrated journalist of his era. Woodie called them by their first names and once told me that Ruth was out to change the world and that Heywood was bent on improving it.

My mother was a secretary, and my father was a traveling salesman. I used to love to hear his stories about dragging his steamer trunk full of samples onto a train and arriving in places like Duluth, Minnesota, where temperatures were so cold you could catch your breath in your hands. Woodie had acquired an intellectual view of the world. I was still absorbing America.

When Jackie Robinson died, we were asked to fill most of the half-hour of a CBS News Special Report with a historical view of this baseball and civil rights trailblazer. Woodie, on assignment for a New York newspaper, had first laid eyes on Jack at an exhibition game in Havana in 1947, where the Dodgers were holding spring training for their best prospects. He was sitting next to Branch Rickey, the Dodgers executive tasked with managing Robinson through an expected minefield of racial bigotry once he hit the big leagues. Players on the Cardinals and Giants had already made it known that they would go out on strike rather than face a team with a Black player. Rickey turned to Woodie and bemoaned, “You writers haven’t been fair to me in the matter of Robinson. Great pressures have been brought to bear on me, which I am not at liberty to tell you about.”

Then, a short time later, when Woodie heard Rickey say, “Did you see that play?! Robinson has the greatest pair of hands I ever saw,” he knew that Jack would be in Ebbets Field on opening day and that the integration of baseball was at hand. Woodie told me that shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who was from Louisville, was one of the few who ”made it clear to Jack very early that he was welcome 65

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on the club and as soon the others realized that he was going to put them in the World Series, some of them would become fiercely protective.” But Rickey had to get rid of other Dodgers who were radically opposed to having Jack on the team. Brooklyn won six World Series during Jack’s ten seasons. In 1962, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

There were others who followed Robinson from the Negro Leagues to the majors. Pitcher Joe Black spent eight years with the Baltimore Elite Giants before the Dodgers called him up to join Jack on a Dodger team that would face the Yankees in the 1952 World Series. He was so good that he was chosen “Rookie of the Year” and wound up as the featured guest on Ed Murrow’s See It Now. Sunday Morning took me out on the road occasionally to do pieces on my own for Kuralt. I interviewed Joe Black, who told me, “Baseball was a dream of mine when I was a young kid. Then I turned 17 and found I couldn’t play baseball because I was colored. I just couldn’t figure out how I could be an American singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and then ‘you can’t play America’s number one pastime.’” He was a graduate of Morgan State College and was bound and determined to make the “bigs.” “I came in five years after Jackie,” he said, “but they still didn’t like us. You would get phone calls, people saying, ‘Why don’t you monkeys go back to Africa?’”

On the road, he was Jackie Robinson’s roommate. “He carried the burden of thirty million Black folks on his shoulder by turning the other cheek,” Black told me. “If Jackie had punched somebody, you never would have heard of Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Reggie Jackson because they would have said to Branch Rickey, ‘See? We told you it wouldn’t work.’ This man would go to a ballpark and he had teammates who wouldn’t talk to him. He’d slide into second base, you’d see him coming up wiping spit off his face. When he played first base, they’d try to spike him. He would go home at night and talk to his wife and sit there and cry; tears came down his cheeks. There were times Jackie said, ‘I felt like quitting, and Rickey would say, ‘You can’t quit.’”

Joe Black was a big teddy bear of a man who spent his later years helping old baseball players who had fallen on hard times as part of an organization called BAT, the Baseball Assistance Team. We followed him to Chicago, where a busload of Negro League veterans joined him for a reunion. These were the men who used to barnstorm with Bob Feller and Joe DiMaggio — like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson — during the offseason because of baseball’s strict color line. They took in a game at the brand-new White Sox ballpark and reminisced about the good times. One of the names that kept coming up was “Double Duty” Radcliffe, nicknamed “Double Duty” because he’d pitch the first game 66

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of a doubleheader and catch the second. Black put things in context, “‘Double Duty’ Radcliffe, Jimmy Crutchfield, Albert Perry, these guys were stars. They outplayed Jackie Robinson in that league, but because they were born too soon, they never had a chance to play major league baseball.” And, he added, “They had to suffer indignities and were paid almost nothing, but played their hearts out just for the joy of it. Now there’s about 75 or 80 without any pensions, without any hospitalization, trying to survive on a Social Security check of three or four hundred dollars a month.”

Another of those survivors was Sandy Amorós, also a Negro League graduate and Black’s teammate on the 1955 Dodgers team that finally beat the Yankees to win their first World Series, aided by a spectacular catch by Amorós in the final game. Black reached out to an aging Amorós, who was almost a casualty before he became a survivor. “He was so quick, so fast. Now, here’s a letter saying he’s living in the garage with one leg and doesn’t even have crutches. What we did, we gave him his dignity. We got him an apartment, got him an artificial leg, and helped him find a job so that he can say, ‘I am somebody,’ once more.”

One year after Robinson’s date with history, the Cleveland Indians’ Larry Doby integrated the American League and became a perennial All-Star, yet it took him almost a lifetime to get to Cooperstown. His Hall of Fame teammates Bob Feller and Lou Boudreau got there a lot sooner. Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of the Cleveland Indians, said he received thousands of letters from the fans warning him that if Doby put on a uniform and played, there would be consequences, code word for boycotts, Bill Veeck and wife Mary Francis Veeck, courtesy of son Mike Veeck Family maybe even demonstrations. That didn’t scare Foundation, Budlam Productions Bill Veeck. He was known as a champion of Archive the people, often sitting in the far reaches of the stadium to get the real scoop.

Meanwhile, his wife, Mary Francis Veeck, was spending time with the fans, too, getting the bleacher slant of all things Veeck.

Here’s what Doby told me in a Sunday Morning interview, “When I first walked into his office, he was sitting behind his desk, and he said, ‘Lawrence,’ and I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Veeck?’ and he said, ‘Call me Bill. From now on, I’m Bill, and you’re Lawrence. We’re in this together.’ When pitchers threw beanballs, they told us that’s because you’re a good hitter, but DiMaggio, Musial, Williams, 67

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nobody threw at them,” or his teammates Bob Feller and Lou Boudreau, he implied.

Bill Veeck was a maverick owner wherever he went — St Louis, Cleveland, Chicago – but his one great wish, to get Doby into the Hall of Fame, would die with him. It would take Larry Doby a lifetime to get into Cooperstown despite better than Hall of Fame numbers. Hall of Fame voters kept listening to ugly rumors, many racially oriented.

A widely-circulated photograph from the AP showed Doby and pitcher Steve Gromek hugging each other after Doby won a World Series game for Gromek with a home run. “It was such a happy moment,” Doby said. “We didn’t wait to say, ‘Well, he’s white, and he’s Black.’ It wasn’t rehearsed; nobody wrote a script.

You felt that emotional type of happiness, and you just grabbed each other.”

I asked Gromek what the reaction was back in his hometown of Hamtramck, Michigan. “When I got home, I found so many people who resented Blacks. I went into a bar, and a fellow said to me, ‘You didn’t have to do what you did in that picture.’ And I said, ‘Why not? The guy hit a home run for me. I’m gonna be famous for the rest of my life.’”

Helyn Doby, his wife of 52 years, said she had stopped thinking about the Hall of Fame until the day the phone rang in 1998. “I cried, and it was really unbelievable because we really didn’t think it was going to happen after all these years, you know, but it did.” And Larry Doby added, “You had Mr. Rickey, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Veeck, and myself, the courage to do this against all odds.

Baseball should be given a lot of credit for integrating the game because they did it without someone signing a bill saying this is right for everyone.”

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Chapter 5

“America’s Pastime and Its Voices” With the advent of televised sports in the 1960s, there was a huge transformation taking place. The NFL, with its first NFC-AFC championship, soon to be labeled the Super Bowl, and the new star power of the NBA, with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Cousy and Jerry West, were about to become the big players in the network television ratings race. The old powers, boxing, thoroughbred racing, and even baseball would suffer by comparison. But if you were looking for the stories with heart, baseball was where the nuggets were.

Before Google and the instant information age, our stories emerged out of every local newspaper we could find. “We’re out here,” those newspapers seemed to plead, “Come and get us.”

Baseball had moved its brand beyond the Mississippi in 1958, and fans in Minneapolis, then Houston, then Kansas City finally had some hometown heroes to cheer for. The Twins produced Rod Carew, a seven-time league batting champ who came close to hitting the now unachievable, magical .400. Royals’ diehards saw their batting champ, George Brett, come even closer. Now, instead of having to root for a team in Chicago or St. Louis, they had their own guys.

And their loyalty was unbroken, even when their favorites suffered through mostly inferior seasons, especially the Houston Astros. Their story, a particularly poignant one, involved a pitcher named James Rodney Richard.

Woodie once gave me the best explanation of why some of us consider baseball the almost perfect game. “I think it is the endless figures of baseball that are largely responsible for its fascination. Ask a question about the arts, and you cannot help but get a lot of round, imprecise words that are hard to sort into a pattern; ask about politics, and you will get sonorous abstractions; ask about life, and you will get a subjective lecture from someone who probably hasn’t lived enough for it to be worth listening to; ask about baseball and there it is, crystal

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clear. It is, more than anything else, a game of statistics, the most measurable and the most measured of sports.”

Woodie’s multi-faceted background somehow fit the bill if you want to consider his pre-World War II years in New Orleans recording the undiscovered Black jazz giants, serving four years as a U.S. Army Sergeant in Germany, returning to New York to resume his career as a baseball writer. That became a link. The newspaper PM, his employer, suddenly folded, and he decided to become an actor. A friend, the television host Phil Silvers, had his own show and gave Woodie a job because he liked talking baseball with him — another link. That led to a variety of character-actor roles on Broadway, including that of a singing waiter and a comical Western cowboy. His big break came when Leonard Bernstein agreed to direct him as a singing druggist in a big production at Philharmonic Hall. “Everyone told me later that I sang just like a druggist,” he said, “Now if someone will write a full-length work called ‘La Farmacia,’ I will be ready to go to the Met.” Fourteen Broadway gigs later, a sure-shot winner, “Xmas In Las Vegas,” closed after three performances, and another friend, Gordon Manning, made an offer Woodie couldn’t resist.

The Woodstock, N.Y., Times wrote this, “Broun’s passions were expansive. As a journalist, an essayist, and a human being, he was as comfortable with Leonard Bernstein as he was with Joe Namath.”

“Gordo,” as Manning was known, was a former executive at Newsweek, knew Woodie’s range of interests, and had a bit of Rockne in him as our CBS News boss. His “Gordograms” or story ideas, were never-ending bursts of enthusiasm, penned in dark ink over a ripped-out piece of newspaper copy. Manning’s roots were in the slick newsmagazines, where the cover story was king. He had big ideas and big successes as a CBS News executive. He helped persuade Walter Cronkite that the Washington Post Watergate coverage needed a partner to push it onto the national stage. That action turned up the heat and effectively led to the resignation of President Nixon.

Manning was just a dynamo and kept pushing the idea that people turned to sports to escape gloom and thus wanted to hear about the stars. We kept peeking at the other side of the coin where the little stories were, often hidden behind the backstop. If we strayed too far afield, we’d hear from Gordo, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Guess it’s time to do a ‘Bill Bradley,’ the Princeton basketball star, who had proved little more than monosyllabic in an early interview.

Typical of our kind of story was a three-paragraph AP item on the Washington Post sports page that told of a high school phenome near Grambling, Louisiana, who had pitched a no-hitter while hitting superlative-laden home runs and 70

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setting all kinds of local records. We flew down on a whim and had to find a seat among a gaggle of major league scouts who had definitely heard about J. R. Richard. He was a big-boned teenager and had all the tools, according to the baseball “bird dogs.” The whim might pay off, after all, I thought. Woodie took the mic, looked into the camera, and intoned, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, so dreams of games are born on the cow pastures of the rural South, dreams which may soar into reality for James Rodney Richard.”

We learned while we were there that college football and basketball scouts were also hard on his heels. I happened upon the Chicago Cubs super scout Buck O’Neil, a veteran of the Negro Leagues, a founder of the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, a posthumous winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and, as I write this, finally rewarded with election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Over three days, I listened as O’Neil waxed eloquently about the potential of that untapped talent in front of us and told me there was no doubt that J.R. was a “can’t miss’’ baseball prospect. The Richard house was down a dirt road, technically in the hamlet of Ruston, LA, not far from the historically black Grambling College, one of 50 schools to offer J.R. a scholarship. A lawyer had been called in from Houston for advice. Would it be college or pro ball? J.R. was 17 years old, towered over the other kids, and could throw a baseball through the side of a barn.

The home was spare but a warm and welcoming one where his mother, Lizzie, was clearly the boss. She made us coffee and offered to show us the meadow where Rodney had spent his youth. There stood a path-worn, oddshaped diamond containing two old apple trees as bases and a stone marker for home plate. A nearby apple branch, shiny from use, served as the bat. There were rubber balls that had seen better days. Lizzie told us that from daylight to dark, boys and girls of various sizes and ages played until the scores ran up into the hundreds, and there were no umpires or parents to settle disputes.

“Apparently,” Woodie wrote, “Jumping over cow flops and leaping off hummocks in pursuit of a flying tennis ball makes, eventually, some awesome outfielders while fielding ground balls that carom off boulders like the steel spheres in a pinball machine is the way to become a shortstop for whom infield pebbles hold few terrors.” And, Woodie added, “I would like to bring Little League coaches to this field and make them sit in silence, observing the proceedings.”

While we were in Ruston, we got to spend some time with the Grambling College football coach Eddie Robinson and a gathering of his NFL alumni, a veritable all-star team. In attendance were Hall of Famers Buck Buchanan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Willy Brown of the Oakland Raiders. Tank Younger 71

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of the Los Angeles Rams, the first NFL player from a predominantly Black college, was also there. He was a sixtime all-pro and a member of the college football Hall of Fame. They resembled a formidable recruiting machine when it came time for J.R. to make his decision.

The baseball “bird dogs” were relentless, but the Grambling University football coach was also tenacious in trying to Grambling University coach Eddie Robinson, Woodie Broun, Buck Buchanan (rear), (unknown), get J.R. Richard to settle in his familiar Bud Lamoreaux, coach Douglas Porter, Paul home surroundings.

“Tank” Younger, Budlam Productions Archive Eddie Robinson and his football family had seen the talent in young J.R. and had sent him the message that opportunity awaited. Here’s the opportunity Woodie imagined, “The high school baseball games we saw were played on bumpy fields that revealed crude farm boy strength, except for J.R. Richard, who had the grace that makes strength the agent of art.”

Before we left town, J.R. asked us to meet him at his house and presented both of us with wooden lamps he had fashioned in shop class in high school. Woodie was so moved by it that he put it beside his bed and told me he was “saving it to give to Cooperstown, where I expect, eventually, to see him honored.” J.R. tried college for a short spell, but when the Houston Astros came calling with a substantial bonus, he hit the road for Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the lowest of the minor leagues, where he proudly introduced us to his new bride. It was a struggle the first few years finding his confidence and learning to live on his own. We dropped in on him a couple of years later in Oklahoma City, just before he sampled the bright lights of the big leagues. He wasn’t ready yet, but he would be soon enough. His confidence had grown and so had a new Afro. “His sense of himself,” Woodie wrote, “extended beyond the simple prides of strength and agility, and the eye of his mind could see a world much bigger, if perhaps somewhat less pleasant, than the apple tree meadow in Ruston.”

It had been five years in the making, but the final time we did a story on him, he was wearing a Houston Astros uniform and just beginning to blossom.

He was six-foot-eight but looked eight-foot-six when that baseball exploded out of his hand. In fact, with his speed, he conjured up images of Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan, the elite of power pitchers. In the next four strikeout-filled seasons, he won the respect of every National League hitter and looked like a cinch to 72

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make it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He became one of the highestpaid players in the game, too. And his Astros were about to become a playoff team for the first time in 1980 — when suddenly, in mid-season, at age 30, he began complaining of headaches, of deadness in his arms. A stroke put him in the hospital, and arterial blockages were discovered in his pitching arm. He was upset about the way the Astros treated the early signs of his medical troubles.

Their relationship soured.

Baseball was over, but what about his life? He went through an expensive divorce from his first wife, with whom he had five children. He lost most of the rest of his money through investments that went sour, lost his house, and wound up living in a cardboard box under a Houston overpass —a few short miles from the diamond where thousands had cheered his every pitch. He was 45 years old and homeless.

The Astros were no help, but the Baseball Assistance Team and Joe Black found him and started him on the road back. It took time, but he went through extensive counseling, and then I read he had become a Christian minister tending to the homeless. I immediately remembered a pre-meal prayer he had said before serving up one of Lizzy’s recipes back in Cocoa Beach and thought, He’s gonna be okay. At the 2019 All-Star game in Houston, the Astros selected him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch and finally inducted him into their Hall of Fame. The old fastball had lost some of its zip, but it sailed right into the catcher’s mitt, and the crowd roared. I pictured that apple tree meadow in Ruston and thought, J.R. Richard is a survivor.

And then COVID-19 came along, and even J.R. couldn’t win that fight. In their announcement of his death at age 71, the Astros called him a “legend and an icon.”

“It is a sad day in Houston,” said the statement. “J.R. will forever be remembered as an intimidating figure on the mound, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Nolan Ryan as one of the best pitchers in Astro history.”

Posthumous accolades poured in from the best hitters from his era, citing those five years before the stroke when he was the most feared pitcher in all of baseball. He twice led the league in strikeouts and wild pitches, throwing 100 mph or more. He averaged 19 wins and 14 complete games. He struck out 313 batters in his last full season, an Astro record. Cooperstown is probably out of the question because of the shortness of his career, but my conversation with super scout Buck O’Neil keeps popping into my head. What he saw, what we saw that day in Ruston, surely was greatness in the making.

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In his book, Tumultuous Merriment, Woodie wrote, “I doubt I’ll be there with a camera crew when he walks off the field for the last time and therefore I send this message in advance, ‘You were always a treat to watch, J.R., agreeable to talk to, and the lamp works just fine. I hope, too, that the last day will be one of your choosing and not one circled in black by Father Time.’”

Later, when Father Time did rudely interfere with J.R.’s life, Woodie wrote in The New York Times, “He must have been cruelly bewildered as the world darkened around him. He had played the game brilliantly on the field and honorably by the rules of family values, only to be struck down by the world outside the defining lines of the diamond.” The Times headlined the story, “Essence of J.R. Richard Is More than a Lost Fastball,” and wrote this of Woodie, “A lively mind unbeholden to the commercial dictates of the TV sports structure.”

A postscript on Buck O’Neil: He became a lead actor in getting the Negro League players and their records finally accepted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

For any reader wondering about the integration of the game, there is a wonderful book about Buck called The Soul of Baseball, written by Joe Posnanski. It should be required reading.

Leo “The Lip” Durocher had been J.R. Richard’s manager when he arrived in Houston, and he was Eddie “The Brat” Stanky’s manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s. Durocher and Stanky came from the same school. If your mother was in your way when you rounded third base and headed for home, run her over. If an opponent’s spikes bloodied your ankle sliding into second base, rub some dirt on it, spit on it, rub it again, and keep playing. Stanky was as brash as they come. When we interviewed him as the Chicago White Sox manager, Woodie wrote, “Eddie Stanky resembles a boiling pot on the edge of a rickety stove.” We had just finished an interview with him when he began questioning how we were going to edit it, and we better damn not misconstrue the meaning of what he said or — “I’ll come after you with lawyers, do you hear me?— Lawyers!” We were told he had calmed down in his senior years as the coach of the University of South Alabama, and when we got to Mobile, we were pleasantly surprised to find him on the front lawn tending his flowers.

At practice, he was not judgmental when the college kids made mistakes – “I’ve seen great major leaguers like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle drop fly balls.” And then a perfect double play ball bounced through his young shortstop’s legs, and this is what Woodie saw, “Eddie’s face was a mask of molten iron. His incisors seemed to grow and curve, and I thought he might leap at the boy and tear out his throat. However, slowly the fangs withdrew, the iron cooled and softened, and there, growing softly and painfully, was the smile you see on Saint 74

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Sebastian’s face as he speculates that his rough past as a Roman soldier may be atoned for by the arrows that dot his torso.” It was these metaphorical flourishes that would become Woodie’s trademark.

Stanky, Durocher — they were colorful characters. They are one reason I’ve been an unabashed baseball fan since I was a kid. Number two — most ballplayers were average size, my size. Number three — there was a certain intellectual aspect to the game because it moves at a snail’s pace compared to others and therefore gives managers like “Eddie The Brat” and “Leo The Lip” time to plan their strategies between chess moves — do you bring the infield in, do you hit behind the runner, do you sacrifice? That’s why I tuned in to the baseball announcers of my era. They were engaging students of the game who could give you the inside scoop by, for instance, gaining the confidence of a utility infielder who rarely played but soaked up knowledge by sitting near the manager and listening.

But what really turned me onto baseball as a 12-year-old pitcher with a decent fastball was when an old-timer taught me how to grab the seams and spin the ball so that it moved from side to side. It was a wondrous sight when the catcher called for a curveball, and I watched the young batter jump out of the way as the ball spun over the plate for a strike. I was hooked on the game for life.

When I was a budding college J-school student in Columbia, Missouri, I was no Cardinals fan, but I was addicted to the voice of Harry Caray. “There’s a drive to deep right field. It could be — It should be — it IS a home run. Holy cow!!!”

KMOX was a 50,000-watt clear channel radio station that reached Cardinal fans from Carbondale, Illinois, to Bentonville, Arkansas, to Great Bend, Kansas, and beyond. I would sit glued to my tiny transistor radio deep into the night as Harry played out the drama to his huge audience that might reach nine or ten states.

There were no Kansas City Royals or Colorado Rockies or Texas Rangers then, so Caray became a household voice to a lot of baseball fans across the Great Plains and down into the Ark-La-Tex. When Woodie and I caught up to him in September of 1968, he readily admitted flat out to being a Cardinal rooter who did the Budweiser commercials for his employer, the Busch beer family who signed his checks.

Witnessing Caray work for the first time that night, Woodie reported this, “He tells a story, which fans find so authoritative that they listen to it even in the ballpark where transistors and public address speakers relay it to those who prefer to believe their ears.” And, he continued, ”Harry Caray makes drama out of data and brings to broadcasting the flamboyance that many thought went out with the wide hat brim. Still, from St. Louis to Uganda, an Armed 75

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Forces Radio listener wrote to him that eight thousand miles could not dim the resonance of Harry’s cries, especially this one, “It is a home run! Holy cow!”

Harry eventually got caught sleeping with one of the Anheuser-Busch ladies and took his microphone to Chicago, where he became a fan favorite of the North Side Cubbies by serenading them on every broadcast with his throaty version of “Take me out to the ballgame….”

But that’s not to say, Woodie once wrote, that broadcasters who just emphasize statistics without a humorous tone can’t be useful. “Numbers dot baseball conversations and baseball literature as raisins dot the better rice pudding, and the baseball broadcaster depends for his between-pitch material on that clipboard of ready-reference statistics, many of them odd and arcane, but all of them vaguely comforting in their precision.”

Bob Prince of the Pittsburgh Pirates was another of those entertaining guys behind the mic. He had a gravelly voice and a staccato style that earned him the nickname “The Gunner.” Prince playfully held up a rubber rattle that was shaped more like a pickle that he called “the Green Weenie.” But his best prank was the night he was doing a commercial for Pittsburgh’s future Hall of Famer Willie Stargell. As the ball soared deep into the night over toward Willie’s chicken restaurant in the Hill District, “The Gunner” cried out to his listeners far and wide, “Chicken’s free at Willie’s place!” Damned if they didn’t clean out the store, and the only thing left was the furniture. ( “Whenever Willie homered, Stargell’s restaurant would give away free chicken to all customers in the restaurant by yelling ‘Chicken on the Hill with Will!’”)

Bob Prince was not the last entertainer to sit behind a Pirates microphone.

Steve Blass had what one might call a dry sense of humor, very dry on the rocks with an onion, if you please. He had been a star pitcher for the Pirates in the early ’70s, winning the seventh and decisive game of the World Series against the Baltimore Orioles. The cheers of the crowds would soon end in a bizarre way. Blass, who possessed impeccable control of the baseball, suddenly couldn’t get it over the plate if there was a batter in the box. Before this period of insanity, his walks per batter were among the lowest in the league. He tried psychiatry and transcendental meditation. They relaxed him, but not his arm. He tried pitching from the outfield and while kneeling on the mound with his left foot tucked behind his right knee. Nothing worked; as soon as he had to face a batter, the world looked different to him, so he retired. As he told Woodie, “I go along with the philosophy of baseball that it’s not like we’re a bunch of heart surgeons.

We’re not the most critical thing going on on this earth right now. There’s a new hero every day. I’m sure I’ll have my share of solitude.”

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It wasn’t often that Kuralt asked to do a baseball story, but when I found one that fit into his schedule, he leaped at the chance. Ernie Harwell, the longtime voice of the Detroit Tigers, was an announcer he admired. Charles described him as “one of the towering figures of baseball announcing, never frenetic and fevered — calm and accurate, kind of a poet of the game.” Harwell broke into the big time in 1948 when the Brooklyn Dodgers announcer, Red Barber, became ill and needed to be replaced. At the time, Ernie was calling the games of the minor league Atlanta Crackers, and they wouldn’t let him go unless the Dodgers gave them a player in return. “So he became the only announcer in baseball history to be a part of a major league trade,” said Charles. “He was there when Jackie Robinson helped the Dodgers win a pennant. Then he became the broadcaster for the New York Giants, who won with Willie Mays as their star.”

Kuralt posed a ticklish question, “I guess there are some owners who want the broadcaster to be a rooter?” “Yes, that’s true,” Harwell offered. “I’ve heard of certain owners saying, ‘You’ve got to build up this guy’ or ‘Don’t talk about the rain’ or ‘We’ve got a young player coming along who’s going to be great, talk about him. Be positive about everything. Don’t give a negative statistic.’ But nobody’s ever told me my whole career how to broadcast.” Kuralt wanted to dig deeper. This is what he got.

(Harwell) “Willie Mays was the best player I ever saw, and Jackie Robinson was probably the most exciting player I ever saw.” Kuralt had done his job. Ernie Harwell was 84 years old when he “hung ’em up.” It capped a 55-year career of entertaining Tiger fans with the sweet sounds of “the summer game.”

Baseball had a pretty pristine image up until 1970. Baseball was still a game before television moved in and made it a way to get rich. Sure, there were the occasional scandals and some celebrated barroom brawls involving Mickey Mantle and his drinking buddy Billy Martin. But nothing shook up the establishment like the “tell-it-like-it-is’’ book written by Jim Bouton titled Ball Four. He was a big game pitcher with the Yankees and had taken up the knuckleball with the Houston Astros to stretch out his career. Knuckleballers have a history of being a little flaky, but Bouton was sensitive to the world around him and to the baseball heroes who were more one-dimensional but had their dark sides, too.

Here’s Woodie, “Baseball has always liked to be painted in the bright primary colors suitable for storybook figures. It likes book titles like Baseball Joe Meets The Bobbsey Twins. You have a love-hate relationship with baseball; what’s the hate part?”

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(Bouton) “I hate it when some players become too pompous. I hate it when they have rules that you can’t sign autographs for kids. I hate it when general managers cheat ballplayers when they lie to them.”

(Woodie) And what’s the love part?”

(Bouton) The love part is standing out on the mound and saying to yourself — “Hey! I’m pitching to Henry Aaron.”

Bouton tore into the fabric of the game, revealing unspoken tales of carousing, drinking, racism, and popping pep pills called “greenies.” Actually, it was mostly an irreverent book, not written to defame anyone but just to show how human ballplayers were. Bouton was clear about that: “One of the things that has been misunderstood about the book is that I really do enjoy the humor, the bawdy kind of humor, the things we do on the bus, on the plane, in the hotels.” But the heat was on, and baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn summoned Bouton to New York to give him a stern lecture about the sanctity of “America’s pastime.”

Some of the Astros gave Bouton the silent treatment, especially those who were in the book. One of them was Joe Pepitone, who had been a teammate when they were both with the Yankees. We watched as Bouton pulled a clubhouse prank on Pepitone, who was known for his vanity about the bald spot on his head. He had a box of wigs he wore, and Bouton secretly sprinkled them with talcum powder that, when worn, would make Joe Pepitone look like George Washington. Pepitone was not among those laughing. “I know I’m in the book and that he had a few things to say about me, that there are certain things he said that can make marital troubles real bad.”

Bouton said his favorite manager was a baseball lifer named Joe Schultz. “I loved Joe. I thought he had things in perspective. We’d lost about six in a row, Baltimore was leading us 15-to-1, and Joe goes up and down the dugout saying, “Well, men, between games today, we have a choice of ham, roast beef, or tuna salad.” Another time, in a critical moment of the game, with Bouton trying to get the last out, Schultz called time out and strolled to the mound. What’s he doing out here? thought Bouton. Schultz blurted out, “Okay, kid, get ’em out, and we can go pound some Budweiser.” As Woodie summed it up, “A name in lights is an actor’s dream, and scoreboards are lavish with electronic immortality. Jim Bouton enjoys the lights but senses that ink on a title page might be more longlasting. This is Heywood Hale Broun at the Astrodome in Houston.” As it turns out, Bouton followed his baseball career with a successful career as a New York television sportscaster and wrote a popular follow-up book, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally.

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I once had a long conversation with Woodie about how he came to appreciate baseball so much, and he told me that his father, who wrote a serious newspaper column about more earthshaking subjects, was also a widely read sportswriter around the time of the Great Depression: “They were the only storytellers. You didn’t listen to the radio; there wasn’t any television. You picked up the afternoon edition of the paper, which would have the first three innings stamped on the front page. When my father and Ring Lardner were writing baseball, the whole world that was interested in sports turned to them. Lardner was a personality; my father was a personality. Grantland Rice wrote in doggerel, which is often considered trivial but effective, with comparisons to Thermopylae and Waterloo.”

Rice’s most repeated piece of purple prose happens to be about football and a Biblical reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He wrote this account of the Notre Dame backfield smashing arch-rival Army in 1924: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore, they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction, and death.

These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden,” — The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Woodie is remembered for quotes that were a little more sophisticated.

He once wrote, “In sports —- the hidden banana peel waits for everyone.”

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“New York, It’s a Helluva Town” One of the challenges of being on assignment with Woodie was that he had absolutely no sense of direction. Here was a man with a mind chock-full of historical bon mots who couldn’t find his way from Avenue A to Avenue B. We would arrive at the airport with a tight schedule of events ahead. I would head to the rental car counter, secure a map to Toonerville, hand it to Woodie, and drive to the exit. “Which way, Woodie,” I would ask. “Turn left,” he would say.

I would turn right and be almost never wrong. Except after we flew into Los Angeles International for Super Bowl I, I turned right and could have wound up in San Diego, but for a quick course correction. The navigator was right for the first time in months. Coach Lombardi had chosen to sequester his Packers from the eyes of the media at a practice facility in the mountains near Santa Barbara to the north.

Actually, he would have been safer in the Coliseum in Los Angeles, where Super Bowl fever was nowhere to be found. The average ticket cost $10, and there was zero chance of a sellout. City buses advertised racing at Santa Anita. The marquee outside Super Bowl headquarters featured a Machinists Union meeting and the hotel’s bar. Gambling that Lombardi would let us in by remembering our lights that had allowed him to practice in Tulsa a month before, we arrived in Santa Barbara just as the Packer bus was pulling in. Here’s what Woodie wrote, “The ukases of Lombardi usually had the force of the wishes of Genghis Khan, but when Vinnie came close enough for recognition, he rumbled to a stop and growled in a voice one would use to profaners of the inner temple, ‘Oh, it’s you guys. Okay, but twenty minutes. — Got that? — Twenty minutes!” Then he turned on his heel and marched toward the only other cameraman in sight and ordered him off in a tide of scalding words. “But Vince,” he protested. “I work for you. I’m the Packers’ cameraman.” “One camera is enough,” snarled Lombardi, “and right now it’s theirs.’ OFF! OFF! OFF!” 80

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The Green Bay Packers coach had gotten to the championship by beating his arch-rival Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys in the famed “Ice Bowl.” After watching it on television, Woodie opined, “Landry seemed more ready to head to the office rather than to coach a football team, with that slightly ill-fitting hat and calm demeanor — while around him, giant men covered with icicles and bruises are growling and bumping, and he’s just sending out orders rather like Napoleon, small but terrifying.”

Returning from Santa Barbara to our hotel in Los Angeles, there were a myriad of messages from a vice president friend at CBS Sports begging me to get Roger Mudd to mention on our Saturday night newscast that the game could be seen on CBS. NBC was also telecasting the game, and the battle of the networks had begun to feed the NFL money machine. In keeping with the CBS guidelines then that separated news and sports, I don’t remember quite what Mudd said, but it didn’t sound like a promo to me. The Packers beat Kansas City pretty easily. The networks had moved the 60,000 fans into the sideline seats to give the appearance of a sellout. The end zone and the other 40,000 seats were empty.

Woodie fired his opening salvo, “As befits a Bowl called Super, there was in Los Angeles Coliseum today enough pageantry and color for a coronation.” Our most memorable moment was a shot by an industrious cameraman that pictured Commissioner Pete Rozelle in a booth high up in the Coliseum, watching the game on a television monitor. It spoke volumes of where the game was headed.

Woodie saved his best shot for halftime when, as two rocketmen were propelled aloft, he stood beneath them and shouted over the noise, “Sensing a lack of suspense, the super satraps poured on the production and the air, empty at least of vital passes, was alive with balloons and enough pigeons to fill [Piazza San Marco] in Venice.”

We caught up to Lombardi again at Super Bowl II in Miami, which the Packers again won in a walk, beating the Oakland Raiders. Lombardi pretty much summed up his philosophy of football when Woodie asked him if, during the grind of a long season, he ever had time to relax. “I think there’s a place for laughter, Woodie,” he said, “but certainly not on the field. And, I might add this: There’s no laughter in losing either.” Standing in front of some crashing waves on a Miami Beach, Woodie offered this observation: “Long ago, Canute, king, coach, and general manager of the Britons, commanded the waves to stop, but they broke through his line. Vinnie Lombardi hasn’t tried stopping the tide, but it’s safe to say that if he told his Packers to do it, they’d drown in the attempt.”

Lombardi’s opponent that day was another Brooklynite, Al Davis, coach and general manager of the Raiders. Davis may have been on to something when he 81

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uttered these prophetic words to us before the game, “We admit that the National Football League is ahead of us in years, but our dedication goes onward, our desire to become number one. We feel that an organization like ours is destined for this; it may be this year, it may be next year.” The next year proved to be the right year when Joe Namath, the matinee idol, fast-living quarterback, bragged before Super Bowl III that his New York Jets would upset the Baltimore Colts.

A few years removed from being a sad sack franchise named the Titans, new owners had pumped cash into the team and signed Namath to a sweetheart contract.

Here’s Woodie, “The hurricane that Namath stirs has blown both his team and his league into the public consciousness and as many come to see him thrown, as come to see him throw.” (Woodie) “People want you to be an example, a wise man, a politician, don’t they?”

(Namath) “Oh yes. I think about that every now and then, and people that feel I’m giving a bad image to the youth of today by wearing a mustache.”

(Woodie) “Mustaches are all right with me.”

(Namath) “Yeah, but you’re prejudiced.”

(Woodie) “You’ve been told that newspaper clippings on a bulletin board fire people up and that you shouldn’t give frank opinions. Have you been told to be more diplomatic?”

(Namath) “I don’t think a team playing a world championship game needs anything to get them up emotionally, and as many things I’ve read about myself in the past that weren’t true, I certainly don’t look in the newspapers. But I’ll tell you this: We got the grooviest team going, man.”

I stood on the sidelines, near the Baltimore bench, during a hard-fought first quarter and got an inkling of what was happening when I saw two Baltimore offensive linemen come off the field shaking their heads and heard one of them say, “These guys are tough.” At halftime, I went up to the press box where the typewriters banged out the first half story and stats — out-of-town writers had begun to look at the game as if it were a major confrontation at the Berlin Wall.

Over in the corner, I heard cameraman Lawrence Pierce, who had fearlessly covered the ongoing civil rights struggle in the South, talking animatedly on his prototype cell phone, which weighed about 10 pounds, to his little girl, who was busy enjoying her birthday party back home in Alabama. I reminded him that the denizens of the press were starting to complain about his irreverence, and they could have us thrown out of the stadium and maybe out of a job. Lawrence uttered one more, “Well, I have to go now, Sweet Pea!” and thankfully hung up.

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When the game resumed, the Colts in no way resembled a team that had been a more than two-touchdown favorite, and the Jets beat them handily. I followed Commissioner Rozelle into a dark corner of the Orange Bowl, where he stood holding a big silver trophy he would give to the Jets. He was shaking his head and professing that he hadn’t readied a victory speech for the underdogs.

Woodie, meanwhile, ran by us and followed the Jets into the locker room, and here’s what he and our cameras recorded. “We were the only news camera to get into the dressing room, and there was a tiny little man in a straw hat embracing Namath, both of them weeping. It was his father.”

It was 1969 and a precursor of good things to come for another sports team in New York, which, according to Joe Namath and Frank Sinatra, “was the city that never sleeps.” That team was the once-hapless New York Mets — “The Miracle Mets.” Early that season, when the Mets looked like they might be at last respectable, a lone figure in a carnival barker’s hat appeared behind the opponent’s dugout and held up a series of mostly critical signs that the players could clearly see — reading slurs like “Losers,” “Rats!!,” and “Not Again.” Karl Ehrhardt was a commercial artist and ex-Dodger fan who had become frustrated by the Mets’ continued ineptness. They were so bad in their inaugural year they had stolen manager Casey Stengel off the rock pile of retirement to entertain “his” writers and deflect any mention of the team’s miseries. An example was Casey’s postgame take on the performance of his catcher, Chris Cannizzaro, “I knew he couldn’t throw, I knew he couldn’t hit, and I knew he couldn’t run — but I didn’t know he couldn’t catch.”

Woodie thought Ehrhardt’s signs, if not the team, hit a lot of home runs, that seven years with the team had added a mordant edge to Ehrhardt’s humor. Was he correct?

“Oh yes, definitely,” Ehrhardt said. “You feel like you’re talking to the players, and they may not look like they see it, but it’s there. And the fans all around us, I feel we’ve become all one, that we’re all saying the same thing. We want to needle them. Like all Mets fans, we are frustrated.” His favorite target was the Mets’ homegrown first-baseman, Ed Kranepool. Ehrhardt had a special sign for him — “Superstiff.” Was Kranepool aware of it?

“It is a little annoying,” Kranepool said. “But if that’s all these fans have to do is make signs and ridicule the players, I feel sorry for them. But, on the other hand, they’re out to have a good time, and if you’re playing poorly….”

The owner of the Mets was a society woman, Joan Whitney Payson, who was part of the Whitney horse racing clan. She had been a minority stockholder in the New York Giants before they scurried out of town to San Francisco as part 83

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of the Dodgers’ defection to the West Coast in 1957. And she was instrumental in bringing National League baseball back to New York a few years later. When baseball expanded, she invested one million dollars in the new team in town, the Mets, soon to be dubbed the Mutts. The Whitneys were a prominent New York family. Mrs. Payson was better known as a philanthropist and patron of the arts, a quiet, dignified lady suffering through the worst period of baseball New York had ever seen.

We went out to Shea Stadium to check out the lady in charge. “For many Long Island ladies,” Woodie began. “The rhythm of the day is expressed in the ruffle of bridge cards, the tinkle of tea cups, and the soft chunk of garden shears.

For Mrs. Joan Payson, the good days are marked by the cheers of Mets fans and the crack of Mets bats. Mrs. Payson, is there a special problem being a lady owner in baseball?”

(Joan Payson) “No, the only real disappointment I’ve had is not being allowed to go down in the dugout or on the field before the game. I thought the owner would at least be allowed to do that.”

She had been a big Willie Mays fan when she owned the Giants, and rumors abounded that when she gave up her stake in the Giants, she wanted Willie to join the Mets instead of accepting monetary compensation.

(Woodie) “Is that so?”

(Payson) “Yes, vaguely. We had a feeling they wouldn’t accept, though.`` With Joan Payson watching her Mets in action over his shoulder, Woodie wrapped it up. “In the theaters and art galleries which are part of her world, Mrs. Payson is likely to talk not of Shakespeare but of Swoboda, Ron Swoboda, her right fielder. When she speaks of Bosch, she means outfielder Don Bosch instead of painter Hieronymus. She is a throwback to the old days when owners threw profits over the fence in search of men who hit the ball over the fence.” The Long Island newspaper Newsday called Woodie “a witty, urbane, sophisticated, eye-twinkling man, with all his colorful plumage.”

When the dog days of August arrived in 1969, the team that had never won more than half its games in a season became a legitimate contender. And by early September, the Mets were on a roll that would take them to victory in the World Series when the Leo “The Lip” Durocher-led Chicago Cubs, who were in first place most of the way, arrived at Shea Stadium. “The city that never sleeps” was in a frenzy. Out to Shea and Woodie, “The upward rush of the Mets united the skyscraper people with the barbershop, bar room, and bleacher sets, who formed a compact bloc of hysteria. Business types grabbed for baseballs as if they were checks at the big client luncheon. Fans who used to want nothing 84

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from the Mets but a little wry amusement now fought for garments that gave off the secret shine of success.”

And when a black cat ran in front of Durocher’s dugout, it was another sign that the suddenly struggling Cubs were probably finished. At least, that’s what Woodie was feeling. “The next night, nearly sixty thousand jammed into Shea Stadium. With the cruel gaiety of bullfight fans, they waved white handkerchiefs at old hero Leo Durocher and called derisive goodbyes. And when Tom “Terrific” Seaver pitched a masterful twenty-first victory to bring the Mets to within two percentage points of the lead, Leo was probably happy to say goodbye himself.”

The team cheerleader who wouldn’t let up all season with cries of “You Gotta Believe” was relief pitcher Frank “Tug’’ McGraw. Woodie asked him about how those fans who actually loved a loser would react. “I think the New York fans want either the best or the worst,” McGraw said. “I don’t think they want anything mediocre. When we were the worst, they loved us, and now that we’re possibly the best, they love us too.” They had become the “Miracle Mets” almost overnight, and Woodie was in high gear. “A team which has fought its way from being a joke to being a club that can take victory calmly and which can make its owner, Mrs. Joan Payson, swagger like a musketeer, can well ponder the words of Francis Bacon, ‘He conquers twice, who upon victory, conquers himself.’”

The New York Post reported, “Heywood Hale Broun, all the world’s his stadium, the fellow whose arcane, irreverent comments may make you smile.”

Up in the “nosebleed” seats at Shea, we found Charles Dillon “Casey’’ Stengel, the ex-manager who helped put the franchise on the map. Woodie asked him if he ever thought he’d see this day coming. Casey offered this piece of Stengelese: “Yes, I thought I’d see it. But they shoulda put two more tiers (of seats) on by now. It’s getting too crowded. We can’t get out of here.”

When the Mets won the Series in five games, Shea Stadium looked like Times Square on the day World War II ended. Our five-minute piece actually led the Cronkite Evening News broadcast. The producers used to kid us that the only sports story they might consider using would be Mao Tse-tung swimming in the Yangtze River. In their day, the Mets had become bigger than Chairman Mao. Every major leaguer has days that they hope will just go away. Very few have one bad day and have to deal with the consequences for the rest of their lives, like Ralph Branca. I pitched on the same sandlots as Branca in my hometown of Mount Vernon, New York, hung out on the same high school field, and idolized him even though he was only a few years older. In my senior year, he pitched in his third All-Star Game representing the Brooklyn Dodgers and was a superstar in the making. Then, a single pitch changed all that and turned daylight into 85

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darkness. It became one of the defining moments in baseball history and followed Branca like a black cloud for the next 65 years of his life.

The moment came on a game-ending pitch in the ninth inning of a 1951 playoff game against the arch-rival New York Giants for the National League pennant. I was a freshman in college, glued to my transistor radio in far-away Virginia. The Giants had overcome a 13-game deficit to get there. The batter was Bobby Thomson. The Giants’ announcer, Russ Hodges, described the pitch and then the swing and then paused for what seemed like an eternity before screaming over the crazed Giants fans, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” It was almost immediately christened “the shot heard round the world.” In my little college town, I had no idea of what Branca would be facing back home after Thomson’s dramatic home run.

