When I was growing up, the news was delivered by Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. Back then, the news was serious business. News anchors sat quietly at their desks and, without fanfare, serious and sober, presented the news of the day. This was the world of adults, and it was a world where momentous things happened. These men were my tutors to the world beyond my everyday life and the small farm where I lived with my parents, my brothers and sisters.

I was in fourth grade when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Evenings and weekends I watched the news with my parents. Listened as Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite narrated the events of those days, the assassination, the funeral, the transfer of power. Listened as my parents talked about this president that they had not voted for. This was my introduction into what it meant to be an American.

Late weekend afternoons I watched as Walter Cronkite narrated The Twentieth Century, a TV news program covering the significant events of the century. It was Walter Cronkite who taught me about World War II, the atrocities of war, and the sacrifices of soldiers so that we could live in a better world.

July 20, 1969, my mother’s birthday, my family sat in a dark living room late at night to watch Neil Armstrong in his bulky spacesuit take that last step from a flimsy spacecraft to the surface of the moon. Walter Cronkite was there with us, his voice choked with emotion, “The Eagle has landed.”

A few days after 9/11, Walter Cronkite appeared on David Letterman. He told how so many of the local German families were appalled when they entered the death camps like Auschwitz. Cronkite said he didn’t blame the German people for what happened in those camps. He blamed them for not knowing, and he warned all of us of the dangers of going too far in the coming days, the danger of overstepping ourselves, of hubris as we responded to the national tragedy facing us. We should have listened better.

Friday, July 17, 2009, Walter Cronkite passed on. His voice is silent now.

© Bill Stifler, 2009