Things I Like: Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt

JESUS. Was I born in the golden era of television or what? As a kid I could wake up to Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt and simmer down with 60 Minutes.

Charles Kuralt. I mean, what is there to say?

He had a beautiful, weird voice, all tobacco smoke and cheap coffee. His mashed potato figure and tendency towards storytelling, in the pattern of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson, made his show a program, in the true sense, with its own quiet syllabus and gentle arc. Like Franklin and Johnson, he also had a thing for the ladies, which was revealed in several breathless articles published after his death on Independence Day of 1997.

Charles Kuralt was cool because he had the patience and openness to pursue and reveal the stories and characters that seem American in the best sense, like the Chandlers, sharecroppers in rural Mississippi that put 9 children through college, or the 78-year-old man who had built 12 miles of a 190 mile highway from Duluth to Fargo because he thought one should exist. No, seriously, watch the story of the Chandlers right now. About filming the Chandlers, Kuralt said "Looking back on the humblest beginnings any family could ever have, all we did all afternoon was cry."

My father ran into him at the Gris, a Revolutionary War-era bar in coastal Connecticut; when I visit, I like to imagine him holding court there, like Johnson, though it's probably more likely that he had a beer at the bar, was interrupted on occasion, laughed a little, swirled his beer and had some quiet moments to himself.

Remember the day he signed off? His closing speech went like this:

I aim to do some traveling and reading and writing, and to watch this program the civilized way for a change: in my bathrobe, while having breakfast. Charles Osgood appreciates poems and often commits poetry, himself. There is a rhyme by Clarence Day which says what I want to say: 'Farewell, my friends-farewell, and hail/I'm off to seek the Holy Grail/I cannot tell you why. Remember, please, when I am gone/'twas aspiration led me on./Tiddly, widdly, toodle-oo/All I want is to stay with you.' But...here I go. Goodbye.

At the close of the program, some pastoral scene: ducks dip low into a cold pond, in a town that may be the next one over from your own, or one you'll meet some day.