‘Sunday Morning’s’ Rise and Shine

Considering how much of the world travels through it every week, and the number of people and ideas and arts its loyal viewers have met there over the years, the set of CBS’ “Sunday Morning” is a surprisingly simple thing. A carpeted, two-tiered platform riser, framed at various angles by movable plexiglass partitions bearing the day’s headlines and topics and, somewhere in its midst, an easel and a chair ... and Charles Kuralt.

On this particular Sunday morning, with New York in the early grip of the Great Freeze of ‘94, the set inside CBS’ West 57th Street studios is busier than usual. The show, launched on Jan. 28, 1979, as a “Sunday newspaper in a tube,” is about to celebrate its 15th anniversary, and many of its current cast of critics and reporters are assembling for a promotional photo.

There is Eugenia Zukerman and Billy Taylor, who have introduced so many talents in the worlds of classical music and jazz. And Bill Geist, the droll commentator who finds the most eccentric people in America and treats them as if they were absolutely ordinary. Hobbling around on an ankle twisted in an icy fall outside his Manhattan apartment is John Leonard, the media critic whom Kuralt describes as the “office intellectual.” And there’s Roger Welch, the Plains philosopher who files those “Postcards From Nebraska.”

“This is the first time these people have been in the same room together,” says Kuralt, who greets each one as if he were a proud uncle hosting a family get-together, which, to use a phrase that slips frequently from his own lips, seems about right.

“Sunday Morning” is a unique creature in the jungle of network news, a throwback of sorts to a time when words were as important as images, and when personality and point of view ranked at least as high on the list of job qualifications as hairstyle and the ability to read off a TelePrompTer.

The show has followed virtually the same format since its inception, with brief recaps of the news, weather and sports, followed by a cover story that may take eight to 10 minutes to tell and a variety of what media insiders refer to as “back-of-the-book” pieces: profiles of up-and-coming people in the arts, eloquent tributes to those who’ve been around a while, whimsical features from the hinterlands and a well-written review or two.

“It’s the last refuge of prose in television news,” says Leonard, a former New York Times columnist whose on-air style has been likened by one observer to that of “a raccoon caught in the glare of headlights.”

Leonard used to worry about his electronic presence, but no longer. His smart, wryly acerbic commentaries blend right in on a program that has written its own stylebook. After all, this is a show that for 15 years, without fail, has concluded with a two-minute visual essay on nature.

Those bucolic “end-pieces” can be anything from wheat stalks bending with the wind to gentle manatees lulling beneath the surface of a Gulf Coast pond, which is the subject of this show’s closing. And they are stretches of silence that the estimated 3 million viewers find as soothing as a mantra.

“People have suggested that we put out a video of the end-pieces,” Kuralt says. “But I think two minutes is about right.”

“‘Sunday Morning’ is more spiritual than almost anything else you see on television,” says ABC media critic Jeff Greenfield, who had Leonard’s job when the program began. “People don’t simply like the show, they worship it.”

Talk to anyone who has worked on “Sunday Morning” and they will likely tell you it is Kuralt the fans worship. They know his personality from 20 years of friendly “On the Road” stories, and his smoke-cured Carolina drawl is as comfortable as the slippers on their feet.

“People don’t ask me what it’s like being on the show,” says Zukerman, who’s been on it from the beginning. “They want to know if Charles Kuralt is really as nice as he seems.”

Kuralt blanches at any suggestion that the show is him. Sitting in a chair in the hallway outside the sound stage, chain-smoking Pall Malls and allowing the ashes to fall between his feet, he credits Shad Northshield, “Sunday Morning’s” first producer, with designing it and sending it on its way.

“Shad really did have the concept for what the show should be, and it was brilliant,” he says.

Northshield, now producing shows out of CBS’ news archives, declines the credit, too. He says then-CBS President Bill Leonard came to him in mid-1978 with the idea of installing a 90-minute news show in place of three half-hour Sunday morning programs that were not producing advertising revenue for the network or the affiliates.

“He said he wanted a show that would be the television equivalent of a Sunday newspaper,” Northshield recalls. “I jumped on that and said, ‘We can do a lot more art things,’ and he said, ‘Fine.’ ”

Looking back over the first 15 years of “Sunday Morning,” Kuralt mentions as highlights the shows devoted to Pablo Picasso and to Vladimir Horowitz’ triumphant return to Moscow, and recalls a potent essay they did on the tragedy of the violence in Northern Ireland.