It was only later that I heard that he had broken down and cried as the delirious Giants fans exited the Polo Grounds and that Jackie Robinson, who knew something about defeating long odds, consoled him and told him the Dodgers wouldn’t have made it that far without him. And then it started — the insults, the slurs, the boos, being hung in effigy on the lamp posts outside Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Even his parents were harassed back home in Mount Vernon. The next year, in spring training, Branca suffered a freak back injury in the clubhouse and never regained his old form, but he never ran from that pitch.

When Branca learned from a credible source that the Giants may have cheated by stealing the Dodgers catcher’s signs in that playoff game with a telescope and relaying them to the Giants hitters, he was bitter and confused.

But that did not stop him from appearing with Thomson at card shows where fans were curious to hear the inside story. Thomson, whose homer made him more famous than his career deserved, denied that he had been aided in any way by a “stolen sign.” Branca thought otherwise.

Weeks before Bobby Thomson died at age 86, Branca was asked about that famous fastball. Did Thomson have any advanced knowledge? “Absolutely,” he replied. “He knew it was coming.” Ralph Branca lived to be 90 years old, always wondering about his place in history.

“A guy commits murder, and he gets pardoned after 20 years,” he once said.

Ralph Branca in Dodger-blue uniform with Bud “It didn’t get me pardoned.”

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I ran into Ralph a few times over the years, the last time at a Dodgers fantasy camp in Florida, where I was doing an interview for Kuralt. He was sitting in the clubhouse dressed, as I always remembered him, in his old Dodger-blue uniform number 13. I asked him how difficult all these years of questioning and criticism had been, and he said simply, “It hasn’t been easy, but I never stopped believing in myself.”

Real reporting is painstaking and exhausting, getting people to tell you things they shouldn’t. Storytelling is a different matter. Getting people to talk on their own time about their achievements and conquests — and hopes and fears— demands only a built-in radar. Staying focused, listening, and asking follow-up questions will reveal unimaginable gems. CBS News had always been imbued with storytellers of the first rank. Old PBS hand Bill Moyers with his illuminating interviews and Hughes Rudd, who was considered puckish and outspoken, come to mind as contributors to Sunday Morning. Some of them were there for only a cup of coffee in time, but they all fit our model to perfection.

Rudd had an acerbic wit, whether he was barking about the legend of rock and roller Buddy Holly as being no “Irving Berlin or Hank Williams” or describing Detroit as “Cleveland without the glitter.” When he was the co-anchor of the CBS Morning News, viewers liked him because he was cranky, just like them at that hour.

But it was Kuralt who stood above them all. David Halberstam once wrote, “He is clearly the best writer on television because he writes carefully, often poetically, and he understands the value of silence.” That was epitomized by the two minutes of nature that ended each show. Our chief editor, a mad Russian named Al Balisky, became the keeper of the end-pieces. His Rolodex was filled with cameramen from all 50 states eager to provide something for Charles to add a flourish to his finish. The words were few, the silence for cleaning out the cobwebs.

I always felt that, in some way, these nature closers were a substitute in Charles’ mind for those days “On The Road,” when he was footloose and fancyfree. Even though the writing was sparse, it spoke to his wandering spirit.

“Rainstorms don’t often come in the deserts of the world, but when they do come, they can be awesome, full of power and jagged exclamation marks off in the distance. We leave you this morning in Nevada with the wind coming up and a desert storm building.”

“We leave you this morning, in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, in the dark. The sun will rise above these ancient hills before very long, and with it will rise the mist of the mountains, from the lakes and hollows and rivers that have been here just a little short of forever.”

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“We leave you this morning at Canyon De Chelly National Monument in Arizona, where the Anasazi, the ancient ones, lived long ago — long ago and so respectfully of nature that Canyon De Chelly is unmarked but for their dwellings on the cliffs. Even so, the new landlord likes to blow a blizzard through the place now and then just to spruce the canyon up.”

The CBS News publicity machine didn’t do much in the way of on-air promotions in those days about the upcoming content on our Sunday Mornings, so we were mostly reliant on viewers just finding us each week. Out in Hollywood, songwriter Sammy Cahn and singer Dinah Shore actually formed a loosely organized fan club, but although our advertisers were mostly highbrow, IBM, Mercedes, etc., our demographics did not skew to the rich and famous. People in Kuralt country were those slowly passing the word.

Sammy Cahn did send us a letter, “Dear Charles, I had to take the time, along with the whooping cranes, to enunciate my gratitude for the impeccability that is the hallmark of Sunday Morning. I hope you will relay my congratulations to all those people before and behind the cameras that make it possible Sunday after Sunday after Sunday!”

In the first year of Sunday Morning, newspaper reviewers celebrated what our opening Baroque fanfare for trumpets called “Abblasen” promised. One of them talked about Kuralt’s “pastoral pace,” another about his “adroit turns of phrase,” and still another about “his great compassion for others.” In looking through over 100 reviews that are fading fast in my file boxes, here is a representative sample: The Shreveport Times Editorial Page: “The program has proved itself to be the most literate, sensitive offering on commercial network television.”

The San Diego Union: “The best newscast on television: richly informative, diverting, varied in content, presented with great style and professionalism, and above all, intelligence.”

The Rocky Mountain News: “Correspondents are witty, but not in the happytalk genre, a thoughtfully written style with depth not regularly found in electronic journalism.”

The Louisville Courier-Journal: “It is a blend of unrushed, reflective essays and maybe a story that happened a century before or one that’s still developing an eon away.”

Upon returning from a vacation where he refreshed himself with sightings of moose and blue herons and bald eagles, Charles offered some advice to city reporters wrapped up in the rat race, “Once every year, go and be rained on, scratched by Montana briars and share lunch with Wyoming chipmunks. There 88

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is a kind of balance that only rain and briars and chipmunks bring — and the true cool wind from the east.”

All of this would certainly suggest that Charles was a laidback Tarheel who was not particularly competitive. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was fiercely competitive when it came to his writing. Every last word had to be perfect. He would get very annoyed when a bad piece of writing was put in front of him. His first writer was Mel Lavine, a genial, lanky downeaster from Maine and a refugee from the Today show on NBC. He was an old-fashioned journalist, always looking for the story inside the story. I nicknamed him “Scoop,” he called me “Chief.” Here was his first impression of Charles, “Writing scripts for him proved to be an agony. I tuned in to his basso profundo whenever I sat down to write, but he always rewrote my stuff, making it better.” Lavine quickly realized he was writing for a genius. “The show was carved out of Kuralt’s own heart,” he said, “one that favored victims over victors, the anonymous over the famous.

My first year on the job, I gamely fought on, but almost always with the same stupefying results at the hands of Killer Kuralt.”

I had never heard him referred to as “Killer Kuralt” before. But as one who would turn over many a script to the maestro, I never felt frustrated when my script became “Kuralted.” I knew deep down that this was an individual who hated office politics so much that he never would or could challenge the bosses, no matter how badly they treated his show. However, he always felt he could write his way out of any situation — and he did until it all became too much. At one point, he even suffered from stage fright, and we had to pre-tape the opening of our “live” broadcast because he was getting the jitters. Hard to believe from the most competent broadcaster I have ever worked with, but true.

His mailbag was one of his favorite creations. “Postcards From Nebraska” became an instant hit because the mail kept telling us so. It became a staple of the program with tales from the rural plains. For instance, one of Roger Welsch’s Postcards, from “the guy in the overalls,” involved the ancient art of witching. One of Roger’s Dannebrog neighbors was Don Hochstetler, a man of many talents who raised hogs and sold the pork, presided as the town marshall, served on the town board, and fixed cars in his spare time. And when it came to finding a source of water, well, we’ll let Roger explain, “Don ‘witched’ our well by striding across our land with a forked stick and found a vein of water right near our house. There are well drillers who so thoroughly trust the skill of ‘dowsers,’ as many of them like to be called, that they consider it a waste of time to unload their equipment if the well has not been ‘witched.’

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Well, the mailbag wasn’t totally convinced. As Charles reported, “Tony Banks of Redwood City, California, wrote to ask if we knew about the Ogallala Aquifer, with about nine million acre-feet of water, a lot of it under Nebraska.

He said it shouldn’t be too hard to strike water in Nebraska anywhere, with or without a dowser’s help.”

“Here’s a debate on the same subject,” Kuralt reported, “right within the state of Oregon. Barbara Getty of Portland says, in vivid calligraphy, that from her experience, “Yes, I believe in well-water witching.”

“But,” Charles said, “Donald B. Miller of Corvallis accuses us of spreading scientific illiteracy. He says: ‘Dowsing may be folksy, but it is also nonsense.’”

I’ll give Roger Welsch the winning explanation. He wrote, “Sometimes clear-cut answers and the cold certainty of science aren’t nearly as interesting as the wonder of mystery; there are occasions when the absolute truth isn’t nearly as satisfying as wonder.” Touché, Roger.

Many of those “Postcards” from the Great Plains were evocative of an Roger Welsch walking property with Kuralt, Roger era that no longer exists in most of Welsch Family Collection, Linda Welsch Family Archives America. During the early twentieth century, Nebraska had more school districts and thus more one-room schools than any state in the nation, seven thousand, to be exact. Farmer kids would do their morning chores, scrub up a bit, and hurry off to be with their only teacher, usually a young woman who taught grades one through eight in a small building that stood stark against the big skies of the Plains. At the end of the school day, the children would be back on the farm for afternoon chores before supper and homework. Their numbers were dwindling when Roger took us in 1990 to the Happy Hollow School in Weston, Nebraska, about an hour’s drive west of Omaha.

We watched a three-student Christmas pageant under the direction of Helen Horacheck, the aunt of Roger’s wife Linda, who had been teaching there for more than 20 years. The school district was nearly a century old. Roger wrote, “I look with wonder at these three as they stand on their makeshift stage in front of an enormous audience for this county — about 70 local farmers and recent graduates.” Roger asked Mrs. Horacheck if it wasn’t tough to see them leave when they graduated. Her reply: “I have stood here and cried every time I’ve 90

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had an eighth grader leave.” His summation was “These kids will graduate into the bigger world beyond Happy Hollow, able to take on any challenge because Helen Horacheck told them they could.”

Looking back a few years later, Roger wrote in his “Postcards’’ book about the retirement of the teacher and the closing of the school: “Although the children of that one-roomer now attend a much bigger school with much more modern equipment, I can’t help but wonder how much better an education they might receive.” Nebraska closed its last one-roomer about ten years ago. The Happy Hollow building was sold and moved away, removing the last vestige of a place where weddings, funerals, and community meetings were conducted. Other towns have left their buildings abandoned, left to grow old as aging symbols of what used to be — out on the lone prairie.

A final note in this chapter, there’s a New Yorker cover illustration by artist Saul Steinberg that hangs on the wall of my office, presumably representing “flyover” country and its lack of influence on the rest of America. The drawing jumps from New Jersey to Nebraska to Los Angeles in an inch. Ironically, the CBS Production Center where Sunday Morning was broadcast was presumably the only opinion-maker in that small slice of a Manhattan street heading toward the Hudson River. So, perhaps spurred on by the artist’s ingenuity, a new program took on the challenge of introducing flyover country to the elitists — or, it may have been one big coincidence — or, it could have been my flight of fancy, in which case I would let Charles handle it in his mailbag along with his “Sunday John Holladay Cartoon Morning Fact or Fancy Review Board.”

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Chapter 7

“Characters and Family Connections” You won’t find “offbeaters” in your old Funk and Wagnalls, but the Urban Dictionary permits it as a new-age term meaning unique, original, or maybe just plain old funky. We’re about to take a detour from the rich and famous and explore with Woodie those arcane sports and people that our boss Gordo used to hate, “the offbeaters,” starting with a fellow named Ted Owens. We called him “the Hexer.”

Big money was just starting to chase the NFL, but there were still a few colorful owners with a sense of humor then, most especially Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Baltimore Colts. Ted Owens claimed to be a psychic. At least that’s what columnist Lawrence Maddry of the Norfolk, VA Pilot told me one day when he casually suggested that we owed it to our viewers Woodie interviews Ted Owens in his living room to come down and listen to this guy, that while Bud Lamoreaux produces and camera crew records, Budlam Productions Archive Owens was making some real waves for the NFL. He was threatening to put a hex on the Colts, and owner Rosenbloom reportedly offered Owens $25,000 to stay away from his team. Smoke and mirrors could have been involved, Woodie put his tongue in his cheek, and we decided to investigate. We called the office of the NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, and they refused to comment for the record. Rosenbloom told us he was not sophisticated enough about the occult but that he would do anything to help his team.

Owens told us he was the self-styled representative of Dimension Intelligences that had been sent to help those of us of Limited Intelligences here on 92

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Earth. As Woodie put it, “It is his contention that he has powers sent by entities to whom the far side of the moon is suburbia.” And, he added, “To finance his research, he has called on pro football to pay him not to influence the outcome of games through vibrations sent through power-coded discs, TV images or inperson glances.” Owens called the power PK. “It’s the initials for psychokinesis, the power to make or influence matter with your mind, separate from your body.” Owner Rosenbloom played along, “If there’s a chance that would cause us to lose or help us to win, I don’t want Mr. Owens against us. I want him with us.”

Owens insisted that he had used PK to cause an offseason injury to quarterback Johnny Unitas. “You see, I could code these discs a certain way, and if the players would wear them, they would have fewer injuries and win more games than any other team in the NFL.” It turned out that Maddry had encouraged Owens by knighting him the Swami of Norfolk and established a fan base for him. It became more complicated when Maddry suggested Owens really might be able to affect the outcome of Baltimore Colt games by dubbing him The Wizard of Odds.

In the end, Rosenbloom kind of fessed up to all this crazy humor. “I think I may call him and get one of these coded good luck omens. You see, while I hold it in my hands, I feel a great surge of power going through me.” Privately, Maddry confessed, “I found the disc works best when augmented with intermittent sprays from one of those B-S preventers now offered through your local novelty store.” Through it all, Woodie kept his game face on, and we came away with a nice little spoof on Norfolk’s “Hexer.”

As Woodie put it in his summation, “Owens and other science-oriented seers of the ’70s reject the old occult tradition as indignantly as coaches will probably reject the new excuse for a Bud Lamoreaux, Woodie Broun, Ted Owens, fumble, ‘But coach, he PKed it out of and Norfolk, Virginia Pilot newspaper columnist Lawrence Maddry, Budlam Productions Archive my hands.’”

Lawrence Maddry, the columnist, wrote this after the story appeared on Sunday Morning: “Broun was in Norfolk Tuesday, a Little Orphan Annie in a sport coat as outrageously flowered as a Tahitian garden. He is a master of the lyrical phrase who has raised sports reportage to a level that closely parallels art.”

In Petaluma, California, we found Bill Soberanes, a newspaper columnist turned promoter and the founder of the World Wrist Wrestling Championship.

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The world paid attention when cartoonist Charles Schulz sent his “Peanuts” dog Snoopy to the event, only to have him disqualified because he didn’t have a thumb. California Governor Ronald Reagan added notoriety when he showed up one year to wrestle Soberanes — broke one of his ribs, too. Petaluma called itself “America’s Egg Basket” and was Woodie Broun arm wrestles columnist Bill distinctive in that no other city shared Soberanes, Budlam Productions Archive its name.

For as long as Soberanes stayed alive, it was strictly an amateur hour event — then big-time cash prizes moved in, and the tournament was staged in a casino in Reno, Nevada. But the town didn’t forget Soberanes; a bronze statue of him stands in downtown Petaluma. As for the allure of it when it was just a smalltown event, I am reminded of Woodie’s words, “The ten seconds or so of puffing and panting had become of such moment that each competitor who lost would seem to have no option but to join the Foreign Legion to hide his shame.”

Horseracing In Nassau in the Bahamas, we came upon a little race track named Hobby Horse Hall and an extra-small jockey named Alfred Gibbs. He was 14 years old, weighed only 73 pounds, and was riding against the big boys, hoping to make some purse money to pay the grocery bills for his mother. We filmed him exercising a horse down on the beach, splashing the steed through the waves. He was very photogenic, and in the post parade for the third race, he wore a wide smile as he sat proudly on his mount, while at the bottom of his skinny legs, his feet swam inside his cavernous boots. As the field rounded the last turn, he seemed to be looking for our camera and happily peered right into the lens as he crossed the finish line, in the money for the second time in his career. “These horses,” Woodie wrote, “are only nodding cousins to the thoroughbreds of the studbook. But to the railbirds with their form sheets, those that say a profit is without honor don’t go to the race track.”

Alfred’s saddle cloth had been stuffed with a lot of lead bars to satisfy the weight requirements that all horses had to carry in the race, and on his way to be weighed in, he didn’t see one of them fall to the ground and thus disqualify him. Woodie felt the boy’s pain. “Suddenly, the narrow shoulders seemed unable 94

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to fill even the collar of his jacket, and on the endless walk from the track to the jockey quarters, Alfred Gibbs was the most desolate of sights, a racing man shorn of his last shred of optimism. I like to hope that the next day’s sun and surf washed away his cares and relit the fire of his small ambitions and that finally, still, he had a winner.”

Stan Isaacs, a New York sports writer, wrote, “Woodie Broun loved horse racing, maybe most of all, most especially in the TV essays he spiced with wit and eloquence.”

Hurling One November Saturday, Roger Mudd closed out the Evening News with this introduction. “To most Americans, autumn Sunday afternoons mean the exciting, violent world of pro football. To many Irish-Americans and many more Irish-Irish, the violent world of Sunday afternoon is the world of hurling.

Heywood Hale Broun reports from New York’s Gaelic Park.” Woodie came on and described the setting, a field hard by an elevated subway line in a corner of the Bronx. Cork would be playing Kerry, and the sticks would be flying.

“The teams bear names as evocative as the sound of a tenor through a fog or the smell of spilled stout,” intoned Woodie. “The clubs, called hurleys, look like hockey sticks made in the dark, and the players churn up a sea of mud and often release pints of blood.” One of the goalies told us, “It’s not a violent game really. We Irish love it and we think it’s a kind of art really. It’s a game that no other country has ever mastered and, in this day and age, very few things are unique to countries as hurley is to Ireland.” After the match, the devoted and their devotees gathered in a big, warm saloon next to the field’s edge to argue deep into the night over the finer points of the match and, as Woodie put it, “dream of a triumph so grand that the pints of porter will keep flowing until the sun comes out.”

The TV critic for the Denver Post wrote, “Broun’s prose style, unabashedly Victorian in its roots, abounds in metaphors, similes, and alliteration. In top form, his words can make even the most unknown sporting event or athlete seem positively Olympian.”

Sports Families Sneads, Talberts, Mannings, Aarons, Pettys, Serena and Venus Williams were not the first siblings to excel in sports The name Snead evokes memories of the sweetest swing in golf. Slammin’ Sammy Snead was a born hustler out of Hot Springs, Virginia, from a family of 95

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golfing Sneads, which made the name synonymous with the best the game had to offer. Sam was a swashbuckling smoothie who challenged Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson over four decades for the title “best in the game.” He won the most tournaments of the three, and his side matches with braggadocious challengers gave him lots of banking money, which he claimed to have kept in some tin cans in his backyard in West “By God” Virginia, which he called home.

Sam’s nephew J.C. Snead was a middle-rank player on the PGA and Senior PGA tours. They both got the golf bug early from Sam’s oldest brother, Homer, the leader of the clan. Woodie explains, “Homer, now 71, starts his days on one side of a Fort Lauderdale highway and crosses it to run through the hours of light on the firing line of a dusty driving range. Closeness to the tee makes Sneads happy because that’s where they’ve always lived.”

Homer carried the name well. “We grew up ran right out the door onto the golf course. Sam, or so he claimed, copied me. Now, I wouldn’t say that, but I did show him a lot of things when he was a youngster. I think it does run in the family. Just look at the DiMaggios in baseball, Joe, Dom, and Vince (all center fielders, Dom with the Red Sox, Vince with the Pirates).” He admitted to some frustration over the motivation of his driving range customers. Woodie had some theories. “It was for a variety of reasons: some as if to cram all their disappointments into a dimpled white package and hit it over the horizon; some in hopes that a tip in a golf book will suddenly make them look like Heifetz playing a cadenza while others were imagining a lost lover’s head on the tee.”

“I’d rather teach on a range any day than at some club,” Homer told Woodie, “where you’ve got managers and so forth you have to cope with.” He told us he had tried the country club route but that his favorite spot was right there at the driving range where no pupil was too inept, ashamed, or old to try his theories. Woodie had the last words. “Then he gives himself a shake, his wrinklehandled teaching club a little swing, and reminds himself that there are an awful lot of people who remember him, not because they saw him make a shot but because he taught them how to make one. This is Heywood Hale Broun in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

Homer Snead was only sort of an “offbeater.” His was more of a family story, and we discovered more than a few compelling ones like his along the way, families that worked together and played together — like the Talbert brothers from Mississippi.

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Football Don Talbert was the big brother and an NFL offensive tackle. Diron was the bigger brother and an NFL defensive tackle. By a quirk in the schedule, Don’s New Orleans Saints would be playing Diron’s Los Angeles Rams, and these two tree-trunk-sized brothers would be matching up against each other, eyeballing each other directly across the line every time they were on the field. Parental approval would be difficult to attain. So when Don and Diron told us of plans to have dinner the night before the game with their folks, we decided to tag along to check out the dynamics of the Talbert clan.

The most famous of NFL brothers were Peyton Manning and Eli Manning, but because they were both quarterbacks, they never stood across the line of scrimmage from each other, let alone tried to knock each other’s block off.

The Talberts had been doing that since they were kids, roughhousing around, with older brother Don usually having his way. But now Diron was bigger and stronger and the one with the edge because he would be the attacker on every play. At the dinner table, after drinking a couple of cocktails, they began razzing each other while their parents indulged their pranks.

Woodie asked Mother Talbert if she was nervous about the battle to come.

“Yes, I really am,” she said. “I will get very nervous.” Woodie asked, “Do you think you will cover your eyes?” “No,” she said. “I always look regardless if it’s bad or not.” The father had played college football at Mississippi Southern, and lest their heads get too swollen, Don said it was his mother who kept them in line. “Mother always said, ‘Well, your daddy was the best ballplayer of the whole bunch.’”

After they had slugged it out on the field, it was difficult to tell how the allegiances had played out. We recorded Dad yelling, “Hook him, Don, hook him,” while Mom uttered a few neutral pleas like, “Goodness gracious,” and “Oh mercy me.” Don had a beef. “I got something that felt like a ham hock hit me across the side of the head. It was Diron’s fist, of course, and we had a few words.”

Diron confessed that he felt a little relieved. “I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as nervous about a ballgame.” Don had the last word “I might be the oldest, but I’m sure not the biggest. He’s packin’ a lot more weight now than he did as a kid.” As for Dad, “I just can’t help which one loses. I’d just as soon see a tie game.”

Diron’s Rams won the game, and Woodie summed it up, “The Talberts ignored the score and fought their own no-quarter war with an intensity that showed as they glared from the sidelines like young bulls looking for a flicker of the cape. When the game ended, they were suddenly two amiable, disheveled young men, anxious to poultice each other’s bruises with warm words.

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Baseball The Aaron family of Mobile, Alabama, had two sons, Hank and Tommy.

Hank was the big brother and the big bopper, breaking Babe Ruth’s then-career home run record of 716. Tommy spent parts of seven seasons playing alongside him in Milwaukee and Atlanta, constantly trying to live up to those Ruthian feats. We checked in with both of them to find out how the Aaron family was handling things. Hank told us, “The scouts that signed him thought he could be a big league ball player, or they wouldn’t have given him such a large bonus, more than I got.” Tommy chimed in, “When I first signed to play pro ball, people expected me to hit 35 home runs and drive in 100 runs.”

That proved a cruel brotherly comparison, and as brother Hank was inching ever closer to Ruth, Tommy found himself on the hot dog circuit on the Braves farm team in Savannah — coaching, playing, and hoping for one last shot.

Brother Hank had mixed feelings about the way his lifetime employer had treated his brother. “He had such a good first season, and then at the tail end, they cut him off and didn’t play him at all. They should have given him his release and let him go to another ball club.”

Hank had his own problems chasing the legend of “the Bambino” and his 714 home runs. Here was Woodie’s take: “A man who has waited 713 times for the right pitch has learned that patience, unlike virtue, is more than its own reward.”

There were boxes of hate mail, racial taunts, and death threats that caused him to withdraw, much like Roger Maris when he chased Ruth in 1961. “When I don’t hit a home run,” Aaron told us, “they feel like they’ve been let down. I just try to hide a little bit more and stay to myself because I just feel I haven’t had a moment of peace since the season started.”

Tommy sympathized but admitted to us that the comparisons to his brother had been unfair. “Every little bit I had to scratch and dig hard for. For Hank, everything came naturally.” And Savannah was a long way from Atlanta, as Woodie took us home. “The atmosphere here is more homey than heroic as Tommy Aaron plays out the string of his baseball years, a string shrunken to a thread. The anti-climax following Tommy Aaron’s post-game shower is a bus crawl through the tunnel of the night to the club’s next stop in Montgomery, Alabama, just up the turnpike from where he was born.”

Auto Racing The Petty clan of North Carolina once ruled the speedways of the NASCAR circuit as the natural successors to the moonshiners of many moons ago. Lee Petty, the clan elder, is alleged to have plied the illegal whisky trade on the dirt 98

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roads of the Carolina backcountry by outracing revenue agents hell-bent on collecting the federal liquor taxes and putting the drivers behind bars. Woodie asked him if he had any firsthand knowledge of that. “Well, I’m not gonna commit myself to that, Heywood, ’cause I guess there’s still a few revenue agents around these parts.”

Tom Wolfe, a writer who took on America’s fascination with the car with some delicious envy, once wrote a critically-acclaimed essay titled “The Last American Hero” about Junior Johnson, one of Lee Petty’s rivals, who invented the “Johnson Slide.” With a tax agent in his rearview, going about 90, Junior would suddenly hit the brakes, do a 180-degree turn, and head back in the opposite direction through the dust kicked up by his tires as the government agent sped on past him up the clay cowpaths of the Carolina hills, a victim of the “Johnson Slide.”

Woodie Broun and Bud Lamoreaux at a That’s the legend Lee handed down to his Nascar race in South Carolina, Budlam son, Richard. They called him “The King” in Productions Archive car number 43, a Plymouth. Richard Petty ruled the sport for a long time and brought the big money in. He had fond memories of his dad’s day. “I only heard about it that it was a lot of fun running the liquor. But then when you bring the (tax) money into it, it kind of takes the sportsmanship out of it.” Standing outside the Petty garage, Woodie offered this: “It looks like the grim operating theatre where the garage man gives you the bad news, but this is where stock car dreams begin. This is where patient men put together the pieces which often come apart on roaring weekend afternoons.”

Richard Petty said the NASCAR formula was simple: the happy fans are the ones that drive one just like that of the winner. “Everybody moves on wheels, and everybody’s got a Ford or a Chevrolet or a Plymouth, and then they go to a racetrack, and they see their car win...” Woodie finished the thought, “Winning turns the wine of competition into champagne. Richard Petty has quaffed a lot of bubbles so he can be philosophical when a race turns out to be just one long drive.”

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Basketball Any college basketball coach thinks of himself as part of a community that includes the players and their parents, who have all been privy to the living room sales talk. Al McGuire, who won an NCAA championship in his final year at Marquette, stood hands above the pack as a street-smart, straight shooter who never promised more than he could deliver. The most quotable of his generation, he said stuff like, “Help one kid at a time; maybe he’ll go back and help a few more.” He told us, “I think I’m a tenement recruiter; I do better recruiting in big cities and in kind of middle- to low-income brackets. When I do go into the suburbs where grass is in front of the house, I don’t feel too comfortable.” Here’s Woodie: “Al McGuire is one of those coaches who stand in denial of the old bromide, “Nice guys finish last.” He knows the rewards and the price that his players must pay and looks for those recruits to whom the rewards, educational and/or athletic, would mean the most.” McGuire had come from those playgrounds himself as a wise-cracking kid from Rockaway Beach, Queens, where his father owned a gin mill and the family lived behind it.

Some of his contemporaries considered him a “character,” but he was just a guy with a big heart who could speak the lingo. He said, “Every coach coaches the way he played. I couldn’t shoot, so I coached defense.” He told us, “There is no way you can kid young kids today. I can’t walk in, and all of a sudden, I’m going to put my game face on and give them the Rockne talk and kick two lockers so they’ll run through the door and knock it down. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure on a young student-athlete coming to college. In the town he left as a hero, they wait for him to do it again. It’s the saddest thing to see in sports, to see a boy not get a contract or get a degree and then come home, put on his shades, and shape up on the corner.”

He was referring to one of his top players when he said, “I have looked inside Jim Chones’ ice box, and I think it’s best for him to take the bonus and leave now. I do not run a plantation Coach Al Mcguire on the sidelines, here at Marquette.” Woodie became more courtesy Marquette University Athletics, Milwaukee, WI emotional than usual in describing McGuire’s last bounce of the basketball. “When, in his last collegiate game, his team won for him a national title, he knew the magnitude of the gift. And the sharp, calculating face he had long presented to the world was suddenly cracked apart.

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Almost unbearable emotion pressed against his lifelong hard-guy pose, and in a moment, the cracks were filled with tears, and he walked blindly from the floor into retirement. ‘It hadn’t,’ he had said, ‘been fun,’ but I doubt he knew when it was over how much it had held of fulfillment.”

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“Augusta and Tiger” Golf is a maddening game. One day, you’re the King; the next day, you’re the King’s trainbearer taking him to a rendezvous with one of his concubines. In Roger Welsch’s world, a good day for golfers was when they didn’t have to pay a fine for spraying an errant tee shot into one of the cows that shared the local nine-holer. As Roger wrote in his “Postcard,” “At the Dannebrog Country Club links, there are more nibblers than niblicks, more udders than duffers, more branding irons than nine irons. It costs only two dollars a day, and nobody checks your pedigree.”

As for the cattle, it seemed they had learned certain dance steps from Fred Astaire in trying to avoid the offline shots and the barbed wire that surrounded the sand greens. As Roger tells it, “One time, Dave Fries hit a cow right in the middle of her head with a Roger Welsch and Bud Lamoreaux at “Dannebrog hard-hit drive, and the cow died on the Country Club”, courtesy Linda Welsch Family Album, Budlam Productions Archive spot. Dave still insists that paying for the cow didn’t bother him nearly as much as the two-stroke penalty.” After golf, these tales and friendly arguments over who won the dollar golf wager were hashed out at Eric Nielson’s Big Table Tavern and, according to Roger, could go on for hours and produce an abundance of “history, genealogy, sociology, and humor.” As Roger concluded, “One of the very few times I’ve heard anyone cuss out loud in Dannebrog is on the golf course. I guess around here, if you really want to take it easy on a Sunday afternoon if you really want to relax, you don’t play golf.”

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William Least Heat Moon, author of a classic book of rural America, Blue Highways, wrote, “Roger is an old Plains possum who can nose out a tale in your backyard.” And talk show host Dick Cavett, another Nebraskan, offered this, “Reading [Roger’s] latest book gives me the same sort of pleasure I get from reading Thurber, Tarkington, and Twain.”

Aficionados of the Masters, and I admit to having been one of them, often speak in hushed tones about their annual rite of spring. Nearly 90 years ago, champion Bobby Jones and Wall Street tycoon Clifford Roberts set out to build their brand of exclusivity and named it Augusta National. Over the years, they left no stone unturned. Their golf course would be pristine; their galleries, or patrons as they called them, would be reverential but allowed to roar when appropriate; everything symbolic would be green, including the jackets given to members and all tournament winners; and the television coverage would be tightly controlled and awarded to CBS, on a yearly basis. It was the secret sauce that allowed the Masters to become the icon it is to golf fans today.

However, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, and national origin, the winds of change began spreading wide, and Augusta National felt its ferocity. Half a century ago, most private clubs barred Blacks and women. Augusta’s Black caddies in their white jumpsuits stood out as a silent symbol of racism. Charlie Sifford, who won two tournaments after the PGA tour ended its own apartheid-like policies in 1961, did not meet the Masters’ “qualifying regulations” and never received an invitation. Progress would be drip by drip.

In the spring of 1970, we decided to celebrate the arrival of the azaleas and dogwood and do what we would call a “puff piece” about the place we had visited before with Jack Nicklaus. I put in a call to get credentials, and a Colonel Parker informed me that I was welcome but that Woodie was not. My pals over at CBS Sports explained that they were told that Mr. Roberts didn’t like Woodie’s style of reporting, that he was too “irreverent.” The phone lines burned as I made my case, citing our previous “Valentine at Augusta” involving Nicklaus. And I mentioned that the PGA had awarded Woodie a gold engraved reporter’s badge, even though I knew the Masters Tournament is one event that the PGA Tour does not control.

But it became clear that Mr. Roberts felt that there had been other occasions at other events where Woodie had permitted an unacceptable sense of humor to show. Woodie later wrote, “Describing Cliff Roberts as tournament chairman was, though correct, misleading. It would be like describing Ivan the Terrible as presiding over the Council of Boyars. It’s right, but it doesn’t catch the 103

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atmosphere.” The canned nostalgia idea was at once put away and preparations put in train to “spill a little prune juice on the brightly burnished golf shoes of Augusta’s bureaucracy.”

News President Richard Salant was alerted to the obvious potential trouble we might cause for the network’s annual renewal of its Augusta contract, but Salant brushed off that possibility and told us to cover the event like any other news story. So, I secured credentials for myself and my ace southern cameraman Laurence Pierce and his Alabama team of soundman Leroy Rollins and electrician Clarence Gibbons and headed for Augusta with Woodie. We would cover the preliminaries before the actual tournament began, and Woodie would get in with a “patron’s pass” he would purchase at the gate.

We agreed on an outfit hardly befitting someone surreptitiously gaining access to the Masters — a blue trench coat that came down to the ankles over an eye-numbing patchwork sports coat, a deerstalker cap, binoculars, and large sunglasses just like those worn by a Georgia sheriff. Woodie said he looked like “a German expressionist’s idea of Sherlock Holmes.” Before entering the hallowed grounds of Augusta, he stood outside and did his on-camera open, “The Masters Golf Tournament, played on the beautiful dogwood-dotted course inside this gate, breathes tradition and prestige. Of course, like many venerable institutions, it sometimes has trouble breathing and becomes as red-faced as a Coldstream Colonel. In its rigidity, it has never invited a black golfer. In its fear of irreverence, it has barred this correspondent, whose mild laughter is perhaps presumed to wilt dogwood.”

Pierce and his southern crew, who were more used to covering civil rights demonstrations, were waved in with their credentials dangling from their necks, and I made a hand signal for Woodie to buy a ticket and come through the turnstiles with the other “patrons.” All the folks in their Arnold Palmer shirts may have given him some funny glances, but nobody recognized him, as cameraman Pierce made no overt attempt to single him out. Woodie said, wandering alone like that amidst the azaleas, he “felt as forlorn as a notary public whose seal had expired.” I told Woodie that the next rendezvous point was a magnolia bush at the third green and that he should peer from behind the bush with his binoculars as if he was a Russian agent spying on the Pentagon while Laurence would continue the game of cat and mouse. Woodie was on a roll, “In front of me is a scene from one of those movies where dukes put down their champagne glasses, tighten up their Eton ties, and step out of the morning room for a bit of sport.”

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That set the tone for the rest of the day, with Woodie avoiding all other spectators by peering between bushes or using his binoculars to pick up play while nesting in a tree. The generally mocking script had scenes of Woodie sauntering along behind a garbage truck adorned with the green Masters symbol and of two portly members in their green jackets, “very much like those worn by past winners here,” a phrase dripping with sarcasm. At that point, all that was needed was an interview with Mr. Roberts about his exclusionary policies. Somehow, correspondent Phil Jones wangled an interview with Roberts, who rambled on about charges that this was a racially-segregated tournament, saying, ”that particular angle will take care of itself.” When Jones asked him about Broun, Roberts kind of hemmed and hawed, and after denying that Woodie’s request for credentials was turned down, he became agitated and said, “Let’s just say I’m not a fan of his” and stormed off. That’s when the fun started, although it didn’t feel like fun at the time.

Frank Chirkinian, who had directed every telecast from the beginning of the CBS contract with the Masters, knew firsthand about Roberts’ autocratic ways.

But Frank was a bit of an autocrat himself — his nickname was “The Ayatollah” — and he had a cackling sense of humor. He could see us editing our piece back in the Broadcast Center in New York, copied the parts where Woodie was doing his best Sherlock, and fed it out to the monitors on the course where some of the technicians nearly fell down laughing. But there was no laughing after Roberts saw the piece on air. He called Bill Paley, the CBS founder and chairman, and demanded that Woodie and “that producer of his” be fired immediately.

Mr. Paley recognized the value of the Masters, but he was also proud of his news division, so he did what all great executives do in such moments of crisis: he promised he would have his lawyers look into it. A briefcase brigade shuttled back and forth between Black Rock and the Broadcast center, practically tearing the sprockets out of the film. Roberts was reassured that an extensive study was being made, and Mr. Paley proved it from time to time with reams of paper that resembled the work of an FBI task force. Almost like magic, the air slowly leaked from the crisis balloon, and another spring was looming in Augusta.

The critic for the San Diego Union wrote this about the Masters piece, “Broun writes with classical leanings and Edwardian illusions, flowingly and rhythmically, in a rounded, engaging rococo manner.”

We were sitting around in the office plotting our April schedule, and I discovered that while the 90 or so top golfers would be playing at the Masters, the other pros would be playing in the Magnolia Open, a satellite tournament in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Might be a good idea, I thought, to see how the 105

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other half lives. So, we showed up in Hattiesburg, and, as expected, they were delighted to see us. They told us, “We have a couple of Black golfers in our field, including Charles Owens, who played football at Florida A&M and served in the U.S. Army.” I asked the press person if he could spare a half dozen extra badges, and he said, “Take as many as you want.”

Woodie will take it from here. “Despite a stiff knee caused by a bad landing in his paratroop days and an over-and-under grip he had picked up as an uninstructed kid golfer, Owens played a pretty good game and was an articulate spokesman for the fringe players on the tour. At the end, I was covered with badges, which admitted me to everything but the Daughters of the Confederacy clubhouse, and I announced with a happy smile that it was nice to be welcome and thus finished my very small contribution to the fire of controversy.” Gasoline was flung on the flames in the next few seconds when Mike Wallace, anchoring the program, had a post-piece comment that ran, “Charles Owens, the golfer interviewed by Heywood Hale Broun, finished in a tie for 43rd place and won $28.50. In the ‘other’ golf tournament today, the Masters was won by Charles Coody. Meanwhile, in Vietnam….”

Time went by, and Woodie was asked to speak at a Traveler’s Insurance convention in Hartford. He amused the insurancemen with tales from the road but never mentioned Augusta. Travelers was a main sponsor of the Masters.

Afterward, the CEO took him aside and told him the speech had been a big hit and then said something like, “Oh, by the way, Mr. Broun, after that story you did at the golf tournament in Mississippi, I got a call much later that night from Cliff Roberts, and he was in a rage, saying stuff like, ‘Perhaps Travelers would like to join us in a lawsuit,’ and I said, ‘Oh Cliff, go back to bed, we thought it was pretty amusing.’”

The racial barrier came down in 1975 when Lee Elder became the first Black golfer to participate in the tournament. There is a wonderful photo of Elder hugging Tiger Woods after Tiger won his first Masters, two pioneers taking a victory lap together. And there were a couple of other sidebars. Charles Owens won two tournaments on the Senior PGA tour in 1986 and was inducted into the Florida Sports Hall of Fame. And, about those green jackets, that proprietary item that Augusta holds so close to its chest, one sold at auction a few years ago for over $700,000. And I forgot to mention Woodie’s best line about those two portly members in their green coats. He described them as resembling “two prize-winning zucchini.”

It would be 1992 before the boy wonder showed up in the golf world and announced to all that this Black golfer could not only be good enough to win but 106

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would eventually be the best player on the planet. His name was Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, and he was 16 years old when I got wind that his father, Earl, was about to show off his son on the PGA tour. I called Earl out in Cypress, California, and he said, “When are you coming, and are you bringing Charles Kuralt?” I told him that Kuralt was unavailable but that I would be out post haste. I met them at the Navy Golf Course, where they were playing a practice round trailed by Dr. Bob Rotello, a noted sports psychologist who published titles like Putting Out of Your Mind and The Golf of Your Dreams. Earl had been a Green Beret Colonel in Vietnam and was a man beyond the dreaming stage. When Tiger was five, a television reporter asked him what he was thinking about when he swung the club. “Head still and follow through,” said Tiger.

“Why are you so sure?” asked the reporter.

“My dad told me,” answered Tiger.

Earl Woods had his son on the fast track with television appearances on the networks. He broke all the records as a junior champion, and now he was ready for the big time. Father Earl told me, “The one thing you’ve got to understand about Tiger is his level of concentration is far in advance of his age. He’s been doing this since he was a little boy. He’s accustomed to playing against older people.” I watched for a couple of days as Earl relentlessly tried to rattle Tiger’s cage by using every kind of ruse: walking behind him in his backswing, coughing in his backswing, jingling change in his pocket. I waited for Tiger’s reaction.

“It’s hard for another person to play mind games on me because of all the things he’s done,” he finally said, “Nobody is that deliberate with it. That’s the only voice that will get me is my dad’s. He would do that for an entire round, almost every shot I hit, for about two of three months. He did it everywhere until I grew up and accepted it, and then it was nothing.”

Earl chimed in, “I knew the stress I was putting him through because I’ve undergone similar stress. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I knew it was a necessity.” And the old man knew that when the time came for Tiger to hit the pro tour, there would be those in the galleries and clubhouses who wanted to see him fail. Tiger had been trained to face them down. “Every country club I go to, you’re going to feel it, the sensation where people are just staring at you. But when they stare for a long time, I’ll stare right back and kind of smile at them.”

After golf, we retreated to their neat little suburban house, where Earl and Tida Woods talked about what it was like to have a prodigy for a son. “I’m not a wealthy individual,” said Earl. “I was foresighted enough and lucky enough to recognize that I had a very exceptional son, so I devoted all my financial efforts to saving to make sure that he was covered.”

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Tida Woods proudly showed off shelves full of trophies and beamed. “When he was six, he beat his dad. Now we have so many trophies we don’t have enough room, so we put some of them in the garage.”

I asked Earl if college fit into the equation. “He has told me that he wants a quality education. And I said, ‘Okay,’ and he said, ‘I want to major in accounting and business.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘So I can manage the people that manage my money.’ And that was at 10.”

Kuralt loved the Tiger saga but had been on the road with me in spirit only when he introduced the piece on Masters Sunday with the following words, “We can tell you that the winner will not be Black. There have never been many Black golf pros, and this year in Augusta, there isn’t even one. But there may be, in a year or two or ten. Tiger Woods has plenty of time to take on the establishment of golf, plenty of time.” It would be a lot sooner than later. I would shoot these stories and put them in rough form with a narration and then Charles would “Kuralt” the narrative and make it something special. It was a collaboration that would produce pieces on Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio titled “The Heroes of 1941,” on Secretariat, and on Martha’s Vineyard, among others. And I would take along Charles’ old “On The Road” warriors cinematographer Izzy Bleckman and sound engineer Larry Gianneschi, for good measure. We’ll report on those stories later on.

As for the rest of the Tiger tale, we followed the family up to Riviera Country Club outside Los Angeles, where Tiger would play in his first professional tournament as an amateur. Rumor had it that he had to get a permission slip from his school principal to get the time off. Physically, he was still a boy, weighing under 150 pounds, but there was a great buzz when he made an appearance on the first tee. Hollywood star Joe Pesci, who was playing with Tiger, tried joking around a little bit, but I could see how focused Tiger was.

He played two rounds and finished well behind the leaders and said later that it was a great learning experience and that he still had a long way to go. But that didn’t stop the adoring fans from crowding around him and treating him like a rock star. They wanted autographs on their hats and on golf balls. One middle-aged woman offered the sleeve of her shirt, and Tiger said something like, “Your shirt?”

