The End Of The Road
ON A BITTER JANUARY MORNING in 1974, Charles Kuralt and his CBS crew were setting up on a remote hilltop west of Dubuque, Iowa. They were there to do an ""On the Road'' segment on farmer Bill Bodisch, who hoped to sail his 58-foot homemade yacht around the world. While the three crew members arranged their equipment, Kuralt, stirring his coffee with a butcher knife, traded yarns with Bodisch. ""Y'know, you really can't find a hick town anymore,'' said Kuralt, who was then 39 - and not at all happy that American places were becoming less distinct. ""People see television, and they read good newspapers,'' he told Bodisch. ""Once, when Harry Reasoner was still with CBS, we traveled to his old Iowa home at Humboldt. We thought the people would want to talk about hogs. Instead they wanted to talk about the European Common Market, which we didn't know anything about.''
Kuralt, who died of heart failure on July 4 at the age of 62, could always find the stories about the hogs - or the singing mailmen or the 93-year-old brickmaker. Driving around America in a beat-up motor home, he could not only discover but also celebrate the oddities, the piercing truths hidden in an otherwise prosaic yarn from somewhere up the dirt road. In an era of journalistic cynicism run amok, Kuralt had an even rarer gift - a genuine interest in the people he profiled. He spoke about them, even the kookiest, with reverence and without the slightest sense of condescension. His view was that he was enriched, not diminished, by dealing with everyday people.
Kuralt got his ""On the Road'' ideas from viewers, or he found the stories himself, from snippets buried in country papers or in conversations over coffee. He used to marvel that often he produced stories that even the smallest local papers hadn't bothered to write. He would devote enormous time to these ""little'' stories. He once spent five days working on a five-minute story about a high-school basketball team that had lost 127 straight games. ""I really don't know anything about anything,'' he insisted with typical self-deprecation. ""But I've picked up lots of little bits of knowledge.''
His greatest fear was that CBS would order him back to covering bread-and-butter news stories. At 25 he had become CBS's youngest correspondent ever. He covered the Vietnam War and 23 Latin American countries, assignments most hard-nosed reporters yearn for. But not Kuralt, who grew weary over war and riots and tinhorn controversies that in the end, he felt, didn't matter very much. ""Wishing to escape hawks, doves, gurus and acid rock, I took to the road,'' he said.
Kuralt stayed there from 1967 to 1980, traveling through all 50 states. In 1979 he also began anchoring CBS's leisurely paced Sunday-morning news magazine - a show created around his poetic storytelling and curiosity. He retired in 1994. If today's TV news shouts, Kuralt remained calm and civilized, reminding us that the planet would survive another day.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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