July 22, 2009 --

LPR is not sure how people get television news jobs, today. Are consultants part of the hiring process? That question would not have come to mind in the old days, not when Hunntley-Brinkley were on NBC, Frank Reynolds, or Howard K. Smith (ex-CBS) were on ABC. And when Walter Cronkite was on CBS.

Back in those days, newspeople were not required to fit the Ken and Barbie mold. My mom, Anna Zukerman, was a CBS fan, and so I became one, too. CBS correspondents were my heroes.

By the time I was ten, years old, I knew the names of all the CBS correspondent, including Douglas Edwards, Dallas Townsend, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Robert Trout , Daniel Schorr, Larry LeSueur, David Schoenbrun, Richard C. Hottelet, Allan Jackson, Ned Calmer, Winston Burdett, Frank Kearns. And, of course, Edward R. Murrow, whose radio commentary concluded with an announcer saying: "Listen to Murrow, tomorrow."

Not a Ken in the group.

When I worked in the CBS newsroom as researcher on the radio network side, Walter would pass my desk every afternoon, walking from the CBS Evening News studio to the radio studio where he taped his five minute news commentary for the radio network.

I was at CBS News from December 1964 to April 1969. I was in the newsroom when Fred W. Friendly, hoarse with emotion, (and without microphone) told the staff he was stepping down as president of CBS News. I was there, next day, when John Schneider announced (with microphone and network hookup) that Richard S. Salant would return as head of CBS News -- ending his remarks with a "let's get back to work," kind of like the ending in "On the Waterfront," I thought.

The four years and five months I was at CBS News, I don't recall having a conversation with Walter. Some Fridays though, as he returned to his TV studio from the radio side, he would pause a moment, and take a cookie from a carton on my desk. Every Friday my mom sent me to work with a carton for the newsroom filled with chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, pound cake and brownies. Mom got to be pretty well-known around CBS News for her baking.

And so, as we remember Walter Cronkite as the premier TV news anchor in the nation, and recall, too, his reporting on the space program, on Vietnam, on civil rights, his interviews with world leaders ... his appearance, without suit jacket, to announce the death of President Kennedy, when we recall these events, I have the speck of memory, the gift of my mom, actually, of this giant of broadcast journalism, pausing a moment at my desk, to get a chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie on his way back to the studio to report the news of the day to the American people.