“On my shirt,” said the woman, “and I’m not gonna wash this shirt ever again.”

Five years later, Tiger would be slipping on the green jacket awarded to the Masters champion. He had won by a record 12 strokes, and Earl was there when he came off the 18th green. The two hugged each other and cried. Tiger 108

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fans who witnessed it will forever hold it special. It had been a long journey for them. For the Black community outside the Augusta gates, it signaled a form of racial justice. But for Tiger and his father, who were both stubborn, that special relationship would begin to change, especially when Earl became a celebrity himself, traveling the world with his son and reverting to his old womanizing ways that Tiger had been preaching about since he was a teenager.

At the end of our interview with a 16-year-old Tiger, I asked him about his real name whether anyone ever addressed him that way. “It’s funny. When I have to write it on a form, my real name — my first name — I have to think about it and see how I spell it because I really don’t ever write it.”

(Kuralt) “And what is his real name?”

(Tiger) “Uhhh. It takes a minute for me to remember it.”

(Kuralt) “Just think of him as Tiger. That will do just fine.”

That Kuralt analogy got me thinking about mentors of other famous athletes and another story we had done on Sunday Morning on heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and his trainer Cus D’Amato reported by Robert Lipsyte, ex-New York Times sportswriter, author, broadcaster, and noted social critic. How would the two father-son relationships compare? Here’s a truncated version of what we came up with — in Bob Lipsyte’s words and those of Tyson and D’Amato.

Lipsyte begins, “We watched Tiger Woods and Mike Tyson grow up. They became the most dominant athletes of their time. But we also remember them as teenagers, and those early days were inspirational. They came along when sports crossed over into the mainstream — lost their traditional role as moral training — and exploded into the world of celebrity-driven, money-whipped mass entertainment. Mike Tyson was a fatherless thug when he was plucked from an upstate New York correctional facility by a discarded old boxing manager, Cus D’Amato.

“Like Cus would always say,” Tyson told Lipsyte, “there’s a difference between the coward and the hero. They both feel the same, scared and nervous, but I used to always think for some reason that I was a coward.” Lipsyte continues, “Mike’s was a story of sports salvation. Cus legally adopted him, became his spiritual father, and guided him inexorably toward the heavyweight championship.”

“The boy can do everything a champion is required to do,” D’Amato told Lipsyte. “And if he does everything he is capable of doing, I tell you, he may go down as one of the greatest fighters of all time. I mean by that if there are no distractions.”

“On the other hand,” Lipsyte reported, “multi-racial and adorable little Eldrick was a California child from a leafy Long Beach suburb. He was the 109

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pampered Mozart of golf. And then, after he and Mike became champions, the media declared them unbeatable. But D’Amato died just before Tyson won the title, and without him, Tyson became a thug again and to many people, seemed unredeemable. And without Earl Woods at his side, Tiger appeared to be squeezed into a straitjacket of focus that controlled his life and maybe even stunted his emotional growth, too.”

And here’s how Lipsyte finally analyzed this conundrum. “The media had been wrong. Mike wasn’t unstoppable and Tiger wasn’t invincible. They had come from upbringings that couldn’t have been more dissimilar,” he wrote. “Yet, it is unimaginable to think of Mike without Cus and Tiger without Earl… for better or worse.”

We will end this chapter with another peek into the Sunday Morning mailbag. Charles always treated it as his community forum, as a way to bring folks together to comment on issues far and wide, especially the content of “their show.” For instance: (Kuralt) “We do make mistakes from time to time and always try to acknowledge them. The other Sunday, I made a big mistake. I said there is no federal regulation against selling or giving guns to minors. This is not true, as everybody in America — everybody but me — seems to know. You wrote letters in great numbers, and some of you, like Ronnie Garrison of Griffin, Georgia, sent along copies of the federal firearms regulations, which plainly say, ‘You may not, under federal law, sell a handgun or handgun ammunition to persons under 21 years of age.’ Mr. Garrison asks, ‘Was Kuralt lying intentionally, or was this just an example of total incompetence?’ The answer is the latter. The year isn’t over yet, but that was the error of the year so far.”

(Kuralt) “We had a lot of mail about the plan to mine gold near the border of Yellowstone National Park. Everybody was against it. Terri Rose’s whole class at Palm Desert High School in California was against it. Karyn A. Gamble, one of the students, wrote to the mining company, ’You guys really need to take your noses out of your wallets and look at the big picture.’”

On Thanksgiving weekend, we heard students at Occidental College beating up on the pilgrims. That brought this indignant response from Jay W. Hansen of Albuquerque, New Mexico: “Minority students who are attending a prestigious college on financial aid, a school where my middle-class student could not attend — they can’t identify with Thanksgiving?”

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It was all civilized discourse, refreshing but increasingly rare. I could give you hundreds, maybe thousands of examples, but for now, this one will have to do: (Kuralt) “I have a letter here from Dennis Hosack of Front Royal, Virginia, about our story on the California fires. Mr. Hossack writes, ‘The commentator remarked that one resident decided to remove his turtles. They were not turtles from the very short glimpse I got. They appeared to be desert tortoises, Gopherus agassizii, the official reptile of the state of California, in the family Cheloniidae….’”

(Kuralt) “...and so on. Not turtles, tortoises! Unfortunately, the tortoise subcommittee of the Sunday Morning review board has so many other cases pending that it will not be able to get to the bottom of this one for quite some time.”

You ask, how is Sunday Morning different today? That’s how! “You can‘t make the chicken salad without the chicken,” as Grambling’s Hall of Fame football coach Eddie Robinson once wisely told me. The founding fathers at CBS News had given us our orders, “Create something for the soul,” they said. Charles Kuralt’s Sunday Morning gave Americans something to dream about. In today’s hot media and political environment, that is an impossible dream.

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Chapter 9

“Twists of Fate – the Random Chances of Sport” Eddie Arcaro was someone I had to talk to. As a young rider in the 1930s, he had been known as a fearless, even reckless competitor.

Never known for his openness with the electronic media, and clearly nearing the end of his story-telling years, he had invited me down to his high rise overlooking a sparkling Atlantic seashore in south Florida. He was anxious, he said, to clear up some things concerning his public image, even though he was considered the king of the jockeys. Arcaro won five Jockey Eddie Arcaro, Budlam Productions Archive Kentucky Derbys and two Triple Crowns, but he was regularly suspended for rough riding and was accused of hanging out with some mob figures, a no-no in any athletic endeavor.

We began talking about his career highlights, and he said his biggest surprise was getting to win his second Triple Crown in 1948 with Citation, one of the alltime great thoroughbreds. It was a last-minute thing, he told me, “I got to ride the horse over the phone. The trainer called me the morning of the race, asking if I was available. Could have come through the phone, I was so surprised.”

Was that a twist of fate? Hardly, if you consider Arcaro’s reputation. But many fortunate athletic figures get only their 15 minutes of fame. And they make their case to be remembered too.

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One Shot at the Open Mike Donald was just your below-average Florida kid, small in stature, as Charles Kuralt reported, but obsessed with beating golf balls until his hands hurt. His father was a mechanic, and his mother was a waitress. He showed some talent as a teenager and qualified for the U.S. Amateur across the country in Los Angeles, but his working-class parents barely scraped up the money to send him.

After ten years of grinding it out, he finally won his first tournament, which qualified him for the 1990 Masters, where he was the leader after the first round.

He didn’t win it, but the national media couldn’t get enough of his “rags to riches” story. Sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, “In the little theater of golf, Mike Donald is the guy who came to town with a straw suitcase and a bus ticket and became a folk hero.” Ahead lay the U.S. Open, a career-maker for any golfer and the defining moment in his life.

Mike played “lights out,” as the golfers like to say. He finished in a tie with a U.S. Open champion, Hale Irwin. An 18-hole playoff followed the next day.

Mike was the underdog, and the fans were pulling for him. He had a two-stroke lead with three holes to play. He had a 15-foot putt to win it on the last hole, it just missed, and Irwin became, at 45, the oldest U.S. Open winner. Mike Donald would never play at that level again never find the tempo and confidence to be a headliner. But even worse, the constant reminders from golf fans about his lost opportunity were difficult to deal with. “I do a lot better when I don’t think about the U.S. Open being a disappointment,” he said. “People dream their whole life sitting on a putting green saying, ‘This putt is going to be for the U.S. Open.’”

Old “Crazyak” From the battle of Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific to a support ship off the Korean coast to the South China Sea and Vietnam, Ed Krysiak had seen three wars and much of the world. When Woodie and I found him at the University of New Hampshire, he was a 43-year-old grandfather with six children of his own and determined to play varsity sports. He was a decent tennis player, despite all that time at sea, and became the number two man on his college team. Here’s Woodie: “Ed Krysiak took to the game in the Navy with a sailor’s scorn for sissy stuff and rose to the rank of chief petty officer, who became the conqueror of commanders and admirals.”

His collegiate tennis success seemed to awaken the animal spirit in Krysiak after his 23 years in the Navy, and he decided to go one step farther and try out for the varsity football team as a defensive safety. His wife mentioned all 113

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the usual sensible things he should consider, like age, injury, and foolhardiness, but he was not to be deterred. The New Hampshire football coach, Jim Root, told Woodie that Ed was very convincing in pleading his case. “He was dead serious about it. I pointed out things that I normally wouldn’t, like competing with 20-year-olds doesn’t jibe too well with someone his age. But after the shock wore off, I couldn’t come up with a good sound reason why he shouldn’t play football.”

Woodie chimed in, “Shared zeal breeds comradeship, and the players, whatever they think of Ed’s judgment, accept him as a comrade. One of them, however, finds it hard not to call him Uncle Ed, having played with Krysiak’s son in high school.”

“But does that mean giving him some leeway,” Woodie asked the teammate. “‘Not me. I’ll hit him just like everybody else will hit him if he gets in the way.

That’s the game.’” On the practice field, the players got to calling him Pops and “Crazyak,” a gentle jibe at the old gentleman for maybe getting a little soft in the head at his advanced age.

Ed was a third-string safety and was not looking at much playing time if any at all. Woodie put it this way, “It was an effort, in his late flowering collegian-ism, to see more than the blackboard, to be more than a belated sheepskin collector.”

In the game we attended against the University of Maine, New Hampshire had a slight lead, and the seconds were ticking away when Coach Root told Ed to put his helmet on and get out there. A pass was completed over his head, but fortunately, the receiver was knocked down short of the goal line, and New Hampshire had its first victory of the season. I’m sure the coach’s heart was pounding, but he never blinked. Woodie summed it up, “For the successful in sport, the rewards are fame, fortune, and the symbolically precious crockery of the trophy case. For Ed Krysiak, the reward is something else, the sweet surprise of the dream deferred.”

“Cheers” to Tom Follett Tom Follett was a sailor of our acquaintance who lived for his next adventure.

He had been known to be the skipper of boatloads of dynamite that had to be navigated through the locks of the Panama Canal. A message arrived from his winter escape lodgings in the Virgin Islands that he was plotting something that could revolutionize the art of sailing. His partner was Dick Newick, a pioneering designer of multi-hulled craft. This creation was a racing twin-hull with the optimistic name “Cheers.” The plan was to be ready for the Single-handed

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TransAtlantic Yacht Race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island, meaning each sailor would be racing without a crew.

It usually took a sailboat the size of a fifty- or sixty-footer to be competitive in this race. Follett’s sleek racer would be half that size, almost like a water bug next to a whale. When the Royal Committee in Plymouth received the entry from America, they disbelieved its seaworthiness. So Follett sailed it from St. Croix straight across to England and arrived unannounced. He had a big red beard, resembling a smaller version of Ernest Hemingway, and the committee was taken by his boldness and cockiness and told him he had just qualified for the race. Woodie reported that the skeptical British press likened Cheers to a “child’s bathtub toy, whose living quarters were as tiny and incommodious as one would expect to find in a celluloid duck.”

Follett was not undone by any of this, and as soon as he was out of the harbor headed for Newport with the 35 other skippers, he dumped most of his water bottles to lighten the load, as every ounce of weight was considered a drag, but he did keep a bottle of whiskey as a companion. He was not allowed to carry a radio, either. Woodie imagined the month-long voyage, give or take a few days, as “endless heaving hills of the ocean, which brings a special kind of exhilaration and fulfillment to some and depressive nausea to others.” We went to Newport and set up a command post, which included designer Newick and assorted nervous backers. We were approaching the expected arrival date, and there was no substantiated word of a “Cheers” sighting from ships and planes to whom a small pitching boat presented an identification problem.

Follett wrote an account from his log. Here are bits and pieces: “First afternoon at sea, I could count ten yachts all bunched up; finally a nice breeze out of the north, and that’s the last I saw of anyone; by the end of the second week, was in good position and with a little luck I could do the remaining 1400 miles in another week; quite suddenly the winds stopped cooperating; I whistled, I scratched the mast with my fingernails, poured a bit of my precious whiskey, and I wept; made an old man of me, this race did, and well before my time, too.”

On the 26th day, a 57-foot ketch, the Sir Thomas Lipton, appeared on the horizon, followed a day later by another large ketch and not too much later, Tom Follett and Cheers. They had all broken the record for the race. We were among the first to greet him, and I noticed that his beard was considerably shorter. I asked if he had trimmed it on the way over. “Not intentionally,” he said, “just nerves.” He had pulled the ends off with his fingers. Woodie asked if he ran out of anything. “I ate very sparingly, but I didn’t have a lot left over because I was running along in rough weather and throwing things overboard.” What about 115

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exercise? “I even had a little swim when the weather got a little warmer. And I didn’t forget a rope because if a puff of wind comes up, that boat will go a lot faster than me.”

Woodie asked what his inner self was telling him. “Every time I go out, especially if the weather’s bad, I ask myself what in the world am I doing out here. I should be home in front of a fire with a nice book.” Then Follett found a guitar and entertained all his well-wishers with some flamenco music. Woodie had this Tom Follett on the hull of one of his final thought, “As spare and stripped as Cheers boats, Budlam Productions Archive is, she has the grace of directness, the beauty of utility, and for sailor Tom Follett, she has been more than home and more than transportation. She has been a somewhat moist magic carpet.”

The Philadelphia Bulletin wrote, “It is the small, seemingly undistinguished, but in reality, gem-like events, which cry for Broun’s sensitive, literate touch.”

Woodie once wrote, “A good deal of the whirling journey had been what we had hoped for when we submitted ourselves to chance.”

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Chapter 10

“Louis, Ali, and Frazier” Joe Louis was boxing’s “diamond in the rough,” growing up dirt poor and without a formal education in a sharecropper family in rural Alabama. His New York Times obituary described him as “a humble man and, according to the boxing experts, the best heavyweight fighter of all time.” When Louis destroyed Adolf Hitler’s protégé Max Schmeling in the first round of their heavyweight championship bout in Yankee Stadium in 1938 – Schmeling had kayoed Louis in their first fight – it was considered a victory for the Allied cause against the hated Nazis. The United States wasn’t in the war yet, but most Americans were drawn to their radios to root for Joe, who had become a quiet, heroic figure.

Louis further endeared himself to his countrymen by enlisting in the Army in 1942 and fighting nearly 100 exhibitions for the troops.

Words attributed to him, “We’ll win because God is on our side,” became the slogan for the national war bond drive, and President Franklin Roosevelt became his biggest booster.

Out on the prairie, farmers paid little heed to the pre-war fighting in Europe until their sons and daughters began leaving for combat, and captured German soldiers began arriving at a prisoner-of-war camp in the middle of Nebraska in the little town of Weeping Water. As Roger Welsch reported, eventually, “tens of thousands of them worked in America’s agricultural fields. The farmers needed help, and escape was not likely because they could run for days on the open Plains and not get anywhere. Ironically, German prisoners in Nebraska often found themselves working for German-American families. I can recall POWs working for my own German aunts and uncles, sitting around the supper table listening to the radio together to reports of the war, far away.”

Joe Louis, “the Brown Bomber,” had become a household name by then and was as important a symbol for the American war effort as Muhammed Ali was to the anti-war sentiment against the American presence in Vietnam. Louis was 117

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plain-spoken and showed little interest in politics or advancing the cause of his race, while Ali was an outspoken, charismatic hero in the civil rights movement and became a part of the American storybook for more than half a century. They are undoubtedly above all the rest as heavyweight champions of the world, a title that has since lost much of its luster.

Cassius Clay was just becoming a household name in 1964 when I became involved in a freelance documentary project about the self-proclaimed “Louisville Lip.” New York State was considering a bill that would ban boxing, and Clay was sent up to Albany to defend his sport. Clay, who was not yet known as Muhammed Ali, was in rare form in front of the panel and began charming the politicians. His next fight would be for the heavyweight title against Sonny Liston, and Clay began working on his rhyming jabs, such as: “Clay lands a right; what a beautiful swing, And the punch raised the bear clear out of the ring.

Who on Earth thought when they came to the fight, That they would witness the launching of a human satellite.

Hence the crowd did not dream when they laid down their money, That they would see a total eclipse of Sonny.”

Clay was a seven-to-one underdog, and he made his boast come true at the end of the sixth round when Liston stumbled to his stool and refused to continue. Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammed Ali, was boxing’s new marquee champ. He wasn’t the “Louisville Lip” anymore; he was “The Greatest.” “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” he said. He won his rematch when Liston went down from a “phantom punch” in the first round and never got up. He became a Muslim and declared himself a conscientious objector. He refused to fight in Vietnam and was banned from boxing for four years — that’s how fast “The Greatest” became a Muslim minister in search of redemption and a leading proponent of Black pride and civil rights. Ali wasn’t reinstated until 1970, and Woodie and I went down to Atlanta for Roger Mudd, curious about what the long layoff had done to the boxing skills and the oratorical couplets.

We set up our camera ringside for a news conference, and Woodie began, “Whether violent or verbal, Muhammad Ali has always had a talent for the unexpected.” Ali looked out into a sea of cameras and spotted Woodie. “Tell Walter Cronkite I said hello.” His opponent would be Jerry Quarry, a journeyman heavyweight with a wild streak who once broke his back jumping into an empty swimming pool. Quarry had fought for the heavyweight title twice, the second time losing to Joe Frazier, who would become Ali’s ultimate nemesis.

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The promoters had, presumably, scoured the country for a “white hope” opponent for Ali’s comeback. The media generally painted Ali as a controversial figure, many labeled him a draft dodger and a loudmouth, and Quarry proved to be a perfect “sparring partner.” As we watched Ali work out, Woodie provided some commentary. “Sometimes he floats like a butterfly in galoshes, but there are moments when a lithe youth breaks through the rusty layers of disuse.” Ali questioned Woodie’s assessment, “I was supposed to come in fat, with a belly.

I’m trimmer. And if you notice, I haven’t just lost weight; I’m in shape. My body’s in proportion. I’m trim. Look around here, everywhere: legs, arms, face.”

Woodie threw a jab. “Ali quickly set himself up as that staple of romantic fiction, the laughing cavalier. But there were moments when one wondered whether the romantic wasn’t blurred by the hysteric.” The “champ” wanted to take us to his favorite soul food restaurant in Atlanta and came to pick us up at the wheel of a big, white Cadillac. And as he careened through the streets, he would occasionally take his hands off the wheel, look in all directions, and playfully say something like, “See how great I am, great enough to drive with no hands.”

Woodie assured him that he was still “The Greatest.” The Black community of Atlanta had become extremely vocal in their support of Ali because of Georgia’s segregationist governor, Lester Maddox, who issued a proclamation that the occasion of the fight would be an official “Day of Mourning.”

Woodie provided more commentary: “The fight mob, which travels the world enclosed in a cloud of its own cigar smoke, was out in force to see the rebirth of a fighter, who ironically seems to some, including Ali himself, all the fresher and more formidable for not having pounded himself blunt of the jaws of mediocrities.”

(Ali) “I’m more experienced. I’m less nervous. I’m more cooler. All those things I’ve learned to put together in my 16 years of boxing. I’ll be in my prime until I’m 33 years old. After 33, I think I’ll start slipping.”

Woodie asked him a probing question: “Do you think maybe you grew up more and found yourself more by the troubles you’ve had than you would have had fighting in the ring all that time?”

Ali took his time answering, “Well, no. I think I was going to grow up regardless of the troubles or not. But the talking and the poems is something we really don’t need now. That was to introduce myself to the public. I said a lot of things in the past that I shouldn’t have said, running my mouth a little too much, I’ll have to admit. It got me in a lot of trouble in more things than just boxing.

So, I just about know now what to say and what not to say if I think about it.”

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Ali knocked Quarry silly in the seventh round, and the referee stopped the fight. Looming on the horizon were Joe Frazier and three of boxing’s most memorable bouts.

Joe Frazier was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, to a family of sharecroppers.

He had eleven brothers and sisters. He wasn’t big, but he was built like a tree trunk, and he headed north alone when he was 15 years old, looking for his place in life. Eventually, he wound up in a Philadelphia gym and caught the attention of Yancey “Yank” Durham, a part-time trainer whose day job was welding metal for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Young Joe had been eating too many groceries and was out of shape, but he told Yank he’d do anything to become a fighter.

As Woodie saw it, “Joe Frazier was in search of a weight-control program. He instead got Yancey Durham’s life-control program.” Yank began the long process of teaching Joe a hook and a jab and a knockout punch. Three years later, they were in Tokyo, and Joe was center stage with a gold medal around his neck as the 1964 Olympic heavyweight champion.

Two years later, we were out on the West Coast, covering a couple of polevault record-holders. Woodie enjoyed the troubles they had getting to their next meet, transporting the poles sticking out of their Volkswagens over California’s busy freeways and causing frequent “dodge-’em-car brake-fests. We suddenly heard somebody mention on the radio that Joe Frazier was out there for a match that week against a local nobody, so I thought it might be a good time to see if he was the real deal.

When we arrived at the Olympic auditorium, Yank Durham was at work in the dressing room, getting Joe psyched up for his match. He was a soft-spoken man, but Joe stayed riveted to every word. Joe told Woodie, “I get a kick out of seeing a man crumble to his knees more than anything.” The drab marquee outside read “Tonight’s Main Event, Chuck Leslie vs. Joe Frazier, ten rounds.” It lasted three. Woodie had this observation: “Yancey Durham has been something of a father and teacher to Joe, and his rumbled advice has been the drumbeat to which he has marched since he left a butcher shop to try his fortune as a fighter.”

Yank was a boxing lifer who would turn the flabby kid into the fearsome machine called “Smokin’ Joe.” We jumped on that train and caught up to them at the Concord, a mountain resort in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City, which was sometimes referred to as the Jewish Alps. Getting away from the roar of the crowd was part of Yank Durham’s strategy. Woodie wanted Joe’s reaction to being away from the action. “Well, I feel like this,” Joe said.

“The people who are just lounging around have already done their hard work.

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Therefore, I got to get into condition for mine. Their lounging around don’t bother me. It just makes me work a little harder.”

“What’s the one thing that draws you to boxing,” Woodie asked. Joe gave this wonderful wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing smile and said cheerily, “I like to hit people and watch their knees buckle.” Then he walked into the dining room, only to be repelled by the sight of whitefish, a Jewish delicacy, which provided some brief entertainment for some of the grandmotherly blue-haired guests. After that, Joe stuck to his medicine balls and punching bags and got rid of 240-pound Buster Mathis, who had dispatched him during their amateur days. Ali’s absence allowed Joe to be recognized as champ in New York State only, but he would soon be champion of the world.

On March 8, 1971, an entire nation would be glued to their radios or watching on closed circuit TV — no free TV was available — as the match made in heaven took place: Ali-Frazier I, the fight of the century, matching that respecter of the flag Joe Frazier against that loquacious draft dodger Muhammad Ali. It would be an infrequent moment when a sports event added fuel to the discussion of race relations in America, and it would, ironically, involve two Black men. Before the fight, Ali told Woodie, “This will be one of my easiest fights. Joe is not a boxer; he’s a slugger. He just walks in, and everybody hits him.” Frazier counterpunched, “I don’t think his speed will do anything to me. My only real problem will be to get him to fight. I’m pretty sure he’ll bring his skates with him.”

The Merv Griffin Show was on the CBS network that night, and headquarters wanted us to break in with a special report from Woodie, who would be at the fight observing. I told him to dress up in the most splendiferous jacket he could rent at a Broadway costume shop, and he took me at my word. When the tally light went on, and the studio camera lit up, signaling that we were on the air, there was Woodie in a checkered formal coat, the likes of which you have never seen.

The ringside at Madison Square Garden was jammed with an all-star cast.

Sinatra was there, and so were Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr., and Hugh Hefner.

The fighters were a contrast of styles. We were a few rows removed and taking notes. Frazier was a plodder, relentlessly moving forward, fists flying. I could imagine Yank’s voice, “Kill the body and the head dies,” he would say. Bang, bang, bang — pop, pop, pop. Ali was a dancer, Fred Astaire in lace-ups, high-top whites, always moving with an occasional “rope-a-dope,” looking for an opening with his lightning hands.

Woodie’s report, with accompanying still pictures from the Associated Press, caught the essence of a brutal slugfest, which left both fighters exhausted.

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And it was Joe Frazier, with Yancey Durham beaming at his side, who wore the championship belt, and Muhammad Ali, who was headed to the hospital to recover, although Frazier was hospital-bound, too, such was the damage they rained on each other. But the CBS technicians in our little studio were more taken with Woodie’s attire, congratulating him for his choice of finery, which one of them said was better than a test pattern. In fact, it was a black and white check formal jacket which Woodie said looked like “the dress coat of the Las Vegas Hunt Club.”

After the Frazier fights, Ali’s promoters were looking for some easy money, and CBS offered him two hours on a Friday night in February of 1976. The opponent would be a little-known Belgian, Jean Pierre Coopman, whom Ali called “The Lion of Flanders,” and I was assigned as the executive producer. I was on loan to CBS Sports and had never produced a sports event before, but I thought I had pretty good knowledge of the nastiness of the fight game. My first eye-opening run-in was with the promoter, Don King, the electric-haired ex-con who had his dirty fingers in everything.

King told me he had this great idea for a pre-fight entertainment package, three blind musicians, Stevie Wonder, Jose Feliciano, and a third whose name escapes me — as he downed his third brandy of the morning. He made some comparisons to “The Three Blind Mice,” and I got a queasy feeling in my stomach.

I left his penthouse office atop Radio City, feeling the need to take a long shower.

The bosses assured me that I should treat it as a news event and that they would take care of King.

The fight would be staged in Puerto Rico and would draw an immense audience of some 45 million, but I had to beg for additional resources because I knew it wouldn’t last very long, so what would we do for the rest of the two hours? So they opened the coffers and gave me a star-studded array of talent.

Brent Musburger and Phyllis George would be the anchors. Woodie and Jack Whitaker would be the essayists. Pat Summerall, Tom Brookshier, and Don Dunphy would be at ringside. Don King brought in Stevie Wonder and Jose Feliciano as the pre-fight entertainment. There was one thing missing. “The Lion of Flanders” turned out to be “The Pussy Cat of Ponce Beach,” or at least that was what Don Dunphy called him after “The Lion” hit the canvas early and was counted out.

Dunphy had been the longtime boxing expert on the old Friday Night Fights series on NBC when boxing was the big game in town, so this wasn’t the first bum he had ever seen. I think we re-ran the knockout seven times in every form of slow motion from every angle. The arena was practically empty when Brent 122

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and Phyllis finally said, “Good night from San Juan.” On the plane ride home, I asked Ali how he managed to carry a trial horse like Coopman as far as he did.

He looked me square in the eyes and said, “Well, I was dancing around pretty good until the fifth round, but when I heard the crowd begin to stir, that was no good for me and no good for TV, so I knocked him out.” *** The renowned New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling wrote a biblical book on boxing long ago called The Sweet Science. Liebling took the gloves off, cut through the violence and glamour, and, with wit and dash and the smell of the old gyms, found the humanity inside. He wrote, “These gyms have the mingled aura of rubbing alcohol, sweat, and hot pastrami, which distinguishes them from a gym run by Helena Rubinstein.” We found just the place in a tough neighborhood not far from the nation’s capital. Woodie expounds: “In a little gymnasium perched above the temptations of a ‘go-go club,’ promoter Eli Hanover has taken on the task of giving Baltimore the enthusiasm for boxing that it now reserves for football and crab cakes.” While the promoter worked the phones trying to arrange a fight card that would bring in some bucks from the neighborhood, a dedicated few worked the bags, hoping to be included in one of the preliminaries.

One of those locals wouldn’t give us his name, but he would talk about his reasons for being there. “It does something to your character once you become a pro fighter. It gives you the self-confidence that you never had before.” Hanover was still working the phones, only this time with a prospective customer, “Yes, Tuesday night, come and see it. Yes, he’s going to fight. The main thing is the guy’s very popular, and he has a degree of charisma.” Woodie asked Hanover what kind of fights he liked. “I like to see a little blood. The fan comes to see the real contact, the real thing. The true master, physical master.”

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Chapter 11

“Women Pioneers” The uber boss at CBS News, Dick Salant, took a major interest in the women’s movement as the 1970s began and presided over the hiring of additional women correspondents, producers, writers, and researchers. That message was not lost on our story selection either. During our road warrior days, the jock-oriented sports establishment began to feel some elbows from female athletes looking to cash in on all that gushing television loot. We watched the tennis pioneer Billie Jean King challenge loudmouth Bobby Riggs in a Las Vegas TV extravaganza and beat the pants off him. And then there was the unbeaten and unrivaled thoroughbred filly Ruffian, who challenged the Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure in a match race made for television. Some of the other sports stirrings happened quietly, however, with little pressure from the media or women’s lib enthusiasts.

That’s how Woodie and I found ourselves in Des Moines, Iowa, covering the Girls High School State Basketball Championships. Woodie takes over: “The towns from which the players come are those huddled crossroad communities with names as far off and lonely as train whistles — Winterset, Gravity, McCool Junction, Promise City. These are the towns where the only winter sounds are the rustlings of dead cornstalks and bouncing basketballs. The cheering sections exceed the listed populations of the towns from which they come, and those who stay behind to do the chores give thanks for the transistor radio that sits on their tractor or the automatic chicken feeder which gives one a chance to run in and look at the TV.” Some 17,000 Iowans packed the hall at various tip-offs until it was time for the girls from Union Whitten and their senior star, Denise Long, who also happened to be the homecoming queen. It seemed then like the whole state was in the building. She was only five foot eleven but tall for the company she kept, and she was unstoppable. She had scored 93 points in one tournament game 124

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and was averaging 60 points in all the others. She told us she spent at least four hours in the gym every day shooting hoops. When the gym was locked, she would practice outdoors in near-zero weather, brushing the snow off the court.

“I couldn’t bounce the ball,” she said, “but I could still practice shooting.” Her coach said, “I think the girls can be driven a lot harder than the boys; they have a lot more pride.”

The Union Whitten girls didn’t win the championship, but Woodie was so impressed by Denise’s accomplishments that he took home the team’s orange and black banner and hung it in his study. We kept tabs on Denise as the San Francisco Warriors selected her in the NBA draft. She appeared on the Johnny Carson show and toured Europe with a U.S. Women’s team. But her NBA dreams quickly vanished when the commissioner of the NBA ruled her selection “a publicity stunt.” Even if it was, it was a helluva trip. Denise got a degree in pharmacology and moved to a small town in Kansas, where she is now a retired pharmacist. Woodie later told the Denver Post, “That tournament was the most important event I ever covered. I showed up as a snobbish, effete Easterner to laugh at the rubes, sensing that basketball in little towns is just a way to keep them from hanging around the laundromat. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by the excitement and spontaneity. One father didn’t even go to his seat. He went straight to the infirmary and asked for oxygen.” From California, there was this from the Fresno Bee, “Broun’s confident, gentlemen’s air just naturally attracts the spotlight.” *** When Sweden’s Annika Sorenstam challenged the men on the professional golf tour in 2003, she was following a precedent set 50 years before by Babe Didrikson Zaharias when women’s golf was in its infancy. In between, there was not much else. You had to dig to find anything meaningful. That’s when we decided to check out a head-to-head match between Doug Sanders and Carol Mann, both champions on their respective tours.

Harry Reasoner was in the anchor chair that Saturday night and gave this wry, rather outlandish introduction, “The Women’s Liberation Movement, which has been having success after success in getting equal treatment for women, suffered a severe setback this week at Grossinger’s in Liberty, New York.

Heywood Hale Broun was on hand when a giant step for a lady golfer turned into a jump backward for womankind.” Woodie appeared, dressed in one of his multi-colored check jackets befitting a golf course, and began, “In a man’s world, 125

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the feminine athlete has been limited to the tea party competition of her sisters.

Now the women’s movement, which wants more than a steno pad share in the business world, wants more than a cute curiosity role in golf.”

Doug Sanders was one of those golfers right out of a Dan Jenkins novel, Southern sassy and gambling-ready. Carol Mann was an elegant target, six foot three, although she referred to herself as “five foot, fifteen inches,” and she had won the U.S. Women’s Open championship. They were playing at a Catskill resort where the entertainment director signed off from his adult campers with his signature line, “Yours truly, Lou Goldstein.” In the gallery was the esteemed Broadway director George Abbott, whom Woodie had worked for as a supporting actor in a number of stage productions. He had taken a liking to Woodie and was curious to see how his protege was faring wearing his Broadway signature jackets in his new role as “Mr. TV Newsman.”

Getting a critique from George Abbott was not small change. At age 92 and with a hundred or so Broadway and off-Broadway shows under his belt, George Abbott was the most revered and versatile show doctor in the small world of the New York theatre. Out of respect, theatre people called him Mr. Abbott. To everyone else, he was Mr. Broadway. As a playwright, director, and producer starting in 1913, he lasted for more than 70 years working his show magic on a virtual history of Broadway in the 20th century: “Pajama Game,” “Damn Yankees,” “Call Me Madame,” “Wonderful Town,” and the list goes on and on.

In “Damn Yankees,” George Abbott was way ahead of his time when he put a girl in a baseball suit. Woodie appeared a little tense having the great Broadway master on hand.

Carol Mann was a pioneer in her own right, having teamed with another woman pro, playing from their shorter tees, against Sanders and Jack Nicklaus and earning an 18-hole tie. On this day, the wind came up howling and brought this commentary from Woodie: “The feeling that she was supposed to be the Susan B. Anthony of golf seemed to drag at Carol’s clubheads, and as the day progressed, she got deeper into uncharacteristic trouble. Doug was moved to gallantry, which some women regard as subtly patronizing but which certainly gets rid of the pebbles.” Sanders won easily, but as Woodie observed, Carol Mann held her head high. “Her spirit, battered by a day which would make many a golfer bend a putter round a tree or drop the whole bag in a lake, remained unbroken.” Mr. Abbott appeared pleased, too, and Woodie breathed a sigh of relief. *** 126

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We met another pioneer in Kilgore, Texas, once an oil boomtown and the boyhood home of the classical pianist Van Cliburn. Kilgore is home to the Kilgore College Rangerettes founded by Gussie Nell Davis, the Vince Lombardi of precision dance instructors. Ever since 1951, and for 70 years and counting, the Rangerettes have performed their halftime routine at the Cotton Bowl football game in Dallas.

We got to Kilgore just as the hundred or so precision artists were beginning to practice Gussie Nell Davis and The Rangerettes, and heard this bark, “Ready again, let’s have courtesy of Kilgore College And The it perfect, and not one muscle is to be out of Rangerette Showcase place.” If you closed your eyes, you might imagine Coach Lombardi yelling out commands to his Green Bay Packers. Woodie had some different images in mind. “The commands suggest the dusty swirl of the drill field, the costumes, the bone-bending ballet class. Put together, they make the American answer to the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the Kilgore Rangerettes.” Woodie paused as the girls tried to please and said, “Only surgeons and sergeants give commands with the suffused assurance of a Gussie Nell Davis.”

Kilgore was a quiet little town “over in east Texas,” as they say when Gussie Nell arrived with the mission of helping student recruitment. So, she created a non-traditional show team that put the college on the map. Since then, her vision has spread the message far and wide with performances at the annual Pearl Harbor Memorial Ceremony in Honolulu, at the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.

Gussie Nell Davis brought a strong will and a stern but motherly message to Kilgore. “I expect the very best they can do, and no matter how good they are, no matter, they can always do better.” Woodie asked, “Are they competing with perfection, then? “Well,” she replied, “I guess so because they better be as perfect as they can be, or else.

“Most girls think that Rangerettes are Gussie Nell Davis leading Rangerettes in nothing but glamour. They don’t realize you practice, Courtesy Kilgore College and The Rangerette Showcase

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have to work for glamour and work hard and that it’s physical work,” she said.

“Actually, on the first day of practice we probably lose about twenty-five or thirty girls.”

As we watched, her energy level never flagged. “Let’s get aware. Makeup, honey? I know you’re trying to make a point, but I’m not thinkin’ about that at this moment.” Woodie summed it up. “The Rangerettes may yield something in antiquity to the Russian Imperial Ballet, but since their beginning, with little change in basics, they have danced metronomically lashed on by the voice of the lady who substituted choreography for cheers at halftime, Gussie Nell Davis.

This is Heywood Hale Broun in Kilgore, Texas.” *** Then it was off to the races. Tradition dies hard at the Kentucky Derby, and in 1970, Diane Crump became its first female jockey. Even the studious and usually unruffled Jack Whitaker sounded flummoxed before a CBS national TV audience. “That’s number 17 Fathom, history being made here. Her jockey... err, his jockey is her, Diane Crump, the first….” Crump told Woodie, “They say everything’s calm until you walk out on the horse, and they start playing ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ and you kind of get a little funny feeling. There’s nothing like it.”

Her first mount, and the very first for any woman, had come at Hialeah Race Track in Florida. The publicity made for an unruly mob scene outside the track, and police had to be called to escort her inside. “The crowd was swarming all over me,” she is quoted as saying. “They were going crazy. Hecklers were yelling, ‘Go back to the kitchen and cook dinner.’ They thought I was going to be the downfall of the whole sport, which is such a medieval thought. I was like, ‘Come on, people; this is the 1960s.”

After finishing almost dead last in the Derby, she decided to tackle New York, where the railbirds were an especially unforgiving bunch. She told me, “I mean, they really harassed you, and you just totally had to block it out. Two or three girls quit riding because they couldn’t take the abuse. But I never heard what they said to me.”

Her parents got her a horse when she was a kid in Florida, and everything evolved from that. “First time I came around the race track, I was fourteen years old, and there was not one single girl galloping horses. Obviously, as we’ve found out now, twenty years down the line, girls are very capable. If it wasn’t for women on the backside, tending to the horses, racing would be in trouble.”

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The female at the race track that had the biggest impact on the women’s movement was actually not a woman but a thoroughbred, a filly named Ruffian.

Here’s Woodie: “The U.N. has decreed that 1975 is International Women’s Year, and whatever sexist grumbling that may bring, few on the turf would deny that this is a woman’s year and that the empress is Ruffian.” It was a day like no other televised sports had ever dealt with, a match race of the best girl against the best boy, even up. Ruffian was an undefeated “black beauty” who won by wide margins and intimidated her opponents with her size before they even left the paddock.

Her opponent, Foolish Pleasure, was the Kentucky Derby winner. It was a kind of “battle of the sexes” that drew 18 million television viewers, a huge audience back then, and a lot of women to Belmont Park wearing T-shirts emblazoned with lady logos. “I think we were short of human heroes at the time. The country was in some ferment,” explained Woodie, who was part of the CBS broadcast team that day. “And so you turn, as children turn, to the classic old legends and fables, we turn to the fabulous horse, to something which is so remarkable in her mixture of speed, power, and beauty, as to be a kind of icon.”

They weren’t more than five hundred yards out of the starting gate when Ruffian began to wobble and quite suddenly began resisting her jockey’s attempt to stop her. It was a frightening scene. The horse ambulance arrived, and they put a screen around her. She had broken her right front ankle and compounded it by running on through pain, such was her intensity. The veterinarians worked into the night to save her, but when she came out of the anesthesia, she thrashed around and had to be euthanized. The next morning they buried her in the Belmont infield. Jack Whitaker, Woodie’s erudite broadcast partner, said, “One false step and years of planning and breeding and loving come to an end, a horse like the Bible says, whose neck is clothed in thunder.” Woodie added, “The remarkable thing about Ruffian was that until the moment of the tragic accident, no horse had ever been in front of her. In her regal and majestic way, she denied the lead to one and all. She was not going to allow it if it killed her. And it did kill her. And it was a day, as a sporting tragedy, ahead of anything I can remember.”

A review of Woodie’s racetrack work by the editor of the Oakland Bay Times called him “the patron saint of the trade.”

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Chapter 12

“Heroes of the Summer Game” “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you Woo, Woo, Woo What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?

Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away Hey, Hey, Hey Hey, Hey, Hey” I was driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge with that tune from the 1967 box office hit The Graduate ringing in my ears. And guess who was in the car in front of me — none other than Joe D, with our cameraman making pretty pictures. We were headed for the Oakland Coliseum to do a rare profile of DiMaggio, the “Vice President of Batting” for Charley Finley’s A’s. And we were following the same route Dustin Hoffman took in the movie when he was a lovelost youth, listening to Simon and Garfunkel and trying to forget his romance with middle-aged Anne Bancroft, Mrs. Robinson. DiMaggio had hidden from the news television media once his playing days ended. He was only comfortable as the on-air salesman for Mr. Coffee. But Woodie had a connection from his 1941 season as a rookie Yankee beat reporter when Joe D set the greatest record in all of sport, that 56-game hitting streak of his. Woodie remembered it as if it was yesterday.

“We went to Washington for the opening game. DiMaggio hit the horns on the speakers way up in the centerfield bleachers. I knew, just then, just from the gracefulness of the way he played, that I was one of those baseball writers who was lucky enough to come along at a time of greatness.” DiMaggio seemed at ease with Woodie, renewing a relationship from his storied past. He was chatty until it came time for the formal interview when the words just didn’t seem to 130

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match the man. He did give us one great shot to end our story, putting his arm around the bat boy as he walked off the field and disappeared into the dugout, almost mirroring Dustin Hoffman’s disappearing youth. “What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away, hey, hey, hey — hey, hey, hey.”

“The Yankee Clipper,” a nickname from the New York scribes, had been lionized in literature in the 1950s by Hemingway in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea, in which Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, fights a losing battle with a giant marlin while finding strength in the DiMaggio persona. “I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing,” said Santiago. “They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

Before we left, Joe asked us to meet him in the sanctity of the coach’s room, where he hung out away from the media. He said, “I know I can’t give you fellows any tickets or anything like that.” Then he sat down, autographed two baseballs and handed them to us with a boyish grin, and remarked, “but you can probably use these.” Normally that would be a “no-no” under all the CBS News guidelines.

But hey, this was a Joe DiMaggio autographed baseball. Case closed. Years later, I interviewed Woodie, and Bob Lipsyte scored an exclusive interview with DiMaggio at a Yankee “old timers” day for one of his probing Sunday Morning profiles. The following is a combination of Woodie on DiMaggio and DiMaggio on DiMaggio.

They called him the “Yankee Clipper,” and he was all you’d expected a clipper to be, the epitome of style and grace. “I didn’t know I had a loping stride,” DiMaggio said. “I didn’t know I was that graceful. I didn’t try to play that way.

That was my style. I was used to playing hard no matter what. I felt the tension.”

Woodie saw it this way: “When something went wrong, he wouldn’t throw his cap or bounce his bat or kick the water cooler. I said to him once, ‘you’re going to get an ulcer if you don’t express your feelings. Your stomach is filling with acid.’”

DiMaggio had seen it coming. “That’s when I got my ulcers, in 1942,” he said.

“That was due, I think, to the pressures from 1941.”

The hitting streak had provided a diversion from the war raging in Europe and all across America that summer; on assembly lines, on street corners, in barber shops, and in saloons, everybody was talking about that hitting streak.

Woodie continues, “You begin to follow it with a kind of obsessive feeling.

Baseball is a game of numbers, and this was going to be, as it went on and on, the most remarkable number of them all.” DiMaggio agreed, “It was the magnitude of everybody coming out of the woodwork. So, I played it safe by staying away from the field for as long as possible. It was very difficult to get out and get 131

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around. Lefty Gomez, my roommate, did such a great job of just handling people. If it were not for him, I guess I would have gone a little berserk.”

