Cronkite
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Everyday life got extremely tense in the Cronkite household in 1930. In general, Houston was a good place to weather the stormy economy, but not for the Cronkites. As Cronkite told Dan Carleton in an interview for the Archive of American Television in 1998, “Dad ran out of cash.” Bills were left unpaid, piggy banks were emptied for loose grocery change. The cupboards were bare. Pitifully, Helen was forced to cook up a can of Ken-L Ration for dinner one evening; so much for Hoover’s chicken in every pot. (Helen denied this happened, but her son insisted.) “We had actually run out of food,” Walter recalled. “Thank goodness we didn’t have to dine on dog food for long.” The pressure on Dr. Cronkite was so unbearable he turned even harder to drink.
In 1932, Helen Cronkite, then thirty-nine years old, filed for divorce. When a broken-down Dr. Cronkite moved back to St. Joseph to reopen his practice, Helen and Walter stayed in Houston. It wasn’t easy being a single parent. The alimony checks seldom came. Much like Ronald Reagan, who also had an alcoholic father, Cronkite bottled up his emotions about his dad. To his credit, he learned to be stoic about his parental abandonment—dad had done the best he could. And instead of finding dark clouds of pain in his childhood, he purposely remembered only the silver linings.
Even after his father left for Kansas City, Cronkite remained a good kid without any glint of rebellion. His mother instilled tolerance and liberalism in him. She also made him go to church most Sundays. When asked as a CBS News anchorman about his Christian upbringing, Cronkite explained that he had a “Presbyterian-Lutheran kind of Calvinist background.” (As an adult, he became a token Episcopalian.) As a single mother, Helen doted on Walter. She established strict curfew hours. She grounded him for misdemeanors. Cronkite told a Parade magazine interviewer in 1981 that he once persuaded a Houston pharmacist to allow him to purchase a watch on credit. When Helen learned that her son had made a major purchase in that way, she confiscated the watch, paid the druggist a dollar for it, and kept it hidden until Walter could pay her back. “Don’t you see?” she asked him. “You don’t know how you’re going to earn the money. There’s no outright dishonesty here, but you’re flirting with it. It’s one of those gray areas, Walter. Be careful of gray—it might be grime.”
Working on The Purple Pup at Lanier had kept Cronkite out of trouble. The idea of trying to teach reporting was a relatively new one in 1929—the nation’s first journalism school had been established at the University of Missouri–Columbia in 1908. As more journalism schools opened through the 1920s, newsroom veterans debated whether a good reporter could be manufactured from classroom learning. Some said that journalism couldn’t be taught and couldn’t be studied; it was a natural bent. A former reporter in Houston, Fred Birney, strongly disagreed and set out to prove his point by teaching journalism part-time throughout the metropolitan area, including at San Jacinto High, where Cronkite had recently been named sports editor of the student paper, the Campus Cub.
Birney—in Cronkite’s memory a “wiry man” and a “bundle of energy”—taught the class to write with economy and speed when necessary and with accuracy under any circumstances. The students were enthralled by Birney’s tales from the world of print. “I had a sense,” Cronkite said of Birney, “whenever I was in his presence that he was ordering me to don my armor and buckle on my sword to ride forth in a never-ending crusade for the truth.” The metaphor might have been merely playful coming from almost anyone else, but it is obvious Birney set Cronkite’s standards for decades to come. “He was so in love with his work,” Cronkite recalled of Birney, “that he passed it on to all of us.”
Not every article printed in the Campus Cub had to be seized with armor and a sword. A typical news flash, which might be attributed to Cronkite (or “Cronky,” as he was sometimes called), covered the annual picnic for the journalism classes or a stray feline on school grounds. The Cronkite pieces in the Campus Cub don’t stand out markedly from the others, but even so he was voted by his peers as best reporter. Cronkite found that he couldn’t resist the excitement of editing the school rag. According to the 1933 San Jacinto yearbook, the Campus Cub had been able to maintain a “high standard of quality” in spite of the Great Depression, even while other high schools were forced to close shop.