“The day they buried Lord Mountbatten, who had been killed in an IRA attack in England, they also buried a Catholic kid who had been killed in a Protestant attack in Ireland,” he says. “It was a mean, cold day, a handful of mourners on a bleak hillside in Ireland, contrasting with Westminster Cathedral and the panoply of a royal funeral.

“But they said a lot of the same words. Some of the prayers were the same, some of the songs were the same. It told the story of the pain of Ireland eloquently without any words being spoken by us. It went on and on, and it just made you want to cry. That kind of story we have a chance to do.”

They also have the chance, in what Kuralt refers to as “this comparative backwater we’re in,” to do pieces like the one on the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.

“The orchestra had decided that in one season they were going to play concerts in every county in Vermont,” Kuralt says. “We sent a camera crew along for much of the trip and it was just terrific. This caravan of cars going through the snow and ice to play a concert in a high school gym somewhere. It reminded you that it’s not just the Metropolitan Museum and Lincoln Center--the arts are alive everywhere in the country.”

Kuralt, 59, still goes on the road occasionally for “Sunday Morning,” but he admits he gets tired of traveling now. He’s been on the road, and in the air, since he was 25, hosting a CBS show called “Eyewitness to History.”

“I remember going to Laos one week, then to Japan the next, and back to Vietnam, and doing the show in New York between each trip. Around the world three times in three weeks. I couldn’t do that now.”

Kuralt also spent several years as CBS’ lone Latin American correspondent, living in Rio de Janeiro but spending most of his time in such far-flung places as Peru, Cuba and Guatemala. During the ‘60s, he covered stories in the Mideast and Southeast Asia, and says he was standing on a street outside Saigon when a bullet whizzed past and killed the young Vietnamese officer he was talking to.

Such close calls and a general insecurity about his hard news-reporting skills convinced Kuralt that maybe he ought to concentrate on the kind of people story that brought him to CBS’s attention in the first place.

“I don’t have the instincts of Mike Wallace or Dan Rather,” he says. “I always kind of hated asking embarrassing questions and sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted, all the things good reporters have to do every day.”

When he began his “On the Road” series for CBS, crisscrossing the country with a camera crew and a motor home searching for stories most hard news reporters would walk past, he found them, everywhere, “endlessly rich, fascinating material, people doing amazing things.”

“To this day, I am never more than 50 miles from a cup of coffee with someone we’ve done a story on,” he says.

Kuralt doesn’t like to get too far from those stories, which is why he has former New York Times columnist Bill Geist (“one of the best feature writers I’d ever read”) scouring the country, and Roger Welch and Tim Sample filing “postcards” from small towns in Maine and Nebraska.

“Since so much of television comes from New York and Washington and Hollywood, it seems to me these are exactly the kinds of things we should be doing,” Kuralt says. “I’d like to have three or four of them on the show. I’ve always dreamed of having Molly Ivins do ‘Postcards From Texas.’ ”

If Kuralt doesn’t have the instincts of a hard news reporter--and he seems to almost stammer on those occasions when a breaking news story forces him to do live interviews--it doesn’t concern his fans. His reluctance to bore in on an interview subject, to not stick his nose in where it isn’t wanted, is part of his charm.

“The ambush interview with Kuralt,” laughs Greenfield. “No, Charles is much more in the world of E.B. White. Audiences sense that they are with a gentle spirit, absolutely.”

“I don’t have a very clear idea of our audience,” Kuralt says. “I used to think when we started it was some kind of intellectual audience, but I know it’s not. Because so many cops on the beat, or skycaps at the airport, or people I meet on the airplane say, ‘We never miss that show at our house.’

“It’s a small audience, I guess, but it’s a very grateful one.”

What the audience has to be grateful for, says Greenfield, is that here is an “oasis” in television news where, at a leisurely Sunday morning pace, “nobody is shouting at you and nobody is pontificating.”

Peter Freundlich, the show’s writer for the last eight years, was inspired to put it another way. While watching the manatee rolling laconically underwater on a monitor at the end of the show, he turned to a guest and said, “It just occurred to me, ‘Sunday Morning’ is the manatee of network news.”

Kuralt lets out a deep laugh when that is repeated to him later. “I guess that’s about right,” he says.

“Sunday Morning” airs at 7:30 a.m. on CBS.