For the record, the day after the streak ended, DiMaggio went on another hitting streak of 17 straight. Remarkable! But for all that magic season had wrought, maybe his greatest legacy was winning nine world championships in 13 seasons. Woodie agreed, “He realized that the streak, in essence, was a series of lucky breaks, like red coming up 56 times on the roulette wheel. The streak is exciting, the streak is fun, but it isn’t as great an accomplishment as all those championships. But the steak was, in a romantic sense, the crown, the accomplishment by which he would always be remembered.”

When DiMaggio died, Woodie wrote, “All the trumpets and drums of farewell to the great are deserved in the case of Joe DiMaggio, and in a world where sleaze laps up on every side, he left us a legacy of simple nobility.”

From the Big Apple to Beantown Red Sox fans will remind anyone who asks that the baseball scuttlebutt in Beantown in 1941 was more about one of their own, Ted Williams, “The Splendid Splinter,” or “Teddy Baseball,” take your pick. Williams wasn’t the warmest player either, but he was their guy. That season, he was the last player to hit for an average over .400, maybe the last forever. Yet, when the time came to pass out the coveted “Most Valuable Player” award for 1941, it wasn’t even close. DiMaggio won, hands down. Joe and Ted didn’t really have a rivalry, they kind of danced around each other, and the New York-Boston cat fight over who was the best. Williams talked about that in a Sunday Morning interview. “I’ve always said DiMaggio was the greatest player that I played against. He did things so smoothly and did them great. But I had a personal rivalry with anybody in the league that was doing better than I was as far as hitting was concerned. I felt that.”

Woodie gave his assessment: “You would expect that of Williams, who was obsessive. You cannot hit .400 unless you are obsessive. I remember one World Series he was in; when people in the stands shouted unfriendly things at him, he shouted back at them. He even competed with people in the stands.” That criticism of Williams stemmed from his nonchalant play once he put his glove on and took his post in the outfield. “When I got to the plate, boy, I was serious, and there was no kidding around. But when I was in the outfield, I was a little more lackadaisical about my overall attitude, and if I had it to do over again, I would have been a little bit more businesslike in those early years because sometimes the first impression is the one that is everlasting.”

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When Red Sox fans cheered extra hard for Carl Yastrzemski as he took Boston to a World Series in 1967, the first in twenty years, Woodie wrote this: “Carl Yastrzemski was not just hitting home runs, but was, in fact, accomplishing the ninth labor of Hercules, bringing a championship to Boston, a city whose previous baseball idol, Ted Williams, resembled that other Greek, Achilles, who fought a good fight, but spent a lot of time sulking in his tent.”

In the summer of 1991, the Red Sox paid homage to Williams on the 50th anniversary of his 1941 season, as Charles Kuralt reported. Fenway Park was packed to the rafters. Williams addressed those sportswriters and former teammates “who said I was hard-headed or that I never tipped my cap. Today I tip my cap to all the people in New England, the greatest sports fans on Earth.”

Standing alongside him was DiMaggio, who had a pretty good season himself that year. Red Sox legendary broadcaster Curt Gowdy, who had broadcast some of their games, went on the public address system and began his tribute, “DiMaggio says that Williams is the greatest hitter he ever saw, and Williams says that DiMaggio is the greatest ballplayer he ever saw.” The crowd pretty much drowned out the rest.

I thought back to our interview with Williams and remembered this: “You know, it’s great to be introduced, and when they say, ah the greatest hitter that ever lived. I’ve heard guys say that, and people believe it sometimes. But, I say this, ‘I don’t believe that.’ I would be as happy as I could be if somebody said he was as good as Ruth or Gehrig, or Foxx or Simmons, or DiMaggio.” Kuralt had the last words on Sunday Morning, “As the two great warriors approached each other with waves of applause falling on them, for a moment, just for a fleeting moment, it was 1941 again.”

It was an emotional moment, but time has a way of bringing back other memories that are not so warm and fuzzy. I remember a story that speaks to Williams’ inability to get along with anyone who didn’t meet his high standards.

Our Boston cameraman, Dave Marlin, who was quite the organized perfectionist himself and was brilliant with all things cinematic, was hired to shoot a fishing film with Williams in the Florida Keys. He picked Ted up in their rental car and barely got outside the gates of the airport when Ted told him to pull over. “Get out of the car and move over to the passenger seat,” he said, “I’m a better driver than you are.”

When Williams decided to try managing a ragtag Washington Senators team, Woodie and I stopped by their spring training camp to check on the explosiveness of that arrangement. We talked about how to address such a touchy subject.

After all, here was a perfectionist trying to get his batch of mostly inexperienced 133

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misfits to understand what it takes to reach his expectations. It was a tall order indeed. There wasn’t any trouble arranging the interview alongside the batting cage, but as they settled into their positions, I was struck by how Williams towered over Woodie like an elephant over a bumble bee.

The interview started with the usual platitudes, how do you think the team looks, etc.. But, it was when Woodie began to get into the tough stuff I noticed that handsome face began to tighten up, and the hands became like two baseballs.

In Woodie’s words, this is what happened next: “I noticed that his neck seemed thicker and pinker. So I tried to soften the rasp of my persistence with the oil of tact when the cameraman announced we were out of film, and Ted turned and raced off into the outfield.”

When Woodie protested to me that since the interview had just begun, we couldn’t possibly be out of film, I responded, “Woodie, I just saved you from being knocked out in the first round.” It reminded me of Williams’ earlier acknowledgment of his poor treatment of others, “Sometimes the first impression is the one that is everlasting.” On the other hand, he was a Navy pilot in both World War II and the Korean War, giving up prime years of his career to serve his country. And he was a major sponsor of the Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that raises money for children with cancer.

One day, while on a spring training assignment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Roger Mudd’s Saturday News, word came down from the press box that Walter Cronkite’s producer was on the phone. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted since we were covering Mickey Mantle’s experiment as a first baseman, not exactly an earth-shaking item for the Evening News. Mantle was a Yankee icon nearing the end of his career, and Joe DiMaggio was a spring training coach helping him make the transition. If we could get some soundbites of the two greatest Yankees since Babe Ruth and build it into a story about the end of a Yankee era of greatness, Cronkite would be very interested, I was told. A helicopter would take us down to the CBS Miami affiliate, where we would cut and script the piece and feed it up to New York.

It would be a mad scramble, I told the Cronkiters, but I thought we could accommodate them. Woodie’s past friendship with the reclusive DiMaggio helped overcome that obstacle, and even Mantle, who didn’t trust television reporters, gave us a few soundbites. The helicopter was to land in the parking lot of the stadium, and we rushed outside to find it surrounded by five police cars.

The chopper pilot had failed to get the proper clearances to land there, and the sergeant in charge told me there was no way he was leaving there until things got sorted out.

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As precious minutes ticked away, and as Woodie and I kept pleading that time was of the essence and Walter Cronkite and millions of Americans would be cheated out of the story from Ft. Lauderdale, the sergeant finally got the public relations aspect of our argument and released the helicopter. As we prepared to board, I noticed that the chopper was rather small, and after Woodie squeezed into the passenger seat, there was barely room for me to sit on the same seat.

We were strapped in, but the door to the chopper was slightly ajar as we soared above the Gold Coast with yours truly hanging partway out and headed down to Miami —mission accomplished. It was my first experience with the “Walter Wants” needs of the Evening News producers. I found out that what Walter wants, Walter gets.

Charles Kuralt was also an unabashed baseball fan, so when I mentioned to him that I was assembling a story on Bob Feller, he said, “When do you need me there?” Normally I would do the interviews and block out a dummy piece with suggested narration by him, and he would “Kuralt it” and improve it. But Bob Feller was somebody he wanted to talk to. He was the game’s marquee pitcher before and after World War II who earned the nickname “Rapid Robert.” We arrived in Gates Mills, Ohio, to find this 74-year-old veteran practicing his fastball against the side of a barn. He said he wanted to be ready when he pitched in a Cleveland Indians “Old Timers” game in a couple of weeks. He was the Iowa farm boy with the blazing fastball who broke into the big leagues when he was barely 17. Charles queried him, “You were pitching against Gehrig and DiMaggio and Williams; surely you couldn’t have thought you were a match for them when you were a kid?” Feller never blinked, ’Oh Charles, between home plate and me, there was nobody.” In short, the teenage Bob Feller thought no batter, nowhere, could catch up with his fastball.

He grew up in Van Meter, Iowa, and practiced until dark on a homemade diamond his father carved out of an oak grove, just the two of them. When the rain was hard or the snow was high, they practiced in the barn. “It was getting to dusk one night, and my father squatted down for a curveball, and I couldn’t see the sign. Well, the ball didn’t curve, and it hit him right above the heart and broke three ribs. They had to tape him from his navel to his armpits. I was throwing pretty hard.” When he reached the big leagues with the Cleveland Indians, that fastball was estimated at over 100 miles per hour. “You’ve got to be born with a good arm,” he said. “Nobody can teach you how to throw a fastball.”

Kuralt had a question. “Your dad built a ballpark, spent all those hours with you.

Your dad must have thought you had a future in baseball?” Feller’s answer came from the heart, “My father gave me time. The most important thing any parent 135

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can give their child is time — not money, not the keys to the car. Listen to them and give them time.”

The Iowa farm became a destination for all the major league scouts, and the little town of Van Meter didn’t know what to make of all the fuss. “When I graduated from high school, we had 17 in our class. And it was broadcast live coast to coast because the Chairman of the Board of NBC was from Iowa.”

Feller never forgot his hometown, and they never forgot him. They built a museum to house all his mementos, and they occasionally would stage parades in his honor. We went back with him and watched as he climbed onto a fire engine and began engaging a group of kids in conversation. Kuralt asked him, “What kinds of things can you tell young pitchers?” He answered, “The way to hold a ball. I practiced that in the hotel room.”

(Kuralt) “You practiced in the hotel room?”

(Feller) “Oh sure, in the mirror. I had a habit of looking at third base and then throwing it home. Probably shook up a lot of hitters.”

There were no speed guns to test velocity back then, so baseball officials, anxious for some publicity, rigged up a test site near Lake Michigan and set up a battery of cameras. Kuralt was curious. “They had primitive methods of timing your fastball, with a motorcycle for example?” (Feller) “I gained 13 feet on that motorcycle running at 86 miles an hour. Mathematically it figures out at 104.”

Charles persisted, “But if they had a speed gun, what would a good Feller fastball have timed out at?”

(Feller) “104 to 107, but nobody will ever know.”

(Kuralt) “Nolan Ryan says he can throw faster than you.

(Feller) “Ask the ones that have hit against me and seen Ryan. I’ll take their word for it because I know what they’re gonna say. And he does, too.”

On our way out, we found his first framed Charles Kuralt and cameraman Izzy contract written in longhand on the back of Bleckman, cartoon by John Holladay hotel stationery. Feller remembered every detail. “I was sixteen. It said nothing about salary, but it was understood I would get 75 dollars a month with a bonus of one dollar. What I wanted was opportunity. I didn’t look for security. There’s not much security in professional sports, certainly not many in those days, no long-term contracts. Everything 136

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was based on your performance—not your potential. That’s the way it should be.”

So, was Nolan Ryan Bob Feller’s successor as the most feared power pitcher in the last part of the last century? Not many would argue with that assumption, except some of those who remember James Rodney Richard. What intrigued me was who discovered Ryan and how. Pretty soon, I was on the trail of a super scout named Red Murph — “bird dogs” they called guys like him because they never lost the scent.

In April of 1964, Murph took a random detour off the interstate and found Clear Creek High School down near the gulf in Alvin, Texas. And there was a skinny kid, weighing 140 pounds soaking wet, throwing heat. “He really got my attention,” Murph told me, “I was trying to get settled in my seat, and he unsettled me. I said, ‘Who is that kid, Nolan? What?’ Guy I was sitting next to said, ‘Ryan, Nolan Ryan.’” Murph continued, “You kept ballplayers hid from the other scouts. You went to see a player, you left early to confuse the opposition. I just got in the habit of being a lone wolf.”

Murph told me that Ryan had “the best arm I had seen in a lifetime of scouting.” And he knew the Ryan men tended to be big and brawny. Ryan told me, “The lights on those high school fields were bad, and I wouldn’t have wanted to hit against myself. I was quite wild and intimidating. I signed and got sent to Virginia, and that was the first time I had ever flown. A year later, I was called up and found myself in New York pitching for the Mets.” And for 27 major league seasons, Nolan Ryan kept throwing that fastball, a record not likely to be challenged. There were seven no-hitters, 12 one-hitters, and the most career strikeouts ever. Nolan Ryan was a pitching machine who would spend the last half of his career back home in Texas, pitching for the Astros and the Rangers.

So, how did Red Murph get so lucky? He’d been a good athlete as a kid, and at age 29, he gave up a successful business career to pitch at the lowest level in the minor leagues. Lo and behold, in 1957, he found himself on the World Champion Milwaukee Braves, playing alongside Hall of Famers Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron. Murph said that was his secret sauce. “When you play with people like that, you see the difference in what makes them a winner and a Hall of Famer.

“It made my yardstick a bit more accurate than everybody else’s yardstick because I knew what it took to be that extra. I told Nolan early on, ‘If you’re half as good as you think you are, you’ll make so much money in this business of baseball that both of us will be embarrassed when we talk about it.’” There’s a bronze statue in front of the town hall in Alvin with Ryan’s number 34 on the 137

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back. Red Murph stood there and reminisced about his days as a baseball “lone wolf.” “I went to every living room and Baseball Park in this state and several others. I guess my thoughts were that everybody’s a prospect until he proves he isn’t.”

On a September night in 1961, I was a spectator at Yankee Stadium, drawn by a dual assault on Babe Ruth’s sacred home run record of 60 in one season

by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The place was on fire when Mickey hit his 51st, and Roger hit his 54th. I subsequently went to a movie theater, and the newsreel reminded me of the hype and clichés that fed the appetite of the baseball public, “Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle are murder and mayhem for the Yankees. Maris blooms with his long ball and scatters home runs into the stands like hailstones.”

Here’s Roger, “Mr. Ruth said, ‘Well, let some S-O-B catch that one’ after he hit his 60th.” Maris was talking to Robert Lipsyte, Sunday Morning’s sports essayist. Bob had a knack for getting the big interview and digging deep. There were no softball questions.

The gods of baseball were rooting for Mantle because he was the anointed “Golden Boy” of the game. Maris must Robert Lipsyte at his typewriter, courtesy Bob have sensed that his duel with Mantle Lipsyte Photo Collection, Budlam Productions Archive would have repercussions for the rest of his life. Mickey had been his soul mate, but surely they both must have understood that the fans and the media thought that Mickey was the “golden boy” and Maris was “the devil.”

It was quite a contrast to the year before when Maris and “The Mick” were the toasts of Broadway and beyond, way beyond, except for the baseball brass and some of their lackey writers, who desperately wanted Mantle to win the race. Lipsyte got this from Maris: “I look at what I did and what Mickey did.

We both ran this race together and what we did was give adrenaline to the 1961 season.” Lipsyte reached out to Mantle for his take. “The writers tried to act like there was a grudge match between us. Actually, when you live in New York, you can choose your own roommate, and we were roomies that year. It was tough for him, and that’s why it was such a great thing he did in breaking Babe Ruth’s record.”

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Even to this day, after Aaron Judge was anointed as a baseball god by the media for eclipsing Maris’ record by one, there is no clamor to finally put Roger into the Hall of Fame where he belongs. Judge’s road was paved with accolades.

The fans packed the stadium every night as he neared the record and stood in reverential silence. Whereas Maris was treated like an intruder in his own house.

Yankee Stadium was less than half full when he hit number 61 on the very last day of the season.

Roger Maris was 51 when he died of cancer, still wondering why he felt betrayed by the game he loved to play. “Generally, when I talk too much about it, it sort of bitters me up because it’s something I just don’t understand and never will understand.” Roger Maris never got a gold plaque, a gold belt buckle, or even a gold pen for his achievement. Those who broke his record, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds, are still considered cheaters because they played “juiced.” Nobody is shedding a tear for them.

Not many baseball players get to become household names, like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, and Mantle and Maris. Most of them barely have time for a cup of coffee in the majors before they hear the dreaded words, “We’re sorry to have to tell you this, but….” But there are some journeymen ballplayers who experience a magical World Series moment that is life-altering. Let’s call them “three guys named Joe.” I set out to find those few and to let them tell their stories, which had the benefit of a Kuralt narration. The names Lou Johnson, Nippy Jones, and Dusty Rhodes probably don’t register, but they did to fans of the Brewers and Dodgers and Giants. They weren’t playing for big bucks back then, either. None of their salaries topped eight thousand dollars a year. But, oh, what thrills they gave.

“Sweet Lou” Johnson had spent 13 long, hard years in the Negro Leagues and the minor leagues before becoming a Los Angeles Dodger. Then he hit a home run that won the World Series. “Do you know what it’s like to get your name in headlines from New York to Los Angeles?” Johnson told me. “L-B-J, Louis Brown Johnson, not Lyndon Baines Johnson.” Vernal “Nippy” Jones was finishing his career as a pinch-hitter for the Milwaukee Braves, who were facing elimination from the 1950s juggernaut that was the New York Yankees. Last of the tenth, Braves losing by a run, “Nippy” gets hit in the foot by a pitch, and the Yankees dispute the call. “Nippy” told the umpire, “There should be shoe polish on that ball, ump.” And by golly, there was, and the umpire says, “Take your base, Nip.” It was Jones’s last at-bat in the big leagues and the turning point in Milwaukee winning the title in 1957. He told me, “I still get fan letters from people that are still talking about the shoe polish incident 35 years ago.”

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Dusty Rhodes of the 1954 New York Giants was another pinch-hitter extraordinaire whose timely hits included two home runs in a sweep of the heavily-favored Cleveland Indians. Willie Mays was the Giants star, but after the last out, Rhodes told me, “They were all jumping on me! It was wonderful, let me tell you. To tell the truth, I just loved to play ball. I would have played for nothing.”

Lou Johnson really got into it when I mentioned that one swing of the bat in 1965 that changed his life. The kid who had come from the projects of Lexington, Kentucky, was still beaming. “I went back to be honored, and they met me at the airport. I had the red carpet and everything, and they paraded me through in an open car, thousands of people throwing confetti, man. Hey, it was a shot heard around the world.” Dusty Rhodes was of the same mind, “I had a big parade in Rock Hill, South Carolina. You know, you get a boy out of the country, and all of a sudden, you’re riding in the head automobile. That was quite a thrill.”

“Nippy” Jones kept shaking his head, “For a while there, it was embarrassing because no matter where I went, I was the ‘shoe polish kid.’ I’m almost 60 years old, and I’m still the ‘shoe polish kid.’” Lou Johnson had one final thought, “I look back, and I don’t have no question marks about my success. I got a World Championship ring. This is braggin’ rights. You don’t have to read it in the paper.

I got it right here on my finger.”

These stories and others of lesser lights in this book keep reminding me of Woodie’s quote, “Fame is fleeting, but immortality is immortality. You take it the way you can get it.”

During Woodie’s days as a sportswriter after the war, he was assigned to cover the New York Giants. The press corps was an insular group traveling by train with the team as far west as St. Louis and Chicago. They were a small fraternity of men who ate, drank, and played cards together far into the nights of mid-America. Woodie was working for a newspaper called PM, and his editors were always asking him for some baseball tidbits. His strategy was to find a utility player who spent a lot of time on the bench soaking up all the conversations around him. Those lesser lights, either from the bench or the bullpen, were likely to reveal priceless gems.

And then there were the priceless few who were there just to entertain us.

Kuralt and I found him tucked away on a minor league diamond in New Britain, Connecticut. Meet Max Patkin, the “Clown Prince of Baseball.” “I used to go down to places like New Iberia, Louisiana; Tibbideau, Louisiana; Natchez, Mississippi, where the mosquitoes were so big they thought my nose was a landing field.”

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on the “hot dog and cola” circuit, he was the king, especially to the youngsters.

“You kids want to see a chicken? Ever seen a chicken this big (pointing to his costume)? If you kids aren’t good, you’ll grow up to look like me.” He was a failed player and beloved entertainer, but he wasn’t just another novelty act on the baseball circuit.

“This is no chicken, ladies and gentlemen,” interrupted Charles. “Max Patkin’s choreography is pure Balanchine. Remember Newark, New Jersey, Max?” (Patkin) “I’m tellin’ ya, what a three days I had there. But they laughed. I used to be a funny-lookin’ guy in those days. Every time I used to say that, the ballplayers, wherever I go, they’d say, ‘Used to be? You still are funny-lookin’.”

He was a gangly pitcher with limited ability for an Army baseball team during wartime when the day came that he had to face Joe DiMaggio. “Joe hit a home run off me that’s still bobbing around in the South Pacific somewhere.

As he rounded first base, something came over me. So, I followed him around the bases stride for stride, and his whole team comes out of the dugout to shake hands with Max Patkin, the guy who threw the home run pitch!” He put that into his routine when he became “The Clown Prince” and would give the umpires a heads up. “When I slide and you call me out,” he told them, “you don’t have to put your whole heart into it, but let the fans know you’re calling me out. It gives it a little bit of a zip, especially to the kids, you know, ‘Geez, he called him out!’”

The night we visited Beehive Field in New Britain, Connecticut, there were maybe a thousand people watching. “What the hell’d you expect, Robert Redford?” He went non-stop for seven innings, an aging clown looking for one more smile. “I love the intimacy of a ballpark. The fans are so close to me, and the kids can see my puss. And when I make the faces and I get dirty. It’s a dumb act, but it’s good. You know why? Because that’s what they want to see. Look up at the faces of those kids and of those families that came to see Max Patkin perform. Let me tell you something, that’s a great feeling.” I don’t think he ever made a lot of money, going town to town, night after night. Money did not drive him. It was a solitary life, and there was a certain sadness about him. He seemed resigned that he was the last of his breed. “I just can’t see anybody, with all the money the big league ballplayers are making, that is going to go out and beat the bushes like I do, the one-nighters, the loneliness, the travel, and all that. No one will do that. That’s why there will never be another Max Patkin.” He finally got a national audience in 1988, playing himself in the romantic comedy “Bull Durham.”

Nor will there probably ever be another Carlton Fisk. Charles was not available when I interviewed Fisk, but I could tell from the way he engaged me 141

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in writing the narrative that this one was special to him. He wrote, “It’s been 17 Octobers since Carlton Fisk danced on the first base line, willing fair the home run that won a great 1975 World Series game for the Boston Red Sox.” (Fisk) “It seems to me like it happened eons ago, like in another lifetime, like it wasn’t even me that it happened to.”

(Kuralt) “He measures his career in eons. That alone makes Carlton Fisk a rare big leaguer. He plays for the White Sox now, at age 44, one of the oldest catchers ever to play in major league baseball. But when the Red Sox released him thinking he was in the twilight of his career, Pudge Fisk, feeling unwanted and betrayed, moved on to Chicago and put on White Sox, and now he’s been there longer than he was in Boston.”

Fisk was born two hours from Fenway Park, a lifelong Red Sox fan who felt betrayed by his dismissal. “I felt like I was stabbed in the neck, right in the heart — violated, let down, cut off. When I go back there to play now, I have such conflicting emotions. One side of me says, “You dogs, you stiffed me. The other says I really like playing there, the uniform, the fans. But then when I go back in there, I want to stick it in their face so bad that I almost get too worked up to play.”

It’s not uncommon to hear that, but for a catcher, the agony is made more intense by the beating they take behind the plate from the foul balls and the constant movement up and down. Fisk was always a great believer in the weight room to keep him fit, but the foul tips caused him to miss some 500 games, what he called “the little dings you get as a catcher.”

Birdie Tebbetts, a Red Sox catcher after WWII, said it best when I asked him about the job. “You walk into spring training; you know you’re going to get hit.

And you keep getting hit, but as long as you don’t get hit in the throat, it doesn’t hurt very long. When you get hit in the Adam’s apple, that hurts. It makes a soprano out of you.”

Only a handful of catchers have been in 2,000 games or more. Pudge Fisk is second on the list. Even near the end, when the conditioning became difficult for him, he refused to think about hanging it up. “Sometimes when you go into the gym, you begin thinking about some of the guys you’re playing with or against, and you look around the room and suddenly realize — I played against a lot of their dads.” Charles gave him this sendoff, “If some young catcher thinks he’s going to replace Pudge this year, think again, kid.”

Kuralt once gave a speech in New Orleans in which he said, “I long ago became aware of such a thing as a conspiracy of good people in this country.

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recognize them right away. And they recognize one another, but not by race or age or position in life. What they have in common, what makes them a sort of conspiracy, is the naive belief that there is a solution to every problem. But never mind: it’s long been one of the most appealing things about our country for me.”

In 1992, The New York Times wrote, “Kuralt is the object of such devotion that some see him as a cult hero. By current standards, Sunday Morning is an improbable success. It is flourishing in an environment in which news has become entertainment and ratings increasingly dictate the tone.”

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Chapter 13

“The Visionaries” If you are wondering how I was able to produce a ninety-minute television program every Sunday and still have time to be in the field interviewing sports figures, an explanation is in order. By 1986, Sunday Morning was at the top of its game and the top of the ratings when the unforeseen happened. Lawrence Tisch, a cutthroat New York billionaire businessman, became the majority owner of CBS. William S. Paley, who had protected the newsroom since he founded the network in 1928, had finally ceded control. Tisch ordered an immediate slashing of the news division budget. We went from the show “with deer running through the woods” to the show of “deer in the taillights.”

The broadcast lost some of its glitter, despite our best efforts to keep the Kuralt name on top, and Chairman Tisch, that unattractive little Caesar, was immediately dubbed “The Jug-Eared Martian” by the newsroom. Our president of news, cost-cutting, Welsh-born Howard Stringer, who had been angling for the big job at Black Rock ever since Tisch took over, would be promoted to Chief Operating Officer of CBS Inc. His nickname was “The Slimey Limey.” More on all that later.

I always felt the road well traveled could lead to exhilarating experiences if you got off at the right exit and followed your nose. It is rare to find a visionary down among the haystacks, but they are there — they really are — if you just keep looking. Bill and Mike Veeck, William Powell, and Jim Ryan were visionaries you might have never heard of, but you will if you stay the course. It’s about an hour’s drive from Washington, D.C. into horse country on Maryland Route 27.

I was looking for the town of Mount Airy, Maryland, population about 10,000 and a farm owned by Jim Ryan. He had been a successful thoroughbred owner, winning the Belmont Stakes with a horse named Caveat. A horse-racing bird dog named Bob Curran, my thoroughbred racing guru, put me on the scent of this and a lot of other racing stories.

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Ryan built housing complexes for a living and was well-off, not real rich like some of his racing contemporaries, but he was very charitable. Now he was getting out of the game, tired of what he felt was a lack of interest in backstretch workers suffering from severe cases of alcoholism and drug abuse. He had issues with thoroughbred racing’s ruling bodies, saying they “needed to be more proactive, that there was a real substance abuse crisis in the backstretch and that lives were at stake.” Most race tracks have since committed to outreach programs for backstretch workers.

While we stood talking, overlooking the track at the Laurel Race Course, Robert “Peaches” Whye was getting ready to gallop some horses. He was a prime candidate for Ryan’s program, a Black man in a white man’s world. “When I was shootin’, I got on these horses all high in the morning, got throwed, and they let me get right back on ’em. They just know somethin’s wrong with you.” Ryan offered some statistics. “There’s a lot of addiction in the backstretch. A large percent in Maryland, they say, are addicted to some substance. A lot of us in this business notice the horse but are blind as to who’s holding him.” Kuralt offered optimism. “Jim Ryan and Peaches Whye have never met. But they will. They will.”

In 1988, Ryan began advocating for better living conditions and the implementation of programs to help barn and backstretch workers get treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. He sold off some investments and started the Ryan Family Foundation.

Laurel was not some “Toonerville” track operating on a shoestring. Five Triple Crown winners have graced its backstretch, including Secretariat. I asked around about the workers who roomed back there and was told the hours were long, the wages short, and the living conditions, for the most part, were dehumanizing. Peaches told me, “They let you walk the horses drunk; they don’t care. Just as long as you do the job, you get paid, and you go out, and you get drunk again. They don’t say you can’t work here anymore.” Ryan reiterated that the job created an ongoing sense of fear that one of these twelve-hundred-pound animals could seriously injure them. That’s why he started the program to invest in the workers and their substandard living conditions. And that’s why he kept giving a million at a time. As we walked through the dorms with Ryan, a hand suddenly met his. Jim Ryan had been a donor in name only until that moment.

“My name is Robert Whye, but they call me Peaches.”

(Ryan) “Hello, Peaches.”

(Peaches) I appreciate what you’re doing. That’s why I was glad to meet you.

I heard so much about you, and I sure hope it works.”

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Peaches Whye and Jim Ryan eventually moved on from Laurel, leaving behind some good old horse sense and charity that made it a better place. *** Sons of famous fathers and daughters of famous mothers often walk in quicksand, trying to live up to their legacy. Mike Veeck, son of that colorful baseball impresario Bill Veeck, welcomed the comparison. “We had this kind of large, rambling house, all wood; it would have gone up like that if it had burned. We would have fire drills, and there was a box full of ideas, a card file.

Our assignment when we were kids was to grab that card file first because that was the legacy.” He wasn’t afraid of living up to the image; he was inspired by it.

Bill Veeck was the game’s greatest innovator as owner of the St. Louis Browns, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago White Sox — and a maverick, as well.

He was the first to put names on the backs of uniforms. He integrated the American League with Larry Doby. He designed the first scoreboard to light up every time the home team hit a home run. His most controversial stunt was sending a dwarf to bat in a game. That really ruffled baseball’s feathers. He summed up a lifetime of serving his fans this way, “Entertainment, beyond the most obvious purpose, softens the blow of losing. It gives the fan something to Bill Veeck sitting in baseball stadium seats with think and talk about as he is leaving the fans, courtesy Veeck Family Album, Budlam Productions Archive ballpark.”

Both Veecks were anti-establishment revolutionaries. Mike loved the intimacy of the small minor league stadiums. In St. Paul, he told me, “We have this pig, St. Paula, the princess of pork, she brings balls out to the umpire. Wally, here, is the most famous beer man in Minnesota. He even has his own cheering section. On Sunday afternoon, we give away giant ice cream sundaes.”

In the Florida State League, with a franchise called “the Miracles,” Mike had a Miracle dog bring out refreshments to the umpires, a barber behind first base gave free haircuts to fans, and I will let him describe “The Phantom.” “We had this player get killed in a collision behind second base, so we spread his ashes.

This past winter, we were working out, balls are taking funny hops, things going crazy, and all of a sudden, “The Phantom” lives here in the ballpark. What does 146

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it mean? It doesn’t mean anything, just makes you laugh. Dad would have loved it.”

Mike told me the background of the dwarf story in St. Louis. Father Bill’s Browns were a lousy team and couldn’t compete against the Cardinals at the box office. Bill Veeck had a line for every calamity. “I said to a customer, ‘Where would you like to sit?’ and he said he’d like the best seats in the house. And I said, ‘Why don’t you sit at second base? We’re not using it this year.’” A major radio sponsor was threatening to pull out, so he hired Eddie Gaedel, who was barely four feet tall, had a uniform tailor-made for him, and sent him up to bat. We’d asked Bill Veeck about it, and he was still chuckling. “A man his size could do something no one else on the Browns could do: he could get on base. At least he wore a baseball uniform; he didn’t pretend to be a chicken or a goose or a peacock.” Mike beamed at the mention. “There’s one of those contradictions about this man: underneath, there bubbled the heart of a traditionalist in so many ways.”

Then Mike Veeck explained his baseball philosophy. “This game doesn’t belong to ownership. It doesn’t belong to those lucky enough to be its gladiators.

It belongs to us spectators, to the people who provide the life. The unsung heroes of performance are the fans.” And then he paused and thought of his father, “Almost every night I hear this kind of very low, throaty chuckle… ‘and you know Michael, this is real larceny.’

That was the way he would describe something that pleased him. That’s a little tribute to a man I adored. And I only wish he could sit out here in right field and drink a beer and gaze across this silly, little ballpark. I think we’d have a great laugh together.”

When Bill Veeck died in 1986, Mike and a house full of siblings who Mike Veeck, courtesy Veeck Family Album, Budlam protected the “idea box” and his wife Productions Archive Mary Francis never gave a thought to Bill getting into Cooperstown. Mike said the chances were about as good as Eddie Gaedel hitting a home run — zero!

“We had insulated ourselves from this,” he said. “We knew that he would never be in the Hall of Fame.” The other owners hated him for being different, most sportswriters thought he was a wacko, and the retired players were usually more interested in themselves. However, they would be the ones that would eventually decide his fate. Mike, in his quiet way, talked up his dad every chance he got.

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He’d even go into the stands and sit with the fans. Got that idea from Bill, who was a bleacher regular, wanting to get the real poop from baseball’s not-so-silent majority.

When baseball had trouble putting fannies in their small market seats and began to shrink their stadiums in size, Mike would fill his little parks using dogs, pigs, donkeys — whatever it took to get his customers’ attention.

But as the years passed and the memory of Bill Veeck faded, there was a sudden change of heart. Mike theorized how his dad’s last hope, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, made up of ex-major league players, decided it was just time to honor Bill. Someone said, “Here’s the ballot, Veeck’s on it again, what do you want to do? Then somebody told a Veeck story, and someone else told a Veeck story. I really believe it was almost accidental, the euphoria of the moment.”

Mary Francis Veeck said her phone rang nonstop. Those fans who sat in the bleachers with Bill were ecstatic. “One young man called and said he and three or four others were sitting around saying we just feel like it’s happening to us.”

Mike Veeck had his own take. “It had to be a posthumous award because were he still alive, he’d still be popping off, they’d still be annoyed, and it never would have happened. He was very accurate when he said, ‘I will be remembered. I will carry this man into my grave. I will carry Eddie Gaedel and be known as the champion of the little people.’” *** William J. Powell of Canton, Ohio, had a vision. He was going to become the first Black man to build his own championship-rated golf course and open it to the public, giving Black golfers in the area a place to play. He was the grandson of slaves, born in Greenville, Alabama, in 1916 and raised in Canton.

The Powells were the first Black family in town, and he was a three-sport star and the captain of his golf team. That was before he would serve in World War II, and he bristled at the memories of the segregation he faced. “You go to Canton,” he said, “you couldn’t get into a restaurant and get anything to eat.

Golf course owner William Powell and Hall of In the theater, you had to go into the Fame golfer Renee Powell, courtesy Powell Family Photos, Budlam Productions Archive 148

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peanut gallery. I don’t think people realized how bad it was in the North.” After graduating from high school, he was no longer welcome at the golf courses he starred on. “I couldn’t compete with the kids I played with. That was like saying you are no good.”

When he came back from the war, he found 80 acres of rolling hills east of town, but he had trouble financing it, even with a GI loan. He said, “This was a run-down dairy farm, weeds everywhere.” Afterward, he said one bank loan officer asked him, “Do you believe in intermarriage?” But his brother and a couple of other friends came up with the money, and Bill and his wife Marcella went to work pulling weeds by hand. Some friendly farm neighbors pitched in with their tractors, but he was the architect and the principal landscaper, “You know, I tried to get a rock picker, but I turned out to be the rock picker.”

He started with nine holes and bought more acreage to make the course a true 18-hole test of golf. He had played golf while in England during the war and incorporated elements of traditional British designs. He fixed up the farmhouse and raised his family there. Fashioning the sand traps, grooming the greens, and planting hundreds of trees was arduous and sometimes discouraging. Daughter Hall of Fame golfer Renee Powell, courtesy Powell Family Photos, Budlam Productions Archive Renee remembered the heartbreak. “I’d come home and see him and mother planting trees, and it was devastating when some of them died. It was tough, really tough.”

Renee had her own racial battles to fight as the only Black child in school.

Her escape was the golf course, her golf course, “It was really a sanctuary. I didn’t have anybody saying you can’t do this. I always had my parents saying, ‘You can do whatever you want to do.’ She captained the Ohio State golf team and was one of the leading amateur players in the country. When she turned pro, the tour was all-white except for Althea Gibson, who was better known as a tennis champion. Renee said, “I had no problems with the players. The only problems were with the spectators, the outsiders — a lot of obscene phone calls, people trying to run you off the highway.” Dad still couldn’t believe it. “Can you imagine? The game’s hard enough when you have everybody rooting for you, but to be out there wondering if some kook’s going to do something to you?”

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spokesperson and for teaching the game to minority youths. She became the head professional at her father’s course and was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame. Before he died at the age of 93, Clearview Golf Course was designated a national historic site, and he was honored with a Distinguished Service Award by the PGA. I remembered asking William J. Powell if given a chance, could he have played with the big boys of his era — Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan? His eyes brightened, and he said. “Absolutely, absolutely. They came up the same way I did; why not? I never felt subordinate to anybody.” *** I promised only three visionaries, but there is a fourth that bears more than a mention. His name is Sylvan Hart. He lived at the confluence of the big Salmon River and Big Five Mile Creek in a wilderness area in central Idaho. So, a couple of city slickers, Woodie and I, decided to give ourselves a crash course in the Western lifestyle before heading into the wild. Our first adventure was to shoot the rapids in a couple of McKenzie boats on the Deschutes River in central Oregon at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

The Native Americans who fished there long before the white man arrived considered the river a sacred place, and there was a silent war going on with those outsiders who would break their laws. Woodie managed opening remarks as our fishing guide slammed into the first of the rapids. He described the oars as “bending like noodles in a hurricane.” The trip was like “piloting a paper cup through a food mixer.” And the scenery was meaningful. “The great stone faces on the precipitous bank symbolize the views of the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute warriors whose sons still control one side of the river; the other is open to fishermen who are willing to hike in over the mountains.” The two sides eye each other warily. Soon, we were through the rapids and eating a feast of rainbow trout cooked over a grill by our guide. Woodie demurred and grabbed for a bologna and cheese in the cooler, claiming his stomach was a little woozy, the trout not up to the standard of the Algonquin Round Table.

We moved onto a vast reservation of combined Native American tribes and Woodie Broun out in the wild, Budlam Productions witnessed a roundup of wild horses.

Archive

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Hundreds of bronco riders, among them Shoshones, Snakes, and Navajos, came from all over the Northwest to participate in a festive rodeo that was a little more than we bargained for. The wild horses had been fighting and biting each other, and chunks of flesh had been ripped out of their hindquarters. The riders were in for a wild ride. I watched lots of beer and hard stuff being consumed and knew this was a formula for disaster. I had a talk with the official on horseback assigned to protect each rider and told him Woodie was doing an on-camera piece just inside the ring and to make sure he steered those wild ones away from us.

Just as Woodie began his opening narrative to the camera, the official lost control and a wild horse and rider came charging right at us. I yelled for Woodie to drop his mic and run, but it was too late. The horse’s hoof clipped him just below the right eye and down he went. He shook off the grogginess, but his cheek was swelling rapidly, and we still had the on-camera close to do. In the true spirit of his show biz days, he gathered himself, and as the eye began to close, he did the on-camera in one take. “In these wild hills, braves have ridden wild horses for ages. As the rest of the country gives way to pavement and power mowers, wistful thousands gather on this hillside for a peek at the past. This is Heywood Hale Broun in the Tygh Valley of Oregon.” Then he dropped his forehead into his right hand and became Woodie Broun, Budlam Productions Archive suddenly silent.

A few leeches from a local doctor relieved the swelling, although an eye patch was prescribed and made Woodie look like a smaller version of John Wayne in True Grit. Soon, Woodie began talking again, thank God, and we found ourselves in a couple of singleengine cropdusters headed south above the Salmon River and our rendezvous with a “Mountain Man.” The raw beauty was breathtaking. Here’s Woodie: “Flying over the mountains of Idaho, we are reminded that the stone spears of our hamburger-lined highways have Woodie Broun and Bud Lamoreaux with eye patch, happily missed a few places. Here the Budlam Productions Archive

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landing field looks like a road, and the road looks like something trampled into being by elk feet.”

The landing gears seemed to buckle from our weight as we screeched to a halt on a strip a couple of football fields long next to a dude ranch at a place called Mackay Bar. A young bearded man in a jeep introduced himself as “the nephew,” and with all the camera gear and five of us in tow, we started north on a crude path along the river, which was moving hard and fast. As we advanced onto higher and higher ground, the river looked more and more menacing. There were maybe four feet between us and a drop to oblivion. Then somebody told a joke, everyone relaxed, and ten miles and an hour later, we arrived at the camp of Buckskin Billy Hart.

Woodie continues. “Slightly larger than the cabin at Walden Pond and much farther from town is the brave, pink compound where Buckskin Billy Hart at Western Buckskin Billy weaves the complex fabric of the Campsite, Budlam Productions Archive self-sufficient life.” Billy was standing in front of a small village of connected buildings he had built with his hands. Tom Thayer, the cameraman, slipped getting out of the flatboat after we crossed the “Big Salmon,” and the camera case landed with a thud. Tom looked worried. He was a lanky, raw-boned outdoorsman, and this spelled trouble.

There was some damage to the inside of the lens opening, and he needed one of those fine jeweler’s screwdrivers to fix it. Without that camera, we were reduced to silent pictures. I looked around. We were two days’ drive from the nearest small town. Fat chance of finding one of those, I thought. Buckskin Billy greeted us and asked if he could help. “Jeweler’s screwdrivers?” asked Tom. “Just a minute,” said Billy. And that was the moment we knew we had found a visionary, an adventurer who was truly isolated from the ways of the world.

He took us on an eye-opening tour of his compound. When he arrived here 40 years ago, he was a college-educated, trained engineer escaping the oil fields of the Oklahoma patch. Black Friday had struck, and the Great Depression squeezed the American dream. Right there, Sylvan Hart decided to trudge deep into the wilderness, stake his claim, change his name to Buckskin Billy, and the rest of the world be damned. Turns out, he had the mind and skills of a young Tom Edison; he could make everything and anything. He found a vein of copper in the ground and fashioned pots and pans to cook with. He panned for gold 152

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and built a blacksmith shop. He fashioned an intricate flintlock rifle to hunt with. He’d shoot a bear when the need arose, eat the meat, put some up, and keep jars of bear grease to flavor his food. Nothing was wasted. He had learned to hunt as a youngster when his family needed food.

He grew a nursery-sized vegetable garden and set aside jars of preserves to carry him through the long winter. He built a bomb shelter when he got word the Russians were coming.

Somebody dropped in a plastic cockpit bubble from a World War lI fighter plane, and he made Buckskin Billy Hart panning for gold a solarium out of it. He was a crack shot and took a lot of moose and deer. He told us that a mountain lion bagged a deer right outside his fence once and spent two days devouring it. Billy and the lion respected each other’s territory.

Even his clothing had survival written all over it. A helmet that resembled something worn by Humphrey Bogart on the sands of the Sahara protected him from falling objects. A deerskin jacket was best for staving off the rain and the heavy snow, which cut him off from civilization, except for July and August when a trapper or a trader might show up on foot or horseback. “The nephew” had come to check in on Billy, but he would not not be staying long. Billy did have a companion, a bulldog he named “John Chinaman.”

We brought him a bottle of whiskey, and he opened a hatch in the floor where there was at least a year’s supply.

“Could have used a quart of fresh cow’s milk,” he said. Dinner that night was elk chili, delicious! He told us that history books called the Salmon “The River of No Return” because it was so dangerous that Lewis and Clark had to detour around it on their way to the Pacific.

Bud Lamoreaux and Buckskin Billy Hart at It was the perfect place. He had a great Buckskin Billy Camp; Budlam Productions Archive wit, laughed easily, and had oh so many stories to tell: “Well, I haven’t really missed anything because you’re the master of the situation here instead of being dragged through the world like a child pulling a cat by the tail.”

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We were standing in the spot where Big Five Mile Creek runs into the Salmon, and he was telling us that when he arrived back in ’32, he was carrying an ax, a rifle, and a knapsack full of provisions. Then he stared at the mountain in front of us, and we talked about his fears that the world might be closing in around him, that he could almost hear the sounds of bulldozers over the mountaintop making way for a casino, with ski slopes and condominiums to follow —-- and that he hoped he could last before the world came crashing in: he did. Sylvan Hart died in 1980. Buckskin Billy will be remembered in mountain lore forever.

