January 1999/Our State/3,160 words

Charles Kuralt Remembered

A look back at where the road began.

By Ralph Grizzle

In art, as in life, fact and fiction sometimes intermingle so that truth becomes indistinguishable from non-truth. What seems to have been, was not. What seems not to have been, was. Memories extinguish; imaginations ignite; fact and fiction are fired into a vacuous urn into which fall new truths.

Accordingly, autobiography often employs a modicum of invention. Dates become blurred, places forgotten, anecdotes altered. The writer is left to see things not as they were but as he remembers them to have been.

In his book, "A Life On The Road," Charles Kuralt appears to have used such invention. The writer takes us on a journey back to his boyhood, back to his first extended journey, a car trip meant to take his friend, Landon Smith, and him to the Golden West.

But halfway across the country, the trip began to go awry. Kuralt, then 15, and Smith, a year older, were suffering "crises of inexperience," the author writes. They had overestimated the car's soundness, the distance they could travel in a day and their own immunity to homesickness. After crossing the Mississippi, Kuralt and Smith instead pointed their 1938 Chevy north and headed toward Evanston, Illinois.

There, at Northwestern University, Kuralt attended a six-week writing program for high school students while Smith, Kuralt writes, landed a job selling hot dogs to make enough money to return home alone. With Smith gone, Kuralt finished his studies, then caught the train to Gary, Indiana, where he lugged his "big Samsonite suitcase to the side of the highway and started hitchhiking home."

Smith's account, however, contradicts Kuralt's. "I can't concur with some of the events of the trip," Smith says from his home in High Point. "But it made a good book anyway." Smith says he did not travel home alone that summer. He and Kuralt packed their bags, got in the Chevy and drove back to Charlotte by way of Niagara Falls, New York and Washington, D.C.

"We went to a Broadway show in New York and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington," Smith says. The two boys even ventured up into Montreal, where most of the people spoke French, Smith says, "and we had trouble getting directions."

If, during that summer of 1950, Kuralt was struggling with Canadian French, that would mean that he could have not stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride with the elderly couple or the "kindly and demented evangelist" that he mentions in his book. It would mean that he could not have patterned his life "after that of the daft old man in the pickup, who wandered where the back roads took him."

Whose story to believe? Smith's or Kuralt's? Still living in Charlotte, Ruth Pentes remembers the trip. She confirms that the two boys returned home together, not separately, as Kuralt had written.

Maybe Kuralt's memory had eluded him. Or, to smooth the transition to the next chapter, could the writer have substituted a series of events from one time in his life for those of another? Maybe he really did hitch a ride with the daft old man, but perhaps years further down the road. We will never know why Kuralt fictionalized the ending of his book's first chapter. The answer, whatever it may be, was buried with him in July of 1997.

The Muse That Drove Him

What is certain is that a different picture of Charles Kuralt is emerging as more and more information becomes available in his wake. For nearly 40 years, Kuralt turned his reporting abilities on others, but after his death, journalists and historians returned the spotlight. The intent wasn't necessarily to be nosey or to uncover intimate details of his life. It seemed to be more about not wanting to let go of the man America loved.

Even so, when the Charlotte Observer broke the story about Kuralt's 30-year extramarital relationship with Patricia Shannon, many of Kuralt's friends cried foul. An exception was Jack Claiborne. He said that he thought Kuralt was an unhappy person and that he was pleased to learn of the relationship in Montana, because it represented a "center of happiness."

And while some saw Kuralt's infidelity as a contradiction of all he portrayed on television, Claiborne did not. "What seems to me a contradiction is to look at someone on television and say, 'You know, I really know him,' " Claiborne says. "I think that is a mistake. People feel like they know Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, or anybody in the spotlight. They feel like they knew Andy Griffith. Well, Andy Griffith was playing a professional role and had a professional persona that he projected. Charles was the same way."

Indeed, Kuralt's persona was a screen between his private thoughts and the rest of the world, says former colleague Bill Moyers, who worked with Kuralt at CBS during the 1980s. "It wasn't a deceptive screen," Moyers adds. "It's just that he was a very private person despite being a very public man."

It was not the Observer's intention to muckrake, says Paige Williams, the 32-year-old reporter who helped break the story. All along, she says she asked herself, Why is this a story? What do we get out of it? What is the purpose of this story? "The answer was just to understand human nature," she says. "With someone like Charles Kuralt, someone who is watched and beloved, someone who is such a well-known face, and in many ways was a teacher, we have to be able to learn something from the choices he made."

Even in the episode that many would have preferred to forget, there were life lessons. Williams says that "98 percent" of responses sent or called into the paper were positive. "People wrote things like, 'I still have deep respect for his character and his talent, and to me it just made him a richer character,' " Williams says. One woman told Williams that Kuralt had such a big heart that he probably needed two lives to give it all. Another said that if he had two lives, good; he deserved both.

Some came away from the revelation with a sense of disappointment. Others cast moral judgment. Williams walked away having learned that despite his seemingly simple character, Kuralt was a complicated man. "Many great people are," she adds. "They are not linear, they are not one dimensional, they have a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of times that is what drives their art, what drives their passion."

