Cronkite (3 page)

The City of Fountains—another Kansas City nickname because of the Romanesque fountains in public places—mesmerized young Cronkite. He was also fascinated by the electric streetcars that rattled by their sparsely furnished apartment. In sun and rain alike he would time the streetcars’ progress from one point to another, keeping careful records. He knew the trolley cars by number and knew all the drivers by name. “I played all kinds of imaginative games with myself,” he recalled. “We had a swing on our front porch and that swing became everything from a submarine to an airplane. But mostly it was a streetcar!”

Cronkite’s avid interest in Kansas City’s transportation system offers perhaps the most telling window into his personality. Unlike school learning, monitoring streetcar activity gave Cronkite mathematical discipline and fed his excitement about how the world really worked. Whenever a streetcar ground past, he shouted “hello” at its passengers. Kansas City had the perfect geographical conditions for electrified cable traction (with an industrial district by a river and residential areas upon bluffs on either side of the Missouri River). For Cronkite, the Ninth Street trestle across the Argentine yards toward Union Depot was a kinescope into the Great Wide World. Whether it was streetcars, sailboats, race cars, airplanes, or rockets, Cronkite liked motion. Although the Cronkites were struggling to make ends meet, with Helen selling sets of the
World Book Encyclopedia
door to door to help pay the rent, the family nevertheless bought a complete set (used) of the volumes for little Walter. His first instinct was to memorize the key facts about tinkerers like Thomas Edison and Robert Fulton. “I was always a researcher,” Cronkite recalled, “and anything that interested me I’d go to the
World Book Encyclopedia
for information.”

Following the Great War, everyone in Kansas wanted revelry and hijinks. Big band concerts at Fairmont Park’s outdoor pavilion, American Legion parades down Grand Avenue, and zeppelins passing over the stockyards were all part of the pageantry celebrating victory in Europe. On November 21, 1921, the city dedicated the Liberty Memorial—a towering monument—with General John J. Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, as the main attraction. As the economy improved in Kansas City, the Cronkite family shared in the resulting prosperity. They were able to vacate their apartment and move into a humble bungalow on Kaycee’s southeast side. The rich kids lived in Swope Parkway. The Cronkites resided in a “
middle
middle-class neighborhood.” Only six blocks away was the Electric Park amusement grounds, which included a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster. Sometimes young Walter visited his paternal grandparents in St. Joseph for some fresh country air. “They had horses,” Cronkite later said, “and a storm cellar that always smelled marvelously of apples.”

The CBS News legend had lived in St. Joseph for only the first ten months of his life. He had no memory of Sapulpa. He considered Kansas City to be his hometown. In looking back on his childhood during the peak of his fame in the 1970s, he would hold court about the marvels of Kaycee during the 1920s Jazz Age. Never feeling underprivileged, he eagerly performed odd jobs in order to treat himself to a marshmallow sundae or Mrs. Stover’s chocolates. By keeping twenty-five or thirty cents in his pocket, he always felt rich. Sometimes he would, with his mother’s approval, tip street musicians who were playing blues-infused jazz and ragtime.

When Cronkite was nine, he became a paperboy for the
Kansas City
Star
and dreamed of his own byline emblazoned above the fold.
Nothing
seemed more intoxicating to him than encountering his own name in print. It was a classic case of “Kilroy Was Here” syndrome. The paperboy job demanded that he travel to Union Depot by himself via streetcar and lug as many copies of the
Star
as he could back to his neighborhood to sell. Kansas City’s bustling downtown thrived as a commercial hub after the Great War. Under the guise of working, Walter used to window-shop in Harzfeld’s and Woolf Brothers. (His parents forbade him from ever going to Twelfth Street, where vice flowed as freely as the beer.) Radio hadn’t yet become a commonplace commodity, so newspapers were still the town criers. Both Kansas City’s
Journal
and
Star
were published in morning and afternoon editions and, when important stories were breaking, in special editions. Anyone who wanted to know the latest developments relied on a passing newsboy hawking a clutch of papers. It might have been child labor, but young Cronkite thrived on it. Not every newsboy becomes a journalist, but the early exposure to the pressures and satisfactions (and the remuneration) of the news business intrigued young Cronkite. He had no inkling that he had entered the journalism trade at the very bottom of the food chain, but he had. Besides peddling newspapers he also sold subscriptions door-to-door to
The
Saturday Evening Post
and
Liberty
magazine.

