| Subject: Charles Kuralt, 62, Is Dead; Chronicler of the Country |
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July 4, 1997
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Date Posted: Wednesday, July 04, 2012, 10:57:48pm
Charles Kuralt, the CBS newsman who turned basic curiosity into a prize-winning journalistic ethos as he ranged across the country to interview the overlooked and explore the underappreciated, died yesterday at New York Hospital. He was 62.
The cause of death was heart failure, said Shirley Lentz, a spokeswoman for the family. She said that Mr. Kuralt had recently been found to have lupus but that it had not contributed to his death.
Mr. Kuralt, who at 25 became the youngest CBS correspondent ever, covered the Vietnam War and reported from 23 Latin American countries. He was the anchor on the weekly show ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and was the host for many special broadcasts and documentaries during his 37 years with the network.
His work won three Peabody Awards and 12 Emmys. He also wrote more than half a dozen books, including ''Dateline America'' and most recently ''The Perfect Year,'' an account of 12 months in his 12 favorite spots in the United States.
But it was as the humbly inquisitive, idiosyncratically investigative host of his ''On the Road'' reports that Mr. Kuralt earned his lasting reputation. From 1967 to 1980, he traveled through the 50 states, mostly in an inelegant but durable motor home, and produced big-hearted essays on topics others thought tiny. He reported on horse-traders and a 93-year-old brickmaker, on the wonders of nature and the nature of other wonders, like the sharecropper in Mississippi who put nine children through college or the 103-year-old entertainer who performed at nursing homes.
Howard Stringer, the former president of CBS, who worked for years with Mr. Kuralt, said of him, ''He achieved a texture in news television not seen before, a blending of pictures and words that illuminated the country in a remarkable way.'' Commenting on Mr. Kuralt's death on the Fourth of July, he said, ''An inappropriate death on a most appropriate day, and I think it would have given Charles a delicious sense of completion.''
Charles Bishop Kuralt was born on Sept. 10, 1934, in Wilmington, N.C. The son of a teacher and a social worker, Mr. Kuralt, at age 14, broadcast minor-league baseball games and became the host of his own music program. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of North Carolina, where he edited the student newspaper.
In a 1996 interview, Mr. Kuralt said his father had first instructed him in the skill of meaningful, everyday observation.
''I don't know, I have always had the travel itch,'' he said. ''When I was a little boy, my father was a social worker in North Carolina, working for the state. He used to baby-sit me by taking me on his supervisory trips to one county seat after another. And I looked forward to those trips. God, I loved it. And he would tell me little bits of history, try to interest me in what was passing by down there in eastern North Carolina. Maybe that's where it began.''
Mr. Kuralt, who lived in New York City, is survived by his wife, Susan; two daughters, Lisa Bowers White of Winnetka, Ill., and Susan Bowers of New York City; a brother, Wallace Kuralt of Chapel Hill, N.C.; a sister, Catherine Harris of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and two grandsons.
Mr. Kuralt, whose first job was as a reporter and columnist with The Charlotte News in North Carolina, joined CBS as a news writer in 1957 and was named a correspondent in 1959. Don Hewitt, the executive producer of ''60 Minutes,'' said he hired Mr. Kuralt because of his writing talents. ''I saw him sit down at a typewriter, and copy flowed out of it that was unique,'' Mr. Hewitt said. ''He had a reverence for words rare in an industry obsessed with pictures. But television news, like any other, is and will always be about telling stories and not about showing pictures.''
After being the first host of the 1960 prime-time broadcast ''Eyewitness'' (he was promoted over Walter Cronkite) Mr. Kuralt went on to report from Africa and Latin America. And he went to Vietnam four times during the war. In one 1965 broadcast, he took the television camera to the front lines.
''We thought you might be interested to know what it was like along these 300 yards of front line near the Iron Triangle,'' he reported. ''The enemy is right there, down this line of rubber trees where the jungle begins. And here, facing the enemy, is the Third Platoon, A Company, Second Battalion of the Second Infantry. This is the week of Christmas in Vietnam. If you are the kind who prays, you might pray that these other brave men all leave this terrible place safely.''
Eventually Mr. Kuralt tired of the grimness of what he was reporting, in Vietnam and across a divided United States. He said he was ''weary of covering both the war and the peace marches,'' and added, ''Wishing to escape hawks, doves, gurus and acid rock, I took to the road.''
There, he found his full voice, one deepened and enriched by sharp reporting, an open mind, an appetite for surprise and a nose for ignored worth. He once compiled his list of America's best: its best slingshot artist, its best beanshooter (Rufus Hussey of Seagrove, N.C.), its best holder of hens' eggs, its best runner at the age of 104 (Larry Louis of San Francisco).
Mr. Kuralt liked to play down the significance of it all. ''I have resolutely pursued irrelevance out there on the back roads,'' he said once. Clearly, though, he believed otherwise. Of his report on the sharecropper with the nine college graduates for children, he said: ''There are probably no lessons in any of this. But I know that in the future, whenever I hear that the family is a dying institution, I'll think of them.''
''The simplest thing was put under his microscope, and it became something beautiful, hopeful, encouraging,'' said Isadore Bleckman, who was Mr. Kuralt's cameraman for 15 years. ''He gave a depth to my pictures that I could not have got otherwise, with color or anything else. I could have shot them on toilet paper, and he would have given them truth.''
Mr. Kuralt had myriad assignments and roles at CBS. In 1980 and 1981 he was the anchor on the weekday morning show ''Morning With Charles Kuralt.'' He filed reports from China during the democracy movement in 1989. In 1992 he was an anchor on the ''America Tonight,'' meant to rival ABC's ''Nightline.''
In 1994, however, Mr. Kuralt retired from CBS, giving up his position as the anchor of ''Sunday Morning,'' a show he had used to report widely on music, painting, sculpture and architecture. He then spent a year, as he put it, with a ''notebook in my hip pocket,'' traveling to his dozen best-loved locales. The product was his final book, ''The Perfect Year.''
This year, Mr. Kuralt returned to television as the host of a syndicated show, ''An American Moment,'' 90-second spots three times a week that looked at unexamined America. He also was the host of a CBS cable show called ''I Remember.''
''My brother tended to believe in people and things until they proved otherwise,'' said Wallace Kuralt, who runs a bookstore in Chapel Hill. ''That was his approach to anyone and to America.''
For all of his travels and conversations, Mr. Kuralt, according to colleagues and friends, was in certain ways a loner. His restlessness kept him moving and in ways remote. Indeed, in his book, ''A Life on the Road,'' he tried to put his finger on himself.
''I didn't want a place to live,'' he wrote. ''I had nothing to do there. I didn't want days off. I had no way to fill empty days. All I wanted was stories, the wilder the better.''
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