The Four Who Were One

Growing up in Charlotte, Kuralt and his first road partner, Smith, had been friends since middle school. They spent nights together. They listened to jazz records on an old Victrola. In amber fields, Kuralt and Smith sent records soaring through fall skies, like Olympians hurling disks. They shot basketball, picked boysenberries and spent glorious youthful days as friends.

They hosted a magic show together, "Landon's Revue of Wonders." Smith was the magician, Kuralt the assistant and emcee. Once, Smith recalls, he and Kuralt had to substitute a kitten for a disappearing dove. Unlike the dove, though, the cat meowed after it vanished. And while Kuralt was usually adept at diverting the audience's attention from such a goof, this time he failed, Smith says.

The two boys organized a daredevil show, charging a dime admission to neighborhood kids. In one stunt, Smith was to jump 10 feet from one ramp to another on a motorized bicycle called a Whizzer. To heighten the dare, Kuralt and two other kids stretched out between the two ramps. Smith revved the engine, began his descent down a slight grade and succeeded in bridging the gaping chasm without scraping so much as a belly.

When not taking such risks, Kuralt, only 14, worked as a broadcaster. Mack Howey, who makes his home in Lake Junaluska, assisted Kuralt, who announced games from Memorial Stadium for the Charlotte Hornets, then a baseball team.

Friday evenings, Howey, Smith and Charles "Abie" Lockwood dialed in to hear their buddy's radio show, at 610 on their AM dial–WAYS. Smith remembers Kuralt started and ended each program with Louis Armstrong's "On the Sunny Side of the Street." The young DJ "talked slightly faster than he did in later years, but always clear, concise, pleasing and relaxing," Smith says.

After Kuralt's broadcast, he, Smith, Lockwood and Howey would head out to the Town House, which at that time was a drive-in restaurant. The four boys were not only inseparable but also gave validity to the notion that boys will be boys, even Kuralt.

"He wasn't a goody two-shoes," says Lockwood, who still lives in the neighborhood where he and Kuralt grew up. Like his friends, Kuralt scaled fences for a midnight swim. He pulled innocent pranks, such as the one on Halloween when the four boys planned to hang a neighbor's lawn chairs in the top of a tree. To their surprise, though, the owner was sitting in one of the chairs.

"We didn't see him until we got close," Lockwood says. "So we took off running." There was a house under construction next door, and either Kuralt or Smith ran into a two-by-four extending from one of the sides of the house. "I can't remember which it was," Lockwood says, "but whoever it was, we thought he was dead."

Separate Paths

Kuralt and Smith had started down the same road together, but like Robert Frost's proverbial poem, when two roads diverged in a wood, Kuralt took the one less traveled by. Smith went to the Navy. Kuralt went to CBS. Smith became an electronic engineer for AT&T. Kuralt became the poet laureate for the common man. Smith raised two children and stayed devoted to his first wife for 42 years now. Kuralt followed his calling at the expense of his first family.

Twenty years after their road trip together, Smith caught up with Kuralt at a Holiday Inn in Greensboro. The conversation was "kind of cool," he recalls. Kuralt was "a little more reserved," he adds.

"College life is not only a great educational experience but also a good social experience," says Smith, as if trying to explain the reason for wedge that had worked its way between him and the man who had once been his best friend. "I consider myself successful, and certainly Charles was successful. I married, raised two children and lived comfortably. He did the same, but we just took separate paths."

In the apparent fabrication of part of his life's story, was Kuralt making a symbolic separation from his boyhood friends so that he could begin the journey that would engage him for the rest of his life? Maybe this was a coming of age for Kuralt, a rite of passage, mythically told.

Autobiography can contain a high quotient of invention, says former college pal Ed Yoder Jr., who now teaches journalism at Washington & Lee "What seems to matter to those who write their own stories is that anecdotes be more or less faithful to character and experience."

As teenage boys, Smith and Kuralt used to talk about going to New Orleans. Kuralt loved Dixieland jazz. He idolized Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Pete Fountain and other jazz greats. Years later, Smith moved to the New Orleans area. For the next decade, he kept hoping that Kuralt would visit. "We could have had a ball together," Smith says.

He kept hoping, too, that he and Kuralt could have remained lifelong friends. Listening to Smith, one gets the sense that his loss is great. Maybe too much was left unsaid. Smith makes reference to having once given Kuralt a black eye. "He probably never forgave me for that, and I can't blame him," Smith says. "Now, fifty years later, I can't remember why it happened. I hope he can see this. I'm sorry Charlie."

Makings Of The Broadcaster

It was apparent early on that Kuralt was headed down a different road. At Charlotte's Alexander Graham Junior High School, he was co-editor of the school newspaper, The Broadcaster, where he wrote a column called, "Kaleidoscope." Even then, his style seemed more mature than that of his classmates, his observations keen. In this column, he appeared on the outside, looking in.

The bell will ring at 2:55 today. Instead of the usual sounds of hundreds of tramping feet, a much more natural, quieter noise will be heard.

What's going on? Oh, that's right; report cards will be given out. Cries of joy, distress, and horror will be heard throughout the building.

