Our State/January

The Long Journey Home

By Ralph Grizzle

In September 1994, I received a phone call. "Mr. Grizzle, it's Charles Kuralt. You probably thought I'd died . . . ."

The consummate traveler had taken several weeks to answer the messages I had left for him. I was a reporter for a trade magazine for the American Society of Travel Agents. Kuralt was to be the keynote speaker at the Society's annual conference. My job was to profile him for the upcoming event.

Kuralt said he had been "up in Montana doing some fishing." He sounded jubilant. For close to an hour, we talked about his career, his North Carolina roots and travel. "Are you a fan of the West, Ralph?" I told him I was. I said I loved its rugged beauty.

"It is gorgeous," he rumbled with delight. "I just hold my breath at the beauty. A couple of days ago, I got going just about as the sun was coming up. I was coming back from Billings, back toward western Montana. With the sun behind me, a cup of McDonald's coffee in the cup holder of the Jeep and the NPR station on the radio, somehow or other everything really seemed right with the world."

This was Charles Kuralt at his best, celebrating simplicity: the Montana landscape, the rising sun, a cup of coffee and the cool-mannered broadcast of National Public Radio. He was in no hurry. He had no hard deadlines. There was no place he had to be. Half an hour into the interview, I asked if he needed to go. "No," he said, and he meant it. "I have all the time in the world right now."

Six months earlier, Kuralt had left CBS. He had grown tired of the "chatter and commotion" of television and the burden of having to answer to an employer. Not that his employer ever knew where he was. He was, of course, on the road for much of his 37 years at CBS.

He thought it unwise to stay too close in touch with the office. "You get a long line of messages that leaves you no time to do your work the rest of the day," he told the Greensboro News & Record in 1994. "You need a little freedom in this life. In this business, you go and go and go. You never have time to think."

Kuralt wanted some time to think. He wanted time to take the days at his pace, to slow down and be present in life. He told me it all dawned on him at the 1993 Winter Olympics in Norway. He was enjoying his time over there, but what he really wanted to do was hang around in Scandinavia to learn more about the country and the people.

"But no, I had to leave on a certain day and get back to New York to do the 'Sunday Morning' program. And even that much duty, I realized, had become kind of onerous. I longed for an even greater freedom than I had. An inner voice spoke to me and said, 'You have done this long enough, you know that? You're not going to do anything new or better, so you're just going to have to give up your corner office and your big paycheck and strike out and do something different.' "

He returned to New York, and with three years remaining on his contract, he left CBS. Then he set about doing what he loved best: roaming the country with pad and pen. He was going back to where it all started, back to the road, back home.

"I always feel like a North Carolina boy a long way from home when I'm in Thailand or Zaire."–Charles Kuralt in 1994 interview

Popular history will tell you that Charles Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was born there, as the records indicate, but only because it had a hospital. At the time of his birth, Charles' parents were living with his maternal grandparents on their 100-acre tobacco farm in Onslow County. Worried about complications from delivering the baby at home, the Kuralts drove to James Walker Memorial Hospital, a little more than an hour south. After Charles was born, the family immediately returned to the farm.

It is an important distinction, because Charles Bishop Kuralt grew up not as a city-dweller but as a farm boy who later in life began to acquire a thin veneer of city sophistication. Named for his paternal uncle, Carl (Norse for "a man of the common people"), Kuralt remained connected to his rural roots all his life. Being raised on a farm provided him with his neighborly mien and ambling Southern disposition. On television, at times, he appeared as though he were leaning on a fencepost, dispensing rural wisdom to viewers.

The farmhouse where Kuralt spent much of his childhood had no electricity. In winter, woodstoves and fireplaces worked to heat the high-ceilinged rooms. There was no plumbing. A pump with a long, cast-iron handle delivered drinking water on the porch. A gourd on a nail nearby served as a drinking dipper. There was a well in the side yard, with a bucket for watering the stock.