Rivers held a special fascination for Charles Kuralt, especially the Salmon River that lured Buckskin Billy Hart. He wrote, “Lewis and Clark found that one too wild to ride. Clark wrote in his journals, ‘The passage by canoe is entirely impossible.’ And it still is.”

Charles wrote, “Something draws us to the riverside and keeps us there through winter freezes and spring floods. It was so from the beginning. There would be no Bunker Hill, no Back Bay, no Boston Red Sox, no Boston if there were no Charles River. John Winthrop and the first Bostonians chose the Charles because it offered easy access and the possibility of a quick getaway.”

The old Bostonians were very puritanical, but our mail sensed that sensitivity vanished in America long ago. As Charles reported one Sunday morning, “I thought we’d get a lot of mail objecting to the nudity in the paintings of Lucien Freud. Not so. All the objections were to our covering up some of the nudity. Jerry Mott of Martinez, California, said, “The obvious censorship of the paintings by strategically placing a spectator to block certain views was absolutely ludicrous, somewhat like putting fig leaves on Michelangelo’s David.” Kuralt was in high gear now. “Here’s another viewer—Dr. J. David Forbes of Charlottesville, Virginia, said, “I was reminded of a mentor of mine’s insightful reflection on his childhood: ‘In my family, we didn’t have genitals.’”

Charles continued, “We often read these letters as a way of acknowledging small errors on our broadcast. Here is a card that says: ’Dear Mr. Kuralt, I have been watching your show and heard that you are making mistakes. My teacher says that mistakes are a wonderful way to learn. Sometimes I make mistakes, too. Everyone makes mistakes, especially grownups, but it’s OK. Abigail Baum, age seven.’ Thank you, Abigail. That made us all feel better.”

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Chapter 14

“Show Biz and Knuckleheads” We used to have some spirited discussions about not “getting on the tricycle,” that is, being wary of the correspondent who wants to hog the limelight by doing something stupid. Producers were forever warned that holding onto a tree in a hurricane was okay only if it was going to save your life. Otherwise, and especially on more light-hearted stories, stick to the people who were our newsmakers and don’t let them be one-upped by a reporter acting like Clarabell the Clown. I did manage to sneak in some tongue-in-cheekers with Woodie, but I wasn’t really stretching the CBS News guidelines.

One such instance was at Niagara Falls, where I stationed Woodie near the top of a stepladder at the bottom of the roaring water. We were there to do a story on the diminutive Niagara University basketball star Calvin Murphy and the imagery was meant to reinforce the notion, according to Woodie, “that they were both wonders of nature.” Murphy was an All-Star with the Houston Rockets, performing feats of magic with his dribbling skills. Murphy was a dribbling wunderkind from the time he could tie his Cousys. As Woodie stood on the ladder, with Niagara falling over his shoulders, he explained, “Comparisons between man’s accomplishments and nature’s wonders are usually fatuous, but it seems fair to say that Niagara’s Murphy shares one quality with Niagara’s Falls, both are hard to believe until you see them.”

There was more than a little show biz attached to five-foot-eight Calvin Murphy’s career, and that’s what the rest of this chapter will be dedicated to — a wide array of entertaining personalities who just happened to be in the sports business. Fans of early television got their kicks from the so-called sport of Roller Derby. The sheer force of the name “Toughie Brasuhn” was what attracted Woodie to her sport, which he called “an exercise in orchestrated mayhem” with a simple formula, heroes and villains. Toughie was the board-slamming star of the Brooklyn Red Devils, and like wrestling’s Gorgeous George, she had a 155

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promotable name and was the target of the fans’ abuse. But a short revival of the sport on New York’s Madison Square Garden quickly lost its appeal in the 1970s, much to Woodie’s chagrin.

“Born in 1935,” Woodie reported, “the derby became a national craze in the days when one went next door to see Uncle Miltie on the block’s TV set, but like all crazes, it has experienced a rapid decline. Now that violent sport is all the rage, the trips over the wall bring bruises exacerbated by the jeering laughter of the fans, who live the fights from the safety of their seats.” Roller Derby has since been reduced to being an intermittent roadshow, hoping to catch some gold in the new streaming niche of mayhem entertainment.

Sports talk radio was just getting its legs in the 1970s and Boston was one of the first hot spots with a show called Sports Huddle. It was the brainstorm of Red Sox talk show lifer Eddie Andelman. The conversation turned to those Red Sox outfielders who were having trouble solving the strange bounces from the Fenway Park walls, among them Reggie Smith. Andelman lit his torch. “I wouldn’t consider Reggie a good outfielder. He has what I call ‘wallophobia.’”

Eddie and his trouble-maker panelists were on the airwaves for one reason — to stir the pot and get their fans jabbering. “Hello, this is Sports Huddle.” A caller wanted to know who was going to win the wrestling match at the Boston Garden, Bruno Sammartino or Smasher Sloan. Eddie unleashed his best fastball, “Smasher will give Bruno such a vicious beating that Bruno will not be able to show up at his vegetable wagon in Haymarket Square.”

George Plimpton was a New York aristocrat, writer, and punster who wrote Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback about his experiences at a Detroit Lions training camp. The players weren’t told his identity, nor that his real aim was to write a book about what happened off the field, as well as on it. One of his central characters was All-Pro defensive lineman Alex Karras, a playful version of someone who loved making mincemeat of opposing quarterbacks.

The book was being made into a movie, with Alan Alda of MASH fame starring as Plimpton and Karras playing himself.

The script called for Karras, making his movie debut, to have only one line, “I’ve got the coat.” Instead, he shouted, “I’ve got the fuckin’ coat,” which, according to Woodie, “threw chaos at the choreography.” Moving on from there, Karras was in the Mel Brooks breakthrough comedy Blazing Saddles. This time, he was a cowboy named Mongo who punched out his horse, one of the memorable scenes from that movie classic. His fun-loving comedy days were only beginning.

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We found him next at a golf course in Fenton, Michigan, ringmaster at a charity event he dreamed up called “The Distraction Open.” His co-conspirator was a funeral director named Pete Buterakis. Woodie said Buterakis reminded him of a “scale model Zero Mostel.” The first tee shot is usually a nervous reaction for the average duffer. Woodie said these golfers resembled “twanglers who were a roaring chorus of twitch makers.” Those poor souls had to fight through shrieking sounds followed by bugle calls coming over the PA system while a crop duster sprayed them with a pink liquid, and Johnny Weismueller of Tarzan fame beat his chest and bellowed his siren call — “Ahhhhhheeee!” Elephants, llamas, and cows foraged on the fairways, and a giant tortoise crawled through the sand traps, leaving some interesting sand castles for the golfers to navigate.

Karras, accompanied by his bewildered movie pal George Plimpton, drove around the course with a truck armed with a blaring brass band. It might have been called “The Survivor Open” because not many of the contestants were fit enough to attend an evening banquet in which rich prizes were promised, including four automobiles and lots of new golf equipment. We didn’t stay for the awards ceremony, but Karras told us later, “You shoulda seen the guys’ faces.

I mean, you promise them a car, and they get all lit up like a kid at Christmas. We pull back the curtain, and there it is, something that went over a cliff ten years ago.” Woodie offered this observation, “The general flavor had the elements of a Flemish Harvest Festival, a gypsy camp, and a country fair midway. It in no way resembled a golf tournament, an event usually carried on in the somber, silent intensity of brain surgery.”

When the Detroit Free Press decided to anoint Karras as a reporter to give them some unique angles from Super Bowl VI in New Orleans, we decided to follow along and, I thought, produced one of Woodie’s best metaphors, “Arriving at Super Bowl headquarters, Karras arouses nervous merriment — like a bear banging on car windows at Yellowstone.” Karras went on to a long career in movies and television, with roles in hits like “Victor/Victoria” and “Webster.”

Knuckleball pitchers who throw that mysterious wobbler have often produced guffaws from disbelieving fans, who are often blown away by occasional “gee whiz” moments. Knuckles were one reason why Charles Kuralt loved baseball.

Listen to Charley Hough, who spent 25 big league seasons mystifying batters.

“I mean, I’ve thrown ’em where the batter has swung and missed. He thinks it’s a strike; he swings and whack, it hits him in the chest. I remember a game in Cincinnati where I hit both Pete Rose and Joe Morgan on pitches that should have been strike three. Both pitches hit them in the head, but the ump didn’t call it, and I’m sure both of them swung.”

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Knuckleball pitchers have been a scarce commodity in modern-day baseball because it’s such a difficult craft to master. It darts and it dances and nobody in the ballpark really knows what it will do. Surprisingly, history shows us that the 1945 Washington Senators’ four starting pitchers were knucklers. Charles Oliver Hough learned from the master, Hoyt Wilhelm, who pitched for nine teams and in more than a thousand games and lasted longer than Charley, almost until he was 50 years old. First time we caught up with Wilhelm, he was nearing the end with the California Angels. You wouldn’t think so listening to him. “Just because an organization gives up on you, it’s not 100 percent sure. I was released off a Class D club one time, the bottom rung in professional baseball. They took me back in about three weeks, and I wound up pitching my way toward the Hall of Fame.”

Woodie thought Wilhelm was more than a survivor. “A pitcher before many of his teammates were born, and a big leaguer before some of them were on solid food, he moves with the economy of an old dance teacher as he pushes up his puzzling pitches that are likely to bloody the nose of one waiting to catch it in front of the kneecap.” That’s exactly what happened to our cameraman Freddie Dietrich, who was an old-school newsreel guy without fear. However, old dogs do learn new tricks, and Freddie never squatted behind Wilhelm’s catcher again.

Wilhelm said, “The whole secret to a knuckleball is to throw a ball that does not spin, that goes up there dead. I don’t think anybody can really teach it, but you can show them how you hold it, doubling your fingers up. It’s actually a fingertip ball, and it’s just very difficult.”

But it’s not the pitch baseball scouts are looking for — one that travels about as fast as a car obeying a 65 mph speed limit. Charlie Hough knew the drill. He told me, “Nobody’s looking for a guy like me. But when I throw it right, start it in the strike zone where I want to, and then it’s kind of out of your control. It might do something different every time, and that’s when it’s really perfection!

I have laughed along with some of my teammates; yeah, some of the games are fun, some are. But playing a baseball game is still pretty serious stuff.”

Charles Kuralt said this of the knuckler and its practitioners, “It is baseball’s most tantalizing pitch that seems to have allowed both Hoyt Wilhelm and Charlie Hough to tap into Ponce de Leon’s fountain.” Hough finally made a million dollars in his last year with the Florida Marlins. He had to convince a lot of disbelievers that his knuckler was a winner. “In the minor leagues, you didn’t have an agent; you just argued like crazy for what you were gonna make. I mean, we were arguing for a hundred dollars a month, maybe a couple of thousand a year. There was no media coverage; I mean, guys would walk out of spring 158

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training, saying, “That’s it, I’m not playing baseball anymore until you give me my hundred dollars.” As previously stated, back in the day, baseball players, but especially knuckleballers, were a different breed of cat. *** Lake Louise in La Tuque, Quebec, about a four-hour drive north of Montreal, was a place caught up in the 24-hour marathon craze that hit New York in the bobby socks days when 24-hour dances and bicycle races were big stuff. We went north to investigate and found that La Tuque was just a long grind. “Few actors play parts as lengthy as these well-greased athletes,” Woodie reported, “athletes buttering up for a marathon in water which, after twenty hours or so, will feel as cold and heavy as jellied consommé.”

It was August, but the temperature in the water was barely 55 degrees when two-person teams from all over the world plunged in. Tents lined the water’s edge. Inside them were trainers and blankets to deal with the exhaustion and the cold. After an initial sprint-type splashing for position, the swimmers settled into a tireless rhythm, and a radio station operating on a raft boomed out music that only the Canadian youths lounging on the perimeter could appreciate. The swimmers were busy counting their laps. Counting the prize money would come much later and wouldn’t take long. As one contestant put it, “The money’s not great, but it’s more than we’d have sitting home on our duffs.”

As half-frozen swimmers climbed the banks, replaced by half-hearted partners, our Montreal cameraman, Jim Gratton, suggested a restaurant visit might be in order to relieve the tension. A quick survey by the producer found a lot of fast-food joints and one Chinese restaurant. I checked the menu. There was Chung King in a can and something called “buttered blowfish imported from Newfoundland.” We settled for hot dogs and poutine, a Quebec delicacy, while being serenaded by Radio LaTuque.

Still, there was a pageantry to it all, and when dawn finally arrived the next morning, a Dutch team would go on to win, having swum more than 60 miles, a record that would undoubtedly put them into the La Tuque Hall of Fame. As one of the winners put it, “Here you think only about the water; it’s so thin and cold.” Sleep, however, was just a distant thought for the swimmers, as Woodie reminded us in his conclusion, “For those who have endured the marathon in the water, the rewards have ranged from a big, warm blanket to a big cramp. For

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those who watched, the reward will be a big sleep. This is Heywood Hale Broun in La Tuque, Quebec….dozing off.”

Laughing through tears is something that a coach often goes through, if for nothing else, to show his players that he still has their backs and that it’s a long season ahead. Those cliches work only until the finger-pointing starts.

Bill Fitch, coach of the hapless and hopeless Cleveland Cavaliers, resorted to humor to keep himself half sane. At the weekly fan luncheons, he was supposed to show the highlights of the week; however, since he didn’t have any highlights, he would run the film forward and then backward to show, he said, how fast his players were still hustling to get back downcourt.

“I once said,” he told his fan loyalists, “coaching a first-year team is a religious experience. You do a lot of praying, but most of the time, the answer is NO.” He had been a successful coach in the Big Ten at Minnesota and jumped at the chance when Nick Mileti offered him the job with his expansion Cavaliers. It would take him six years before he had a winning record, and then he went to Boston and won an NBA championship.

Woodie wrote, “I arrived in Cleveland expecting to find a somber group given to locker kicking and wall pounding and was surprised to discover in the great tradition of brokenhearted clowns, they were enduring a kind of mordant humor.” Owner Mileti told us, “It’s dreadful, it’s incredible, it’s unbelievable, it’s indescribably painful.” Everything had gone wrong right from opening night.

He had a plan for the full-house crowd. Everyone would get a bottle of wine and two commemorative glasses, each bearing a plumed swordsman, a Cavalier.

There would be a grand toast to a new and promising season. The Ohio Liquor Board put a kibosh on that.

Woodie continues, “The unhappy Mileti was left with a lifetime supply of one of those vaguely identified pink California wines that do not improve with age.” And, Woodie said, “Mileti took to pressing it on visitors at every hour of the day, even those who, like myself, arrived at nine o’clock in the morning more in the mood for coffee than for an imprinted glass of what appeared to be a mixture of Kool-Aid and aftershave.” When the team finally achieved respectability, we returned to ask Coach Bill Fitch about that painful first season. “If you recall, we didn’t win too many in a row,” he said. “In fact, we didn’t win too many. I would rather paint the house with a toothbrush than go through that again.” Woodie asked if he ever thought about giving up. Fitch thought for a moment and said, “Oh, I don’t know, give up life maybe, but not coaching.”

The Charlotte Observer wrote this about Woodie, “He flits in and out of our lives like a gypsy moth, a moment of refreshing color, a mayfly of subtle wit and 160

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subtle words. He is a mustachioed elf, capturing for an instant the elusive simple joys of life.”

That, in a nutshell, is what Charles did “On the Road.” Occasionally, one of his pieces had a touch of whimsy to it — “tall tales and their dreamers,” he liked to call them: Francis Johnson, who lived in a roadside farmhouse in Darwin, Minnesota, hated throwing things away and started saving bits and pieces of string. Over three decades, his ball of twine grew thirteen feet high and thirty-eight feet around. As Charles reported, “Owning the world’s largest ball of twine is a heavy responsibility: the neighbors brag about it; visitors are brought to see it. If Francis Johnson ever unrolled it, it would stretch from Darwin, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“The backroads connect up a country that still seems rather fine and strong and enduring,” he wrote in the Charles Kuralt and Izzy Bleckman on location, jacket of his On the Road’ book in 1985. Budlam Productions Archive “You don’t read about this America in your morning paper, but it’s there.” All of his stories had significance, but some had a wider historical message, such as to what ends the U.S. Postal Service went to reach the most remote areas of the country. He called this one “The Singing Mailman from Magoffin County, Kentucky.”

Moses Walters and his mule Julie went to work for the post office in 1926, serving the residents of rugged Cow Creek, where winter arrives early and leaves late. Moses was a great believer that “neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night” would keep him from his appointed rounds while always humming the quiet, repetitive hymns of the hollows and hill country. He went through six pack horses and mules in his half-century on the job and had been out of Kentucky and the mountains only once in his life. Charles summed up his story this way, “Folks along Cow Creek wondered what we wanted to take pictures of Moses for. He’s ordinary to them, so they have not stopped to consider that it takes a lot of people to make a country work and that one of them might be an old man on a mule.”

Another of his tales from the road with historical bite was a war effort that knew no bounds. It involved more than a hundred communities and 50,000 volunteers in and around North Platte, Nebraska, and a place familiar to some six 161

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million WWII service personnel — the North Platte Canteen. “ It is something worth remembering, ‘’ Kuralt told us, “Every day, as many as ten thousand servicemen and women came through here on the troop trains on their way to war, some of them never to return. The women of North Platte and small towns like Elm Creek, Buffalo Grove, and Lodgepole met every train, fed every soldier and sailor, and never sent a bill to anybody.”

Here is more of Kuralt’s remembrance. “If someone was having a birthday, the women gave them a cake decked with candles. There was fried chicken and milkshakes and coffee and cookies and homemade pies. The volunteers were most proud of the fact that they never ran out of food, not once. The troops, in kind, became pen pals with the women of North Platte, thanking them for the homemade food that brightened their otherwise dreary journey on their way to a foxhole in an unknown land. One returning infantryman said he repeatedly heard fellow soldiers on the battlefield mention the hospitality of the women of North Platte. ‘They would talk about it like it was a dream,’ he said. ‘Out of nowhere they’d say, “How’d you like to have some of that food from the North Platte Canteen right about now?”’”

As Charles took a sentimental journey back to North Platte, and as he reported then, “We came to North Platte to look for a place where a miracle happened, but time goes by. Urban renewal got here first, the old Union Pacific depot and hotel where the Canteen set up shop is gone,” but the town will never forget their boys on the troop trains.

I know I have written it before, but it bears repeating: Charles and Woodie were quite a pair, even though they operated independently most of the time.

They both looked for the humanity and humility in every story, be it at the end of a dirt road or up on a big league scoreboard. Their independence stemmed from Kuralt’s freedom to roam without front office interference and Woodie’s contract that made him an independent contractor and not a member of the CBS News correspondent corps, who could be ordered around at management’s will. That freedom put them above anyone else in the network news business, and it showed in their work. Never did they have to report on a calamity waiting in the wings. Their oratorical flourishes were elegant. They gave us grace notes, lots of grace notes. Even the correspondent corps thought they were the top of the heap.

Charles Osgood, a CBS News wordsmith of longstanding and the heir apparent to Kuralt on Sunday Morning, wrote this in Charles Kuralt’s American

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Moments: “He was an explorer, Charles Kuralt was. And every explorer, in a sense, is trying to find himself. Whether he finally did find himself out there in America, I cannot say. But I know what he did find. He found us. No one in my time, no one on television, has shown ourselves to ourselves as truly, as lovingly, as skillfully, as memorably as he did. Was he also other than the man we watched on TV? Did he have flaws and imperfections like the rest of us? Yes, of course, he did. Whatever else he may have been, Charles Kuralt really was Charles Kuralt.”

Charly Osgood was one of the good guys.

Charles Kuralt Cartoon By John Holladay

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“Mexico City and Munich/Watershed Olympics” As previously reported, the Mexico City Olympics were to test our mettle for covering an international event that involved more than prancing equestrians and bounding gymnasts. In the parade of nations in the opening ceremony, Woodie spotted a lone marcher, Edward Monsel, a sprinter from the tiny South American territory, Surinam, who represented the hopes and dreams of its 350,000 people. “Monsel is not an eccentric or a joke,” wrote Woodie, “but a world-class runner.”

Many of the Olympic disciplines had matchups of nations that had politics written all over them — the Russians versus the Czechs, India versus Pakistan, etc. — and, of course, stories on American heroics. That’s what the weekday Evening News wanted, and then there were those stories that they called “Walter Wants.” So each morning, Woodie and I would go to breakfast at the Del Paseo Hotel on the Reforma, armed with the International Herald Tribune, which had the most extensive days’ “Olympic listings” — and to get ready to rumble.

The schedule said, “Russia vs.

Czechoslovakia, Ladies Volleyball.” There would be no love lost here since the Czechs were still smarting from the Soviet invasion in 1956. ABC, which paid millions for the games, chose to ignore it, but Robert Lipsyte, who would later become a contributor to Sunday Morning, didn’t. He was covering it for The New Woodie Broun, Budlam Productions York Times. The Czech girls looked like they had Archive 164

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spent most of their training in the weight room, while the Russians bounded out on the court sporting hair ribbons and lipstick. Woodie later reported that they looked like “they had just finished the swimsuit and evening gown competition and were getting ready for the talent show.”

Another breakfast table special was India versus Pakistan in the semi-finals of the field hockey tournament. I had been scanning the Tribune schedule and mentioned that Paraguay was playing Uruguay, in whatever sport memory fails, and Woodie brought me up short. “We can’t cover that match,” he nearly shouted, “both countries are run by dictators.” I looked at him a little cross-eyed, and that’s why we settled on India against Pakistan. We did not make a mistake.

Those two rivals went at each other like it was the Greeks against the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen spectators along the sidelines as they went up and down the field, slashing away with their sticks. Injured players continuously limped off the field, all except the goalies who wore heavy pads on their legs. Pakistan won the match and later its second gold medal in field hockey.

It wasn’t as exciting, but finding the oldest Olympian required some detective work.

When we finally tracked down Mrs. Lorna Johnstone, a 66-year-old British equestrienne, we had a gem. We politely inquired about her age, and she laughed heartily and said it wasn’t her advanced years that worried her but rather the age of El Guapo, her horse. As Woodie recalled it, “At twelve, he was only middle-aged for a dressage mount, but he had had a heart attack, and Mrs. Johnstone didn’t know whether Mexico City’s high altitude was going to affect him adversely.” It didn’t. Woodie asked her if there were too many young dressage riders “for the comfort of a mature person.” Mrs. Johnstone had a ready answer. “No, I don’t find them peculiar at all, but they apparently find me rather peculiar. I’m usually mistaken for a chaperone or a trainer.”

When we looked her up again at the ’72 games in Munich, which almost matched her new age, she brought her entire family along. That prompted Woodie to write the following: “They seemed to step out of one of those golden English film comedies of the ’50s, the husband a retired army officer with pale blue eyes, a white mustache and a tweed coat of great age and elegance, while the daughter was a hearty sort in a twinset whose large hands and feet belied the delicacy that had won her the ladies fly-casting championship of England.” Mum’s new horse, El Farruco, aka the “wild gypsy,” didn’t win any prizes, although, according to Woodie, “Farruco seems to symbolize the zest that lies beneath the look of one who would seem to be seeking prizes for homemade jam.”

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Another event that required coverage was the sailing competition in Acapulco. This wasn’t as much a “Walter Wants” as a “Walter Gets.” Cronkite had been a sailing enthusiast all his adult life, and I had detected a certain admiration of royalty. Put those two together, and you have a guaranteed piece for the Evening News. It was just a shame it had to be in Acapulco, but work always comes first. The combo Acapulco offered was Crown Prince Harald of Norway, later to become the king no less, in a solo sailing event. Harald was a toddler when his mother, Princess Martha, made a daring escape as the Nazi occupiers took over their country, and they spent their WWII years outside Washington, D.C. Martha and FDR became quite friendly, maybe even an item, as rumor would have it. So, young Harald had been something of a minor celebrity at the White House.

There was no contact information when we arrived at the information desk at the Olympic-designated hotel in Acapulco, and I called the front desk to see if the prince was registered. I was told to wait, and then I heard a distinctly local voice over the intercom saying, “Paging Senor Crown, paging Senor Crown.” I decided that time was a-wasting and that we’d better get to the dock in a hurry, as the start of his only scheduled competition was almost upon us.

With cameraman “Herbie from New York” leading the charge as he did at the Presidential Palace in Mexico, we arrived at the dock, and I watched with some trepidation as Herbie approached the prince to inform him that we were from Walter Cronkite’s network and because of time constraints we had to do the interview “NOW!” I got there just in time to smooth things over, though His Royal Highness didn’t understand why we would be interested in him as a sailor, and we set up to do the interview.

Because of our camera angle into the sun, the prince had to be moved slightly.

That’s when Herbie struck again. Instead of suggesting the move, he strode up, grabbed the prince by the cheeks, and twisted him sideways. The prince looked startled, as no commoner had probably grabbed him like that since the nurse who helped birth him. Woodie asked him some pedestrian questions, like “How do you think you will do in the Dragon Class Competition?” We took some pretty pictures of the prince on the water and shipped the film off to New York.

The next night as the Evening News wound down, Cronkite smiled and began, “Crown Prince Harald of Norway….” Sometimes it’s just a matter of reading your boss.

The work became distinctly more earth-shaking when we were back in Mexico City to cover the American men in the 200-meter dash, in which they were favored to win medals. Tommie Smith, who won the gold, and John 166

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Carlos, who won the bronze, were teammates at San Jose State University, and they quickly improvised a plan to protest racial bigotry back home. It was 1968, and racial injustice in America was topic number one. As they approached the victory stand, they carried their running shoes, wearing only their black socks on their feet. As The Star-Spangled Banner began playing, they both raised their gloved black hands and bowed their heads. It was a “Black Power” salute, and it echoed around the globe. As the U.S. Olympic committee held a hasty meeting to consider a course of action that they considered un-American, we raced back to the Olympic Village to get some kind of reaction from other American athletes. The only ones who would talk were members of the Harvard crew. They were unanimous in supporting the protest. Woodie called them “gestures of social conscience.”

“Seminal” is a word not used lightly, but this turned out to be a seminal moment in the civil rights struggle, and we had missed a big scoop. The New York Times has called it “one of Woodie Broun and Bud Lamoreaux the most iconic images in the history of sports reporting for CBS News; Budlam that continues to resonate,” much like Jackie Productions Archive Robinson’s debut at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The New York Times tracked down Tommie Smith, then 76, who, on reflection, said, “It was more than Tommie Smith on that victory stand. All I did was stand there with a fist in the air. It was a cry for freedom. And now people are beginning to throw a fist up for different reasons because they have the freedom to do it.” *** Opportunists in the terrorist business must have seen what a world stage the Olympics had become because of television, and four years later, in Munich, Arab extremists brought their holy war to the games. I was assigned to produce the CBS News coverage with a lot more help this time. For starters, correspondent John Sheahan and the German camera crews headed by Juergen Weiland and Kurt Volkert were experts in covering fluid situations between the Communists and the West. For instance, this marked the first time Communist East Germany, on the other side of the Berlin Wall, would be represented in the Olympics.

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Before the games started, our German colleagues had covered the Israeli Olympic team attending a memorial service at the Dachau concentration camp.

Two short weeks later, game officials were holding a memorial service inside the Olympic stadium for Israeli athletes and coaches massacred by Palestinian terrorists inside the Olympic Village. The embattled head of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, ended that sad event with some contentious words: “The games must go on and we must continue our efforts to keep them clean, pure, and honest.” Criticism rained down on Brundage, calling him a racist and a Nazi sympathizer. Others believed he was an autocrat but one who believed in the purity of the amateur ideal. I thought Brundage, like Asa Bushnell, his college counterpart I dealt with at CBS Sports, was intransigent and racially insensitive. So, in Munich, it wasn’t long before the ticket scalpers returned outside the stadiums, the flags were no longer at half-staff, and some half-hearted Olympians resumed their training.

We had arrived before the games began to give some historical perspective.

Woodie set the scene: “A town hall clock in Munich celebrates relief from a plague in the sixteenth century which almost wiped out the city. And the Olympic Stadium stands as a mountain built from the rubble of war, proof that if man doesn’t learn from his failures, he can at least use them.” Well, maybe, and maybe not. Prior to the games, Munich was a tourist mecca, a picturesque medieval town with beer halls and their stout servers. Then, the lure of the Olympics turned it into a bustling metropolis, with street cars replaced by a subway system.

Our early coverage was highlighted by the story of two Olgas. Gymnast Olga Korbut proved to be Russia’s goodwill ambassador. She was a glowing pixie, “the Sparrow from Minsk,” they called her, as she pranced through her routines to win three gold medals and a silver. She turned the sport of gymnastics into a glamour event, and the fans fell at her feet.

The other Olga was a former American discus thrower, Olga Connolly, who was a crusader for world peace. She was born Olga Fikotova in Czechoslovakia and won gold in the Melbourne Olympics, where she met American Harold Connolly, a gold winner himself in the hammer throw. Their storied romance and marriage sparked international hopes for a thaw in the Cold War. However, Hollywood never was good at solving world problems. We had interviewed her before, and she was no less sparky this time as she handed out her peace badges to some of the ten thousand Olympians. She was the honorary flagbearer for the United States team in the opening ceremonies. The marriage had not survived.

We filed other more obscure sports items like weightlifting and team handball, and we had the good fortune to go to Kiel on the Baltic Sea and 168

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witness a gathering of tall ships in the Olympic Regatta. Bouncing about inside a small cabin cruiser, we joined a small fleet of sailors and fishermen as the first masts appeared on the northern horizon. Cameraman Jurg, a master at his craft, somehow kept the camera steady over the choppy seas. Woodie said Jurg looked like a “genuflecting stork” bending to his knees and rising on his toes — and then Woodie delivered his opening lines: “Twenty miles out in the Baltic, the timeless patter of the sea holds a panorama of the 19th century, the tall ships, man’s last masterpieces before the machine age brought about the divorce of beauty and ingenuity.”

As the ships grew closer, we spied a ship from Colombia, whose cadets were stationed up in the rigging outlined against the sky, and as they sailed into the harbor, they saluted with three hurrahs, “HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!” while several cadets stood at parade rest more than a hundred feet above the deck, swaying in the breeze. It was a breathtaking sight. Woodie was looking a little green from the bouncing when he offered this conclusion: “Maybe the least adventurous of us see the sense now in John Masefield’s vehement demand: All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” We heard the call Masefield heard, in the voices of the young Colombians singing their national anthem in the rigging of the Gloria. This is Heywood Hale Broun in Kiel, Germany.” *** Before sinister forces turned the games into a nightmare, the parents of Mark Spitz, the Indiana swimmer who was on his way to winning a record medal haul, stopped by the CBS office to chat. It seemed they remembered a story we had done on their son and wondered if we could help them with a transportation problem. The office manager, a wise and efficient woman named Ursula Schultz, sized up the situation immediately and gave them a car with a driver. In return, Frau Schultz asked if we could have an exclusive interview if Mark won his seventh gold. For a Jewish kid to become the star of the games on German soil struck a lot of chords. Bad memories were stirred of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazi Olympics, where Hitler barred most Jews from the competition. The world would be descending on Mark Spitz.

Doc Counsilman, his Indiana coach, escorted me toward the victory stand as Spitz won his seventh gold, each race breaking the Olympic record. After ABC asked him how he felt and he said, “Fine,” down he came into our clutches, and I marched him toward a private room where Woodie and correspondent John Sheahan were waiting with Spitz’s parents. There must have been 100 members 169

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of the world press on the other side of a glass partition, banging for his attention.

They would hear our interview over a loudspeaker, but he was ours for the next half hour. He told us, “It was the hardest eight days of my life.” Asked what price he had paid, he answered, “I don’t know. It’s like trying to put a price on the Mona Lisa. Whatever it was, it was worth it.”

The phone rang early the next morning. It was New York. “There has been a shooting in the Olympic Village. We don’t know how many Israeli athletes are dead. Get your butt over there!”

It took almost 24 hours to play out. Nine members of the Israeli team were dead at the hands of a Palestinian group that called itself Black September. Seven were slaughtered by the terrorists during a shootout with German police at a Munich Airport. All eight terrorists died, as did a West German police officer.

One young American Olympian cyclist spoke for many when he told Woodie, “I think the feeling is lost; the Olympic spirit is gone from these games. It’s just finished; I don’t feel it anymore.” Mark Spitz said he thought “the games should go on because of what they stand for.” Spitz had endured some tense moments himself during the standoff before being spirited out of the country

by American security agents. Upon arriving home in California, here’s what he told CBS News: “I was only a stone’s throw away (from the Israeli compound), and I was isolated by ten Secret Servicemen for over eight hours. It was a scary situation, and I wouldn’t want to go through that again.”

There is a postscript to this story — families of the slain Israelis and the German government reached an agreement on a living memorial to all of the Israeli victims in the Olympic Park in Munich. There were differences in how this “day of infamy” would be portrayed. For the Israeli government, it was a day never to be forgotten. German authorities promised reparations, but that process is still working its way through the courts.

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Chapter 16

“Back From Danang and Elsewhere” I chuckle still when I flash back to some of the minor indignities we had to suffer during our time on the Holiday Inn Highway. Our names were difficult to spell, let alone pronounce. Woodie was usually Mr. Brown, and I could be anything from Mr. Lemieu to Mr. Larmonox to Mr. Lemonroll. Once, it was actually Bux Lamo. Thirsty and hungry, we would have gladly accepted those monikers if only they had saved the rooms for those gents and not given them away because we were admittedly always late. If the desk clerk did finally find the reservation, it would go something like this, “Aren’t you gentlemen in luck?

Governor Rottenbreath had to cancel at the last minute, and you can have both of his rooms at no extra charge.”

All the Holiday Inns had the same decor, so if I woke up in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, or Sackets Harbor, New York, or New Hope, Missouri, I sometimes had to call the front desk to find out what state I was in. Woodie used to send me his misspellings on mass mailing offers, Mr. Heywood Howe Brean or Haywood Harold Brune or Harewood Heil Broome. He would scribble above them: “Would you subscribe?” or “I often wondered who I was,” or “I continue to wonder who I am.”

Even when we were called on to contribute some early pieces to 60 Minutes, the food was still mystery meat and french fries. That would have been fine for John Maloney, a 92-year-old pitcher for the Kids and Kubs softball team in St. Petersburg, Florida, who became the star of our first piece for the 60 Minutes’ impresario Don Hewitt. You had to be past your 75th birthday to make the team, and Mr. Maloney told us he had lost something off his fastball. “Don’t tell the other guys, but I’m working on a new curveball,” he said.

Then they gathered for a pre-game cheer: “What’s the matter with 75? We are the boys who are all alive. High, ho, let’s go, rah, rah, rah, 75.” Maloney threw his secret pitch, and the batter hit a ground ball to second, and I’ll let Woodie take 171

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it from there. “I saw the second baseman’s knees give off a flourish of castanets as he moved in front of the ball, clawed it up, then suddenly fell motionless on the grass. The baserunner ran over to him and asked, “Are you all right, Sam?” A suddenly awakened Sam reached out and tagged the samaritan and cackled, “I’m okay, but you’re out!” 60 Minutes and Hewitt loved it. *** Woodie even got a little piece of the Apollo 11 “Man on the Moon” telecast.

On July 26, 1969, at precisely 8:32 a.m., he was doing beach duty at Cape Canaveral, watching astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins soar into space above our heads. Our mission was to report the reaction of the thousands of beachgoers when called upon by Walter Cronkite. I must confess that of all the assignments I’ve covered over 40 years, this was the most bizarre. I mean, what was Woodie going to say about the beach watchers, “Well gee Walter, I dunno, they kind of craned their necks, shaded their eyes from the sun, opened their mouths wide, and shook their heads in disbelief.” Actually, it sounded something like that with an 18th-century Woodie metaphor thrown in and a quick, “Now back to you, Walter.”

It had been Boss “Gordo” Manning’s idea to have Woodie inject some “irreverence” into what was a national Flag Day event, and going against the grain just sounded a little bit off. Nonetheless, the post-liftoff production meeting brought new orders for us to fly to Disneyland in California and report on the reaction to Armstrong’s landing from Mickey and Minnie at the Space exhibit.

Fortunately for us, a Russian track team proved a better target for Woodie’s questioning, and “Uncle Walter” seemed to enjoy the levity on the Cronkite Evening News.

When we arrived home after a month of covering the Munich Olympics, “Gordo” called me in and told me it was time to put my big boy pants on, come in off the road, and become the producer of the weekend news broadcasts.

Woodie would get a new sidekick, and I would be worrying about Vietnam instead of Valdosta. A host of separate events on those weekends would explode into the free world’s consciousness and would test the mettle of any rookie show producer: Paris Peace Accord ends Vietnam War; Roe vs. Wade affirmation; Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab states, and “Back From Danang,” the dramatic story of the winding down of the U.S. presence in Vietnam.

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events and to fill us in on any mood changes over at Black Rock as to our financial well-being. It was in the spring of that year that he began one meeting with a “good news, bad news” scenario. “The good news is,” he told us, “that 60 Minutes has become a ratings and financial winner for the network. The bad news is that it could be a signal that they will expect that from all of us one day.” Broadcast producers at CBS had always pretty much operated in the dark regarding budgets and were rarely denied resources for news coverage. Saint Salant, ever our protector, was just warning us that down the road, when and if news became a profit center, producers would be held more accountable to the bottom line.

Charles Osgood, the poet laureate of CBS News and the eventual successor to Kuralt on Sunday Morning, made his debut as an anchorman on one of those Saturday broadcasts, and it was an eventful one. I was no longer a rookie, and Charley was a CBS Radio veteran long enough to know that those little technical glitches we called “gremlins” could strike at any time. The preparations for the program went smoothly, and we allowed a delegation of Chinese journalists to watch the proceedings from the control room where Director Ken Sable and his technicians worked their magic. As I watched from the glass-enclosed producer’s chair adjacent to the studio, Osgood said his hellos and led into the opening story from Vietnam, and up came a report from Paris. I got on the intercom with the director and told him to go to black and try it again. Charley again mentioned Vietnam and it was a news dispatch from somewhere in Arkansas. I told the director to go to commercial and inquired as to what had happened: a mix-up in the tape room, I was told, as to the sequence of the stories to be aired.

I assured Charley that the third time would be the charm, and he tried Vietnam a third time, and someone appeared from Washington. I regrettably lost my cool, banged the desk, and shouted, “What the fuck is going on here!”

All I remember after that was the response from the stage manager, David Fox, who had a distinct cockney accent. “Tell the producer,” he said, “that it’s not soundproof.” In other words, as we were going to commercial, my profanity had leaked through the glass, separating us from our startled viewers, and my ass was in trouble.

Just before Charley finally said his good night from New York, he mentioned that the visiting Chinese journalists had nothing to do with the mix-up, and they burst into applause. I hid out for a few days, not knowing what to expect from the bosses. This was the “Tiffany” Network, after all, and Bill Paley might react harshly if he heard about my four-letter rant. When I finally dared make an appearance in the big newsroom, I felt all eyes following me as I approached 173

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the water cooler. As I bent down to take a sip, an arm wrapped around my shoulders, and I heard the calm voice of the bossman, Dick Salant, say, “What the fuck was going on there?” – and he never mentioned it again. Charley and I had both survived.

The Vietnam conflict came to a bitter end in 1975. As the North Vietnamese forces surged down toward Saigon, the coastal port of Danang became a prime target. Correspondent Bruce Dunning and cameraman Mike Marriott had hitched a ride on a 747 World Airways jet bound for Danang in what proved a last-chance attempt to rescue South Vietnamese women and children desperately waiting on the airport tarmac.

As the plane landed, we saw jeeps full of South Vietnamese soldiers and a small army of civilians on foot, literally chasing the plane down the runway until it came to a stop. When World Airlines President Ed Daly dropped the passenger ladder, soldiers pushed the women and children aside and surged aboard. Daly pulled out a pistol and began beating them off. Dunning described the soldiers as “armed and menacing deserters.” The plane was packed full instantly, and as it taxied for takeoff, Mike Marriott’s pictures showed soldiers hanging onto the wings. The rear stairway was still full of deserters, and at 6,000 feet, Daly pulled in one last straggler while seven others fell to their deaths before he could close the door. Even after the jet reached cruising altitude, you could still see bodies jammed into the landing gear. Dunning counted 268 persons aboard, only eight of them women and children.

The Overseas Press Club recognized the significance of Dunning’s coverage and awarded him its coveted annual award. The story was called “Back From Danang” and was later added to the “100 Great Stories List” of the Columbia School of Journalism.

Charles Kuralt was no stranger to war scenes.

“The best journalists have been members of a disorganized conspiracy for good, I think… You don’t have to be brilliant to recognize injustice.

You just have to be courageous to mention it.

And some journalists, in common with some other Americans, have found their courage when it mattered. The job of the journalist is simple enough.‘It is,’ said William Storey of the old Chicago Times, ‘to print the news and raise hell.’ Printing the news is the main thing, but an editorial writer who doesn’t stir things up Charles Kuralt in CBS Newsroom, Budlam Productions Archive 174

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isn’t earning his pay. The majority isn’t always right, as we know, and the good editor pounds his typewriter with fervor when he catches the majority in the wrong. Printing the news is the essential work of journalism, but raising hell is the special joy.”

Charles dug deep into his Sunday Morning mailbag right around the time the war in Iraq was heating up. Here’s what he came up with: “We have received hundreds of letters from viewers who are for and against the war, and, therefore, for and against what they’ve seen and heard on Sunday Morning or think they have seen and heard. Ozzie Olson of Eureka, California, was angry enough to write, ‘Your segment about the anti-war activists was biased, as usual, against U.S. policy. In my opinion, you, your program, and commentaries are very close to sedition.’”

“Sarah Wiley and Drew Colinbrander of Midland, Michigan,” Charles continued, “feel that television is not doing its job in its coverage of the war itself. They say, ‘The moment missiles were launched against Iraq, the networks abandoned their critical role and led a national cheerleading campaign.

Switching from news program to news program is like watching a televised wave of acclaim for the war.’”

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Chapter 17

“The Heyday of Sunday Morning” As 1975 dawned on the Weekend News, change was on the horizon. Gordon “Gordo” Manning, the brains, the brawn, and the enthusiasm behind the Woodie essays, departed for NBC, and a new sheriff came riding into town. This was not good news. Bill Small, the Washington bureau chief, a pin-striped, no-nonsense bulldog, was Gordo’s replacement. Woodie had been getting a little tired after almost ten years on the road, and I thought Small could push him off the cliff. It wasn’t long before my phone rang, and it was Mr. Small requesting lunch for the three of us, a “get-to-know” session is how he put it. I warned Woodie to be on his best behavior at the lunch, but when the new boss launched a rocket of criticism at Woodie’s flowery prose and he shot back some derogatory comments about 60 Minutes, my head felt like it had been swiveling at a tennis match that was going to end badly. Small had a reputation for taking his time when he zeroed in on a target, and, sure enough, months went by before he called me in for a showdown. Also in the room was News President Salant, who had protected Woodie after a rocky start, and Small proceeded to order me to change Woodie’s style or else. I figured the honeymoon was over, despite our ratings leadership, and it might be time for me to move on, too.

My move was a short one, across town to CBS Sports for a couple of years.

Woodie found some freelance work. I figured Small wouldn’t last too long in New York and sure enough, he departed, and in his place was an old friend, Bud Benjamin, Cronkite’s long-time producer. And that’s how I got the best job of my life as a creator of Sunday Morning alongside Shad Northshield. My return also had the blessing of Dick Salant, who, in a long sit down, had convinced Kuralt to come in off the road to do the broadcast. Salant, a former Black Rock lawyer, who had become a fierce protector of his News Division in his 13 years

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at the helm, then announced his retirement. None of us saw the upheaval that would inevitably follow.

As I have written earlier, Northshield and I could not have been less alike.

He was a creative, out-of-the-box executive with a moody, flinty, and sometimes dark personality who dabbled in corporate politics. We were basically understaffed with producers and editors, so I had to micro-manage each story from conception to completion, as we could not afford to waste any enterprisers.

That blackboard with the next four shows chalked in was a message that we meant business when we designated one of their stories for a particular week.

Rarely did a producer come back without the goods. I served as the producers’ advocate when we screened the final cut of their stories. Kuralt told me early on, and I remember his words precisely, “You’re going to do all the work, and Shad’s going to take all the credit.” That was a bit overstated, but I got the message.

