Kuralt: The Road Well Traveled

Charles Kuralt was the Norman Rockwell of television.

So even aliens buzzing Roswell, N.M., will appreciate the timing of his death, coming early Friday morning as the sun was rising on the Fourth of July.

Kuralt’s work, more than any journalist’s within memory, embodied the spirit of America at its best--good values, love of country, pride in diversity. And things and people easily overlooked. How Kuralt loved those.

He would have fit perfectly in “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s play examining the minutiae and passages of life in a New England hamlet where nothing much happened. And everything happened.

Kuralt was a master at turning up patches of soil and observing the teeming life underneath that most of his colleagues seemed not to notice. If Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” had been a real banker in a real town, Kuralt and his TV crew would have been the first to find him. And Kuralt, ever the craftsman with words, would have written something memorable that captured and celebrated George’s goodness of heart. And hearing those words roll from Kuralt’s mellow, emotional baritone, we would all choke up, just a little.

It’s impossible not to get maudlin when recalling Kuralt, who died of lupus in New York City at the age of 62, but it’s his own damned fault. For most of his 36 years at CBS--including 15 years anchoring “CBS This Morning” and his multitude of “On the Road” pieces that were his big, bold signature on “The CBS Evening News”--he was America’s official lump in the throat. Unlike his many imitators, he walked a perilous high wire of sentimentality without hardly ever toppling into the corn. How others did try to be just like him, though.

Blame Kuralt for all the Kuralt clones, the epic popularity of his “on the road” stories motivating local stations throughout the United States to create junior Kuralts for their own newscasts in the 1970s and ‘80s. Nearly all were hapless wannabes whose forages in the boonies for cute features yielded charmless cliches and bad Kuraltspeak that fell well short of the original franchise they hoped to copy.

More than just distinctive, Kuralt’s work was unique for his time, at once poetic and emotionally integrated into the subjects he introduced to viewers. You think of him again traveling Gordon Bushnell’s highway in Wright, Minn., or smiling with moonshining poets in Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee, or listening awe-struck to 80-year-old aviatrix Edna Gardner in Roanoke, Texas. You see him with the gnarled canoe-maker of Minnesota’s North Woods or visiting the New Lexington, Ohio, grave of “The Liberator of Bulgaria,” and hear him in Belmont, N.C., toasting the great humanity of elderly Jethro Mann, who fixed broken bicycles and turned them into a “lending library” for the town’s kids who couldn’t afford their own.

The piece ended simply, with dogs barking, children saying good night to their benefactor and going home as day faded to darkness and Kuralt added: “Good night, Mr. Mann.”

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Although his gentle style was perfect for rural rhythms, Kuralt was no hayseed. Drawn to stories in America’s villages, the one he lived in was New York’s Greenwich Village. He reported from urban centers, too. And he could be as eloquent in killing fields as in wheat fields, witness his Christmas report from thick jungle foliage in Vietnam (“The enemy is right there . . .”).

Was Kuralt really only 62? Not 80 or 85? Get outta here. How can that be when his imprint remains so deep and enduring, as if he had shipped in the Pilgrims? Yet, clearly, when he left CBS News three years ago, he was already a pudgy curiosity in an era of news-gathering that values animosity much more than civility. It’s that absence of civility, more than anything, that his own absence symbolizes the most.

One year, he traveled to Charlottesville, Va., for an Independence Day piece that monitored a day at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home with some of this nation’s newest citizens.

“How did you spend the Fourth of July?” Kuralt asked viewers. “Patricia Lam will remember how she spent it, and Zakia Noorani, and Rosito Abelera, and Ronnie Wheeler, and Frances Chow. They came up the hill to Mr. Jefferson’s house, Korean, Kenyan, Filipino, German and Chinese, but they’re Yankee Doodle Dandies now, real-live nephews of their Uncle Sam, reborn on the Fourth of July.”

Here’s to you, Charles Kuralt, the last of television’s Yankee Doodle Dandies. And good night.