Travels with Charlie

TV's wandering minstrel finally comes to anchor

"I guess I'll have to buy another suit." That was how CBS Correspondent Charles Kuralt greeted the news last week that several years on the back roads of America were finally coming to an end. In the network-news world of tailored suits and perfect teeth, Kuralt, 46, has long been an anomaly. Rumpled, round and slightly balding, Kuralt looks less like an anchorman than your average TV repairman. Earlier this year, when Dan Rather, 48, emerged from the jostling pack of contenders to win Walter Cronkite's job as father figure to the TV generation, Kuralt was not even in the running. Many viewers think he should have been. When he sat in for Cronkite a few weeks ago, Kuralt's warmth and humor set off an avalanche of mail to the CBS newsroom. "Mostly they told us we had picked the wrong man to succeed Walter," said one top CBS News producer.

That revelation does not cause Kuralt any regrets. For the past 13 years, while his colleagues dashed about pursuing headlines, Kuralt was happily crisscrossing the country in a camper, looking for stories about ordinary life for his On the Road series. "Reporters flying from one city to another on assignment never have time to learn anything about those little clusters of lights in between," says he.

From the road, Kuralt sent back video short stories describing life in those patches of light: an election in which nobody ran for office, a town full of champion duck callers, a 78-year-old man who had spent 20 years building a road singlehanded, a town on the edge of Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. Each vignette, Kuralt hoped, would provide "a little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that this country is." In sharp contrast to the rest of the news, his stories celebrated qualities of playfulness, compassion, pride, and individual accomplishment. Says he: "I could never nap or read in the camper. I was forever looking out the window, afraid I would miss something."

Once On the Road was rolling, Kuralt resisted all offers to return to New York. He even turned down a chance to join top-rated 60 Minutes. "My style of interviewing is exactly the opposite of Mike Wallace's," he says. "I can't fire questions at people. I just try to put people at ease and find out what's on their minds."

In 1979 CBS News President Bill Leonard finally talked him into coming back as host of the low-key new Sunday Morning magazine show, which wraps up news of the week. In principle, Leonard promised, Kuralt could still spend five days a week out on the road. But, says Kuralt, "after that, I had less and less time to look around for stories. I always had to be somewhere on Friday that had planes that went to New York."

Sunday Morning proved a critical success, largely because of Kuralt's comfortable writing style and delivery. As a result, CBS announced last week that he will soon be waking TV viewers on weekdays as well with the news show Morning. "Charles has a way of touching people," explains Leonard. Observes Dan Rather: "The sad thing, for him, is that the very things that make him so good made it difficult for him to come in off the road." Kuralt is gloomy about the relocation, but typically tireless: he will rise at 2:30 a.m. daily to write his show, though he will be able to do "damned little" reporting. Says he: "I guess I asked for it. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is now in jail." Starting Oct. 27, visiting hours will be Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., E.S.T.

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