Kuralt and Shad respected each other’s talent but never became close. Charles rarely had story suggestions, especially after he complained once about the cover stories being too much off the news, and Shad said something like, “Okay, so are you suggesting you would like to tell us how to produce this show?” That told Kuralt all he wanted to know about getting involved in content. Producer Mel “Scoop” Lavine asked him about the incident later, and Kuralt responded, “I didn’t want to get into it. I wasn’t brave, not by nature, and especially not where Shad Northshield was concerned. He was a genius, but a mad genius. Always blows up, a volatile character, volcanic.”

In his memoir, Scoop, who was an old colleague of Shad’s from NBC, wrote about a particularly telling incident. “Like a great cat, Shad stole into the studio early one Sunday and upbraided a writer in language so violent that Kuralt turned ghostly pale and shook uncontrollably. A technician who witnessed the outburst feared that Walter Cronkite and Bud Lamoreaux in sunglasses Charles might not recover in time to do behind Mel “Scoop” Lavine in blazer, Budlam Productions Archive the broadcast.”

Sunday Morning was just getting rolling when, a few years in, Shad took on a new assignment as the producer of the CBS Morning News and later a new Kuralt prime-time series called American Parade. That meant Charles was on the air six days a week during those experiments. Shad shuttled back and forth and kept his hand in on Sunday, but basically, I was the innkeeper. That was the 177

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beginning of the end of On the Road and Charles’ freedom to roam the country at will. The front office was shifting at a rapid pace, and leadership instability would eventually affect our performance. Gone were our boosters: Dick Salant, Bill Leonard, Gordon Manning, Bud Benjamin. They knew how to keep the vultures away from a format that flew in the face of the “hard news guys.”

One of the new bosses was Van Gordon Sauter, a brash CBS Sports executive, who at times held court in his office with a parrot on his shoulders. During an in-house video feed of the rehearsals for the new Kuralt Morning News, I watched Sauter check his own profile more than once on the studio monitors like a kid repeatedly looking into a mirror to check his pompadour. That was our boss, folks!

What I didn’t realize in my naiveté was that Chairman Paley, who created the whole reason for our being, was on his last legs. He had always thought highly of us, especially because he believed in our news product, was a patron of the arts, and because his wife Babe would brag us up to her Park Avenue society circle. That was big-time protection from those in the news inner circle who thought we were misfits. Bill Paley was really our greatest booster. He started the CBS Radio Network in 1928 as the only competitor to NBC and grew it into the greatest media network of the 20th century. He stayed in an active role until he was 85 years old and in poor health and had to turn it over to somebody.

Unfortunately, that somebody turned out to be Larry Tisch. As the News leadership changed in the space of five years from Van Sauter to Ed Joyce, then back to Sauter and onward to Howard Stringer, Dan Rather’s longtime protector, the rumor mongers like the New York Post and other trash dailies took their shots at the instability to float doomsday scenarios for us. One highly-placed rumor had Kuralt been replaced with a boy-girl anchor team that was more hip than avuncular. We kept plodding forward, but the pointy heads had us in their bullseye.

When we were barely three years old, we were already shuffling talent. New hires were Bob Lipsyte, returning from The New York Times; Dr. Billy Taylor, jazz pianist, educator, and author; Eugenia Zuckerman, flutist and author; Ron Powers, media critic and author. They were not brought in by the front office and thus were vulnerable to corporate politics. We had no idea that our giddy success would, in a few short years, feel the scalpel of corporate raider Lawrence Tisch.

As we settled in, veteran correspondents who had lost favor with the Dan Rather Evening News producers moved across the street with us. We gave an office to one of Murrow’s boys, Charles Collingwood, who did a 40th178

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anniversary piece for us on the end of World War II called “The Last Good War.” It included reminiscences of the joyous scenes in Paris and drew raves from the correspondent corps.

Bill Moyers had some time on his hands and brought us a dozen of his thought-provoking interviews. There was James Farmer, founder of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and a civil rights crusader in the Deep South even before Martin Luther King joined the fray. Sol Linowitz was a “wise man” of Washington politics whose counsel was sought by a number of presidents.

According to Moyers, George Seldes was an old-fashioned critic of the press who reported on the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and later targeted the tobacco industry and J. Edgar Hoover. Seldes lived to be 104. Bill Moyers was always interested in the views of the thinkers. That was reflected in his splendid career on public television.

Marlene Sanders, the first woman correspondent at CBS News, finished up her career with us doing stories on children. She featured a Jacksonville, Florida, center that aided runaways and a Massachusetts program to help imprisoned mothers keep in touch with their kids. We had no quotas in our hiring, but women began taking a prominent role as both producers and correspondents.

The 60 Minutes regulars, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Leslie Stahl, and Steve Kroft, would fill in when Kuralt went on vacation and sometimes even contribute a story to the show. Don Hewitt’s boys and girls were loyal to us to the end. Hewitt once took me aside and said, “I know why you guys are such a big hit — because you’re the best-written show on television.”

Hewitt lasted 34 years on his signature show. His successor as executive producer, Jeff Fager, followed him for another 15 years. “It was a simpler time and place in broadcast journalism,” Fager wrote to me, “when excellent writing and storytelling” won out. After sampling a few chapters of this book, he wrote, “It is like a breath of fresh air. As an obsessive editor, I can tell you that I cannot get enough of the writing excerpts, especially from Charles and from Woodie. It should be required reading for any student of broadcast journalism.”

David Culhane, one of our cover mainstays, was a perfect fit for Sunday Morning with his spare and historical narrative. David walked with author David McCullough across the Brooklyn Bridge on its 100th anniversary, reminding us of Walt Whitman’s prose and McCullough’s best-selling book. Romare Bearden was considered the nation’s foremost collagist and the outstanding Black artist of the 20th century. He told Culhane he considered himself an everyday workman, a blue-collar member of society. Paula Robison defined the role of the flute as

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a solo instrument. She told Culhane that Beethoven was her muse and that she imagined seeing him give her music lessons as she cooked in her kitchen.

On Veterans Day in 1983, Culhane interviewed Vietnam vets suffering from severe and psychological trauma in a veteran’s hospital in Menlo Park, California. These were the toughest cases in America, and the compassionate Bud Lamoreaux and CBS News correspondent David Culhane, Budlam Productions Archive care was extraordinary. The piece won an Emmy for Culhane, producer Kathy Sulkes, and cameraman Skip Brown. It elicited this postcard from Richard Threlkeld, our “cover story” originator, who was long gone to ABC but still a dedicated viewer. “Best thing I saw all last year on television,” Threlkeld wrote. Those that came and went never forgot. It was a loyalty that was very unusual in this business.

Culhane also told me that he once shared an office with Bob Lipsyte, and when Northshield was roaming the halls during one of his manic fits, they had a secret code for whenever he was in the neighborhood, “the dice are on the table.” Lipsyte laughed when I reminded him of it. They both loved working on the broadcast but despised Northshield for preying on the vulnerable staffers.

Ed Rabel was a presence on camera, a war correspondent who covered presidential campaigns and became available to us full-time. We made good use of his talents in our “cover story” rotation. Here is a small sampling of those reports, produced and fine-tuned by Jim Houtrides, who won eight individual Emmy Awards as our most prolific awards winner: “Something Happened In Indianola” — The event was a 1983 garden party attended by an equal number of Blacks and whites in the birthplace of the infamous White Citizens Council. One of the white hostesses invited her Black maid to eat and drink and listen to the music of blues singer B.B. King, a hometown product. Rabel reported, “Maybe this is the beginning of racial harmony in Indianola. It has to start somewhere.”

“Lies, Wars and other Misadventures” — From Gettysburg to Vietnam, a 1983 Memorial Day tribute. Kuralt said, “It is not a day to glorify war. It is a day to remember the war dead, who they were, and who we are.” Rabel reported, “Ten thousand Americans died here in Gettysburg in the bloodiest battle in America’s history, and the dead on both sides were Americans. The long, costly war in Vietnam took 57,000 American lives. It is difficult at any ceremony where 180

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warriors are buried to think of anything but the waste and futility of war.”

Mort Dean covered the homeless crisis in Boston, taking us to Rosie’s Place, which took in poor, tired, and desperate women, the first in the nation to do so.

A social worker named Kip Tiernan founded the shelter in 1979. She told Mort, “We don’t ask the ugly questions that society asks of them: How did you get this way? When are you going to do something about it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? All of these women who come to us are poor. We can offer them a way of looking differently at themselves.” He remains in contact 40 years later, and there is still a need.

And Dean was in The New York Times newsroom to record the dramatic reunion of reporter Sydney Schanberg and photographer Dith Pran. Schanberg had been the Times bureau chief in Cambodia when he was forced to evacuate or be killed in a Khmer Rouge genocide. The Communist troops had captured Schanberg, and Pran saved his life. Pran then fled into the countryside and only managed to escape four years later while most of his colleagues and friends were being slaughtered. Schanberg won a Pulitzer and wrote a book on Pran that was made into the movie The Killing Fields.

Dean’s Vietnam reporting won an Emmy Award for a 1969 Cronkite report on a U.S. Army medevac helicopter team that he flew with on daring forays to the front lines to pick up the badly wounded and the dead. It was one of those combat stories that took the war into America’s living rooms. Dean made contact with some of the crew members some ten years later for Sunday Morning.

There was another link for Dean. A young cameraman with no war experience had been thrown into the early Vietnam coverage. Dean was also covering his first major conflict. Cameraman Greg Cooke was a quick learner during their first frontline combat with an Army medevac team, and he and Dean quickly worked out what proved to be a lifetime interest in this story. In the intervening years, Cooke became an award-winning producer for 60 Minutes. He and Dean remain committed to the story. In recent years, they returned to that dusty firebase named Hawk Hill in Quang Nam Province, which became a symbol of America’s lifelong ’Nam hangover to millions of the survivors and their families.

Dean and Cooke have also returned Greg Cooke; courtesy of Mort Dean Photo Archives intermittently over the years to visit and Greg Cooke Photo Archives 181

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the war heroes they reported on for a documentary they produced for public television’s PBS called American Medevac. The pilot, Bob Brady, from Washington Township, Pennsylvania, still had trouble dealing with that war, suffering from intermittent PTSD and heavy drinking. He couldn’t talk about it, he told Mort.

“It was too painful,” he said. A few years ago, Mort got an email from Brady, “Fifty years, can you believe it?” The medic on those flights was Delmar Pickett from Olsburg, Kansas. He had done two tours and won five Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and a Bronze Star, but he told Mort, “When I came home, I was spat on and cursed and was very angry. Yet the thing I remember most about Vietnam is having somebody else’s life and death in my hands.” Then he showed Mort an unopened box containing his medals and his uniform. In his later years, Delmar suffered from cancer. After the documentary won an award, Mort called with the news. His wife answered. Delmar Pickett had died without knowing his efforts had not been in vain.

These bonds formed on the blood of the battlefield were what old Murrow teammate Robert Trout began talking about so eloquently half a century ago.

“We can enjoy the satisfaction of closure if we live long enough to appreciate the qualities of the people we covered, long enough to understand what our stories really meant. And ultimately how they turned out.” *** Dr. Billy Taylor wasn’t just a jazz pianist and educator; he was a messiah, spreading the gospel of America’s music all over the world. We did a profile of him early on and decided he would give us instant credibility as our jazz critic.

It wasn’t long before I was sitting in the New Orleans living room of the royal family of American jazz. Pianist Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch, was presiding at the keyboard, leading sons Wynton on the trumpet, Branford on the sax, Delfeayo on the trombone, and Jason on drums. This was jazz heaven! However, Ellis told me he had already discouraged his sons from forming a professional family band. “When opportunity comes knocking,” he said, “I don’t want my boys to put family obligations above personal goals.” And how right he was. He had only heard records of the great ones growing up – Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Ellington, and Armstrong – that’s what got him started, he said. He wanted the boys to have the same freedom of choice.

Dr. Billy predicted the Marsalis clan would be the jazzmen who would lead the way back to the traditional sounds of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

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Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane and would become the founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and a virtuoso trumpet player and composer. Branford became the leader of the Tonight Band on NBC and won three Grammy Awards. Delfeayo dedicated his life to his trombone and became a record producer and jazz educator. Jason formed his own quartet and became a popular jazz recording artist.

Eugenia Zukerman came to us as a published author and world-renowned flutist. She said one of her goals on Sunday Morning would be to take the elitism and mysticism out of classical music. I remember her saying something like, “It should not be something for the elite but rather for the informed, and Sunday Morning has a commitment to the intelligence of its viewers.” She understood what we were about almost immediately. She offered profiles of American composer Aaron Copland on his 85th birthday with a stirring rendition of Appalachian Spring; of American opera star Jessye Norman, whose shimmering voice took her to the top of her profession; of violinist Itzhak Perlman, who overcame childhood polio to become one of the great fiddle players in the world.

As he told Eugenia, “You’ve got to separate your abilities from your disabilities.

So I had to, maybe, try a little harder. When I am on stage, the purpose is to play for the audience and to share with them my feelings about my pieces.” Eugenia fit in right away and was an elegant addition to our cast. She would send me story concepts and sign them “Zukerflute.”

Our media critics were stylishly different and fairly new to network news.

Jeff Greenfield was a witty, sassy, political provocateur who could slice up a TV show and have it for breakfast, including those of his employer CBS. Ron Powers was more subtle and more historical. He did a piece on his boyhood town of Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, whose celebrated biography he would later write, and of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the “Bob and Ray” of radio fame, for their “magnifying of the insignificant.” In another critique, he spoke of the “ubiquity and charm” of TV reruns, especially The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and The Honeymooners. Greenfield took a whack at the TV news media’s lack of perspective and savaged the networks’ fall lineup of shows. “Let’s have a quiz, true or false,” he parried. “Which shows are real and which do not exist?” He also strongly urged comedy programmers to consider “an alternative to the laugh track — the think track.” When he left us to do political commentary for ABC, he sent us this note, “The memories of four years will be with me always. I can’t believe I’ll ever find colleagues like the Sunday Morning congregation. No one can be that lucky twice.”

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Sports journalism at the time of our inception was dominated by a group of mostly New York writers called “the chipmunks” because they were always chattering about the “gotcha” questions they would use to corner the stars. Robert Lipsyte was sometimes referred to as an honorary member of that tribe, but he was more of a loner and staked out his territory as the social consciousness beat writer. Racism in sports and human frailties were the underbelly issues in many of his profiles. He was an unpublished first novelist, he reminded me when Heywood Hale Broun wrote a rave review for the jacket cover of The Contender that convinced the publisher to go ahead with the project.

Bob would be a powerful and prolific voice for us. His interviewing style got people to open up about themselves. We were his introduction to television, and he jumped right in because, as he told me, “It was such a literate show, as sensitive to language and nuance as anything I have done. Nothing else ever came close.”

“And the transition,” he said, “was not as difficult as it might have been, although there were times when I wished I could slip back into my old invisibility, just as a shadow on the locker room floor taking notes.” Turn him loose on Arnold Palmer and the Masters, and here’s what Lipsyte gave us, “General Palmer and his army know how to march through Georgia with style.”

“Of all the interviews I did, the most eagerly anticipated was the one with my childhood hero, Joe DiMaggio,” Lipsyte told me. “It was nowhere near the best in terms of news or fireworks, but it confirmed my memories of him as a courtly, even elegant man.” DiMaggio told Lipsyte, “I remember going down Fifth Avenue, three or four o’clock in the morning in wintertime. And it was like New Year’s Eve. People with their black ties, women dressed formally, coming from El Morocco.”

“He was dreamy, and he was honest,” said Lipsyte. He never became a manager, DiMaggio said, because “I had a hard time just handling myself...I was born shy...I was tight as a knot.” As for the line “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” he admitted, “I still don’t know what the song means...but I’m very flattered that they would think of me.”

“Probably the most personally meaningful piece,” Lipsyte offered, “was an interview with Mickey Mantle. In 1983, while he was banned from baseball for taking a gig as a gambling casino greeter, I followed him around a New Jersey golf course on a joke-a-stroke corporate outing. Mantle was mellow. He had been drinking all afternoon while he played — and through the interview. We talked for about a half hour, packaged bullshit, I thought. I asked him if he had any regrets.”

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Mantle said, “My only regret is that I didn’t take better care of myself like Willie Mays and Stan Musial and Hank Aaron. I think I could have played longer.”

“I asked him if taking care of himself included drinking less. His voice changed to a growl. ‘Let’s close this off. Haven’t you got enough?’ He started to get up. The interview was over.

“I felt myself stiffening,” Lipsyte said, “and my voice seemed to be coming from a great distance, perhaps all the way from 1960 when I was a 22-year-old cub reporter, and he had told me to go fuck myself. I got angry again.

I told him about that first meeting and that a lot of newspapermen thought his rudeness was Lipsyte and Mickey Mantle, a result of his stress and pain, but that I didn’t Bob courtesy of Bob Lipsyte Photos, Budlam know that at the time, and his casual curse Productions Archive words had rocked my boat and informed the rest of my career. He listened carefully, flashed that Oklahoma Kid grin, and lifted his drink. ‘I remember that well,’ he said. ‘It always bothered me. That’s why I started drinking, Bob.’ That was the moment I started liking that sarcastic country slickster.

“The interview got a lot better after that. I asked him if he still thought about baseball. Mantle’s tone softened, ‘I dream about it almost every night.’ I interrupted, ‘What kind of dream?’

Mickey thought for a moment, then… “Well, first, I take a cab to the ballpark, and I’m in my uniform, and I’ve got a bat. And I get there, and the game’s going on, and I hear them say, “Mickey Mantle batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.” But I’m not in the ballpark, and the gates are closed. There’s a hole that I can crawl under, and halfway through the hole I get stuck and I can still hear the guy saying “now batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.’”

Lipsyte continued, “He paused to sip his drink, and I didn’t dare breathe.”

Mickey went on, “And I can see Casey and Billy, Whitey, Hank Bauer, all the guys are looking around, like, where’s he at? And I’m stuck in the hole, and they can’t hear me...and then I wake up. And I usually can’t go back to sleep.”

Lipsyte was impressed. “It was a fresh, never-before-seen side of the Mick, and I wondered if he would have that dream again that night.”

In 1994, Mantle posed for a Sports Illustrated cover story with the title “I was killing myself: My life as an alcoholic.” He died in 1995 of liver cancer.

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Once Upon a Time on Sunday Morning

The Washington Post called Lipsyte’s pieces “thoughtful and clear-eyed. He knows how to get people to talk, and he has landed at the one magazine show on television that knows how to listen.”

And there was this from Ira Berkow in The New York Times, “Sunday Morning comes into our living rooms on little cat’s feet. There is often a little claw in the segments that scratches our sensibilities, if not our complacency. Robert Lipsyte exemplifies this, and he is absolutely one of Thurber’s animals.”

“I knew Howard Cosell pretty well,” Lipsyte said. “He was a good friend to me, although he told me when I got the Sunday Morning job, ‘Bobbin, you have a face for radio and a voice for print.’” Cosell’s own ego, never far from the surface, he then told Lipsyte, “Bobbin, I lived on the precipice of professional peril every day of my career.”

When Cosell started in television on the WABC-TV local news in New York, one of his early assignments was to do a story at Gulfstream Park in Florida. For his on-camera, he stuck his mug in front of a horse’s stall and began his spiel.

That annoyed the horse, who grabbed him by the shoulder and lifted Cosell off the ground, causing his toupee to become misplaced. Howard struggled to regain his composure and did another take to send back to New York.

When the film arrived at ABC, writer-producer Paul Greenberg thought it would be humorous to use the take with a helpless Howard off the ground, kicking his feet wildly and trying to keep his rug from falling off. Cosell was furious when he saw it on ABC and threatened to fire Greenberg. When he returned to New York, he bumped into ABC President Tom Moore as he entered the building, who exclaimed to him, “Great piece on that racehorse,” and Howard replied, “You get real reporting when the great Cosell goes after a story.” And, as Greenberg told it, Cosell never mentioned the subject again.

And Lipsyte had one other tale involving the author of this memoir. He told me, “I do remember you pulling the mic on me and Jim ‘Mudcat’ Grant.”

Bob and I were doing a spring training story in Florida on the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest pitcher’s duels in World Series history when the Braves’ Johnny Sain beat Cleveland’s Bob Feller 1-0 in 1948. Sain was visiting with former major leaguer Mudcat Grant, who had been one of his greatest reclamation projects in the 1960s turning him into the first Black 20-game winner in the American League.

Mudcat was an irrepressible figure who had grown up barefoot in segregationist Lacoochee, Florida, fearing the local Ku Klux Klan and had spent his baseball life trying to erase civil rights indignities that Black players were subjected to during his long career. And he had a pixieish personality that 186

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appealed to Lipsyte’s reporting. But I could tell the interview was just warming up and was threatening to become of documentary-length. So, I grew impatient and disconnected his microphone cable. The camera crew and I moved on to record some final interviews while Bob kept jabbering away. A bemused Grant played along — and Bob couldn’t understand why Mudcat was just staring at him as Bob’s mic cord swayed in the breeze. Later, Bob was still a little annoyed when I asked if maybe he had a little bit of chipmunk left in him after all.

In 1985, Charles Kuralt had been gritting his teeth while soldiering on a six-day-a-week grind at the weekday Morning News and Sunday Morning when another change was made. Charles would go back to do Sunday Morning only, and Northshield, his producer, would be fired. I had been running Sunday by myself, and the new boss, Ed Joyce, called me with the news. I implored him to find a place for Shad somewhere. I debated the pros and cons, and I deduced that the two of us turned out the best product. Then I offered to take Shad back on Sunday, the biggest mistake of my life. We stood side-by-side at a bizarre staff meeting — it was a bit awkward for all those in the room, especially for the two of us standing side by side — and I told everyone that Shad’s return was because we were like Damon and Pythias, although, down deep, I knew we weren’t, really.

In producer Mel “Scoop” Lavine’s memoir — he was in the audience that day — he recounts Shad’s rejoinder going something like this, “Bud’s our boss; that’s the good news. But the rest of you assholes still have Shad to contend with, and that’s the bad news.”

“Had we been able to read Shad’s mind,” Scoop continued, “we probably would have been treated to a different speech, one that said, ’that sonofabitch Lamoreaux, he’s gotten too big for his britches. If he had any sense of propriety, he’d have let me claim my old office. It’s my office, dammit. The asshole just doesn’t know his place.’”

Then Lavine laid down the hammer: “Lawrence Tisch was bent on downsizing the once-great network, and people were let go in droves. Shad, with a sixth sense for corporate survival, began separating himself from Bud.” When Charles sent me a copy of his first On The Road book, he inscribed it “To Bud, with affection from his friend and co-conspirator, Charles.” That spoke volumes to me that he tried but probably could not save my job; that Shad was out to get me. We had one last gasp together, which included a Peabody Awardwinning entire show devoted to the return performance of renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz to Moscow after a long and bitter absence.

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It was a dark time in Shad’s life, and I felt more like a character in a Greek tragedy when I was taken off Sunday for budgetary reasons during the first of the mass layoffs because Northshield politicked to be the lone survivor. I worked for Cronkite in the interim before returning to Sunday in a different role. Shad got his walking papers over a sexual harassment issue and disappeared from television forever. Kuralt later confided in me, “You know why he resented you?

Because at a Christmas party at your house, your wife Sue introduced him as your colleague, not your boss. But his biggest gripe was that you saved his career by bringing him back to Sunday Morning, but you kept the big office!!!” In the news business, careers can be made and broken in a heartbeat.

All of this still begs the question, why would any network fire the two creators of the most successful startup program of that era and change the control of the program when it was getting gangbuster ratings? Control is the simple answer.

The new bosses hated us because we were successful without any input from them, and they wanted to protect Dan Rather, so they put one of his producers in charge of Sunday. They never touched 60 Minutes because Don Hewitt and his gang contributed a ton more money than Sunday Morning to the network coffers. And Hewitt and Mike Wallace were big-time players who had great influence at Black Rock. When the news chiefs were in total chaos, Hewitt and Wallace reportedly made a lame attempt to buy the program from the network.

The news bosses could get away with tinkering with Sunday because Kuralt was still there. The viewers wouldn’t notice at first, especially those in America between the two coasts. But as America became more divided, even those folks began to realize they were being short-changed in more ways than one. Charles was still at the rudder, but some of the grace notes began disappearing.

When the Grim Reaper finally came for the first of our staffers on July 18, 1986 — none of them with a previous hard news background — those newsroom skeptics, who still kept referring to us as “the show about deer running through the woods,” couldn’t have enjoyed watching some of our core producers running for the exits. Rash cutbacks are meant to put fear in everybody’s soul. And another mass firing was just around the corner. Woodie Broun was a goner, and soon Bob Lipsye and media critic Ron Powers would depart. Powers later wrote of the layoffs, “It was a day of shock and cruelty and tears and shame. The best program in commercial television hasn’t fully recovered, and it’s doubtful it ever will.”

I was away making a speech to some aspiring journalists in Texas when word reached me that Howard Stringer, who would eventually become Larry Tisch’s CEO, had to see me the following morning. I had heard the rumors, and now 188

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it was happening — the sucker punch that broke so many hearts. These were wonderful, creative producers on a mission of excellence. In a nanosecond, the best job they ever had in their careers vanished despite world-beating ratings.

Stringer gave me the bad news in his best Welsh affectation, “We’re making a change — dear boy — take a couple of months off, and you will be hearing from us. It’s just Chinese arithmetic — laddie — an indiscriminate ten percent across-the-board cut.”

“But Howard,” I pleaded, “Sunday Morning is taking the hardest hit of all the shows.”

“The business is changing, CBS News is changing,” is all he could say.

So were its scruples, I thought. I went back across the street and assembled the battered troops that remained. They were the survivors this time, but nonetheless dumbfounded and hurt. I could not give them much solace except to tell them to hold their heads high and thanked them the best I could. I had no answers. Northshield skipped town that day, not wanting to participate in the blood-letting, a cowardly move, I thought, because when he returned, a lot of talented folks would be gone. He probably felt the guilt of being a willing participant in the purge and couldn’t bear facing them. Northshield and I never spoke again.

For what it’s worth, any journalist will tell you that an information entity that has no perceived bias is difficult to achieve, and Kuralt, because of his folksiness, was probably the least controversial anchor television has ever seen. Our sixyear window was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime combination of management that gave us no financial restraints, rare editorial interference, and an anchorman that was God’s gift. And yes, we were a huge financial success — go figure.

It didn’t take long — March 7, 1987, to be exact — and there was a second mass restructuring that took out almost all the rest of the original Sunday Morning producers. My pal Mel Lavine was given part-time work and fortunately left his little-seen memoir to keep my facts straight. “On the road, I was Charles’ legs,” he wrote. “We were his surrogates, and doors flew open, an unusual experience in the pursuit of news. Be they rich and famous, poor and unknown, redneck or bleeding heart, everyone seemed to be a fan. ‘What is he really like,’ they would ask, and I would have to reply, ‘I really don’t know; Charles is a very guarded person.’ He didn’t like to be regimented, feared for the loss of his independence.”

And Charles once wrote, “I didn’t want a place to live. I had nothing to do there. I didn’t want days off. I had no way to fill empty days. All I wanted was stories: the wilder, the better.”

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Lavine continued, “Shad Northshield could hardly contain his glee over Sunday Morning’s ratings success. He couldn’t keep from crowing, and that swaggering revved up the competition.” Dan Rather and his producers were not happy when we started beating them to stories, and the bosses suddenly clamped down on our access to the best correspondents and camera crews.

There is a sense of loss in me about that because, in our collaborative years, Shad exhibited a real understanding of the human condition when we were figuring it out as we went along. It’s just that he couldn’t control his own demons when it came to using his authority over the staff. If he felt threatened at all, if you knew something that he didn’t, he would lash out before thinking. The result was that they pulled the rug out from under us after seven productive years. Maybe we were lucky we had that many.

Lipsyte told me he found the mercurial Northshield to be “shocking from the get-go,” that he saw him humiliate and brutalize his producers, especially the women. “Producer Pauline Canny and I were summoned to Shad’s office after covering a story,” Lipsyte said, “and he looked at me and said, ‘So, does your wife know you’ve just been out on the road with a nymphomaniac?’ Dead silence followed.” Correspondents Dean, Culhane, and Rabel had similar experiences.

Those who had survived Shad always stayed out of range of his viper tongue.

Culhane said he recalled a farewell speech from Dick Threlkeld when he left for ABC. “I want to thank Shad for giving us the stories he did, and I want to thank Bud for protecting us from Shad.” That may sound self-serving, but I had never heard it before, and it speaks to the kind of fear that Shad liked to operate under, even in the eyes of battle-hardened correspondents like Threlkeld, who had lived through wars all over the globe.

CBS News had been a pretty buttoned-up shop, rising above the fray because of the legacies of Murrow and Cronkite and numerous other broadcast elites.

But when Dick Salant retired, and Cronkite gave up the anchor chair in 1981, the front office changes opened the door to back-biting and skepticism. One of the presidents of news was a decent fellow and an old CBS colleague. But when Ed Joyce was removed after only a year and a half on the job, he wrote a scathing portrayal of the internal politics, calling it Prime Times, Bad Times. He described a news division in chaos and a corporation in a seismic shift toward mediocrity.

Dan Rather’s insecurity in the anchor chair, Joyce wrote, provided too much ammunition to the media skeptics. The New York Times Book Review said, “As television history, this is a Book of Revelation.” Newsweek called it “A mesmerizing study of CBS internal politics, rife with intrigue.” The tea leaves were there to be read, but having offices across West 57th Street in a separate 190

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building did not exactly make us immune to what was happening, as we tried to stay pretty much in our own cocoon.

However, after a second day of mass Lawrence Tisch/Howard Stringer layoffs in 1987, the entire Sunday Morning unit was repositioned from across 57th Street into the Broadcast Center, where the bosses moved an Evening News producer in to run the operation so they could keep a closer eye on the daily doings. Charles would now have to do all the “big interviews” without trusted producers. It was a greater burden he did not relish, and the segments began to have more fluff than substance. Correspondent David Culhane, who survived the purges, told me that he saw the usually affable Kuralt actually become agitated. When David suggested a possible theme for a Kuralt lead-in to one of his stories, Charles got a little short-tempered and shot back, “My lead-in will be better than your story.”

That was very un-Kuralt-like. Charles was obviously feeling the pressure to be better than all of the broadcast’s content. The final straw was an interview he was forced to do with Robert Redford, the actor. He reluctantly agreed to do it, flew all the way to Utah, and then Redford did the Hollywood thing and kept him waiting for more than an hour.

A few months later, he announced his retirement. He was still young in spirit, but he had aged a lot in those last years. Studio makeup covers a lot of weariness.

Many of his loyal viewers were blindsided when he suddenly disappeared from view. Carrying Sunday Morning on his back, with a minimum of resident wordsmiths to bounce off, had proven too great. He was finally free to write that book on his 12 favorite places as the calendar months changed: January in New Orleans, June in Alaska, September in Montana. He called it Charles Kuralt’s America. He was back on the road, feeling the breeze in what was left of his hair and wondering where it had all gone.

He knew his health was beginning to fail; doctors had told him so. He figured out he had two years left. So when he decided to chuck the job, he proceeded apace and got the book done in a year. He had just turned 60. Some of the book’s introduction says it all.

“I loved CBS News ardently at first as a boy loves a girl. We gave each other gifts. They gave me travel and excitement and reason for living, and eventually, a measure of fame and fortune. I gave them most of my waking hours, and most of my thoughts and energy, and nearly all of my dreams of the future. Then I woke up one morning and realized I didn’t love her anymore.”

Here’s what he wrote about Montana, where his radar always took him when he was off the clock, “When you get to the river, you see the work of the beavers and share the place with muskrats and with mink. You think you’re there to 191

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fish, but pretty soon, you’re there to see the blue heron in the shadows of the morning and glimpse the gray owl gliding noiselessly overhead at dusk and hear the coyote in the night.”

A journalist watcher whom I admire greatly, Margaret Sullivan, recently retired as media critic at The Washington Post, wrote this about our craft, “Journalists simply can’t allow themselves to be megaphones or stenographers.

They have to be dedicated truth tellers, using clear language, plenty of context, and thoughtful framing to get that truth across.”

In an earlier interview with The Washington Post, Kuralt revealed he managed to survive all those years of politicking and power-mongering within CBS News the many changes in leadership and direction, mostly by staying out of town.

“The best thing,” said Kuralt, “is to stay out of the office. I would estimate that in my 37-year career, I was only in the office a quarter of the time. That’s the secret of longevity. They kind of forget about you.”

“But while Kuralt continued to press on,” said the critic Tom Shales, “Sunday Morning seemed to be as important to its regular, loyal, and devoted viewers as 60 Minutes could ever be. Maybe even more so. The program has never been as Charles Kuralt in his office, Budlam Productions Archive good since he left.”

If all this sounds like hero worship, you might be surprised to learn that Kuralt had a serious flaw. He had been so used to being the sole boss of his small On the Road unit that he never realized how much all the Sunday Morning staffers longed for a kind word now and then, especially the producers, correspondents, and editors. He would hole up in his office to refine the script on Saturdays and rarely make contact with anyone but me or Shad or his writer. Maybe it was because he hated office politics and had avoided them for so long, but even when there were layoffs or other sad occasions, there was rarely a condolence note, even though he had his own secretary to take care of such things. Was the aloofness a character flaw? It certainly felt like it. Charles never did figure out that he was the titular father of the Sunday Morning family, which had wrapped itself in his view of America. Without the dedicated staff members, Sunday Morning would never have happened. We’ll give him a B minus in that category and move on.

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Charles was quick with a laugh when the occasion warranted, and sometimes his humor could be a little risqué. He once said, “And Justin Brent of San Diego nominates us for the Lorena Bobbitt Award. I speculated one Sunday that evil, like energy, cannot be lost; that if suppressed in one place, maybe it always arises in another place. Betty Wickham of Springville, New York, wrote a lovely letter to say, ’No, evil exists to challenge us and goad us. Just as there can be no light without darkness, there can be no good without evil. But evil cannot ever win, as long as there are Sunday mornings and people who keep the faith.’”

It was only after his death in 1997 that we learned that Charles had a secret life in Montana with another woman and her family. Before the tabloids got hold of the story and tried to destroy his reputation, an old friend and former White House correspondent, Robert Pierpoint, was in southwestern Montana and remembered Kuralt talking about the fishing cabin he had owned near Twin Bridges. Charles made a pilgrimage there every September to ostensibly work on his books and go after the trout that were literally jumping out of the streams.

Pierpoint found the cabin and another much grander house on the same piece of land. He was interested in buying the fishing cabin but was told by a local real estate agent that he would have to talk to “Kuralt’s girlfriend,” Patricia Shannon. It was only then that a baffled Pierpoint found out that Shannon was in the midst of filing court papers to claim the entire property. Petie Kuralt, Charles’s wife of 35 years, seemed stunned by the news that he had been having an affair for most of their marriage and hired a lawyer to contest the claim.

But Petie died before the case was settled, and Kuralt’s two daughters by his first wife took up the family cause. After a three-year legal battle, the courts awarded Shannon the land rights and the two buildings, eating up a good chunk of what was left of the estate. Cameraman Izzy Bleckman later told me that at Charles’s funeral in North Carolina, an attractive woman came up to him and asked in a sweet Southern drawl, “Why, you must be Izzy?” And he responded, “How would you know that?” And she replied, “Because Charles told me so much about you.” And so it goes.

There wasn’t a more dedicated broadcaster than Charles Kuralt. He certainly wasn’t in it for the money because he negotiated his own contracts and undoubtedly left a lot of cash on the Izzy Bleckman and Charles Kuralt; courtesy Sheera table. And he didn’t suffer front office Bleckman Family Archives and Linda Welsch Family Archives

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fools lightly. Here’s part of a talk he gave to a group of television executives. He didn’t shake his finger at them, but it sure sounded like a scolding to me.

“There is a new way of thinking of the viewer at CBS News. It is disturbing,” said Charles. “Ed Murrow used to say someday television news would become mature and develop a conscience. I have watched the maturity come and the conscience burgeon. And now I read that our broadcasts are dull and slowpaced. No doubt, sometimes they are. I don’t see how news broadcasts can be quick without also being cheap and shallow. The story told in a few seconds is almost always misleading. This great country cannot exist without an informed citizenry. The people know all this. The trouble is that managers of some news organizations, large and small, think the people are fools. The torch of liberty does not burn automatically. It has to be fueled by men and women, and if it flickers in the hands of the careless, it can go out.”

Just to put an exclamation point on this chapter, I dug up one of Kuralt’s favorite undertakings, narrating a year-end tribute to “the astonishing men and women that we never fully appreciate until they are gone.” Here is a sampling of those he chose to remember in his final time at bat in 1993: “As a Justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall saw the law not as some delicate instrument in a glass case, accessible to only the privileged few, but as solid, everyday reality for the protection of all.”

“Agnes de Mille, you brought the beauty of ballet to the Broadway stage. The dances you created for Oklahoma and Brigadoon and all those other musicals are still being danced wherever there is music in the world.”

“It’s hard to believe we’ll never have another song from Billy Eckstine or a trumpeter the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, a founding father of American jazz. Not since Joshua has so much territory been conquered by a horn.”

“After the stunning blow of Pearl Harbor, General Jimmy Doolittle and his Raiders flew heavy bombers off an aircraft carrier and brought the war home to Japan, knowing it was a one-way mission from which they might never return.”

“Hall of Famer Roy Campanella, that great Dodger, was a hero on the field and an even greater hero when bad luck forced him off it. From his wheelchair, he taught a generation what it means to stand tall.”

“Richard S. Salant was the president of CBS News in its greatest years. He set the standards for us all and put them in a loose-leaf notebook so that when he thought of even higher standards, he could put those in, too. Dick Salant was a noble man.”

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between us and our viewers and listeners. Nothing erodes the bond faster than a belief that we have an ax to grind or that we are beholden to anyone or anything other than fairness and the truth.”

He was a corporate lawyer who won the immediate trust of Cronkite and Kuralt by letting them do their jobs and protecting them from those who might try to bend their work to popular taste to win higher audiences. Under his watch, CBS became the first with a half-hour evening news with Cronkite in 1963, gave his stamp of approval to 60 MInutes five years later as the first evening news magazine, and finally convinced Charles to come in off the road to host Sunday Morning just before he retired. Dick Salant was a noble man.

In the St. Louis Post Dispatch, critic Eric Mink wrote, “Sunday Morning is arguably the best news program on any network in any time slot. It asks for and even requires viewers’ undivided attention.”

From Tom Shales of The Washington Post, there was this: “It could be well argued that Kuralt gave us the real world and the regular newscasts just gave us the news.”

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Chapter 18

“America’s Anchorman Bows Out” As Walter Cronkite approached the arbitrary retirement age of 65 established

by CBS founder and chairman William S. Paley, rumors flew about Walter’s successor. Roger Mudd was considered to have the inside track, but when he gave up the Saturday Evening News post because, reportedly, his wife was tired of him commuting from Washington to New York every weekend, Dan Rather slid into that slot and became a contender. Also, Mudd’s experience was confined to Washington: he never took an overseas assignment in Vietnam or in Europe and Rather had traveled the world. Plus, Roone Arledge, the news chief at ABC, began to see Rather as his ticket to bringing ABC’s evening news broadcast into the ratings race with CBS and NBC. So, when Cronkite reluctantly gave up the anchor chair in 1981, the fur began to fly. The first idea was to pair Rather and Mudd, Dan in New York and Roger in Washington. In the wings was Arledge, weighted down with bags of money for Rather. Also, it was no secret that Rather and Mudd were barely on speaking terms; there was no love lost between those two. It all became academic, and Dan won by default. Mudd turned down a dual role and left for NBC, where he was paired with Tom Brokaw on the Nightly News.

Cronkite had refused to enter the fray, and that did not sit well with the Rather camp. And when the ratings began to slip, some blame was cast by Rather supporters on “America’s Anchorman,” who was still active on the network doing documentaries and special programs. On a few occasions, Walter would find himself with his longtime producer, Bud Benjamin, in a breaking news location and would offer his insight to the Rather Evening News producers, only to be rebuffed. The front office and President Howard Stringer later admitted they took that line because they didn’t want Dan to feel “uncomfortable.” Walter took it personally, the rift widened, and the battle was joined.

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A sidebar to all that is when Dan became the anchor, it was understood he would move to New York to ensure everyday contact with the bosses. It was a long-held belief in the front office that a permanent Washington anchor would be influenced by the daily drumbeat of Capitol insiders and thus lose sight of where the real nerve center of the news business was — and that was New York, the traditional clearing house where national politics didn’t dominate everything else. The theory was that if you ate, drank, slept, and lived in Washington, that environment was bound to cloud your news judgment of what stories made the Evening News. Today’s technology has undoubtedly made that thinking obsolete -- although…

When the mass firings occurred in 1986, Sunday Morning gradually lost most of the rest of the original production team, which made it difficult to fill the hour-and-a-half with the quality stories the loyal viewers had come to expect. I was sent off on sabbatical for a few months, in a shuffling of salaries to make the corporate books look good, before being assigned to help produce the documentary AIDS Hits Home for Rather, which dealt with the spread of AIDS into the heterosexual population.

A national sense of complacency had developed because the media had generally stopped zeroing in on the problem, which was killing almost 50,000 Americans a year. Dan did most of the difficult interviews with the dying AIDS victims. Bob Schieffer reported on the spread of the disease from the inner cities to the nation’s heartland. There were babies born with it, young kids contaminated by bad blood, and high school kids being warned to wear condoms as protection.

It was a signal to America that AIDS could strike anywhere. A 1986 CBS News poll revealed that one in twenty Americans knew an AIDS carrier, and the rest were pretty much uninformed but worried that it would spread beyond highrisk groups.

Then a fortuitous break came my way in 1986. Cronkite became unhappy with the new producer of his infrequent Walter Cronkite At Large series and asked me to lunch. The Oak Room in the Plaza seemed quite a contrast to our first collaboration in the dingy offices above Grand Central Station, but when an offer was immediately thrown on the table, I accepted without hesitation. Walter warned me that because of Rather’s uneasiness, the bosses would try to bury the few shows they would authorize in late-night time slots, purgatory, I assumed.

Walter wanted to take on the issue of global warming, so we called in two leading ecologists and alarm-sounders, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford and Barry Commoner of Harvard. In Commoner’s view, the crisis in the environment was primarily economic; in Ehrlich’s, it was ecological. Both had presented 197

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doomsday scenarios. In his interview with Cronkite, Commoner said we are going to have to accept that climate change is a social responsibility. “We are not supposed to interfere with the rights of private enterprise,” he declared, but he insisted that one day necessity will compel us to do just that. Ehrlich said, with the acid rain and the vanishing forests and streams, “We’re a planet with finite resources, and if the population continues to grow, is there any way to solve our problems? If you run the greenhouse effect far enough up, after you have your catastrophes with the weather changing, you will gradually melt the ice caps.” That was 1976, and we are already beginning to see that happen.

My producer on all of these Walter projects was Mel “Scoop” Lavine, whom I had rescued after his abrupt dismissal from Sunday Morning.

Walter Cronkite’s producer Bud He was an old school journalist, Maine strong Lamoreaux and Script Writer Mel and street smart, and the perfect fit for Walter.

“Scoop” Lavine, Budlam Production Archive We went to Athens to interview the Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, about how climate change was affecting the Greek ruins and scored an invitation to dinner at her palatial apartment with her husband, the film director Jules Dassin, who had directed Ms. Mercouri in the classic film Never on Sunday.

Walter always dressed the part in a dark suit and tie, and Mel and I followed suit. Mel surmised that the suit represented stature, and Walter had always admired the classic attire of Charles Collingwood, one of the Murrow boys, who was known as “The Duke” because of the way he carried himself.

Collingwood spent many years as our correspondent in Paris, where he never got his information from the presidential aides but almost always from the prime minister or even Charles de Gaulle himself. He once showed up in formal attire in the newsroom in New York late at night carrying a Top left, Walter Cronkite, top right CBS News walking stick and told the deskman he President Bill Leonard, bottom left, CBS News needed a car. “What kind do you want, Correspondent Charles Collingwood, bottom right, Woodie Broun, Budlam Productions Archive

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Mr. Collingwood, a Hertz or an Avis?” “No, no, dear boy,” replied Collingwood, “not one that I drive.”

