Unipressers such as Cronkite knew how to stretch a dollar, cheat a pay phone, use rented typewriters, and sleep in the backseat of a broken-down Ford instead of squandering money on a motel room. Unipressers were preternaturally hungry for scoops to sell to newspapers. At all times, UP tried to break news first, not just to beat AP, but all other media as well. In 1914, UP was the first to use the Teletype (invented that year), and in the 1930s it was the first to develop the International Unifax machine (the pioneering automatic picture receiver). Most important for Cronkite’s career trajectory, UP, starting in 1935, was the first major news service to offer breaking news to radio stations. Before long, UP, a worldwide news wholesaler headed by a dynamic general manager, Roy Howard, also became the first North American news agency to offer wire service to newspapers in Europe, South America, and the Far East.
In Fortune magazine (May 1933), the artiste Stephen Vincent Benét explained the religious devotion Unipressers had to their company. “It is a business concern and its members work for profit,” Benét wrote. “But there is another motive that drives them quite as strongly. You can call it pride of profession or professional zest or enthusiasm or self-hypnosis. But, whatever you call it, it is as common to the stockholding executives as to the lunch-money copy boy—it is indeed the strongest bond that holds U.P. together. And what it boils down to, when the sentiment and the wisecracks are both skimmed off, is an actual genuine love of the game.”
A young Unipresser such as Cronkite, outposted in Missouri, had to dream of big national bylines. He had been jobless long enough to bring a new level of dedication to his UP work. Kansas City was his proving ground. With constant pressure to provide content for thousands of newspapers, especially in the Midwest, Cronkite found himself reporting, fact-checking, rewriting, editing, and even generating story ideas from his UP bureau desk. Although an individual newspaper, such as the Kansas City Journal-Post (where Betsy worked), naturally reflected a particular point of view—that of the locality, as the editors saw it—at a UP office, news was a commodity. When a major story hit Missouri or Kansas, the staff had to scramble to cover it, preferably with greater speed and style than the competing Associated Press or local reporters. Likewise, when mundane events occurred, UP still had to provide news of all types: from eye-catching headlines to incidental squibs to box scores to garden club announcements to instant obituaries. UP was in the wholesale business, and the marketplace didn’t lie. Newspapers, Cronkite learned, voted allegiance with the amount of space accorded to UP-originated material. His reputation would be made by how many “Cronkite” stories sold per week.
A harmful trend to which the advent of the AP and UP wire services contributed was the decline of daily newspapers (or, as Max Lerner plugged it in America as a Civilization, the “thinning of the pipelines of communication” from coast to coast). In 1909, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, there were 2,600 daily newspapers operating in America. By the time Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House during the Great Depression, that number had been reduced to 1,750. An argument can be made, in fact, that the wire service led to many cities no longer having competing newspapers. To the detriment of America, news was getting streamlined into two main pipelines: UP and AP.
Kansas City in the year 1938 still had two fine newspapers: the Star and the Journal-Post; Cronkite intellectually gravitated to the second because of personal friendships. A lot of Betsy Maxwell’s classmates from the University of Missouri–Columbia, it turned out, had worked on the Columbia Missourian in college and ended up at the Journal-Post after graduation. These budding Missouri reporters became lifelong friends of the Cronkites. Both Walter and Betsy were exposed to what was known as the “Missouri Method” of journalism: hands-on reporting in real-world local media market outlets, a kind of provincial baptism by fire that characterized the Missouri School of Journalism, the oldest J-school in the world. John Cameron Swayze was then a young columnist at the Journal-Post—he would become one of Cronkite’s closest friends.
Though Swayze was perceived as a handsome dandy by NBC News viewers in the 1950s, Cronkite knew that Swayze was a true reporter at heart. The Journal-Post newsroom was just across a stairwell corridor in the same downtown building where UP rented offices. Almost daily, as Cronkite was punching out from his night shift, he’d bump into the meticulously groomed Swayze, with a pocket-square in his suit jacket, racing to make airtime (he had a 7:00 a.m. radio news show). Cronkite would hand Swayze the UP news copy, placed in metal-ringed notebooks, for him to speed-read before broadcast. He would sit at his desk and read over Cronkite’s tight UP copy, barely having time for a gulp of coffee. Then Cronkite, with amazement, would watch as the broadcast light went on and a suddenly cool and collected Swayze performed flawlessly. “Good morning, John Cameron Swayze here with the news from the Kansas City Journal-Post city room. Today . . .”
When Cronkite joined UP, he brought with him a good two years of Texas news-gathering experience, checkered though it was. He eagerly volunteered to substitute for vacationing editors and reporters in other UP offices around the region, a form of training that exposed him to other cities and, more important, to colleagues with a wide range of talents and tips. Such assignments, usually in the southeasterly direction, down secondary blacktop roads from the Ozarks to the Rio Grande Valley, kept Cronkite away from Kansas City for two- or three-week stretches. Betsy Maxwell, busy with her own career at the Journal-Post, was patient, although Walter’s out-of-state absences to Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas severely tested their courtship.
Two months after starting at UP, Cronkite was assigned to work at the Dallas bureau for a brief spell, on loan from the Kansas City desk. On March 18, 1937, at 3:05 p.m. on a beautiful spring day, Cronkite was at his Dallas desk when there was a natural gas explosion at a consolidated public school in New London, Texas, causing 295 deaths, a majority of them children. A gas leak at the two-story school, a steel-formed building only a couple of years old, had caused a bomblike detonation that blew the edifice to kingdom come. Balls of rolling gas shot into the Texas sky like a fiery orange tornado and caused the ground to shake for miles around.
