More than anyone or anything else, Walter Cronkite is why I am in this business. Sure, as a kid I was already a “news junkie.”  

I think I’m one of the few ten year olds who watched gavel-to-gavel (and it was in those days) TV coverage of political conventions.   

But it was Walter Cronkite who personified everything that was exciting, important, dramatic, and enthralling about covering the news. Behind an anchor desk or in the field.  

And that, just maybe, you could make a difference doing it.

It’s ironic that his passing comes near the 40^thanniversary of man’s first walk on the moon. Because it was Cronkite’s  excitement about space travel (shared by me) which I so loved.   

I followed every space shot, closely watching Cronkite play with his model space capsules (and I might have done my own make-believe anchoring on the side!). 

He was “Uncle Walter” around our house.  Actually, my brother and I had our own nickname for him : “The Cronk” (I don’t know whether he would have liked that!).

No Huntley/Brinkley at the Palkot home.   It was “The Cronk” every night.   First in 15 minute form. Then a half hour.   Then, gosh, in color. Along with dinner. 

His announcements of the stock market figures each night told us whether we were rich or poor. Maybe, he’d have a funny story at the end of the show.  If you were really lucky you could see him pull out his pipe behind the closing credits.

As many others have noted, he was the one that helped all of us through a lot of trouble.    No worse than the John Kennedy assassination.    The TV (and Cronkite) was on constantly during that terrible long weekend in November 1963.   Kind of…like “rolling news” today. 

I remember him getting angry on air when security guards roughed up Dan Rather on the floor of the Democratic convention in 1968.   I got angry too.
 
And another moment from 40 years ago, I remember him bemusedly leading his show the Monday after Woodstock weekend with a story about a strange gathering of young people and rock musicians in upstate New York.   That made it news.

I remember the other really cool shows he did.   The moving CBS Reports documentaries.  Including one that sticks in my mind on an anniversary of D-Day.  He rode a jeep with Dwight Eisenhower describing the brave and deadly battles on those Normandy beaches.  Years later, I’d report from those same beaches.

There was his serious Sunday evening show, “The 20^th Century.” (His follow-up technology show, “The 21^st Century,” never really made it!)

But my favorite was  “You Are There,” where they recreated historic news events and Cronkite pretended to report them “live.”   For some reason, I always recall the Pearl Harbor episode, with him on a patio, with a scared young couple,  describing Japanese fighter planes swooping in low and dropping bombs.

I remember the slights against him.   When CBS political convention coverage ratings were low one year they yanked him for a Roger Mudd and Robert Trout anchoring team (I think they thought Mudd/Trout had a nice ring to it).   It failed.

And the greatest injustice, replacing him with Dan Rather early, before his retirement age, with several more good anchoring years left in him.   CBS News ratings slipped.

Which brings me to my own “in-person” memories of Walter Cronkite.   My first job in this business was as a Desk Assistant for CBS News in New York when he was still Anchor.  I was so in awe of the man I never gathered up the courage to tell him how much he meant to me. I wish I had. But it was great being around him. 

I’ll always remember sharing an elevator ride with him once. During which he told in great detail a story to a colleague about covering a story on an aircraft carrier and having to relieve himself off the side of the ship.    How cool was that?

In later years when I was anchoring my own show aired on PBS, I would think in my own very small way I was carrying on a big tradition carved in stone…and a flickering black and white image … by Walter Cronkite himself.   

I never attempted to sum up my broadcasts, though, as no other anchor ever really has, with as fitting and proper a closer as he delivered every night.

When he pronounced “And that’s the way it is,” you really believed him.   And you could go to sleep soundly, knowing that everything was, more or less, OK, in that simpler, but still sometimes scary, world. 

Thank you, Walter.  You will be missed.