We ended the Greek broadcast with Walter, who was clearly enjoying himself, standing near the top of the Acropolis, under a broiling sun in a dark suit and tie. “It is the heart of ancient Greece and Western civilization,” he said, “literally being eaten away by the pollution of the modern metropolis of Athens.” Ms. Mercouri, who had to be sweet-talked out of her makeup tent by producer Mel because of the intense heat, finally agreed to join Walter and blamed economics for the Acropolis crisis. “These stones are the stones of life, of pride, of beauty, and of democracy. Unfortunately, Greece is a country that must have a big, big budget for arms. Antiquities are the fourth or the fifth priority.” Since then, the government has taken on a decadeslong restoration project bringing the Acropolis and its most sacred structure, the Parthenon, into the glory that was ancient Greece.

For the rest of the program, we more than satisfied Walter’s quest for adventure. When he was younger, he Walter Cronkite Reporting in front of the always drove fast sports cars and sailed Parthenon, Budlam Productions Archive ocean-going yachts. This trip would take him deep into the syndicate controlling gambling in Macau and on an exhilarating hot air balloon ride with Malcolm Forbes over the Normandy countryside in France. Of the two European colonies returned to China at the end of the 20th century, Hong Kong was the most publicized, and Macau was rarely in the news.

Let’s take a stroll with Walter. “Fifteen years ago, when I first walked these exotic streets of Macau,” Cronkite said, “this Portuguese possession was a sleepy colonial backwater. Fishing, gambling, and mortal sin were its principal means of livelihood. Now this outpost of decadent capitalism is returning to China after a separation of more than four centuries.”

I find it necessary to interrupt this tale to offer a little backstory. The night before we were to swing into action, we were having a fine meal overlooking the harbor, joined by producer Lavine. A little more background on “Scoop:” After college, he took to the high seas as a mate on some merchant ships, hired on as a mushroom polisher on the California coast, became an anchorman and City Hall reporter at a northern California television station where he became

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a legend in his own mind, and found work at NBC’s Today show. Scoop was a reporter who knew where to look for the bodies.

So, at dinner, when Mel began to improvise about this “essay” Cronkite would be doing, Walter suddenly launched into a harangue about how he had been a reporter all his life and that reporters don’t do essays, his voice rising, “I have not traveled to this far corner of the Earth to become Thoreau,” he admonished.

There was dead silence. I sat there sort of transfixed, not knowing if I could help Mel by jumping in and explaining what he meant. Walter caught on quickly and offered his apologies, insisting on taking us both to a Paris follies show with a lot of long-stemmed Parisienne. And he made sure Mel got the front-row seat.

The interview with syndicate boss Stanley Ho was like something out of The Godfather. He had been reluctant to be on camera before Mel turned on the Maine charm. He dressed like a don in a sharkskin suit and appeared to have ice water in his veins when he sat down for the interview. Cronkite asked him if the whole concept of gambling didn’t go against the straight-laced Chinese communist morality. “They know very well that without gambling in Macau, the whole system will collapse,” Ho said, “Even now, the government is getting about 50 percent of its revenue from its gaming taxes.”

Cronkite felt the Chinese goal then was to try to calm the jitters in Hong Kong and that Macau, sitting on the southern fringe of China, was really a pawn in Beijing’s ultimate goal of regaining control of Taiwan. Apparently, the Chinese have conveniently overlooked the capitalist nature of gambling because of the revenue stream that has developed. Macau is now considered the gambling capital of the world, with four times the annual revenue of Las Vegas.

And then there was Malcolm Forbes and his annual hot air balloon festival in France. Forbes’s name then was synonymous with extravagance. He was the publisher of Forbes Magazine, an avid collector of priceless Faberge golden eggs, and a motorcycle- and balloon-riding adventurer. He owned a French chateau, which he lamented at breakfast cost him $250,000 a year to heat. It was in the town of Balleroy in the Normandy countryside and featured giant flying taxis in the shape of the Harley-Davidson motorcycles Forbes drove, a sphinx with which he thrilled the Egyptians, and a Faberge egg that fascinated the Russians.

A replica of his Balleroy chateau was the vehicle he chose to take Walter aloft, and it was immediately clear to Cronkite that God was his pilot. “Malcolm,” he asked, “so you don’t have any control over direction; the wind is in charge?”

Forbes replied, “You can’t be sure of where you are going to be or where you are going to go. Nobody gets in a balloon to really go someplace.” Walter did not find that information reassuring.

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The 10,000 townsfolk turned out every year for the event, and free capitalist Forbes charged them ten dollars a head to attend — helps pay the heating bill, I figured. They did get to see a spectacular show, twenty of these beasts of flight, filling the sky above Balleroy, like flying floats at Disney World. The eye darted from one to the other to capture the magnificence of it all. Forbes and Walter were up there with Kuralt’s old cameraman Izzy Bleckman and Forbes’s pilot.

Cronkite, being the adventurous type, then asked Forbes if he could borrow the Chateau balloon and its pilot for a solo journey. I will let Walter describe the experience. “A lot of things can happen if the wind changes just as you’re trying to land. Here we are, coming in over the trees, and we get a gust of wind. The Chateau balloon is caught, and as we hit the ground, the basket goes over, and we go into a prolonged skid. I want to tell you that can be rather hair-raising, particularly to a novel balloonist.”

The front office buried this Cronkite At Large at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, and the ratings were not good. It would be the last program in this series, but we had one shot left, a documentary titled Children of Apartheid. This time we hit paydirt.

One of our producers, Brian Ellis, a British expat, had been in South Africa during apartheid and had made connections with daughters of the opposing sides, Zindzi Mandela, daughter of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, the leader of the anti-apartheid movement, and Roxanne Botha, daughter of the country’s white minority president, P.W. Botha. Access to both of their lifestyles gave us a chance to contrast how Blacks and whites, especially young people, lived in this racially-charged nation. It was a story of two kinds of justice, one for the ruling class and another for those in the underbelly.

Ellis had been in and out of the country on a visitor’s visa for six months, secretly developing the story with a camera team from our Johannesburg bureau.

The Botha regime had strict press censorship rules that kept any negative news coverage under wraps. In fact, Cronkite had to go in using a tourist’s visa lest his travels be strictly scrutinized by government agents. He warned at the outset of the documentary, “Under South Africa’s state of emergency, reports like this one are assembled at some risk, with not infrequent questioning of reporters and camera crews. Some of the young people who spoke to us on camera do so with the knowledge that they might be subject to arrest.”

The 3 million white Afrikaners ruled with a siege mentality, afraid to share power with the 25 million non-whites. Roxanne Botha put it this way, “We try to solve our problems in such a way that minorities are protected and without rushing into solutions because I don’t believe in radicalism.” Zindzi Mandella 201

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said this, “I think Botha has turned a deaf ear that he’s not prepared to hear what the Black man wants. Our family makes a joke that I literally have been raised by the police. They’ve been a part of my life almost since I could remember.”

Her mother, the activist Winnie Mandela, spent periods of time in jail herself, as did thousands of young Blacks from the slum-like townships, many detained without a trial. Five small Black boys, the oldest 13, told Ellis they were detained and interrogated by police for a month and never charged. One boy said, “They said we were going to live in the jail like Mandela.”

Producer Ellis interviewed a 17-year-old activist named Godfrey, who told him he had been arrested four times and tortured. One of the arrests involved a necklacing death inside the township, a form of revolutionary justice in which a gasoline tire is placed around a victim’s neck and set on fire. Godfrey denied any involvement. Ellis asked him if his life was in danger. “Yes, it is because I might be arrested or eliminated at any time.” Godfrey was supposedly warned that going on camera could be very risky.

A few months later, he was found dead after police questioned him about statements he made in the documentary. We never did learn his last name. I felt the broadcast was partially responsible for his death. At Godfrey’s funeral, hundreds of riot police and soldiers in armored vehicles were supported by police helicopters and military spotter planes using tear gas to disperse mourners.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and elected president of South Africa in 1994.

Children of Apartheid would be Walter’s last major contribution to CBS. He summed up his last report, “The future of this tragically divided land, as with all nations, will be inherited by its children, a future shaped by a bitter racial struggle, a place where non-whites are required by law to live in townships where poverty is the norm and where fear and uncertainty usually wear uniforms.” The documentary won an Emmy.

One day, an invitation came my way. Would I tell a Cronkite tale or two at a gathering welcoming Walter into the Players, a swanky Manhattan eating club usually reserved for theatrical performers? I recounted one of my Walter stories I figured would enhance his theatrical bonafides. “For his science magazine show Universe, Walter set out to do a story on the deforestation of the Amazon. After a long day in the steamy jungle, Walter and crew arrived at the infamous “Rio Del Negro,” the piranha-infested Black River, home to an American environmental station. Cronkite inquired of the official in charge, “What’s the best way to cool off?” With that, the official, who was dressed in hiking shorts, jumped in

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amongst the piranhas. Well, not to be outdone, Walter took most of his clothes off and jumped in, too — in his jockey shorts.

Walter finished his autobiography in 1996 and called it A Reporter’s Life. In it, he chronicled his life-long desire to be in the news business, beginning as a newspaper boy delivering the Kansas City Star. I had Charley Osgood with me when we did a sitdown with Walter for a profile on Sunday Morning.

We dug into his most iconic Evening News moments in the book that are seared in many memories: the assassination of JFK, when he took off his glasses and announced, his voice quavering, “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy has died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time;” the liftoff of Apollo 11 with three astronauts on their way from Cape Kennedy, Florida, to the moon, had Walter pleading “Go, baby, go!”; when Neil Armstrong landed, Walter waited for the official word from space. It was static-filled but finally deciphered by Cronkite as, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The one career moment which still sticks with me was the night he dialed up Israel’s Begin and Egypt’s Sadat on separate satellites and got them to agree to peace talks at Camp David. That was stretching his reporter’s instincts to the limit.

Walter’s interest in young aspiring journalists came through in a few remarks he left behind – On presidential elections: “They have the ability to run for the greatest public office in the land. We ought to know as much as we can about these people, their misbehavior, as well as their behavior. We’re stuck with that unpleasant job, don’t let any problems, alcoholism, womanizing, get in the way of getting the job done. They’re fair game.”

On interviewing big shots: “Politicians, heads of state, I think we’re equals with those people, by golly. I feel there is a dignity in our profession, and I’m not going to accept anything less than that. I’ve got a right to ask my questions, and if they don’t like it, they can lump it.”

On never giving up: “My first boss was the program manager of a station in Austin, Texas, where I was a student at the university. I auditioned for the announcer’s job, and he rejected me practically out of hand with the immortal words, ‘Walter, you’ll never make a radio announcer.’”

On September 9, 2009, a memorial service was held for “America’s Anchorman” at Lincoln Center in New York City. Wynton Marsalis led a band of jazz musicians through the packed audience playing “When The Saints Go Marching In.” President Obama eulogized him as “the man who chronicled our time.” Bob Schieffer said, “His enthusiasm captured all of us.” NBC anchorman 203

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Tom Brokaw offered, “In so many ways, Walter was our dad. There are constant and enduring reminders of how much we owe him.” But it was left for Nick Clooney, father of the actor and a fellow war correspondent, to tell the best story. He described their final dinner together. Walter was ailing and had to be guided to their table at the back of Patsy’s, a legendary Italian restaurant in midManhattan. They swapped war stories for a glorious two hours. No one seemed to notice. Then Walter got up to leave, and as he slowly made his way to the front door, the patrons began to rise one table at a time. Soon the whole restaurant was on its feet, and Walter Cronkite walked out to thunderous applause.

Walter and I got wind of his beloved island of Martha’s Vineyard at about the same time in the early ‘70s. He bought a waterfront home with a dock for his yacht “Wyntje,” and I found a story about a sailboat architect who was making waves with a revolutionary design. It was a two-hulled boat that could potentially beat all the others its size and undo hundreds of years of sailing theory. I could barely tell a sailboat from a cabin cruiser, but the architect, Dick Newick, was an old friend of Woodie. So, I boned up on port and starboard and my jibs and tacks, found a weekly rental near a water tower, and the Lamoreaux and Broun families headed for the Vineyard. It sure beat the hell out of the middle seat on the “redeye” flight from Cucamonga.

Newick turned out to be a peach of a guy and his design “Three Cheers” would later win the Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Yacht Race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island, a big deal in the yachting world. Sue Lamoreaux and I were entranced by that island and would make forays when time allowed. I took a subscription to the Vineyard Gazette, a 125-year-old weekly, and began immersing myself in island lore.

I found there was no better teacher than Henry Beetle Hough, an environmental crusader for a hundred square miles of historical land ten miles out in the Atlantic. He was the Gazette editor and owner and publisher for 65 years and used his bully pulpit to ward off all those invaders who were not conservation-minded. With wit and elegance, he was a fierce protector of all that was natural, even the smallest birds like the piping plover, even the sawgrass waving in the dunes. He wrote editorials like this, “A piece of land or a bit of scenery does not need to be a Grand Canyon or a Garden of The Gods or a Redwood Forest to be worth preserving. Most of us haven’t sufficiently realized that.”

Mr. Hough won a Pulitzer Prize when he was 22 and found time to write more than 20 books, some historical fiction some children’s tales, about the Island and small New England towns. In order to ward off the developers, he 204

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donated hundreds of acres of virgin shoreland to a trust he called the Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation. Other Island conservation trusts followed, and so did generous landowners so that 40 percent of Martha’s Vineyard is now preserved forever with walking trails and seashore.

His last book was a series of pictures and essays about his Island, which he read for us as part of a story we were doing for Sunday Morning. “Someone said, ‘How soft it is,’ and that is a good thing to say about a foggy morning on the Vineyard. The fog is part of the element in which we of islands and coastal places will always live, and part of a heritage that goes back to the eons when all was sea.”

He told me that his most contentious battle was when McDonald’s sought to become the first fast-food place on the Island. “I don’t go off the Island a lot, and I had never heard of McDonald’s and the golden arches,” he told me. “They had picked a site down by the waterside, and they came down here and said, oh sure, it was gonna be all right and fine.” Even though he beat them back with scathing editorials, they were not done. McDonald’s resumed its assault, and the new editor-publisher Richard Reston told us how it ended. “The McDonald’s battle is still a great symbol around here for Henry Hough and for Reston.

And I remember at the end of this, I got a call from the McDonald’s Chairman in Chicago, saying in effect, ‘What the hell have you people stirred up in that community?’” Obviously, the McDonald’s man had felt all kinds of pressure from the thousands of seasonal residents who were avid Gazette readers, Reston told me, “So finally, the Chairman said, ‘Listen, we have decided we want no part of the Vineyard, so just relax.’”

That was 30 years ago, and to this day, there are still no fast-food restaurant chains on Martha’s Vineyard. Instead, there’s the Little House, The Art Cliff Diner, and the Black Dog Cafe. We’ll give Henry Hough the last words. “The mainland is all right in its way, but its way is necessarily imperfect. Only an island has a shoreland that never ends, and that is a present fact rather than a distant understanding. Only an island has the sea intimacy and the level, friendly gaze of a really wise horizon.”

From the pages of the Gazette, I learned about others who were waging their own battles for the environment. Two of them became subjects of mine for Sunday Morning; one founded a world-renowned arboretum, and another brought back a colony of a hundred pairs of nesting ospreys. Gus Ben David is the birdman. For many years, he presided over Audubon’s Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary and introduced children to bald eagles, snakes, and golden eagles.

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In reviving the osprey, he got volunteers to erect 100 poles and platforms.

“As far as we know,” he said, “going back to the early 1900s, there were never more than five pairs of ospreys here. In those days, the Vineyard people and the culture of New England viewed all hawks as chicken hawks, and they shot them.

So, this has been a phenomenal wildlife saga.” Now, solar-powered tracking devices are attached to some birds each summer so that researchers can follow their winter migratory patterns as far south as the Brazilian rainforests. Gus Ben David is a hero to all those Vineyard birdwatchers, “The ospreys are a harbinger of spring when you have anticipation,” he said. “When they leave in the fall, people are sad, sort of like the little things in life. We humans tend to think that a hundred years is a long time. That’s really a nanosecond in nature.”

For Polly Hill, the arboretum lady, horticulture had always been a passion on her 70-acre sheep farm out in the middle of the Island in the town of North Tisbury. Polly was a world traveler, and she began bringing back cuttings and seedlings to see what the climate of the Island would support, like monkey puzzle trees from South America’s Andes Mountains and a Chinese redwood. The results of this half-century experiment are truly remarkable. “It’s just discovery,” she said, “Lovely things happen, and they come from everywhere.” Polly Hill was nearing her 90th birthday when she graciously gave us a tour in her yellow golf cart. “This is a Japanese plant. Look at that magnificent bark. It changes to pink in the winter. Korean things do well here, too.”

She bought seed packets overseas for dimes and quarters and cuttings for a dollar or two. “This is pink pancake. It’s growing into a great tree, and it’s normally just a bush.” She succeeded without a greenhouse or a sprinkler system.

“You can only guess at first where to put things, how far apart, where will they be happy, wind shelter, shade protection or no protection at all? You take that little fellow in there. You don’t put the next one closer than 20 feet; people think you’re nuts.” She kept card files on every one of her experiments that took root.

Her success rate, she said, was about one in a hundred. But she never looked back and just kept collecting and planting, and sometimes the results were stunning.

“This huge magnolia everybody is excited about because it has such big leaves is growing two or three feet each year, and there are so few this far north.”

Then we stopped, and she explained her stewardship of a place that attracts visitors from all over the world, “I don’t feel I own a tree or any of this land.

This is Martha’s Vineyard, and I have to do something for Martha’s Vineyard.”

Polly Hill, the most gracious of people, lived to be 100. She left behind some 2,000 species of plants and trees on meadowland surrounded by 18th-century

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stone walls, part of a preservation trail that stretches for miles. The Polly Hill Arboretum was placed in a permanent trust that will preserve what she created.

During her lifetime, she mailed seed packets to horticulturists across the globe to let them experiment, as she did. She was especially proud of a rare rhododendron she had grown from wild seed she picked off the ground down south on the Delmarva Peninsula. “This one plant took 29 years to bloom,” she said. “If a tree is worth it, I’ll wait. You have to forget about time. Just go ahead and do what you want to do. You may be lucky. I was lucky. The way I was brought up, you have your name in the paper when you’re married and when you die — that’s it.”

As I write this, the Vineyard Gazette is celebrating its 175th birthday. To place that lineage in historical context, Lewis and Clark were just working their way through Nebraska as they established the Oregon Trail, which would open up the West and bring statehood to California. And Texas had just joined the Union, the 28th state to do so. So, the Gazette really is an old geezer.

Henry Beetle Hough spoke for all its editors when he wrote, “Among the merits of Martha’s Vineyard, which we would like to urge for the consideration of prospective visitors and for all others who may not have thought of it properly, is this, it is the last stop. It has nothing to do with rush and hurry; it is in a state of rest. It is a place to arrive, period. Next stop? Don’t give it a thought — there isn’t any.”

Full disclosure: The Lamoreaux family, wife Sue and daughters Sheri, Melissa, and Denise, and their families, regularly congregate in a house we bought on the Vineyard in 1986. Someday, Sue and I could likely disappear into Henry Beetle Hough’s fog.

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Chapter 19

“Postcards From Nebraska” If you’re ever out on the Great Plains, looking for Dannebrog, Nebraska, population 320, you can start by finding Worms on Highway 58, then just head west. I spent so much time out there that I could pick out mailboxes in a 20-mile radius. So, trust me, if you keep driving, you won’t miss the Welsch mailbox.

In fact, you’ll know you‘re close when the road sign changes to Roger Welsch Avenue, named after the “Postcards From Nebraska” essayist from Sunday Morning, the guy in the overalls.

Roger put it more succinctly, “Dannebrog’s not on the way to anywhere. The only way to get here is to come on purpose. I’m here by choice. I like the Plains, I like the rural countryside, and I like the weather. Most of all, I like the people.”

Just a little longer now, over the Middle Loup River, and there it is on the left, not far from the 98th meridian, the absolute epicenter of America. Wright Morris, a celebrated Plains novelist, wrote, “In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.”

“Perhaps the most popular wisecrack in town these days,” wrote Roger, “is about the farmer who was arrested for child abuse because he tried to give his farm to his kids. I used to think that sort of laughter was the strategy of farmers confronted with crop failures, but increasingly it has become an American approach to hard times because even disasters not immediately associated with the farm bring about a new wave of that same sort of laconic laughter.”

When I went back to Sunday Morning after the Cronkite years, my job was to take care of all the back of the book stuff, music, art, books, sports, television criticism, etc. Charles had a particular “ask” of me, Would I give my Television 101 course to this professor friend of his from Nebraska. Sunday Morning had become a little bland due to its new “hard news” approach, and Kuralt knew it.

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kicked up the dust at the University in Lincoln by defying a city ordinance that made any front lawn with weeds a fineable offense. Roger encouraged certain weeds in his small landscape, like clover, daylilies, and oxalis, and ate them in his salads so a weed was not to be taken lightly in the Welsch household.

Nevertheless, the weed inspector hung a summons on his front door.

Rog decided to act. He was a rib-tickler who got the attention of the city fathers by running for the County Weed Board on a pro-weed ticket and won two terms with the slogan “If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.” But he didn’t change many minds after he chastised the weed inspector for condemning a neighbor’s backyard full of wildflowers. Enter Kuralt, who saw that small story as a big one for him. I quickly tuned in to Roger’s style, which was to celebrate the everyday life of just plain folks out in the heartland, sometimes with a prickly edge to his observations, sometimes just to remind us that the past is prologue.

Back in his college professor days, he won plaudits for his scholarship on folklore, uncovering the files of the WPA’s 1930s Nebraska Federal Writers Project, just like Missouri’s William Least Heat-Moon had done with his classic account of FDR’s post-depression writer’s project, titled Blue Highways; just like Charles Kuralt had done with his laboratory of backroad maps and viewer letters, mixed in with a big dose of intuition, that led him to his iconic On the Road subjects. All three took different paths, but they were all really just uncovering the real America. Roger wrote of windmills, “Most now stand as derelicts on the prairies, broken, leaning, tearing themselves apart in the wind that used to be their driving force. At one time, the windmill stood alongside the repeating rifle, barbed wire, and the railroad as part of the hardware that won the West.”

But ours was not an immediate match made in heaven. Rog had an office out in his barn where he churned out a bunch of books about life on the Great Plains and was not used to taking direction. He was a well-known author out in his territory, and as he told one local reporter, “We’d go out for one ‘Postcard’ story and come back with another. I wasn’t really used to being shoved around like that.” He complained to Kuralt, who took a deep breath and said, “I have a suggestion.” “Yeah,” said Welsch. “Just shut up and do it,” Kuralt said. “That’s all I needed to know was to have it explained to me,” replied Welsch.

New York and Nebraska did make it work to the tune of some 200 Postcards of five or six minutes in length over the next dozen years. And Kuralt’s old On the Road crew from Chicago, cameraman Izzy Bleckman and soundman Larry Gianneschi, who eventually retired and turned over his microphone to son Dan, did every one of them. Roger used to call us the “Breeze Brothers” because we’d breeze in and out of his usually unhurried life. We ate together, we 209

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drank together, and we laughed together. We became brothers and road warriors, constantly traversing the almost treeless Nebraska landscape from cowboy country at the foot of the majestic Sandhills rolling down through the endless farmland heading east.

When I arrived as the new sheriff in town, Roger, a larger-than-life character who looked like he hadn’t missed many meals, appeared in a fancy cowboy shirt with a string tie. I sent him back to get his best pair of bib overalls, and that became his uniform. His brand was Key Charles Kuralt Cartoon By John Imperial, labeled “The Aristocrat of Overalls.”

Holladay He reveled in the hypocrisy of that. He was quick to learn how to write to pictures, and we were off and running. I figured since Dannebrog was the Danish capital of America, that would be a good place to start. There was a grocery store, a one-pump gas station, a beer hall, and Harriett’s Cafe or Harriett’s Spisehus, in Danish. That was a daily stop in town where Roger picked up the scraps to feed his chickens.

He was a city boy who had been converted. “Lyle, the rural mailman, drops in before he starts his route,” Roger explained, “As for Harriett Nielsen, I don’t care how grumpy I am when I come in for breakfast; she reminds me how good life is on the rural Plains. And Dee Steffenhagen is more entertainment than waitress. She doesn’t so much ask you what you want to eat as she tells you what you’re going to get. Harriett remembers when there were thirteen families on a telephone line, and everyone used their native language, Danish or Polish, to keep the others from listening in. And Gaylord Obermiller sits over there when he isn’t helping Harriett out in the kitchen.”

The one thing this Easterner had a hard time getting used to was driving with one hand. It seems that local Nebraska custom required that every time you passed another car or someone alongside the road, it was considered rude if you didn’t return a wave or a hand thrust in your direction. I tried to explain to Roger that if you tried that while walking the streets of Manhattan, somebody might think you were giving them the finger and maybe take a swing at you or at least address you in language that contained a lot of four-letter words, none of which were spelled l-o-v-e. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Ah, the things we’ve missed living out here in the vast wasteland of the Great Plains.” The sarcasm was dripping from my index finger as I withdrew it from the open car window.

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One of Roger’s daily stops in Dannebrog was Eric Nielsen’s Big Table Tavern.

Roger called the Big Table “the single most important institution in rural America today, groups of folks getting together to conduct the business of the elders. How can you tell if you’re a member? Well, for one thing, everyone insults you. My favorite insult is when I walk in, and Bumps Nielsen snorts, ‘Whoops, the tourists are in town.’”

I think Roger’s two secret favorites were Dennis Adams, an auto body guy he called “Bondo,” and “Plumber Dan” Selden, both of whom knew how to bust his literary chops. One time the three of them were talking about jerky they had made from deer and goose they had harvested in the fall, and Dan said to Bondo, “We can make jerky out of anything, can’t we?” And Bondo responded, “I know we can make it out of skunk, and no one would know the difference except us. I’m not sure about Rog.” “Plumber Dan” held a closely guarded secret, his old fishing hole where the whoppers swam. Roger could never wangle an invitation.

Then one day, Roger wrote, “I finally asked him where he caught all those big ones, and Dan said, ‘Right here’ as he grabbed his lower lip.” An invitation was forthcoming, however. Dan drove him around blindfolded for a couple of Roger Welsch, “Plumber” Dan Selden and Dennis hours because, as Roger told me, “He “Bondo” Adams sitting on a bench laughing, was worried sick that someone in Tulsa, courtesy Welsch Family Photos or Philadelphia, or Seattle will see the Postcard and figure out exactly where we are.”

Roger’s favorite sessions were “those where some theme develops, like the fights the oldtimers used to have when an outsider came courting one of the local girls, sessions that can go on for hours and are lessons in history, genealogy, sociology, and humor.” We took a short walk down a sidestreet so he could point out where the “town grouch” lived, a busybody he said, “who was always ready to mind everybody else’s business.”

Over at Mel Grim’s one-pump gas station, where you got your windshield cleaned and your oil checked, Roger must have driven his pickup in half a dozen times so cameraman Izzy could get all the angles we needed. Roger was making a point that all the cheapskates in town stopped in to get Mel’s special care, then drove to one of those mini-marts to buy their gas at a lower price. When we 211

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edited the piece back in New York, guess who was seen driving away as Roger was heard beating his chest about the wretches who stiffed Mel? Why, Mel’s old pal, Rog, of course, who was quickly learning that the editing room could provide delicious moments, just as his copy did. Mel got a kick out of it, too. “He’s just Roger,” said Mel. “Still can’t fix tractors.” That earlier piece on the “town grouch” identified Roger as that person, too, so he had already been warned about the endless possibilities of the television editing process.

Once, in one of our rare forays out of state, we were covering the launch of the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Nebraska in New London, Connecticut. You are probably already imagining where I might be going with this. There isn’t a body of water in Roger’s state that could hold this U.S. Navy beast. We were allowed inside the sub, and Rog began tinkering with the periscope. Finally, back in the editing room in New York, Editor Al Balisky, he of the Kuralt end pieces and a man with an endless curiosity, had a creative thought. If we show Rog looking through the scope, he said, doesn’t it just make sense to cut to a picture of cows on a farm in Dannebrog?

Well, that’s what we did, without telling Rog, of course. And as he watched it on Sunday Morning, he is alleged to have cried out, “Well, I’ll be damned, technology strikes again.”

Once we were doing a story on farm dogs, many of whom had obviously had encounters with Lyle Fries, the rural mailman. By now, our camera was pretty invisible to most folks in town, so it should have come as no surprise to Lyle when we tried to interview him as he stopped at Roger’s mailbox. Rober asked him something about the different dogs he had to look out for, and he said something like, “Can’t think of one.” Roger persisted, saying surely he had some unsettling experiences, and Lyle responded, “Uh, no, not really.”

Roger tried again, asking if there wasn’t one dog he remembered over his 30 years on the route. This time, Lyle put his hand up to his chin, paused, and said, “Gee, Rog, not one of ’em come to mind.” Rog wrote, “The camera might just as well have been a flamethrower aimed at Lyle.” Thank goodness the dogs we found were interesting and had no trouble communicating. Afterward, we had a group therapy session over a few beers and decided that Lyle Fries’s performance provided us with a new gauge to rank interviewees, the “Friesometer.” Lyle would be a ten; a good interview rated a “Friesometer” zero.

Every June, Dannebrog honored Danish Independence Day with a mile-long parade up Main Street, the floats coming out of local garages and backyards, many featuring colorful wildflowers or weeds plucked from the roadside.

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straight from the fields into the parade route. Roger noticed some anxiety among the parade organizers at the starting line, remarking, “You know tension must be high when George McCargh is smoking again. Last year the parade was so good, we ran it past the reviewing stand twice.” Then, he offered a different perspective. “For a couple of hours, a parade sweeps away the worry about the crops and drugs, petty feuds and family problems. So, we celebrate Dannebrog, and we celebrate ourselves.”

Then, one year, they had the parade of all parades when the circus came to town. Harriett said she thought it was the first one to come through there since World War II. Roger was a big boy who filled out his overalls pretty well, and he said to Harriett, “I”m looking forward to having my picture taken with the elephants because they’ll make me look thin.” Not missing a beat, Harriett eyed him and said, “Okay, but you better stand close, Roger.”

Roger told me that Corky Plunkett had one of the last touring circuses in America, bringing his camels and elephants to 100 different towns across the Great Plains. His kids and grandkids and assorted nieces and nephews worked as clowns, acrobats, and animal trainers after providing the grunt labor that set up the big poles that hold the tents. Some of them sold popcorn and cotton candy, too.

Corky told Roger, “In 65 years, I thought I’d played every town in Nebraska because my dad came from here, but I’d never been to Dannebrog.” It was a day that brought back fond memories of Roger’s youth. “When I was a kid, Dad took me down to the railroad to see the circus unload and set up, and I’ve always kicked myself for not realizing those were the most magical moments I’d ever known until the Plunketts came to Dannebrog.”

There were no caged lions in Corky’s parade, but that didn’t stop Roger from suggesting a few years later that a lion on the loose near Dannebrog demanded our attention. The subject came up in our weekly exchange of emails, some of them more like jousting bouts, deciding what stories would make good television. This email got my attention. “I am sitting here so excited,” he wrote, “that I am on the verge of pissing my pants. Bud, I actually believe there is a lion out here. Some people are cautioning me about calling attention to it.

“Now that the word is already out, maybe it’s time to go over to the other side and make the critter so public no one would dare kill it. A Game and Parks guy heard a cattleman say if any of his people see a lion, it will be shoot, shovel, and shut up. This is the mentality we are facing. I am trying to get some protection through the legislature, but it turns out politicians are reluctant to protect things that eat their constituents.” And just like that, the lion story faded away.

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Roger’s folklore remained a staple of his Postcards, but the serious business of harvest was another matter. He wrote in one of his books that harvest time requires “a highly-technological military campaign, factoring in the urgency of getting all that food to the bins, barns, elevators, tanks, and silos in such a short window of time. His advice as he was driving at caterpillar pace behind a long line of combines, pickers, wagons, and tractors, “I can get to where I’m going anytime. The corn needs to be picked right now!”

One harvest day in Ulysses, Nebraska, a tragic accident sharpened that community’s focus. Roger explains, “Ignoring the weather, shrugging off the long hours, 48-year-old David Dobish was driving along a steep bank when his tractor rolled, ending his life. He left behind a wife and three children, a farm, livestock, and an unharvested crop.” Marjory Hansen, one of the EMTs who responded, immediately realized the magnitude of the tragedy and began reaching out. As she told Roger, “We just let the word be known that we were going to come out and do the harvest for the family.”

On the appointed day, as the beasts in the harvest fleet arrived from every direction, the widow Dobish was overwhelmed, “They began coming at 6:30 this morning, and the women brought prepared food. It just brings tears to my eyes that we have this much support.” Roger reported counting 50 pieces of big equipment, “and in three hours neighbors and friends finished a harvest that would normally take three weeks. In a world where anger and cruelty seem increasingly common,” he wrote, “there is still fellowship and compassion. Just as there is the inevitable chill of autumn, there will eventually be the warmth of another spring.”

There used to be a railroad line that ran through Dannebrog. Roger said he could hear the rumble and the whistle from his place as it slowed down approaching the highway crossing. He wrote a “Postcard” lamenting its loss and found some old-timers to share their memories. Judy Mickelsen said she remembered as a kid seeing “a conductor in gray-striped overalls throwing us a bag of candy every time he went through here.” Ray Johnson recalled “the eerie whistle of the train at night that pierced the air. It was such a unique sound. We hated it when they took the train out.” Roger concluded, “I think the day will come when Americans will rue the day when we let our rail system disintegrate and disappear.”

When the Union Pacific brought its superpowered Engine 3985, the largest steam engine in the world, out of mothballs, we leaped at the chance to cover its public relations voyage across the state. Roger was blown away by its very presence. “To everyone who sees it, touches it, knows it, it is alive, huffing and 214

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growling, purring and roaring, smoke and steam pouring from its vents. When engineer Steve Lee blows the whistle, folks cheer as if he had just sung the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The engineer thought he knew why. “For a lot of people, it’s nostalgia, but you really don’t have to be a geezer to remember 3985.” Roger continued, “She was a fire-breathing machine as she ran across the Plains, her cars filled with dignitaries, politicians, children, and entertainers.”

People who lived along its path came out of their houses to just gawk and record its passage for posterity. Roger had this final thought, “If nothing else, 3985 lives in the dreams of every man, woman, and child who felt the ground shake beneath its driving wheels. It is the Grand American Chimera, somewhere between Columbus and North Platte, Nebraska, somewhere between the frontier and the future.”

That rail bed pretty much follows the path of the Platte River, which produced a couple of “wonder of nature” Postcards for us — bald eagles so thick in a stand of trees you couldn’t count them all and flocks of thousands of sandhill cranes on their great spring flight north. Roger called the crane migration “an indulgence in frantic swarming, all these cornfields being transformed into a very big-bird sock hop. It’s also the magnificence of their number, the mystery of their inevitability, barring the sort of human idiocy that nearly destroyed the whooping crane.”

We were in Kearney, Nebraska, right along the Platte River at the annual stopping-off place for these magnificent birds on the way north. Roger went on to describe their flight each year over thousands of miles of a diminishing supply of wetlands and river beds needed for their breeding grounds. As we drove home into the setting sun, it became partially obscured by one flock of tens of thousands of cranes, which resembled a huge black kite with a wiggling tail.

Roger penned the following, “When the seasons change, for the ten thousandth year in a row, the sandhill cranes will be heading south, flying over my place in Dannebrog again, on schedule, giving me a chance to reset my cosmic calendar.”

Looking out a window one day, Roger had his first encounter with a bald eagle. It startled him, he said, and soon he began hearing stories of “trees groaning with the weight of eagles’’ along the Platte River about 50 miles south of home. We went to investigate and, sure enough, right near a power plant that kept the river churning, providing fish for the eagle appetite, there they were — hundreds of them. As Roger put it, “One never spots an eagle without running to be in the presence of their majesty.” He talked about how, on his farm, the loss of an occasional chicken or lamb is a small price to pay for a visit by an eagle.

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The “Postcard’’ ended with these words: “There are those who still question the extra effort to protect things like the eagle or the spotted owl, but this is their land, not ours. You can see it in their eyes.”

Roger would meet up with us on our adventures in his well-broken-in Ford pickup truck he called the Blue Beast. I’ll let Rog describe it. “I don’t love it, but I am fond of it. It’s a little on the stinky side, but then I don’t have to worry about dirt on my overalls or dirt on my boots. I throw old iron or dead calves into its bed and drive across open fields or pastures without worrying about cedar branches scratching its paint or rocks denting the fenders. The truck is not a prize or an asset; it’s a friend.” Rog insisted his truck was not the worst in town, so we went to look. We found one with a vise grip for a door handle; another had barbed wire for a radio antenna, and still another came armed with a bungee cord to hold down the hood.

Roger would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the greatest mechanic, even though his machine shop was surrounded by the remains of some 30 AllisChalmers tractors. When he wasn’t pounding away on an anvil, he was over at a place called Stromp’s Dump. He described the attraction, “Part of the reason for going to Stromp’s is the process of dealing with Jim Stromp. He’s easygoing, but he’s no fool. He knows you wouldn’t have come if you didn’t need that part.” We watched Roger check out an Allis-Chalmers carburetor and spoked wheel. Then the bargaining started. I forget how many spare parts Rog threw into his truck to add to the pile at home, but that wasn’t the point. Roger was there for the game.

“And so, the dance went on. How willing is Stromp to let it go? For me, that’s the real art, the process — performance art.”

One of Roger’s favorite Nebraska poets was Ted Kooser, who read some of his work for us: “The gravel road rides with a slow gallop over the fields, The telephone lines streaming behind, Its billow of dust full of the sparks of red-winged blackbirds.

On either side, the loosening barns, Their little windows dulled by cataracts of hay, And cobwebs hide broken tractors under their skirts.”

It’s a truism that Nebraska has a lot of open rolling farmland, but Roger informed us that there is a demarcation line just about in the middle of the state for how that land is used — out west for ranches and, yes, real cowboys. Roger explains, “Back east, there are cornfields and irrigation pivots; out west, pasture and barbed wire. Back east, they wear seed caps and overalls; out west, big hats and cowboy boots.” We visited such a ranch downstream from Roger’s place and 216

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found cowboy Shane Bader and a small dog with a big job. Blaze was a border collie who fearlessly did the hard work of half a dozen ranch hands, moving cattle from pasture to pasture.

These big steers did not intimidate Blaze. He charged right at them to keep them on course. Roger takes it from there. “This is hard and dangerous work.

Circling the herd at the direction of Shane’s whistle, Blaze hits a barbed wire fence, cuts a leg, and gets first aid before going back to work. There’s no place a border collie would rather be than facing down a steer a hundred times his size.

This is in his blood. It’s what he lives for. Asked a week ago what a cowboy’s most important tools are, I suppose I would have said ‘a comfortable saddle, a stout rope, and a big hat.’ Now I know better. At the top of the list would be a good dog — especially one like Blaze.”

Roger quit academia and moved out to Dannebrog from Lincoln with his wife Linda and daughter Antonia just before we started the “Postcards.” The farmhouse they moved into became a story for us when Rog introduced me to Butch Williams, whom he described as “a man of considerable reputation when it comes to moving houses.” A decade earlier, Roger needed a bigger place and found an abandoned farmhouse for $350. Then he found Butch, who said he could haul it over to Dannebrog for $3500, brick chimney and all. “Deal,” said Rog. He was so taken with what he described as “the elegant and intimate ballet that swirls around moving a house over the Plains countryside” that we decided to contact Butch and film one of his legendary house movings.

In addition to having to raise and lower electrical lines and keep adjusting the brakes and wheels as the weight shifted on the house, there were other problems. As Butch explained, “They’ll come out and say, ‘You can’t cut that limb off that tree. My father planted it, and he isn’t here anymore.’” On this trip, Butch had to navigate across an ancient and rotting bridge. Roger fills us in.

“This was a 30-ton house, not a car or a pickup truck. So, I asked Butch why he honked when the house made it to the other side, and he replied laconically, “To warn the sparrows out of the way.”

With this house finally settled in its new home, Butch invited us to a celebration at the Big Table Tavern. His arrival was right out of Hollywood, in a miniature horse-drawn buggy, decked out in his cowboy best. He tossed some raw red meat in the middle of the table, and all of his good old boys began tearing into it. A few were dainty enough to put the “mystery meat” on crackers.

Butch looked at me and said, “Wanna try some, Bud?” All eyes went to me, and I guess I flinched. So, I took a bite and asked, “Okay, Butch, but I don’t recognize the taste,” and he replied, “Guess you’ve never had beaver sushi before, eh Bud?” 217

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Roger took us home: “I admire the notion of someone who alters the landscape around him by not putting up something new or taking down something old, but by shuffling buildings around as if they were hotels on a Monopoly board.”

Roger and Linda took daughter Antonia’s name from Willa Cather’s famous novel, My Antonia. Cather wrote, “If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.” The Antonia in the novel is a Czech immigrant girl whose father tries and fails as a farmer and commits suicide. Despite the bigotry shown by the locals, the family and Antonia plod on. Roger said there was a “Postcard” story to tell in Red Cloud, Cather’s hometown. Her novels of frontier life, especially her Nebraska town a century ago, enabled Cather to find her future and fortune in New York and away from Red Cloud, which failed to prosper. Some blamed her for the bleakness she attached to the settler life. As Roger put it, “She brought fame to Red Cloud, but fame is an uncertain asset.”

After the town struggled for years for an identity, Cather enthusiasts finally made a plan and the town where she once lived became, according to Roger, “Catherland,” “a literary landscape attracting thousands of tourists each year to the newly refurbished houses and buildings where the author and her literary characters once lived and worked. It was only fair. After all, Cather discovered the literary potential of ordinary people in Red Cloud, and the ordinary people of Red Cloud discovered the economic potential of Willa Cather.”

Roger kept telling me about Highway 2, the old road out west. Here’s why: “A few folks who have traveled through the Sandhills might tell you it’s the bleakest 200 miles this side of the moon,” wrote Rog. “For me, it’s one of the most beautiful trips I’ve ever made, not all cluttered up with trees and mountains, without a McDonald’s or a stoplight and the population is well below two per square mile.” Mari Sandoz was born in those hills. She is probably Roger’s favorite Nebraska author, nationally acclaimed for the novel about her nononsense father, “Old Jules,” of whom she wrote, “There was no training school for the pioneer. He either was one, or he wasn’t.” She wrote glowingly about the endless vistas and knowingly about the Plains Indians, the original inhabitants.

Here’s Roger: “The geography that Sandoz loved is the largest sand dune area in the Western Hemisphere, a grassy, billowing, windblown sea of sand. It’s not an easy landscape to love.”

The Sandhills dominate a remarkable piece of America, still largely undiscovered by travelers because of Interstate 80. Highway 2, the old interstate, is dotted with occasional small hotels and cafes, used mostly by locals now. Right at the edge of the Sandhills on Highway 2, we came upon Antioch, described as a ghost town except for the odd traveler making it home for a while. During 218

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World War One, the town became a bustling supplier of potash to the nation’s war effort. Factories with smoke stacks nearly as high as the Sandhills were built, and so was a large residential community with its own post office, gymnasium, and bank.

Four thousand people lived and worked there once, including Nick Dafney, a Greek immigrant, who bought what’s left of the place, mostly for its sentimental value. He took Roger on a tour. “This used to be an opera house just west of the general store I grew up in. There used to be a two-story building over there.

I probably learned to dance in it. There’s no one here now except one man who lives in the house back there and a lady that used to be the postmistress.”

Roger put some historical perspective on our “Ghost Town” Postcard: “Today, the weathered ruins of its workplace are for all the world like what’s left of the classical remnants of its namesake in Antioch, Syria. Antioch is a town that time has passed by, and now 70 years later, little is left, and every year there is less.”

Roger and Mari Sandoz had a common bond: a fierce loyalty and an interest in the folklore of the Plains Indians. Roger was an adopted member of the Omaha tribe of northeast Nebraska. He loved pronouncing his tribal name, Tenuga Gahi, which meant, and he loved this even better, Big Bull Buffalo Chief.