Students may leave the building slowly with plans to do better next quarter, or they may leave quickly with hurried steps for home and a promised reward.

"He had the writing skills as well as the ability to express himself," says Anne Batten, who taught Kuralt at Alexander Graham.

But he was still a boy, too, a fun-loving boy. "The staff wanted to report the news," Batten adds, "but they also wanted to improve the school, and to them improving the school was giving more dances." Thus, "Late Note!" was the headline that blasted an announcement in Kuralt's November 12, 1947, Kaleidoscope column:

Miss Stephens announced yesterday that a Semi-Formal Dance will be held in the school gymnasium on FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12. The dance will be sponsored by the Student Council.

Later, at Central High, Kuralt carried a typewriter to school each day. After classes, he pecked away at a radio script for his show on WAYS or a piece for the high school newspaper, Smith recalls.

Kuralt was a fiercely competitive member of the debating club, Abie Lockwood recalls. In religious debates with his friends, he held that if there were a hell, it was here on earth. Some of the fundamentalists took offense to that, Lockwood says. "But he would always make you come up with specifics," Lockwood says. "He wanted to know who we knew who was going to hell. You couldn't get away with generalizations."

Lockwood and Smith watched Kuralt take first place in the "Voice of Democracy" speaking contest. As one of four national winners, he was invited to give his speech at the House of Burgesses in Colonial Williamsburg. The winners also traveled to Washington, where they met President Harry Truman.

At home, Smith and Kuralt cut out newspaper photographs and made up stories about them, Smith says. "We'd ask 'Well, what's that person like? What do you think his business is? What type of character does he have?' " Even then, Kuralt studied people, Smith says. "He liked to talk about their lives and put himself in their place."

Smith also sat through the incessant squeaking of Kuralt's clarinet practice, and he allowed Kuralt to correct his diction, because he knew Kuralt's grammatical acumen was unassailable.

At the same time, Kuralt was developing superior broadcasting skills. Brooks Lindsay, who worked late nights at WAYS, says Kuralt would sometimes drop in and "hang around for the longest time." Against one wall of the studio was a fire escape that Kuralt walked out on to look out over the city. "We'd hang a mike on him and let him talk as I played music," Lindsay says. "And he would literally create poetry without notes or anything. He just looked out at the city and described it."

Another time, Lindsay came into work to find Kuralt pecking away on an old Royal typewriter. "I asked, 'Charlie, what's up?' and he said, 'Oh, Harry [the program manager] asked me to do a bio on Julian Barber." Barber had just broadcast Matthew Ridgway's cease-fire proposal to the North Koreans. The American Broadcasting Company needed a bio on Barber, who had worked at WAYS before being drafted into the Signal Corps.

"Charlie looked like Schroeder, the kid in the Peanuts series who plays the piano," Lindsay says. "He was just banging away, and I thought, Boy, oh boy, is he going to have to redo something. You wouldn't believe the strike-throughs and this and that. I call it hen-scratching."

Kuralt typed a final draft and handed it to Harry Barfield, who sent it over the newswire to ABC headquarters. "I asked Harry how much did they [the editors at ABC] cut," Lindsay says. "He said very quietly to me, 'Not a word.' I knew then who Charles Kuralt was."

Off To New York

After being voted by his class, "Most Likely To Succeed," Kuralt graduated Central High School and set off to Chapel Hill, where he became editor of The Daily Tar Heel, the University's student newspaper. In 1955, he returned to Charlotte to work on the Charlotte News. Two years later, CBS hired him, and for nearly four decades, Kuralt spent his life with the network.

Margery Baker was an executive producer of one of the last shows that Kuralt worked on for CBS. Called "I Remember," the show retold historical events through the voices of correspondents who covered the stories and those who were there. "Whenever he would arrive at the studio for taping, people would gather around to chat and visit with him," Baker says. "There wasn't any situation where people didn't flock around him and enjoy his company. People glowed in his presence. He brought out the best in everyone."

Despite the crowds, though, Kuralt was a lonely man, says Terry Martin, an executive producer at CBS who worked with Kuralt on various programs through the years as well as the "I Remember" series. In the 1980s, Martin traveled around the country with Kuralt, who was giving speeches at various functions. "After we were done, which was usually 10:30 at night or so, he'd suggest that we go out for drinks or dinner," Martin says. "And then I was greeted with a very different kind of Charles Kuralt from the very professional, sober-sided and serious guy I had worked with on the show."

Martin says dinners with Kuralt would stretch on for hours. "And at the end of them, I got the feeling that he was kind of sad to see them come to an end," Martin says. "I always had the feeling that he was a very lonely man who really liked company but could only take so much of it. And that I found very odd, and kind of sad in a way."

The road for Charles Kuralt ended, of course, July 4, 1997. The nation mourned his death. An estimated 1,600 people filled Chapel Hill's Memorial Hall for the public service.

Landon Smith was not among them, but not for lack of love. "I'll never forget his good, honest character, his thoughtfulness of others, and his deep desire to let the world be aware of the inner beauty of individuals and all God's creations," Smith says. "He knew how to view the color of the world. He truly lived his life 'On the Sunny Side of the Street.' "