Time
magazine reporter James Poniewozik once singled out a telling anecdote about Cronkite’s early years in Kansas City as indicative of Cronkite’s journalistic instinct to avoid hyperbole and be wary of definitive statements. On August 3, 1923, the
Kansas City Star
ran the front-page story that President Warren G. Harding had died of a heart problem in San Francisco. Clutching the newspaper, young Walter sprinted over to a friend’s house to break the dramatic news. “Look carefully at that picture,” Cronkite told his pal. “It’s the last picture you will ever see of Warren Harding.” Years later, in
A Reporter’s Life
, Cronkite reflected on this silly statement with self-deprecation. “I can’t quite reconstruct today what led me to that foolish conclusion, but I record it here to establish my early predisposition to editorial work—the ability to be both pontifical and wrong.”

In late 1926, Dr. Cronkite was invited to join the faculty of the Texas Dental School (now part of the University of Texas Health Science Center) in Houston. The school was a private institution, but the administration hoped to attach it to the Texas public university system. That would put the institution in rightful proximity to the state’s medical school in Galveston. Dr. Cronkite, with his special expertise in the dental aspects of reconstructive surgery, felt he could grow professionally in that academic capacity and accepted the offer.

Ten-year-old Walter didn’t want to leave Kansas City, where he had the Ninth Street line schedule memorized and where his friends were already made. For all his outward gregariousness, he was shy about changing schools and having to make new friends. Youthful pleas were made to stay in Missouri. They went nowhere. As a consolation, at least, he finagled getting both a saxophone and a clarinet for Christmas so he could learn Buddy Rogers songs. His father told him the instruments were gifted because he had behaved so “grown-up” about moving from Kaycee to Houston. As an adult Cronkite recalled with pride that the Kansas City of his youth spawned both Virgil Thomson (America’s premier modern composer) and Charlie Parker (the great jazz musician).

In February 1927, the Cronkites packed up their meager belongings and drove their Ford toward the Ozarks. There weren’t even a lot of teary good-byes. The three Cronkites—Walter Sr., Walter Jr., and Helen—sort of eased out of Missouri in a misty sleet without regrets. Texas was booming economically and plenty of well-heeled Houston folks wanted healthy teeth. If young Walter found any solace in leaving, it was that his grandparents were staying put in Missouri. They were his placeholders. For the next decade living in hot and humid Houston in the era before air-conditioning, he often dreamed about Buchanan County’s apple orchards ripe with fruit. Someday, Cronkite vowed, he would return to his real home, Missouri, and pick those apples again.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Houston Youth

ADJUSTING TO HUMIDITY—BUILDING A TELEGRAPH SYSTEM—NO GUNS AND BRUSH FIRE—ODD JOBS—1928 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—CONFRONTING JIM CROW—THE POLITICS OF BOY SCOUTING—DRIVING A DODGE—GREAT DEPRESSION WOES—AN ALCOHOLIC FATHER—CHILD OF DIVORCE—JOURNEYMAN HEROES—SCRIBING FOR THE
CAMPUS CUB
—THE ORDER OF DEMOLAY—CUTTING HIS TEETH AT
THE HOUSTON POST
—DATING BIT WINTER—BALFOUR RING AT LAST

E
ver since Cronkite was a skinny boy delivering newspapers in Kansas City, he had pushed himself out into the world, hungry for opportunity. His curiosity about Houston loomed large when, in 1927, the Cronkites moved into a rented bungalow at 1838 Marshall Street in the suburban-like Montrose neighborhood. In preparation for relocating to the Gulf South, Walter dutifully read up on Houston in his trusty
World Book
Encyclopedia
. To his disappointment, Houston had no El Paso swinging-door saloons or Fort Worth rodeos. Just a lot of gnarled oaks, biting flies, mesquite groves, tangled thickets, and storm drainage canals called bayous. Cronkite had read that Houston was a huge cotton exchange, yet he didn’t see a single boll. “I expected to see an ocean-going ship . . . right on Main Street,” he recalled. “Of course, they were way out of town. It was weeks before we ever got out to the ship channel for me to see a ship. And that was disappointing. As a Midwest boy, I’d never seen a ship or the ocean. And there were no cowboys.”

Perhaps Cronkite’s most important growing-up moment in Houston, one that signaled a career in telecommunications, was when he erected a telegraph system connecting friends’ houses in the Montrose neighborhood. Cronkite constructed telegraph lines in the same way some kids practice cello or piano five hours a day. Calling the hookup his most constructive hobby, Cronkite rigged the system from a simple blueprint that was published in a boys’ magazine. “We communicated by Morse code and were pretty good at it when it all ended abruptly,” Cronkite recalled. “The telephone company took what we considered to be unnecessary umbrage at our use of their poles to string our wires.”

Once, Cronkite dug a tunnel on a vacant lot using the gunpowder from a package of firecrackers and started a raging fire. A fire department lieutenant arrived to snuff out the flames, full of reprimands. “If he hadn’t stunted my enthusiasms,” Cronkite later joked, “I might have grown up to help build the Lincoln Tunnel, or, at least, be a pyrotechnics guru like George Plimpton.”