Another teacher Cronkite took a shine to at San Jacinto was Sarah Gross Cory, who encouraged him to pursue a newspaper career. While Birney was a stickler for the rules, Cory saw young Walter through a more maternal and comical lens. “He was always running up and down the corridors with a little pad and pencil,” she told Parade magazine fifty years later, “looking for news items.” Besides writing for the high school paper, Cronkite joined the Houston chapter of the junior version of the Masons—the Order of DeMolay—to find fellowship. It soon followed that the Order of DeMolay of Houston had a mimeographed newspaper, edited by one “WLC”—inevitably, wherever Cronkite went, a newspaper byline would emerge.
While Cronkite was in high school in the 1930s radio became all the rage. The number of radios in use in the United States rose by two-thirds in the first half of the 1930s, to 30.5 million sets by 1935. This reflected the increasing potency of radio networks, which provided entertainment programming in the evening. The one laggard in radio was general news reporting. Although many of the most powerful stations in each city were owned by newspapers, interest in developing radio journalism was mixed. Inept in gathering and delivering straight news, radio invented what it called the news commentator: someone who would describe some current event with either style or authority or both and then editorialize lightly upon it. CBS signed the documentarian Lowell Thomas of Ohio as a news commentator–entertainer in 1932. In addition to delivering his own essays on current events, the energetic Thomas produced The March of Time, which reenacted news articles from the pages of Time magazine.
Cronkite took notice. Such live radio broadcasts gave listeners something they could not find in a newspaper: the present tense. Newspapers retaliated by joining together and insisting that wire services such as United Press and Associated Press no longer sell content to radio. The flow of wire service news to radio stopped in early 1933. Left in the lurch, stations and networks now had to gather their own news, which they were ill equipped to do. The radio broadcasting field was more crowded than that of newspapers, and like Hollywood, it demanded a certain charisma, which Cronkite tried to develop. With careful practice, he crafted a “radio voice.” In true Lowell Thomas fashion, he interviewed anyone who would stand still and speak into whatever faux microphone prop he held. When FDR delivered his first “Fireside Chat” a week after his inauguration in 1933, he sounded incandescent, as if he’d been “dipped in phosphorous,” as Lillian Gish put it. Cronkite, thinking about a career in radio for the first time, wanted to glow like FDR someday.
Continuing his apprenticeship in print, Cronkite, after his junior year, landed a summer job as “an exalted copy boy” at The Houston Post, one of the three largest dailies in the city and the one that Cronkite thought reigned supreme. His up-from-delivery duties were generally confined to running messages around the newsroom. Occasionally he was allowed to conduct research for a reporter. Darting around the desks, amid the shouts of the editors, he saw how the Post transformed a slate of random information into a neatly spaced line of fresh newspapers rolling off the presses. The urgency of the newsroom and the rush to fill the paper made him want to excel in a way that his schoolwork never did. “I wasn’t really employed there; tolerated is more like it,” Cronkite later recalled of his stint at a paper on the edge of bankruptcy. “I had discovered journalism to be my life’s ambition.”
When a little article that Cronkite wrote was published on June 29, 1932, he jumped for joy. Seeing his byline gave him an “ego-fulfilling” feeling that he had only dreamed of while selling copies of The Kansas City Star five years before. But now he had that feeling for real. “I could watch fellow passengers reading my story on the Mandellvine streetcar,” Cronkite boas
ted. He clipped the Post article out for his scrapbook; “Page 4,” he wrote. “First story.” And then, best of all: “No corrections.”
In the fall of 1932, Cronkite began his last year at San Jacinto High. He was now the editor in chief of the Campus Cub, and under his aegis the paper leaned toward the humor of Harvard University’s student-run Lampoon. It also gave in to the circulation-building habit of mentioning as many potential readers as possible, and it combined both tendencies by printing column after column of one-line witticisms. Under Cronkite’s leadership, the Campus Cub was a good but not brilliant student paper. Sometimes Cronkite wrote his articles at hangout spots such as Ye Olde College Inn, where a friend of his mother waitressed. When Birney suggested books on journalism for his students, Cronkite sought them out and read them voraciously.
So it was that he happened to be perusing Best News Stories of 1924 in the spring of 1933 as graduation approached. Whether Cronkite studied their style or simply enjoyed the stories in the book, he was unquestionably well versed in the major news of 1924 when he walked into a newswriting contest in the spring of his senior year. The contestants were to be given a random topic and a short time in which to write a story about it. When the moderator disclosed the subject of the news story in question, Cronkite had to smile. It was the sensational newspaper story of 1924: the Leopold and Loeb murder case originally published in The Chicago Daily News. Cronkite had read not only a riveting account of the trial the night before, but also the “best interview” of 1924, which was with none other than Nathan Leopold, and it really paid off. The only entrant with a plethora of just-studied facts in his brain, Cronkite won the contest easily. Luck had something to do with it, but so did diligence, a quality that remained with him as a journalism trademark. The contest taught the valuable lesson that the first rule to being a top-flight journalist is being well informed about the world at large.
Cronkite’s high school sweetheart was Cornelia “Bit” Winter, who was a year behind him at San Jacinto. Bit was an extremely popular girl. Her picture appeared in The Houston Press in October 1931: she was the recipient of an American Legion youth medal. With curled auburn hair, perfect teeth, and an actress’s flare, Bit was irresistible to Cronkite. He held on to her after school as if she were the living embodiment of a Miss America trophy. Not only did they date, but they also hatched plans to perhaps get married someday. Every dollar Cronkite earned in high school doing odd jobs went to filling up his car at the Texas Company (Texaco) station at Main and Bremond and then taking Bit out for blue-plate dinners. In Winter’s scrapbook she scrawled next to a picture of Cronkite, “Tall, very Blonde—Good Dancer . . . Good date.”
That spring, as Cronkite approached graduation from San Jacinto High—which would also count among its alumni racecar driver A. J. Foyt, heart transplant pioneer Dr. Denton Cooley, and future mayor of Houston Kathy Whitmire—he couldn’t afford to buy a Balfour class ring. It was the only time he felt pitiful. All his buddies were showing theirs off during the last week of high school, but Cronkite’s hand was bare. His mother tried to compensate by getting him a cheaper department-store ring with a black onyx stone in the middle.
Later in life, Cronkite used to joke that graduation was his favorite high school memory. Like many of the 425 graduates in San Jacinto’s class of ’33, he was desperate to cut his own swath in the world. However, Cronkite never lost touch with his high school friends, and they occupied a special place in his heart. Every five or ten years, he would return to Houston for reunions to swap stories over cocktails. Perhaps out of all the class of ’33 reunions Cronkite attended, the fortieth was the most fun. Everybody swarmed around the famous anchorman. Like all class reunions, everybody was checking out who was the baldest, heaviest, sickest, and richest, and Cronkite was targeted for a lot of the class of ’33 humor jabs; it was their job to keep his ego in its place. A special 1973 edition of the Campus Cub, in fact, lampooned Cronkite as “the only man alive who can shuffle one piece of paper.” Former assistant principal E. C. “Gumshoe” Gates held court about all the trouble Cronkite had supposedly raised. (Nobody could believe he remembered.) In reality, Cronkite had been respected in high school. “I used to see him in the hall,” recalled Fay Shoss, who was two years Cronkite’s senior. “People used to point him out as the smartest person in the school.”
The highlight of the evening, however, was when the class of ’33 gave the Credibility Gap Award to “the man Americans are most likely to buy a used car from.” The razzing continued until Cronkite, winner of the National Press Club’s very first Fourth Estate Award for outstanding contributions in both electronic and print media, took the floor for rebuttal. “There’s nothing I would like to have more,” he said, looking at his new faux gift, “except the money that went into this award.”
It was noticed at the fortieth reunion that Cronkite was one of the few class of ’33 graduates still without a proper ring. This lingering Depression-era deficit was rectified in 2004 when he narrated the PBS documentary Proud to Serve, about soldiers in the U.S. Army. Executive producer Andrew Goldberg hoped to get Balfour to sponsor the documentary because the company manufactured jewelry for the U.S. military. Reminiscing about his Houston youth one afternoon, Cronkite had told Goldberg he’d been too poor to purchase a Balfour class ring back in 1933. “It was quite moving,” Goldberg recalled. “He went on for a while about just how broke his mother had been.”