Mari Sandoz spent years in contact with the tribes before writing about General George A. Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn River. She once said her chief concerns were “The sight of earth exploited and the right of any man, red, white, or whatever, to walk in pride and dignity before all the world.”

Our very first “Postcard” involved a fierce war of words waged by Roger and others with the Nebraska Historical Society over who owned the remains of the long-gone Pawnee Tribe. Roger reported that “Pawnee graves have been dug up by collectors, hobbyists, and archeologists and the bones of Pawnee now sit on museum shelves.” The Historical Society was reluctant to give up the Pawnee bones, but spurred on by the dissenters, the Nebraska Legislature ordered the remains returned to the Pawnee, who had been exiled to Oklahoma many moons before. Score one for Roger and his mates.

Another Native American Postcard involved “The Battle of the Little Bighorn” from their side. Roger took us to Fort Robinson in the far northwestern corner of the state. He wrote, “Crazy Horse, the hero and the victor of ‘Big Horn’ died right here on this very spot. He was deceived into surrendering to military authorities and was stabbed to death, unarmed, defenseless. He remains a figure of reverence, respect, and mystery.”

Roger spoke to Charles Trimble, a spokesman for the Lakota people, “We grew up with stories of our leaders, just not in the textbooks. But to our people, 219

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they were great heroes, especially Crazy Horse. Now, Indian studies are very important in terms of helping the children understand themselves.”

Roger took us on a few trips to the site of his Omaha tribe, about 50 miles north of the city of the same name, where we witnessed the annual powwow. It was one big family reunion; Native Americans from miles around and all walks of life gathered in celebration of their heritage. As Roger put it, “They dream of a new and vital tribe and hope that someday the rest of America will come to recognize the power and beauty of Omaha dance and music, and food and religion.”

The Nebraska poet John Neihardt, who gave historical insight into the Native American culture, wrote this in the early 20th century: “Unwitting how there fell upon a race The twilight of irreparable wrong The drums had fallen silent with the song, And valiant tales, late eager to be told, Were one with all things glorious and old And dear and gone forever from the Sioux.’

Here are a few Roger offerings that deserve mention because they are mindful of how American individualism was allowed to prosper on the Plains, especially in Nebraska. Kuralt called them “celebrations of the ordinary.”

One “Postcard” was called “Tractor Lady” and had to do with old tractors being shined up to enter in tractor shows, the kinds Rog used to tinker with in his shop on his tree farm. Carol Panowicz lived nearby and was an AllisChalmers devotee, the ones that wore the orange hats, just like him. Here’s part of their conversation. Roger asked, “What exactly is a lady’s tractor?” And Carol responded, “It’s a tractor. I can crank start it myself. And guys can’t believe it, ‘Wow, you can do that by yourself.’

“It’s a ‘her’ to me, and it’s my girl that I did a lot of work on. When I first saw it, I almost cried because it had a big hole in the block, and the tires were coming off.”

Rog interjected, “Sounds awfully good. I love that throaty roar. I wish mine sounded that good.”

Carol replied, “I get a lot of flak about the dents in the fenders. Guys say why don’t you pound them out? Well, each dent to me has a story to tell.”

Rog was curious. “How much would you sell it for?”

Carol wasn’t biting, “It’s not for sale. I’ll have it for a long time.”

And here’s a brief trip down memory lane: “These days you can’t find anything on a rural American radio dial,” wrote Roger, “but self-pitying urban cowboys 220

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and cowgirls, whining away about their sorry lots, lost loves and uncooperative dogs. I grew up with the sound of polka in my ears.” Joe Siedlik, aka “Big Joe the Polka King,” told Rog, “You never hear about anybody coming along and crying and weeping in a polka. Shucks, they’re living it up. They’re talkin’ about the beautiful trees, the beautiful flowers, the gorgeous lookin’ gal.”

Roger continues, “In his heyday, Big Joe was heard across the nation. In some communities, he and his polka music dominated Sunday radio. Not so long ago, small-town taverns and dance halls across the Plains had weekend polka dances. It was an energetic, lively beat, reflecting the lively personality of the Eastern European settlers of the region.”

Turning to Joe, Roger asked, “I’ll bet these dance halls were something when the lights in the beautiful chandeliers were turned down.”

Joe answered, “Oh yes, you could just go ahead and squeeze your girl just a little bit closer.”

Before we get to the closing “Postcard,” some random sights on the Great Plains that are forever embedded in this “city slicker’s” memory. I’ll let the “guy in the overalls” describe them: Round barns — “The most striking barns of all are those that defy folklore because they are round. They are all as impressive as a rural cathedral or mosque.

Something about them catches the eye and makes you look twice.”

Grain elevators — “Are so much a part of every Plains town that some of us forget to notice them, great towers of harvest stabbing a hundred feet in the air.

Grain elevators are where the real power — that of the land and the gods and the people — is celebrated and commemorated.”

Windmills — “They are the tallest thing on the horizon, these flimsy skeletons that have withstood blizzards and tornadoes for a century. They are also the deepest things on the prairies, reaching down into the richest mineral resource the Plains have — water.”

Fence posts — “Part of the folklore of the Plains is the marking of fences by inverting cowboy boots on the posts, a way of making the insignificant notable, the prosaic interesting, the invisible obvious.”

My all-time favorite Postcard was the story of a long haul trucker and postcards from his far-flung adventures to residents of a Schuyler, Nebraska, home for the aged. The best part was “Heavy Duty” — that was his nom de plume — would drive by the home occasionally and honk his horn but be gone before anybody could identify him. Here’s Roger: “The postcards from various places, such as the Statue of Liberty, were addressed to no one in particular and are cheerful and cheering, newsy, folksy, and honest.” The residents put up a big 221

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sign in front, and “Heavy Duty” acknowledged he had driven by and honked again but didn’t stop.

The nursing home called Roger to see if he could do some detective work and he got right on the case. “His home is somewhere around here,” Rog reported, “And he is a big fellow, in accordance with his CB handle, but the closer I get, the more I wonder if I really want to find out Superman’s true identity, to steal away the mystery and replace it with something as boring as facts.” And then a break in the case! Investigator Welsch got a call from our mystery man, who agreed to be interviewed as long as his identity was not revealed. Nonetheless, one nursing home resident told Rog, “If he does decide to stop here, he’d better be ready for a lot of hugs.”

Heavy Duty told Roger that he sent postcards to five or six nursing homes from central Nebraska to New York but that Schuyler was special. He said he was visiting a resident once when an elderly gentleman pulled him aside and asked if he had a few moments to talk to him, that his son would be visiting any moment now. Roger picks up the story: Heavy Duty “later learned that the man’s son rarely visited. It was the hope of a visit that sustained him, and the trucker decided right there that he would become a source of that sort of hope.”

He told Roger, “I just thought it would be nice to share some of the beautiful places I’ve been with people who are shut-ins. I tried taking a picture of that super-neat sign in front of the Schuyler home through my windshield. It worked, and I sent them the picture. I hope they got it.” Rog has the last word: “Maybe what’s important about Heavy Duty is that we don’t know who he is, just another person just like all the rest of us, just a plain guy with a big heart, a feeling for the forgotten, a man willing to take the time to send a postcard to Nebraska.”

Roger and I parted as friends but rarely talked in the ensuing twenty years, and the Breeze Brothers went their separate ways and took their own Friesometers with them. Then Izzy Bleckman died, and there was a flurry of emails. That’s when we began talking again like it was yesterday, and we realized that we were all part of the glue that held our little band of brothers together.

Izzy’s sideman Dan Gianneschi responded this way, “We were so close, and then we weren’t. I know Izzy told me he retired too soon. Maybe he needed the space.

Bud and I agreed that maybe Iz gifted us the reason to reach out and talk again.

Perhaps that’s the best way to remember the best of those memories we shared.”

In a foreword to Roger’s “Postcards From Nebraska” book, Izzy wrote this: “I knew for certain after we shot our second story that my camera and Roger were going to get along just fine. I believe it was Charles’s wish to ensure that

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small-town America continues to have its stories told by a writer with empathy and talent.”

Roger died last year in his beloved farmhouse with wife Linda by his side, and the Breeze Brothers were reduced to two. He was 85 years old. His tree farm has been willed eventually to the Omaha, Pawnee, and Oglala Sioux tribes, whose ancestry can now be preserved as a resting place for the bones of their ancestors. “They were the rightful owners of the land anyway,” he often said.

Of one thing, I am certain, he always knew where home was. “Dannebrog is not on the way to anywhere,” he said, “The only way to get here is to come on purpose. And the single, most important institution is the Big Table. In Eric’s tavern, in Harriett’s cafe, at Mel’s service station, folks get together in town every day to conduct the business of the elders. It’s the real Congress of the United States.”

Roger wrote over 40 books on his singular view of life on the Great Plains, and I do hope the “Postcards” and their folklore will shine again someday.

Americans need to be reminded about that time and that place and that honesty.

And of Roger Welsch’s signature gift to us.

“Esquire magazine called Roger’s Postcards “charming, homey rhythms of his Cornhusker State.” People magazine said, “His peculiar genius, like Will Rogers, can go unremarked.” And the Washington Journalism Review observed, “He often uses Dannebrog to provide a slice-of-life perspective on sometimes indigestible national issues.”

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Chapter 20

Saratoga and Secretariat Take me to that place, that bucolic place where only an uncluttered mind appreciates the soothing baths, the jazz, and the whiskey, the smells from Chicken Sadie’s, a tout sheet to peruse in the shade of the ancient elms, and those wonderful shining and strapping thoroughbreds. It must be Saratoga since no other place, dating back to the Civil War, can make that claim. I’m not Secretariat owner Penny Tweedy and Woodie Broun sure when Charles pulled his roadshow into Saratoga. There’s no evidence of it in his work that I could find. But just from his love of American history, especially the battle of Saratoga, and his penchant to wager a bob or two, I can’t imagine him not visiting this thoroughbred haunt a time or two.

I was a latecomer to the Spa, arriving in my early thirties, when I was invited into a rocking chair on the front porch of 135 Lincoln Avenue, just down the street from the clubhouse gate. Our host was Frank Sullivan, the New Yorker columnist of wit and a half-century of New Year’s poems, who had earned the title “The Sage of Saratoga.” He was born in a house nearby and occasionally ventured into Manhattan, only to scurry back to what racegoers refer to fondly as the “Summer Place.” Woodie Broun and Frank were friends from the “Roaring 20s” days of Lillian Russell and Mr. Arbuthnot, Frank’s fictional cliche expert.

Oh, what it was to be a fly on their shoulders: Woodie: “If you were Mr. Arbuthnot, what is racing?” (Frank): “The sport of kings.”

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Woodie: “If a horse wins at Saratoga?” (Frank): “He ranks with the immortals.”

Woodie: “He ranks with the immortals?” (Frank): “He came through with flying colors.”

Woodie: “And what does he do to the breed?” (Frank): “Improves, he improves the breed.”

Here’s Woodie: “Like many another dowager, Saratoga is grand, dignified, and slightly weathered and provides peaceful porches on which one could, from the form figures, assemble the house of cards soon to be blown away by the winds of chance at the track.”

Frank Sullivan described Saratoga as a town with a “Beaux-art style and gentle eccentricities” and reminded us that the racing gods can defy even the greatest. “Ask Man o’ War,” he said, “who lost to Upset or even Secretariat, who lost to Onion. That’s why it’s called ‘the graveyard of champions.’” Woodie and Frank had access Woodie Broun at the race track, Budlam Productions Archive to the big names in those mansions that gave Saratoga its skyline, the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and the Phipps. Woodie’s father, the most renowned newspaper columnist of the 1920s, taught the boy the ill-gotten science of wagering, introducing him to Tim Mara, a track bookmaker who later founded the New York Giants NFL franchise.

It was before parimutuel machines had been introduced and proved appetizing to another NFL owner, Art Rooney, of the Pittsburgh Steelers. “Art was part of the legend of Saratoga,” Woodie said. “He told me he won enough in a week to keep the franchise alive.”

“I broke the bookies,” Art told Woodie. “I didn’t go there as a maiden either.

I understood the handicap business.” Woodie added, “The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I can only assume it must be evil.”

Frank Sullivan started out as a pump boy to the bookies, doling out cups of water to their clients and earning the princely sum of $15 a day. He told Woodie, “Lillian Russell and ‘Diamond Jim’ Brady and any number of Vanderbilts, we knew most of them. But you never nailed any of them for an autograph as they would today.” He earned his chops as a newspaperman in New York, but he brushed that off as a blip in his writing career. “I once visited there for 20 years, but I wouldn’t live there if you gave me Philadelphia,” he said.

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As a young boy, Woodie found himself in front of Tim Mara’s odds maker board in the presence of the mysterious John A. Drake, a partner in the biggest gambling heist of the century. Drake and a character known as “BetA-Million” Gates won four times that amount in a complicated betting scheme that bamboozled the not-so-jolly bookmakers in merry old England. Woodie was curious, did John A. Drake bet anymore? “Oh, just a couple of hundred for laughs, little boy, just a couple of hundred, for laughs.”

I spent many a pleasant morning with Woodie in the backstretch of Saratoga, looking for the little nuggets of the track’s 150-year-old history. It seemed everyone Woodie and I bumped into was part of the “who’s who of racing.” They are all long gone but would fill a scrapbook in my time machine. Let’s take a walk and see who we find.

John Nerud trained the 1968 champion Dr. Fager. “I came here in 1933 in a boxcar, grooming horses for the Whitneys. Those were great days. We had the casinos, the bookmakers. It was all about the money. All the jockeys had to steal to make a living.”

Eddie Arcaro was the jockey on the 1941 Triple Crown champ Whirlaway.

“Gambling was pretty good around New York, especially. Those guys (the trainers) didn’t think you would let them run unless they put a mutuel ticket in your boot.” Whirlaway became the only Triple Crown winner to take Saratoga’s Travers Stakes, recognized as the midsummer Kentucky Derby. If you had a special thoroughbred like Whirlaway, you wanted Eddie Arcaro to ride it.

Mack Miller trained the 1993 Kentucky Derby winner, Sea Hero. “You have the finest horse flesh in the world here, so many two-year-olds that became champions. Even though I was a Kentuckian, I loved Saratoga before I got here.

My father told me when I was a boy, ‘You must go to Saratoga sometime.’”

Woodie interrupted with a remembrance of Mack’s emotional Derby win with Sea Hero, a Saratoga winner of the Travers Stakes. Mack and Sea Hero’s owner, Paul Mellon, were in their mid-seventies, in the twilight of their racing careers. Sea Hero was their last shot at the Derby. Looking up into their box, Woodie recalled, “Those two old men were like high school cheerleaders, leaping, laughing, and crying. I thought they would both die of pleasure.”

We continued our walk and kept finding those legends. Trainer Max Hirsch won nine Triple Crown races after seasoning his horses and himself in the Saratoga lifestyle. “People came here to spend the summer and brought their horses, carriages, and footmen with them. It really was a sight to see.” In the cottage behind his barn, Max Hirsch offered breakfast every morning to family, friends, and owners. A Hirsch relative described what it was like, “They’d come 226

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in their tuxedos from the gambling. Max would have two or three cooks making pheasant under glass at six o’clock in the morning.”

When we moved on, our camera team of Izzy Bleckman and Dan Gianneschi, who were kind of used to being in the company of greatness, asked who that was. “Why that was Alfred Vanderbilt,” Woodie replied. Izzy and Dan just shook their heads and grinned. Then Woodie chimed in, “The Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Phipps, those were the families that kept racing going in the years when it was not at all a winning proposition.” In the post-World War II years, when there was even talk of closing Saratoga, they were the ones who insisted that history must be served. Woodie offered this: “The spacious lawns and welltended trees here suggest that royal park where one monarch first said to the other, ‘I’ll bet my horse can beat your horse to the palace.’”

Next stop on our morning walk through the time machine was a conversation with Dinny Phipps, one of the old mansion crowd, whose roots were in horses and Saratoga. He came from a monied family, with Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel in his pedigree, and served as the longtime chairman of the Jockey Club.

His grandmother started the famed Wheatley Stable that bred Seabiscuit and Bold Ruler. His uncle was Pete Bostwick, a Hall of Fame polo player, court tennis star, and noted steeplechase rider.

Gentlemen riders like Bostwick competed for the silver cups against the professionals who competed for the purses. One of Woodie’s favorite Saratoga stories was about this rowdy bunch of professional “jump jockeys” who flew over the hedges with abandon. One August afternoon, Woodie recalled, Pete Bostwick and three “jump jockeys” were strung out across the track as they headed down the stretch when a trailer came up from behind and demanded they let him through. “When the seas didn’t part,” Woodie said, “the rider cried out, ‘Out of the way. You sons of bitches; you too, Mr. Bostwick.’”

The biggest economic event of the Saratoga season is when the black tie set turns out, as they have for almost a century, to watch the cat-and-mouse game between auctioneer and prospective thoroughbred owner. It is the annual auction of some of the highest-priced yearlings in America at the Humphrey T. Finney Pavilion. Usually, it takes the auctioneer, in this case, Humphrey T. Finney himself, to set the bar higher. “I have $250,000. Now you know she’s worth three times that,” Finney parried, “Maybe a million more.” He had been doing this for so long that he knew most of the customers, and Woodie asked him why they preferred to be so secretive about their bidding. “Well, does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” he said. Woodie offered this, “To use an old poker expression, this is not an exercise for ribbon clerks. As fragile as the ankles of the yearlings are 227

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the dreams of glory for sale here. Still, just possibly, one of these babies will stand with racing’s immortals, and immortality, even by association, can command a high price.”

We were just finishing up our walk with Frank Sullivan, and Woodie pointed out to him that he hadn’t always been a literary punster, that when he was a youngster working at the track, did he ever have aspirations to be a jockey? “Yes, I did,” said Frank. “Dynamite, one of the grooms, put me on a horse, and I fell off right away. That ended my career as a jockey.” He is credited with writing this, “Saratoga is either a forgery or a damned clever original.” Woodie told me later that Frank had become the “Sage of Saratoga” because of “the gentle joyousness of his writing.”

My time machine was running out when one last item appeared on my screen. Here’s Woodie: “Before the flowers have opened in the morning, horses are on the track. Triple Crown Winner Secretariat comes through the mist, his beauty pushing at the fog like a torch in the dimness of the dawn.” Penny Tweedy, Secretariat’s magnanimous owner, was there too. “Saratoga is a summit meeting.

It’s a family reunion,” she exclaimed to Woodie.

Penny Chenery Tweedy had to become a quick study in the business of thoroughbred racing when she was, quite suddenly, thrown into the breach to handle her father’s estate, which included the Meadow Farm, the family’s racing and breeding operation in Virginia horse country. Her father, the New York industrialist Christopher Chenery, had just died, and an enormous estate tax bill loomed. That made her first priority finding the means to pay Uncle Sam. All eyes turned to her biggest asset. She would be forced to sell Meadow’s majority control of Secretariat, even before the Triple Crown that would anoint him the greatest champion of them all.

Here’s Woodie, “As a financial anatomist, one may speculate on the worth of Secretariat. How much, one wonders, for the flying feet that made him ‘horse of the year’ as a two-year-old? How much for the handsome head which shows a resemblance to his father, the mighty Bold Ruler? How much for the smooth barrel of power from which flows his strength? One is left with that philosophical truth called ‘gestalt,’ which says the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Before he grew into that unbeatable force, Secretariat had some learning to do. After a couple of early defeats, Penny Tweedy remembered her trainer Lucien Laurin’s frustration, “He kicked the chair into the front of the stall. That’s when I knew we had a world beater.” And later, after a second defeat, she said, “Secretariat just kept away from us in the stall. He didn’t care to talk to us because he didn’t go out and do what he had been doing, and he knew the difference.”

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So, when they finally played “My Old Kentucky Home” at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Secretariat was ready. Americans had been wallowing in Watergate and worrying about having enough gas to drive to work, and here was Mrs. America and her big red stallion ready to run the fastest Kentucky Derby ever.

Woodie, who was part of the CBS-TV broadcast team, told me later, “When he was led off the track, the only sweat on his body was a thin line where the girth had touched him. His neck was arched, and his feet were dancing. He was clearly ready to run another race right then.” And when he won the Preakness in record time again, Woodie thought he was ready for his big moment, “So, Secretariat stands on the edge of a Triple Crown, on tiptoe, flying slightly above the earth, like one of those horses the Greek gods used to ride in a hurry to get back to Olympus.”

CBS Sports had developed an all-star cast of racing expertise for Belmont day, probably the finest ever for its knowledge of racing lore: the host, Jack Whitaker, a silver-tongued orator from Philadelphia who could turn a phrase as quickly as Secretariat could get to the finish line; Frank Wright, the gentleman trainer in the fedora, an English major from Duke with an encyclopedic knowledge of the backstretch and the horse flesh; Chic Anderson, the race-caller from Evanston, Indiana, who brought experience from almost every major track in America, with a distinctive baritone voice and instant analysis that would serve him well in a record-setting Belmont Stakes. Frank Wright and Woodie were on their perch at the finish line when Secretariat entered the track. Not known for hyperbole, Frank suddenly remarked, “Woodie, he looks like a million, doesn’t he?” Maybe ten million to be exact. Penny Tweedy’s investors would be regally rewarded.

Secretariat’s Belmont was the toughest ticket of the year in New York, a pretty tough town. The old joint was jumping, and the huge crowd was in a celebratory mood. Guys were cuddling dolls who didn’t even belong to them, as if to say, “Who’s gonna remember anything but Secretariat?” The race was over before it began. “Secretariat is moving like a tremendous machine,” boomed the voice of announcer Chic Anderson. “He is out there almost a sixteenth of a mile from the rest of the horses. Secretariat wins it by a record 25 lengths.” Racing experts opined later that the running time of two minutes, 24 seconds, like Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, may never be broken. Chic’s call was near perfection.

That took an eagle’s eye.

Now the center of attention in the winner’s circle became Seth Hancock, the owner of Claiborne Farm, who syndicated the horse for Mrs. Tweedy. Woodie popped the big question. Could a six-million-dollar horse now be worth ten 229

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million? “Heywood, I don’t know if any horse is worth ten million, but if there is one that is worth it, this one is it.” Jack Whitaker opined, “I believe Dick Butkus (the old Chicago Bear tight end) could have ridden this horse today and won.”

Then, switching gears, he said of the hard-bitten race trackers who rarely show emotion, “Today, I actually saw people crying.” Penny Tweedy was seen waving her hands to the crowd in sheer delight, prompting this from Chic Anderson, “Look at Mrs. Tweedy, she’s having the time of her life.” Secretariat had indeed proved to be a “tremendous machine.”

Looking back on the race years later, Penny told me that in the tense days before the Belmont, “We were on the cover of three national magazines, and this is the kiss of death for Secretariat to be on the cover of Time Magazine alone.

We thought, ‘We will never overcome this.’ I still can’t put into words how I felt because I was so scared we weren’t going to do it that it does almost feels like yesterday. The memories are so fresh, and except for the silver in everybody’s hair, we wouldn’t know it — so many that remember him fondly, and their love keeps mine going, too.”

Woodie offered some other thoughts: “Many people bought mutuel tickets on Secretariat at the Belmont that were never cashed. That was to be their souvenir because when you are in the presence of something marvelous, some little piece of it, like a piece of glitter, drops on you, and you’ve got that ticket.

Part of Secretariat’s glory is with you.”

“Big Red,” as the stable hands called him, was retired to stud duty at the Claiborne Farm of the young horse breeder Seth Hancock, up the pike in Paris, Kentucky. He was the one who bailed out Mrs. Tweedy, so Woodie and I thought we should pay him a visit, and we took our cameras along. Secretariat looked magnificent in his Bluegrass surroundings, the absolute master of his own pasture. Here’s what Woodie saw, “To say his name is to sound a chorus of horns.

To watch him in proud stride, spurning the red leaves which seemed respectful to ape his color, is to see a mixture of strength and grace which makes Nureyev look like a talent contest tap dancer.”

We asked Hancock how the old boy was acclimating/ “He’s just playful now, and he has a real personality. He’s still quite a ham and loves to hear the cameras click and look at the people who come to see him.” As Woodie clicked away with his little box camera, Secretariat came to the fence, and one of those pictures remained in Woodie’s wallet for the rest of his life. I am now the proud possessor of it in my wallet, forever. “They’ll be running another Belmont when the calendar turns,” Woodie wrote in The New York Times, “and as the ordinary horses strive for this crown, some of us will see a white-bridled big red ghost 230

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with a little blue-and-white man on his back.

When the real horses hit the far turn, he will be halfway down the stretch and we will be glad, as we always are, to see him again.”

When Woodie died just before 9/11, his broadcast partner Jack Whitaker memorialized him this way: “He gave the genre a rich and rare dimension, which unhappily departs with him.

I will miss his colorful anecdotes, miss working the horse races with him, miss his droll humor and marvelous writing. He was a colorful man of substance, and his departure leaves us all Woodie Broun’s Wallet Photo Of diminished.”

Secretariat, Budlam Productions Archive The preeminent racing writer of his time, Jay Hovdey, wrote, “Woodie Broun had a million-dollar vocabulary and never used a nickel word when a chewy, multisyllabic one would do.”

At a Hall of Fame ceremony in Saratoga just before he died, Woodie had his last conversation with old friend Penny Tweedy. She told Woodie her yearly pilgrimage here would never change. “New faces come along, and I welcome them because we won’t be here forever.” Woodie paused. “But Saratoga will?”

And Penny wholeheartedly agreed, “But Saratoga will, absolutely.”

Woodie leaves us with this: “Cynics say that racing immortality only lasts until the next starting bell. Saratoga reminds us that, to some, racing is more than just the races. It is a residue of romance, the last cavalry charge.”

A critic for the Atlanta Gazette wrote, “Broun’s inventive prose evokes the inner energy of thoroughbred racing. The paddock is home to us, the horses’ warm flesh and blood that solicit our involvement.”

Secretariat and Saratoga became two of 36 half-hour documentaries called Woodie’s World that I produced and narrated and Art Vizthum edited for ESPN in the early 2000s.

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Chapter 21

“Remembering What We Were” The information glut we are experiencing has become a frustrating journey for all those seeking credible, sustainable sources they can rely on. There is no magic wand that produces good journalism, though having an editor sure helps.

So, it is up to the viewers, the consumers, to figure it out — to go where they are comfortable but challenged at the same time. That was what we strove for every Sunday. We were lucky to have had three television critics who, in their own way, helped us explain our mission — Ron Powers, Jeff Greenfield, and John Leonard.

Powers was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who, I think, best described his Sunday Morning this way: “A show that quietly rewarded excellence in the arts; that dignified the common man without contrived theatrics; that amplified the important events of the time from the perspective of those who endured the consequences, as distinct from those who set the events in motion; that was presided over by a wise and gentle man who made poetry out of vernacular English.”

There was an inner voice that Maestro Kuralt kept calling on every Sunday Morning. When Charles took us on a life’s journey with Mr. Black, the brickmaker who reached celebrity status in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the president of these United States invited him to the Oval Office for a photo op. A grandson of slaves, George Black told Charles his goal in life was “To make somebody call me Mr. Black someday.”

When Woodie and I visited the great Secretariat after he was put out to pasture in Kentucky, Woodie’s little box clicked away, and he offered the following tribute: “In his totality like such brothers in beauty as the eagle, the lion, and the hunting leopard, Secretariat reminds us that Darwin and his theory of natural selection leaves out poetry, a factor unmeasurable, unnecessary and yet, oddly unbearable to be without.”

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As for Roger Welsch, it was an educational journey on the Oregon Trail, where homesteaders in covered wagons once faced inconceivable hardships to open up a path westward. On the way, we were dazzled by Jailhouse Rock and Courthouse Rock, some 400-foot-high monoliths created centuries ago out of volcanic ash, sandstone, and clay. They once served as landmarks for the Pony Express, fur traders, and wagon trains and are listed in the National Historic Register. That heritage is one way Roger Welsch’s Nebraska separates itself from the rest of us.

After doing all this reflecting, especially on my Kuralt years, I share a pride that Sunday Morning is still going strong. But there is a pain in my gut that will not go away, that I cannot explain to those who ask, “So what’s different about the show?” My answer always is, “Obviously, it’s that Charles is gone,” that his successors would have been foolish to try to emulate him. One of the main conceptual differences is that we would let our pieces run as long as they needed, often 10 minutes or more and that they offered reflective moments. No time for that on commercial television today; silence has now become anathema. Charles always subscribed to the notion that a few of those reflective moments are worth a thousand screaming adjectives aimed at raising your blood pressure.

There are certainly no whisperers left inside the CBS hierarchy who feel that we strove to be too highfalutin with our classical music and art museums or even too mundane with our literate sports pieces. That train has left the station; the Kuralt imprint is fading fast. I still have vivid memories of the early days and the precise words of our New York Bureau chief, who was under great pressure to give us all those camera crews to cover the arts scene. Christie Basham, known for her wit under fire, remarked, “If we ever have a heist in one of the art galleries, we’re sure to have an exclusive because Sunday Morning is certain to be there.”

Charles, for all of his “aw shucks” moments, agreed with us that the offbeat topics gave us the balance that was our spine. We even toned Woodie down to tweeds, now that he wasn’t covering games anymore, and was talking to James Michener, the prolific author of historical fiction; John Ciardi, the American poet laureate; or Stephen Sondheim, the Broadway legend. He sacrificed some of his flourishes and gave us insightful interviews instead.

All of the above went up in smoke when management pulled the plug on us. The in-depth pieces vanished to be replaced by quantity instead of quality.

Charles kept it going by the sheer force of his command of the camera. He had a vested interest in the Nebraska Postcards, but there were far too many trips on the tricycle from some of the newcomers. There was always a certain vulnerability about Charles, no matter the subject. I remember playing golf with 233

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him once. When we stopped for a hot dog, mustard dribbled down his chin, and he was in no rush to wipe it off. He knew who he was. He would never look down or patronize. He had seen so much in a lifetime of swapping stories that Sunday Morning’ was his chance to share his elevated view of the American experience — that television that reaches the inner self never goes out of style — most especially if you are the ratings leader by a wide margin.

It was when the wordsmiths and creative producers were eliminated in the management purges that the pressure of doing more of the show himself fell heavily on the anchorman. The subjects became more obscure, the pieces more mundane. When the TV critics started to call him avuncular, he responded once, “I’m fat and bald, undeniably, but I don’t think of myself as avuncular.”

The critics had long promoted him as Cronkite’s successor, but that wouldn’t have worked for him either, just as when the experiment of doing the weekday Morning News had ended after a year, he took a deep breath and thought about those Montana trout streams he had been missing. Dan Rather had a big-time agent and big-time ambitions. Charles never lost the wanderlust. Dan was Texas-bred and charming until he wasn’t. “That dog won’t hunt,” is the way he’d put it. Charles was inquisitive without being pushy. If I needed a defense lawyer, Dan would be the bulldog; if I needed a doctor, Charles had the bedside manner.

When they both were ordered to China to cover the Tiananmen Square uprising, CBS sent along a hairdresser, a makeup person, and a team of producers and researchers for Dan. Charles had only his regular team of cameraman Izzy and soundman Dan. Izzy told me that while Dan Rather was being gussied up to go on-camera, he was busy brushing the dandruff off Kuralt’s shoulders.

Charles made no bones about one aspect of his private life that he was an almost fanatical fly fisherman, and any further discussion was out of bounds.

Also, he readily admitted that a hero of his was Sparse Grey Hackle, the pen name for writer Alfred W. Miller, who was well known for writing often humorous articles about the sport and its history.

When Alfred W. Miller died, Charles took his death hard. He fervently avoided any publicity about himself when he traveled on the bus, and cameramandriver Izzy recalled, “It was a dark day around here when old Sparse Grey died, especially when reporters showed up to get some kind of reaction from Charles.

He waved them off, told them he wasn’t part of the story and that they’d be much better off finding a real story to report on.”

“I have learned a lot about human behavior on trout streams,” Charles once wrote. “I’ve discovered that patience serves better than haste, that silence is its own reward, and that I, at least, like to fish alone; trout fishing should not become a contest.”

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Our best storyteller in Kuralt’s last years was The New York Times Book Review Editor John Leonard. When he was auditioning to become our television critic, I worked on the script with him and suggested it was too dense for the TV viewer, and perhaps he could take out every other metaphor. Steam came out of his ears, and then he smiled in that Irish way of his and returned serve, “Okay, Bud, but just so they don’t go to waste, look for them with your morning coffee anytime soon.” And he was not kidding. He had found a new venue for his erudition, and Kuralt welcomed his company. Here is a shining example of his work: “As a very young man, I volunteered to teach in a church in the craters of a bombed-out inner-city ghetto, in a classroom full of children who had been discarded by the public school system, crumpled up, and thrown away. It’s an idea as old as the Republic: you can’t afford to waste a single child. It’s an idea that animated the lovely novel Christy back in 1967, and out of that novel, they’ve made a television series. Christy is an idealistic 19-year-old who leaves genteel Asheville, North Carolina, in 1912 to teach in a missionary school in the Appalachian Mountains. And out of moonshine, history lessons, bagpipes, cartwheels, cabinet-making, and an ax, we make the music of the Republic.”

It had been a great ride — the perfect cadence of Kuralt’s delivery, Cronkite’s command of the anchor chair, Broun’s Byronic gallops — Charles, Walter, and Woodie, what a trifecta! And let’s not forget Roger Welsch, Robert Lipsyte, Richard Threlkeld, and all those other wordsmiths. Those tech guys that made us look good used to kid me that most of the time wasn’t the job “just trafficking in human misery?” I was one of the fortunate ones who could say, “Not on my watch, anyway.”

We informed, but we never went for the cheap shot or the hype. Actually, “Eyewitless News” has been around for almost half a century beginning when Mike Wallace jammed his 60 Minutes jaw inside a San Francisco TV station to report on this local news phenomenon. I will never forget how Mike showed the station promoting its upcoming newscast. There was a picture of a train station with these words, “Penis found on railroad tracks — film at eleven.” It was only the beginning.

Cronkite had acquired the unspoken newsroom title of “Old Ironpants” for his ability to sit through hours of breaking news coverage without flinching. He was a reporter’s reporter, relentless when he got within striking distance of a good story — they were called “Walter Wants.” When he lost access to his audience, he bemoaned the fact that journalism, as he knew it, would probably not survive. I found this quote: “All of us in those early years felt that we were establishing a set of standards that would be observed, or at least have an influence on, generations 235

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of news professionals to come.”

Woodie was 83 when he died just a few days before 9/11. He was slight of build, but everything else about him was huge: his humor, his knowledge, his wisdom, and his friendship.

He was a walking thesaurus whose dictionary had no bounds. We began as a rookie television producer and an unemployed character actor renowned for his portrayal of bank clerks and cemetery plot salesmen and, together, created a new form of television — the literate sports essay. He delighted in portraying himself as a Walter Cronkite on his boat sailing 19th-century figure who liked his toothpaste the Waters of the World; Budlam Productions Archive from Sweden, his cologne from Britain, and his whiskey from Ireland, “soda, no ice.”

One reviewer wrote, “Were a time machine available, Heywood Hale Broun would most likely settle for an old London men’s club where he could eavesdrop on the latest sporting gossip and grouse over the quality of the port.”

When the Joseph coats became Woodie’s uniform, we would stop at a Boston bargain store called Filene’s Basement, where the salesman always had multicolored creations put aside for him. The frugality came from a Scottish heritage he always proudly talked about. Later, he had the coats tailor-made in a more refined madras.

Awiderangeofathletes,includingDiMaggio and Nicklaus and Ali, opened their human sides to his conversational questioning. And if only Secretariat could talk, he would be chagrined at not being included in that select circle. Woodie’s best obituary headline belonged to The New York Times: “The Sports Commentator that Put Some Spin on the Ball.” From Penny Chenery Tweedy, the owner of Secretariat: “He was as elegant as a Shakespearean scholar, as flowery as a poet and as precise as a race chart caller. Woodie Broun with his dog, Budlam Productions Archive He used wondrous language and created spellbinding images.”

Jack Whitaker, his partner on the Triple Crown telecasts, wrote, “He had the authentic fan’s enthusiasm for the games and the players, but he also had an unerring talent for spotting the sham and the hype. Every sportswriter and 236

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sportscaster should have burned in his mind Woodie’s observation that ‘sport doesn’t build character, it reveals it.’”

I offered this at his memorial service: “He was a true man of letters with a pen metaphorical, With a grasp of humanity of all things historical.

He borrowed from Lord Byron, Dumas, and Trollop, You might call my style, he said, a Byronic gallop.

They’ve taken our wordsmith away.”

But my lasting image of the man himself, etched in stone in my memory bank, are Woodie’s words you have read before but bear repeating, “You know, I never won any prizes. Fame is fleeting, but immortality is immortality. You take it the way you can get it.”

And during August 2023 ceremonies at the Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga, “the patron saint of racing” will finally win that elusive prize, his enshrinement alongside Secretariat and Penny Tweedy and Jack Whitaker and all the other horses and racing giants “in the sky.”

If I was allowed a Kuralt do-over, it would be in the area of office politics, in that he failed to challenge the “hard news” bosses when they axed his most creative producers and on-air talent. I remember seeing the quote, “Kuralt is more interested in wisteria than hysteria.” There was a certain vulnerability about him, and he used that great voice to project a genuine sense of decency.

He also liked his martinis straight up, well shaken and cold, with a dividend poured over a whiskey glass of ice. If you had dinner with him and his wife Petie in his favorite spot, the Beatrice Inn in Greenwich Village, within walking distance of his townhouse on Bank Street, that’s what came to his table when you arrived. Aldo, the proprietor, was an Italian submarine captain who surrendered to the Swedes during WWII. Swedish maidens sure as hell beat Allied torpedoes, or, at least, that’s the story Charles told.

Charles had a fierce ally in Cronkite, who placed Kuralt on a special pedestal that few others reached. In an interview in New York Magazine after his death, Walter explained, “Traveling the backroads where he was out of the public glare, Kuralt was devoted to trying to bring to the American people their own strengths. He was disappointed when CBS News publicity photo of Charles Kuralt on Sunday Morning set

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he stepped down, not just with CBS News, but with the whole trend in news generally. Today, it’s hard to find the news. Everyone’s trying to write feature stories. Everyone wants to be O. Henry, but you know very few are.”

Despite all of his perceived avuncularity, Charles was a very competitive person, and not just in his writing. In his CBS Radio series Dateline America, he spoke of the peculiar nature of success in America. “Losing has been much on my mind lately. My basketball team, the University of North Carolina, lost the national championship. A television enterprise I am involved in has been losing in the ratings. A loser is the worst thing you can be in America. We are a country of winners, which is what made the Vietnam War so hard to take. But while North Carolina’s defeat was agonizing at the time, I liked the way they lost, struggling down to the final buzzer, then shaking hands with the winners, standing up straight and applauding as the other guys got the trophy.”

Even when he retired from CBS, hoping for obscurity, the intelligentsia that remained in broadcasting tried to keep his name alive. On Late Night with David Letterman, Dave picked out his “Top Ten” ways Charles Kuralt would spend his retirement. I cherry-picked three: “Watering and trimming Andy Rooney’s eyebrows…

Start up RV...sit in driveway...drink beer…repeat…

Cruisin’ for babes with Walter Cronkite.”

And there was this from Tom Shales of The Washington Post, “He was a reporter who became his beat, a specialist who invented his own specialty.

Eventually, he didn’t merely practice good journalism but came to personify it.

He was the guy who stopped to notice the meadowlark singing or the wildflowers blooming or the wheat waving while the rest of us just kept whizzing by.”

There haven’t been many media sightings of the Kuralt name in the ensuing years, but when there is one, it sometimes arrives with a bang. Take this mention out of the blue in The New York Times by Richard Sandomir when John Madden, the football broadcaster extraordinaire, died. “He crashed through our TV sets as no sportscaster had,” wrote Sandomir, “and transformed his craft to such an extent that he had no true imitators.” Had no true imitators, I thought, and then came the punch line. “Fans knew that they might see him and chat him up – he was, after all, the pigskin Charles Kuralt.”

At the outset of this memoir, I promised to give a last hurrah to the special electronic wordsmiths who accompanied my journey through the 20th century.

Although their contributions to the American storyboard seem endless, I am still fearful that some of them might one day be forgotten. For the new century’s denizens, Walter Cronkite is a name perhaps associated now with the introduction of the PBS NewsHour, “brought to you by the Walter Cronkite School of 238

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Journalism at Arizona State University.” He is buried near his birthplace of St. Joseph, Missouri. You can see him in living color on “The Paley Center for Media” website. It seems hardly enough for a television giant.

In addition to his coming enshrinement in the Saratoga National Museum of Racing, Woodie Broun will only be remembered by a small flat stone in the Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, New York. He was a metaphorical giant, and the Woodstock historians should ensure he has a place in their town forever.

Roger Welsch deeded his tree farm to the original Native American tribes of Nebraska, and they have buried 2000 of their ancestors there in what Roger told me “was one of the best things I have done with my entire life.” Roger was a giant of American folklore. The Nebraska State Historical Society needs to remember that, too.

Charles Kuralt is buried in a centuriesold cemetery at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There is an office on campus filled with his memorabilia and a collection of his papers in their library.

Charles was the gentle giant. It was fitting that all those broadcasters went home to small-town America, where their greatest admirers lived.

Kuralt used to say his favorite On the Roger Welsch; Courtesy Linda Welsch Road was about the Chandler family in rural Photos, Budlam Productions Archive Mississippi, who had nine children who grew up in a sharecropper’s cabin next to the cotton fields where most of them worked. Alex and Mary Chandler were Black fieldhands who were hell-bent on sending their children to college. As Charles told it, “When the first one was ready, they hitched up a wagon to a mule and rode to town with five dollars for bus fare because that’s all they had.”

Eventually, all nine of them earned college degrees. One of them did their graduate work at Yale, and another became a department chairman at Howard University. Those who graduated helped those who came behind them. Charles discovered them when they all came home to a new house they had built for their parent’s fiftieth anniversary.

“This Thanksgiving weekend, they all returned, from every corner of America,” Charles wrote, “to much cheering and much hugging. It brought back memories to Alex Chandler of all those years of sharecropping and going hungry and of working for a white man for fifty cents a day and worrying about his children’s future. His family started with as near nothing as any American family ever did. There are probably no lessons in all of this, but I know that in 239

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the future, whenever I hear the family is a dying institution, I’ll think of them.

Whenever I hear that anything in America is impossible, I’ll think of them.”

Charles was an inveterate cigarette smoker with a bad heart and that surely contributed to his early death at age 62. His private life was kind of a mess, too, due to the adopted family out in Montana, which undoubtedly caused a lot of stress and some embarrassing headlines, but not until after he died. However, in his totality, like all those who are held to a higher standard, he was above the clouds. It was ironic that he died on the Fourth of July; his kind of patriotism was one he shared with his father, looking for the grace notes that defined their America and the Burma Shave signs where it all began.

On his very first broadcast in 1979, he had promised our viewers, “Most of us around here used to work on newspapers, but we are a television program after all, that’s a little more leisurely and experimental than most, we hope, but a news broadcast after all. And we are going to choose our words as carefully as our pictures.”

On his last Sunday Morning, April 3, 1994, he approached his final nature closer this way: “We will leave you this morning at Tule Lake on the CaliforniaOregon border. Every dawn of every spring, the sky above Tule Lake is made joyous by the sight of snow geese flying north. My heart goes where the wild goose goes.”

When the last goose disappeared, Charles looked into the camera and said, “Time for us to part, you and I. Saying goodbye to the viewers of Sunday Morning is like saying goodbye to old friends. That’s the way I feel. Thank you for making me feel that way.”

Then he chose a rhyme by Clarence Day, an early 20th-century author, for his final salute: “Farewell, my friends, farewell and hail; I cannot tell you why; I’m off to seek the Holy Grail; Remember, please, when I am gone, ’Twas aspiration led me on; Tiddly-widdly-toodle-oo, All I want is to stay with you, But, here I go, goodbye.”

Gabriel had blown his horn. A last hurrah was sounded by our maestro in a perfect baritone, with a measured cadence and a message to ponder. The grand experiment had lost its voice, but there is a contracting small band of brothers and sisters who still savor every last moment.

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