Remembering a True Journalist: Charles Kuralt

Ralph Grizzle's 'Remembering Charles Kuralt' reminds us that if you look for the good in people, you will find it.

It’s more than alphabetic order that places Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language definition of “journal”—“an account of daily transactions and events”—first before defining “journalist.” It’s the fact that the news is more important than the person who observes those daily transactions and events and writes them down. Arguably, 21st-century journalists often write less about what they witness and more about what they think or want others to think.

Not so with Charles Kuralt (1934–97). He began his career writing true, authentic news stories about people and places for a newspaper, and he ended his career telling and showing true, authentic news stories about people and places for CBS’s television series “On the Road.”

Charles Kuralt's picture for the CBS "Sunday Morning" logo. Public Domain

Love Letter to the US

A few years after Kuralt died, travel writer Ralph Grizzle decided to interview 100 of the journalist’s friends, family members, and colleagues in order to compile a celebration of Kuralt’s life. Mr. Grizzle undertook the project out of admiration for the man he had interviewed and respected.

“I was enthralled by this remarkable man,” Mr. Grizzle shares with readers in the preface of 2000’s “Remembering Charles Kuralt”:

“The spirit of ‘Remembering Charles Kuralt’ is best summed up by a line from British playwright J.M. Barrie [creator of Peter Pan], who said in 1922: ‘God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.’ Kuralt presented us with beautiful stories and beautiful people—roses, to help us remember.”

Mr. Grizzle shared with Kuralt their rural native North Carolinian roots, and he starts his book by delving into how and why growing up around hardworking farmers and blue-collar workers informed Kuralt’s endearing and oft-poetic storytelling style.

Kuralt didn’t have to think about what career to pursue. At age 10, he so desired to tell others about the goings on around him that he founded his own newspaper, The Garden Gazette. He was guided by an eighth-grade English and journalism teacher, who noticed a special quality right away in the boy: “He observed.”

By the end of junior high school, Kuralt was already writing about people in a way he used later in his popular “On the Road” series. About two employees at his school, he wrote: “In September a whole crop of new students will assemble in the auditorium, kind of doubtful and scared. And to greet them will be Rosa and ‘Miss Gertrude’—two maids with a liking for their work, an interesting history, and two well-worn brooms.”

His writing, whether for print, radio, or television, endeared him to countless readers and viewers. He became known for presenting nostalgic vignettes of everyone from shipbuilders to bricklayers. No person or place was too small for Kuralt.

Jane T. Tolbert, who traveled with Kuralt during some “On the Road” filming in 1974, is quoted in “Remembering Charles Kuralt”: “For me, like for many other journalists, Kuralt was a hero. He exhibited a unique blend of skills—an eloquent style and a boundless curiosity coupled with a broad knowledge of literature and history. Most important, he had a sincere interest in people and wanted to show what he described as ‘individualism in this age of plastics and conformity.’ Just as a successful artist captures a scene with a few brush strokes, Kuralt selected words and quotes to convey the distinctive features of a person’s life.”

“Remembering Charles Kuralt” reminds us that journalism can be a beautiful expression of human goodness. It does not have to push an ideology; it does not have to sensationalize. Instead, as Mr. Grizzle notes at the end of his book and Kuralt himself expressed: “The country that I found [while reporting] does not bear much resemblance to the one we read about on the front pages of newspapers or hear about on the evening news. The country that I found presents cups of coffee and slices of apple pie and people who always want you to stay longer than you have time to.”

‘Remembering Charles Kuralt’ By Ralph Grizzle Kenilworth Media Inc., July 4, 2000 Paperback, 288 pages

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