OPINION: Uncle Walter: a connection with memories

In 1963, Morning News editor James Rogers told me we had been invited to send a reporter to Kansas City with the state’s Future Farmers of America delegation to their national convention. Would I like to take the trip?
Well, as Sarah Palin might say, “You betcha.”
Just a few years before that, Kansas City had been my weekend playground while I was stationed at Fort Riley, Kan. The chance to go back for a few days and being paid while I did sounded perfect.
Back then, the delegation went by bus, and it was a long trip. We had an overnight stop in Louisville on the way out, spent the time for the convention in Kansas City and then had an overnight in Nashville on the way home.
It was a Saturday night that we were in Nashville, and if you are there on a Saturday and have nothing else to do, what do you do? That’s easy. You go to the Grand Ole Opry, which was still downtown in Ryman Auditorium, as God intended.
So I went down. It was a radio show, so they worried little about what the audience was seeing. Technicians scurried all over the place and directors wandered among the performers. Some people with real clout sat in chairs on the stage at times. At one point, a distinguished looking gentleman was led onto the rear of the stage, given a chair and sat down.
That guy looks familiar, I thought. I puzzled briefly and then it came to me. It was Walter Cronkite. He was still fairly new as anchor of CBS News and had not yet become our Uncle Walter.
I wondered what on earth he was doing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, indeed what he was doing in Nashville, but the next day’s newspaper gave me the answer. He was in town to address the Tennessee Press Association, and like me he did the only sensible thing when he had some Saturday night time to kill in Nashville. He went to the Opry.
Dr. Eric Heiden, then a Florence dentist, told me a few years later about pulling his boat into McClellenville, tying up, or whatever you do to a boat, and looking around.
What he saw was Uncle Walter’s boat nearby. He was not the kind to have doubts about whether he should approach this famous person, so he did and had a nice visit.
They talked mostly about boats and about the waters around there that both had sailed. “He was very approachable and seemed glad to have a little company,” Heiden said later.
I thought about those things when I learned that Uncle Walter had died at 92 the other day.
CBS was the Tiffany network in his day. Cronkite was known as “the most trusted man in America,” and is widely praised now, but don’t let us forget one thing. The same right wing ideologues and government haters who denounce the “liberal media” or “main stream media” and really believe only recently has there been a “fair and balanced” network denounced Uncle Walter back then.
His death didn’t get as much attention as Michael Jackson’s, but it got a lot. One thing I liked about it was the looks back at things he broadcast decades ago. One was something I apparently am one of the few people who remember.
The Beatles’ first American TV appearance was not on the Ed Sullivan Show as is widely believed. It was on Cronkite’s CBS News.
I well remember watching his news one night when they had a piece on this young team from Liverpool that was really wowing people in Europe. It was The Beatles. Soon as the news went off the air that night, Cronkite got a call from Ed Sullivan who had viewed it and wanted to know about the kids and how to reach them. Soon after that, they had their big Sullivan appearance.
Uncle Walter is connected with many of my main memories. His near breakdown as he announced the death of John F. Kennedy and his coverage of the space program are among them.
Cousin Katie is all right, but I still miss Uncle Walter.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .