A Toast for Kuralt and One for the Road

Every kid in Belmont, N.C. , seems to be riding a bike, and that’s the story I want to tell you next. The one thing kids want, and parents want to be able to give them, is a bike. But here in this little town, as elsewhere, there are parents who just can’t afford to do it. It hurt Jethro Mann to see kids growing up without bikes. See, he grew up without a bike.

Thus did Charles Kuralt introduce “The Bicycle Man,” his memorable television profile of a kindly old fellow who maintained a “lending library” of 35 bicycles, all of them throwaways that he salvaged himself and made available to any kid who wanted one. They signed them out, then signed them in the same evening. With a dog barking in the background, Kuralt ended his story this way:

“Good night, Mr. Mann.”

Like so many of Kuralt’s signature “On the Road” pieces, this one hovered in your thoughts as television rarely does, a bright orb of honest sentimentality that radiated hope and warmth while almost moving you to tears. How invigorating--a few minutes that choked you up instead of making you choke.

Kuralt spent two decades being television’s Norman Rockwell. He and his crew were all over the U.S. map, becoming a prototype for all the junior Charlies who sprang up like weed patches at local stations everywhere in the ‘70s and early ‘80s--reporters assigned to unearth the Americana in their own back yards the way one digs up some soil and discovers the fascinating insect life teeming just below the top layer.

They were mostly less-talented, soft-news copycats, the human pet rocks and Hula-Hoops who were destined to vanish like fads when their bosses got bored with them and turned to techno toys and other journalistic gimmicks. Yet Kuralt endured, remaining a road warrior on “The CBS Evening News” until 1987 while also anchoring “CBS News Sunday Morning” since its inception in 1979 and hosting one of the many CBS News morning show experiments in 1980-81.

When he retires from CBS News at age 59 after Sunday morning’s telecast, he’ll pass the “On the Road” torch to . . . to . . . well, no one.

In an era when news on television increasingly consists of everything gory and gossipy that’s fit to articulate in nine seconds, and when thoughtfulness is confined to fine print, an eloquent calligrapher like Kuralt is tragically out of place and archaic in a traditional newscast, a medieval scribe in the wrong century.

From Eric Sevareid to Bill Moyers, there have been many capable writers in television news and documentaries through the years. Still on my wall is a quote from a script by Marshall Frady for a 1985 ABC News program on the possibility of nuclear holocaust, because it captured for me the essence of despair and the utter desolation facing a globe whose superpowers had whipped themselves into an arms-race frenzy. John Leonard’s media criticism continues to flourish on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” and let’s also be thankful for Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Rodriguez and some of the other regulars who contribute sparkling essays to “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS.

Yet no one in television has had Kuralt’s talent for word-and-picture coordination, his gift not only for meticulously crafting and delivering exquisitely simple, minimalist narrations, but also for applying these words to pictures in ways that recall the shapes-and-colors perfection of a Matisse. Everything just fit.

You think of Walter Misenheimer’s garden, “a paradise, a beautiful garden of 13 acres, bright with azaleas, thousands of them, and bordered by dogwoods in bloom, and laced by a mile of paths in the shade of tall pines.” And the old prospector who staked out his mine in 1962, proving to Kuralt that “the dream of gold dies hard. There are a few old dreamers who haven’t quite given up, living in a few old towns that haven’t quite fallen down. I’m in one now. It has a name, but we cannot tell you what it is. We promised not to.”

You remember 89-year-old Ansel Toney, who “turned to a pleasure of his boyhood: flying kites.” And Arkansas dirt farmer Eddie Lovett, whose library--a lifetime accumulation of thousands of books--”transformed the unlettered son of a sharecropper into an educated man.” And of course, the Thanksgiving reunion of the Chandler family of Prairie, Miss., where nine offspring of a sharecropper couple had risen from the cotton fields to become college-trained teachers and academics and were now returning home to celebrate their parents’ 50th anniversary.

In the future, Kuralt said, when he hears that the family is a dying institution, “I’ll think of them. Whenever I hear anything in America is impossible, I’ll think of them.”

So rich were Kuralt’s “On the Road” pieces, so infused with feeling and eye-misting poignancy, that watching the occasional CBS specials that gathered bunches of them in a single hour was almost too much to digest. It was like tripping out on chocolate fudge. Better to experience and savor them separately.

There is no indication at all that Kuralt was forcibly evicted from CBS. He says he’s leaving to write a book and to try new ventures. Nonetheless, his departure is a powerful metaphor. These are not happy times for old guards in television news. The faces are ever younger, the resumes ever shorter and, correspondingly, the payrolls on regular newscasts ever smaller, give or take a few multimillion-dollar superstars.

Age and experience are unfashionable. On April 18, former CBS News correspondent John Sheahan’s age-discrimination suit against the network is scheduled to go to trial in New York. Sheahan claims he was unjustly fired in 1991 at age 53, after a 23-year career with CBS, during which he won numerous awards and was the network’s bureau chief in Warsaw from 1983-85 and in Beijing for six years after that.

In a letter to The Times from his home in Germany, Sheahan says his witness list includes eight former on-air colleagues “who will testify that they, too, were fired or forced to retire because of age.” He asks: “How many of us over 50 does CBS News have left?”

After Sunday, one less.

Just as it hurt Jethro Mann to see kids growing up without bikes, it hurts to see CBS News growing older without the man behind “The Bird Lady,” “The Singing Mailman,” “The Canoe Maker,” “The Prospector,” “The Gumball King,” “The Kite Flyer,” “The Balloon Man,” “The Toy Fixing Man” and “The Bicycle Man.” You think about the stories he would want to tell you next.

Good night, Mr. Kuralt.