Life was full of simple pleasures. Charles spent his days flying kites of newspaper held rigid by flour paste, making slingshots from dogwood branches, and tickling Venus flytraps shut with a piece of straw. Evenings, his grandmother, Rena Bishop, stoked a fire to warm well water, which she poured into an old galvanized tub to wash the dust from her grandson.

After the evening meal, his grandfather spun long yarns. Charles sat spellbound by his voice.

On the front porch of their two-story farmhouse, Charles often curled up beside his grandmother on the swing and listened as she read to him from the travel books of Richard Halliburton, the short stories of O. Henry and the poems of Kipling and Poe. Her reading fueled his love of words and sensitivity to the rhythm of language. It was from her that he first heard words like "pyramid," "igloo" and "Taj Mahal."

Being raised under his grandparents' tutelage gave Kuralt his formidable love of language and words. At the same time, being delivered into the Great Depression provided the boy with lessons of hardship. His parents, both recent university graduates, had emerged into a world of dim career prospects.

A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Wallace Hamilton Kuralt graduated from UNC in 1931 with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a degree in Commerce, but found little sustaining work. Times were hard as the nation struggled to break the yoke of the Depression, and making a living often meant chasing one. The young man ventured all the way to Charleston, West Virginia, finding there a job in the advertising division of the Kroger Grocery Co.

He left behind his sweetheart, Ina Bishop, a home economics teacher in Hillsborough, North Carolina. They met on an eight-week, cross-country trip sponsored by the University of North Carolina. Wallace noticed the attractive young schoolteacher early in the trip, but it took him several days to muster the courage to approach her. He finally broke the ice by offering her a taste of a new soft drink. In later years, they joked they had Dr. Pepper to thank for bringing them together.

Wallace lasted only a matter of months in the hills of West Virginia, returning to North Carolina to marry Ina shortly before Christmas in 1931. The newlyweds made the Bishops' tobacco farm their first home. There, Wallace tried his hand raising "truck" crops such as snap beans and cucumbers, but the cost of trucking the vegetables to market proved too great. He also tried his hand at raising grapes, but the sandy Onslow County soil was ill-suited to the vines. And at any rate, there was no market for grapes.

To eke out a living, Wallace turned to a variety of jobs, including painting Coca-Cola signs on barns and creosoting telephone poles. He "topped" tobacco for $1.50 a day and even tried to make a go at operating a farm supply store in nearby Jacksonville.

But in 1933, his fortunes changed. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration posted a job for a "social case worker" for Onslow County, one of the few specialties in demand among millions of unemployed. Kuralt later would say his father landed the job "because he could type." No matter. After a few months, Wallace won a promotion to county director of rural rehabilitation, and soon after Charles was born, he gained an even bigger promotion, as social services case supervisor for Robeson County, 100 miles away.

The Kuralts packed their bags and moved to Lumberton, the county seat, and Wallace quickly climbed the ranks to become director of social services for a seven-county district in eastern North Carolina.

It was a time of frequent moves, but also of growing stability. Two years into the job, Wallace decided to make social work a lifelong career, and in the fall of 1937 began attending the University of North Carolina's Graduate School of Social Work at Chapel Hill. To support the family while her husband studied, Ina found work in Stedman, a hamlet east of Fayetteville. Barely 2 years old, Charles seemed to already be fulfilling the same destiny as his forebears, shipping from one town to another.

"I come from wandering tribes, Norse and Celtic on my mother's side it seems, nomad Bavarians on my father's, ancestors become Scots-Irish and Slovenian by the time of their migration to America. As far as I could tell, none of them ever stayed anywhere for long."–Charles Kuralt, A Life on the Road

In Stedman, the Kuralts rented a three-room apartment in a house on Euclid Street. From his bedroom window, Charles could see the brick building where his mother taught home economics. On Sunday afternoons he looked out that same window to see his father walking across the street and sticking out his thumb, hitchhiking to Chapel Hill some 80 miles away for a week of attending classes in social work. It was a routine that lasted a year, hitching to Chapel Hill on Sundays and then returning home, sometimes by bus or train, after the end of Friday classes.

After a year of graduate study, Wallace found work as a field representative for the North Carolina Welfare Board. The job required another move, to Salisbury, where they lived in a brick house overlooking a highway. There, Charles gained a sibling when Ina gave birth to a second son, Wallace Jr.

The family stayed in Piedmont North Carolina only a short while before relocating to the Welfare Board's eastern headquarters in Washington, an hour's drive from the Bishops' tobacco farm. His father's new job gave Charles a taste of being on the road, as the 4-year-old often accompanied him on his travels around to local welfare offices in the county seats of eastern North Carolina. Riding along blacktop roads to places like New Bern, Swan Quarter, Harkers Island and Edenton, Wallace filled the miles and his young son's mind with tales of North Carolina history and local lore.

Afternoons, they stopped to fish in creeks turned black by the tannin of cypress trees. At country stores and outside the county courthouses where the welfare offices were located, father and son stopped to listen to old men spin yarns. Charles would later say that traveling with his father taught him a "little more about real life" than most kids his age.

In the fall of 1939, Charles started kindergarten at St. Agnes Academy, a Catholic School across the Pamlico River. He showed early signs of being an independent thinker. He was a daring young man, once asking the school's Sister Rosalind, "If thou shalt worship no graven images, then what are all those statues of the Virgin Mary and the Saints doing around the school?" The other nuns frowned, but Sister Rosalind smiled. Though Charles was barely 5, she promoted him to the first grade. Charles later quipped that he heard his first French words at St. Agnes. "I remember the word for piano. It is piano. I thought I could catch on to French if it continued that way."

Living in Washington meant that the Kuralts were close enough to visit the Bishops' farm often, and on summer nights they gathered around a battery-powered radio, its round dial glowing orange with the station call letters. News was all around. The radio was usually tuned to the nightly news broadcast on WPTF, and stacked neatly on a nearby table were the weekly Onslow County newspaper and the Raleigh News & Observer.

As the family sat listening to the news broadcast, Charles dreamed of becoming a reporter, even playing out his dream by borrowing his father's hat and sticking a home-made "press card" in its band. At age 6, Charles Kuralt saw reporting as a romantic profession that would take him to the exotic places his grandmother had read to him about.

"A sandy road passed in front of the house and a logging path through the pinewoods behind it," he wrote in A Life on the Road. "I always wondered where the roads went, and after I learned that the one in front went to another farm a mile away, I wondered where it went from there."

Kuralt's road carried him to Charlotte, where he lived until entering the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After leaving Chapel Hill, he came back to Charlotte to work for the Charlotte News, before being recruited by CBS and making his home in New York and the back roads of America.

Bill Friday was Kuralt's dean when he was the editor of the Daily Tar Heel in Chapel Hill. And in the years that followed, it wasn't uncommon for Friday to hear from him out of the blue. "Every once in a while, he'd call and say, 'Well I just called to see if the dogwoods are blooming and if the flowers are up.' He was homesick," Friday said. "This was where his soul stayed."

It is also where his soul came to rest. "I know you have better things to worry about, but I thought I would ask if you have any way of finding out if there are a couple of burial plots in Chapel Hill," Kuralt wrote to his old friend on July 2, 1997, two days before his death. Then, beneath the typewritten text, he penned: "I am only now beginning to appreciate the love I have for Chapel Hill. It is a moving place the more I think about it."

"I have been gone a long time, but now I am home."

–Charles Kuralt in North Carolina is My Home.

For more information on ordering your copy of Remembering Charles Kuralt, please write to Ralph Grizzle, Kenilworth Media, 28 Kenilworth Road, Asheville, North Carolina 28803 or visit www.rememberingcharleskuralt.com. phone 828-252-6757 e-mail ralph@kenilworthmedia.com