Two skyscrapers rose above Houston back then. One was the Gulf Oil headquarters; it attested to the pivotal role that “sweet” crude had played in Houston’s fortunes since pay dirt was hit in Beaumont in 1901. Not long after that year, the salt dome oil field known as Spindletop was producing more than twenty million barrels a day, while sparking a regional boom as other fields also yielded black gold. Soon the dirt roads would be paved, world-class art museums built, and universities with large endowments founded. Not a single bank would fail in Houston during the Depression. More than forty oil companies had offices in Houston, and refineries sprang up just south of downtown near Galveston Bay. “The ship channel had been completed and the East Texas oil finds had come not so many years before,” Cronkite recalled. “And the job boom was beginning.”

Buffalo Bayou, a sleepy waterway that connected Houston with the Gulf of Mexico, became Cronkite’s fishing hole, albeit not a very profitable one (except for bottom-feeders). Before too long the oceanside world of Galveston and League City had an impact on Cronkite’s life that was both immediate and unending. Each summer, he and his family explored the sandy beaches along the Bolivar Peninsula, where Cronkite collected seashells and watched the mind-boggling array of wintering birdlife around the tidal marshes of Galveston Bay. Audubon’s
Birds of America
was now his favorite book. An amateur ornithologist, Cronkite one day shot a bird with a BB gun and gave up killing animals for the rest of his life. Firearms, the very thought of them, became anathema to him. “I hit a sparrow,” he recalled, “[that was] sitting on the telephone line in the back of our house. It fell to the ground. And I picked up the sparrow, who looked at me mortally wounded with this look like, ‘Why did you want to do that?’ You know it turned me all funny. I never—I didn’t do it again.”

While the Cronkite family, considered Yankees, loved Houston, one aspect of the city sickened them: Jim Crow laws and rules. The Ku Klux Klan was thriving in America in the 1920s; more than two thousand Houstonians were inducted in a single ceremony. The KKK reflected the institutionalized racism and religious antagonism that existed throughout the nation. Jews were disdained. Blacks were segregated from whites in many aspects of daily life, from medical care to sporting events and public transportation to education. While there had been black students at Cronkite’s Kansas City school, there were none in his new school in Houston. Furthermore, by both law and tradition, the facilities accorded to black people were inferior to those for whites. Jim Crow made Houston an ugly new world for the Cronkites, one that young Walter dutifully accepted but never fully understood. “My natural sympathy,” Cronkite recalled, “was with blacks.”

As a liberal Jayhawker who considered John Brown a hero of the Civil War era, not a terrorist, Dr. Cronkite professionally refused to adhere to Jim Crow, taking black as well as white patients. As his son later told Ron Powers of
Playboy
, this ethic was reflected in a wrenching episode on one of their first nights in Houston. Dr. Finis Hight, president of the Texas Dental School, had asked the Cronkite family to dinner at his River Oaks home. After the steak-and-potatoes meal, the group moved to the porch to savor the breeze and await the delivery of homemade ice cream from a nearby drugstore. In those days, there was no air-conditioning and residential refrigeration options were limited. The Jim Crow “rules” of Houston said that African Americans could not approach the home of a Caucasian from the front. Years later, Cronkite recalled what happened next: “The black delivery boy drove up on his motorcycle and looked with his flashlight, clearly for some way to go to the back of the house.” Not finding a driveway or alleyway to deliver the ice cream, the young man started up the sidewalk. When he hit the first step to the porch, Dr. Hight, in Cronkite’s words, “jumped out of his chair like a cat, and hit him right in the middle of his face, wham!—knocked him back into the grass, ice cream cart spilling—and he said, ‘That’ll teach you, nigger, to put your foot on a white man’s front porch!’ My father said, ‘Helen, Walter, we’re leaving.’ ”

The three Cronkites marched out of Dr. Hight’s house. When the embarrassed host tried to coax them into staying, Dr. Cronkite said “get lost” and kept walking. After that incident, Dr. Hight had the long knives out for Dr. Cronkite because of his “pro-Negro” sympathies. “I was horrified about the incident,” Cronkite recalled. “Terrified by the walk through the oak trees with their long Spanish moss dripping in them. It looked like a Walt Disney forest that I would expect all the animals jumping at us. We finally got a ride from somebody on a street corner. Got back to our hotel. But from that moment on I was wholly aware of the racial bigotry, prejudice, and treatment of blacks in that part of the world.”