A few days later, Goldberg acted on a brainstorm: he invited a top Balfour salesperson to visit Cronkite at his CBS office in New York. Cronkite was eighty-seven years old, but he was excited to talk about the history of Balfour rings, which dated from World War I. The company, to Cronkite’s surprise, presented him with a San Jacinto class of ’33 ring, with a journalism seal on one side and the Campus Cub logo on the other. A black onyx stone was affixed in the middle, to honor Cronkite’s mother.
CHAPTER THREE
Learning a Trade
ROAD TRIP TO THE CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR—TV HAM—STRUGGLING LONGHORN—THE FAILED MINING ENGINEER—GOOD-BYE TO BIT—FREELANCING AND BOOKIE JOINTS—THE CURTAIN CLUB—SPORTS HACK WRITER—VANN KENNEDY AND THE ART OF INS MENTORING—K.C. DREAMING—THE VOICE OF KCMO—FAUX FOOTBALL—THE NATURAL CADENCE OF EDWARD R. MURROW—HIDING BEHIND WALTER WILCOX—HOT JAZZ IN K.C.—COURTING BETSY MAXWELL—FIRED FOR HONESTY
Upon graduating from San Jacinto High in May 1933, Cronkite went on a road trip in a late-model Dodge with Houston buddies to the Chicago World’s Fair (officially, “A Century of Progress International Exposition��). The fair’s motto was “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts,” and it was held on 427 acres on the Near South Side of Chicago, along Lake Michigan. While Cronkite enjoyed hearing the Andrews Sisters sing live and studied dwellings in a “Homes of Tomorrow” exhibit, it was the “See Yourself on TV” interactive display that owned his enthusiasm.
Standing stationary in front of a new-fangled contraption called television—really just a twitching little screen—Cronkite looked into the camera and mugged by playing two clarinets at once like Benny Goodman gone mad. Besides his clowning around, all that was noticeable about Cronkite on the display screen was some Texas barber’s idea of a haircut. “They were inviting people to come up and be on television,” Cronkite recalled. “Naturally, being the ham I’ve always been, I stepped up immediately.” This thirty seconds of World’s Fair camera time allowed Cronkite to comically boast that he was on the Tube long before Murrow, Brinkley, Sevareid, or anybody else.
When it came time for college, Cronkite, to the surprise of his friends in Houston, enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin for the fall semester. Most of his classmates assumed he would attend the University of Missouri at Columbia; his father had opened a dental practice in Kansas City. But Fred Birney had advised him that The Daily Texan was an amazing college newspaper. And he was officially a resident of Texas, not Missouri; this meant his UT tuition was far more affordabl
e. Cronkite’s father offered some financial support if his son went the economical UT route. The real kicker was that Bit Winter would be finishing high school in Houston. By going to UT, he could see his “darling” on weekends.
Cronkite entered the mining engineering program instead of journalism (now, to the surprise of friends, deemed an extracurricular “flirtation”). Like many Houstonians, he dreamed of huge fortunes in the oil industry. Everyone in Texas was always only a Spindletop away from shopping at Neiman Marcus. Cronkite, to his detriment, was prone to sleeping late and soon discovered that learning the intricacies of hydraulics, mineral determination, and blasting was a complex business. By October 1933 it was brutally apparent that the E = mc2 physics in Professor C. Paul Boner’s class was too complicated for Cronkite to master. In the ne’er-do-well fashion of youth, Cronkite preferred attending stadium-rattling Longhorn football games and Dixieland stomps à la the Duke Ellington Orchestra to dull science classes.
Instead of living in a dormitory, Cronkite moved into the Chi Phi fraternity house at 1704 West Avenue in Austin. It was the former home of Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisor. The editor of The Daily Texan was a Chi Phi named D. B. Hardeman. Cronkite became fast friends with him. Determined to be the big man on campus, Cronkite went to every social function imaginable, usually with Vance Muse Jr., a former classmate at San Jacinto High who now wrote a The Daily Texan column called “Musings.” In letters to his mom, Cronkite boasted of dating popular girls from the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, including Louise Rhea, “the campus big shot of Fort Worth,” whom he brought to his fraternity’s formal dance one year. Later in Cronkite’s life the humorist Art Buchwald took exception to the anchorman’s overdrawn boast of prowess with Longhorn women, claiming his friend graduated from the University of Texas a “magna cum virgin.”