Rest In Peace Walter Cronkite

I was, like most everyone else, sad to hear of Walter Cronkite's passing. That's it. The end of real journalism. At least as we knew it. Since the advent of blogging, we are transitioning into a new era of journalism. I'd like to think he'd approve.

I tweeted last night about a fun memory, for me, of Walter Cronkite.

In 1971, I lived with my family in Flintridge, CA. It was a part of La Canada ultimately. We lived on the big hill outcropping that you see when you watch the Rose Bowl game on New Year's Day. It's in Los Angeles County. My father at the time, was the General Manager of New York Life Insurance Company, in their large Sunset Los Angeles office in Downtown.

Early February of '71, Pops was in Orlando, Florida with all the other company managers, at the annual Manager's Meeting. The rest of us were at home, in Los Angeles.

On a normal Monday morning, at 6am, the day ceased to be "normal". I was almost 7 years old, in 1st grade, when my bed started dancing across my bedroom. Wow! What a ride! Everything in my room was crashing around, and I remember I couldn't get a hold of my bed enough to even sit upright. Mom was attempting to get to my room, but I could see her bouncing off the walls in the hallway! I could see this because my bed had moved several feet, enough for me to see out my bedroom doorway and to the hall. I wasn't afraid until I saw Mom. And then it stopped.

Funny, my brothers, older than me by 6 and 12 years, merely rolled over and went back to sleep. My mother still laughs about that.

But Pops wasn't with us. He was nice and safe in Orlando. Pops and his best buddies, Roger and Bob, also managers, and with him in Orlando, were just coming back in from a morning fishing run prior to their meetings. It was mid morning then in Orlando, and the news was breaking.

The news in 1971 was not like it is today, where you can channel hop to find out the latest breaking story. You had precisely 3 options: ABC, NBC & CBS. Period.

Pops and crew got off the boat and were loading the trunk of the rental car with their gear and bounty when someone told them LA had been hit with a huge earthquake. They raced back to the hotel and turned on the TV.

Walter Cronkite was on, reporting on the earthquake. What, specifically, he said, obviously I didn't hear. But Pop's interpretation was that he said, "Los Angeles has been destroyed".

Telephones also weren't what they are today. All phone lines to Southern California were down. Simple as that.

Pops couldn't assess, for himself, anything about what had happened. And then came the reports of the aftershocks. And more reports of "complete devastation" through out the Southland.

In those days, the "media" all originated from the east coast. They were not where we were, and they couldn't tell either.

Pops, without changing out of his fishing clothes, caught the next flight home, with his buddy Roger, whose family lived in Santa Barbara. Close enough to LA to be worried, especially when you couldn't call anyone.

We, were fine. Others, not so much. The "damage" in our house was to make more of a pig pen of my room than it already was. And by that I mean, all my toys and stuff basically turned into a whirlwind of crap. I think we had a few cracks around and stuff like that, maybe a broken crystal glass or two, but that was it. We were completely fine and dandy. So, by the way, was Roger's family in Santa Barbara.

And then began Pops' tirade against Walter Cronkite.

I guess Pops needed to have someone to blame for the extraordinary anxiety he experienced.

As I got older, I used to love to needle Pops about Cronkite. Like anyone my age, Walter Cronkite was our uncle. He was who we depended on to tell us what was happening, and the tenor of his voice told us to be concerned or not. The tenor of his voice would tell us to be gravely concerned at times. And we were.

Walter Cronkite always did his job, and he took his responsibility in that seriously. If you think about it, it seemed like he must have just sat in the studio waiting for the next big story to break, because he was always there. He wasn't like Aaron Brown (CNN) who didn't come off the golf course to anchor coverage following the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. Ironically, Aaron Brown is currently teaching at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

If life were a television program, Walter Cronkite served as the narrator of that program for millions of us. There was significant reason why he was considered The Most Trusted Man in America.

Regardless of how Pops may have felt about him.
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