In the fall of 1927, Cronkite put on a uniform: that of a Boy Scout. Being a Scout in 1920s Houston primarily meant building fires, camping, and fishing. But when the Democratic National Convention convened there in 1928, Walter and other Boy Scouts worked the convention floor at Sam Houston Hall. They served as ushers for the delegates. Without proper ventilation in the hall, let alone air-conditioning, the heat was stifling. Cronkite was tasked with distributing hand-fans with the faces of Cordell Hull, Walter George, James Reed, and Houston’s own favorite son, Jesse Jones, on them. The Democrats nominated Al Smith for president, the candidate of the “wets” (who promised to repeal the then ten-year-old Prohibition law). But Cronkite’s heart was with the polio survivor FDR, who fought for Smith’s nomination at the convention with oratorical zeal.

A month later Cronkite was able to observe the political process again, when Uncle Edward Fritsche took him to the GOP Convention in Kansas City. Cronkite witnessed the nomination of Herbert Hoover. He remembered liking Hoover’s campaign slogan a lot: “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Not many people, and certainly few other eleven-year-olds, could boast of attendance at
both
1928 conventions. “I got hooked on them for a singular reason,” Cronkite recalled. “Somewhere in the convention hall would be a future president. The trick was in picking him out.” When on Election Day (November 6), Hoover defeated Smith (444 electoral votes to 87) to become America’s thirty-first president, Cronkite listened to the results on the radio with his father.

With its boomtown atmosphere in the 1920s, Houston devoted large amounts of money to modernizing its public school system. Forward-thinking educators adopted the system of creating separate junior high schools and hired one of the region’s finest architects as a full-time employee to design them. Young Cronkite was lucky in this regard: in 1927 he was a first-wave student enrolled in the brand-new Sidney Lanier Middle School. The school served several affluent Houston neighborhoods, drawing prep-school-quality students. Lanier boasted a progressive environment from day one. The brightest Houston students chose it over all others. The ultimate compliment came from other Houston public school kids, who dubbed Lanier students “woodenheads” (i.e., nerds with minds full of facts).

Lanier offered a full range of extracurricular activities for the students, including a student newspaper called (like the school’s mascot)
The Purple Pup
. Cronkite—who attended the junior high for three years—was on a reportorial team that won a statewide journalism contest for Lanier. Cronkite continued to take all sorts of odd jobs, including one with
The
Houston Post
that trumped all others in educational value. The
Post
city room was just ten or twelve desks crowded into a crammed second-story office, the floor littered wih the wadded-up debris of rejected leads and spent cigarettes. But to Cronkite it was Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden. “It had a wonderful aura,” he remembered, “the model of every newspaper movie you saw.” Rather than peddle papers on a street corner, as he had in Kansas City, he delivered copies of the
Post
on a regular bicycle route to customers between West Alabama and Westheimer, Woodland, and Hazard. When his boss discovered that he was rolling the papers and throwing them from the bike instead of quietly placing them on front porches, he received a harsh reprimand. “I was a small boy and I guess the
Houston Post
was a small newspaper,” Cronkite recalled in 1985, “although to me it was the
New York World
, the
Washington Star
, and the
Chicago Tribune
rolled into one.”

During summer breaks from Lanier, Cronkite flipped hamburgers at Sylvan Beach, one of the resorts along nearby Galveston Bay. For a spell, he worked at the Sakowitz department store in downtown Houston, helping customers find appropriate toys for toddlers. After only a short time in Texas, his father could afford to buy a
second
car. At the age of about fourteen, Walter inherited the older model. “It was a great big black box of a Dodge,” he recalled thirty-three years later in
Parade
magazine. “I could get more kids in that car. . . . There were usually about 12 passengers. I tell you, it made me the undisputed social leader.”

After the onset of the Great Depression in the fall of 1929, Dr. Cronkite’s life became more complicated. Edward and Matilda Fritsche were forced to close their drugstore and move to Texas to live with their daughter’s family. Having two more mouths to feed put a new stress on Dr. Cronkite, as the Depression clawed away at middle-class bank savings and the Texas Dental School hovered on the verge of foreclosure. Enrollment started to dramatically decline, as did revenue from the school’s clinic.

Still, Dr. Cronkite remained at the Texas Dental School, eking out a living; he had blown the meager family savings on the extravagance of two cars. Houston didn’t have the impoverished Hoovervilles sprouting up on vacant lots common to other parts of America, but overnight dental implants had become luxury items. Walter Sr.’s personal life was also unraveling. Always prone to dulling life’s edge with a swig from the bottle, Dr. Cronkite had, somewhere along the line, passed into alcoholism. His once formidable presence had shrunk. Sometimes he was aggressive and unpleasant in the evenings; at other times he was distant, looking out the parlor window or listening to poetry records and repeating the verses almost endlessly. Under these strained circumstances, young Walter naturally drew closer to his mother. They shared the secret of his dad’s serious drinking problem. However, even as an adult, Walter remained convinced that his father was a perfect medical professional. Only at night, he explained, did Dr. Cronkite become intoxicated.

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.