The area around New London—located in the northwest corner of Rusk County—was surrounded by ten thousand oil derricks; eleven had been fatally erected on school grounds. Governor James Allred called up the Texas Rangers, Texas Highway Patrol, and the Texas National Guard to pull out bruised and battered survivors. The New London boom’s echo, it was said, had been heard a hundred miles away, in the stockyards of Fort Worth. Some students miraculously walked out of the rubble unscathed, dazed and confused but spared serious injuries.
Cronkite received a dispatch from the Houston UP bureau confirming the explosion, and off he raced in his Dodge to New London with Bill Baldwin, the manager of the UP bureau in Dallas. Just how horrific the tragedy was became vividly apparent when he saw a line of cars, ambulances, and trucks parked at the funeral home in Tyler, all unloading corpses. Makeshift morgues had been erected in Henderson, Kilgore, and Overton to accommodate the dead.
Cronkite flashed a United Press badge for access to the disaster zone. He hitched a ride on a fire department searchlight vehicle that had just arrived from Beaumont to help out in the impending nighttime rescue efforts. Cronkite searched for eyewitnesses who saw the school’s roof blow off. “It is not easy,” Cronkite quickly learned, “to approach someone in such distress to seek answers to the questions that need asking.”
Nothing in his University of Texas journalism classes or the Missouri Method had prepared Cronkite for this story. Oil roughnecks had rushed to New London from the Permian Basin to look for lost children, to collect the charred and crushed bodies of the young. Cronkite’s harrowing eyewitness UP features offered emotional images of what the reporter saw—and yet kept the reporter out of the articles. His eye for ironic detail—such as a surviving school wall with a blackboard on which someone had written, “Oil and natural ga
s are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessings”—was superb. One of his UP reports read, in part, as follows:
OVERTON, TEX., MAR. 19 [1937]—(UP)
Take oil from this town and nothing would be left. The last census showed its population to be a little more than 500 yet 3,000 persons receive their mail at the general post office.
It is the capital of the East Texas oil field, the richest in the world, whose forest of derricks stretch [sic] 90 miles across the Texas hills on a line one to 15 miles wide.
Week days, its few streets are dotted by the toughest migratory workers in the world—the men who go from field to field where oil is gushing, who work hard and dangerously and live hard and gaily.
Saturday night, dressed in their silk shirts and pleated trousers, a week’s pay in their pockets, the men come in for what diversions the town affords. They are strong men and hard men.
Today they were in town on another mission and beneath the flamboyant shirts, knotted shoulder muscles bent beneath unseen weights. Faces were heavy-jawed and screwed tensely.
They stood about in small knots, looking not into passing faces but toward their feet. They gathered at the curbs. From a distance they seemed to be chatting. But closer, the passerby heard men weep, heard rasp-like voices oddly strained in unaccustomed efforts to be tender.
Decades later, even after he was credited with helping end the Vietnam War, Cronkite called the New London tragedy his most memorable reporting assignment. Sleeping at the Overton Hotel, calling CBS Radio News in New York from a pay phone to offer a nationwide listening audience a detailed eyewitness report, Cronkite earned his spurs that sad March week. Fifty years later—on March 18, 1987—reporter Harry Smith of CBS Morning News was preparing to do an anniversary segment on the Texas explosion and was surprised to discover after thorough research that Walter Cronkite of UP had been the premier reporter of the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history, one that practically wiped out a whole community. “I got some very good lessons in emergency coverage there,” Cronkite recalled, “and wrote two or three stories that got some notice.”
No sooner were the bodies buried in New London than Cronkite’s managing editor assigned him to open a bureau in El Paso, where United Press was just starting to sell its service to KTSM radio (the voice of the Rio Grande Valley). Unbeknownst to Cronkite, he was walking into a media gunfight between the El Paso Arrow Post (owned by Scripps Howard) and KTSM (using UP reports extracted from Scripps Howard services). After a week in hot, contentious, and dusty El Paso, smack in the middle of a local press war, a month having passed since he’d seen Betsy, Cronkite simply drove home to Kansas City to let the chips fall where they may. With hours to kill behind the wheel, he felt odd thinking that New London had been more fun than El Paso. “I used to think life wasn’t worth living,” Cronkite later recalled, “if I couldn’t be in on the action.”
After a year with UP, unable to settle back comfortably into his K.C. job and more than a bit impetuous, Cronkite bolted back into radio broadcasting on WKY in Oklahoma City. After an interview in Dallas where he auditioned in an empty studio and was told to improvise a football game, Cronkite was hired. He grabbed the chance to do play-by-play coverage of live football games at the University of Oklahoma for the powerful NBC affiliate, which had acquired exclusive broadcast rights just before the season opener on September 26, 1937 (against the University of Tulsa Hurricanes). The Oklahoma locals were sports fanatics, and Cronkite came advertised on WKY as a “hot shot” in football broadcasting with a supposed track record at the University of Texas.
But once again Cronkite found himself in the danger zone of faking football plays on air. In anticipation of the first game in September, he hired spotters and had WKY concoct a costly electronic system to hook him up almost walkie-talkie style with his moles. The scheme was for the spotters to sit in the stands of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium (in Norman) and punch buttons on a WKY board, which in turn would indicate the formation, jersey number of the running back, and the tackler. Cronkite would be in a press booth, watch basic raw data appear on his electronic board, and then riff on air.
This system proved to be a complete disaster. Cronkite’s electronic board went haywire. The spotters made mistakes. Wrong buttons were pushed. There were three or four technical glitches. Cronkite was a complete and utter bomb. “It was really one of the lowest moments of my life,” he recalled. “When it was over I just wanted to go out and silently slip away. But I stayed in the press box waiting. I remember finally when there was no one there, walking slowly out.” The moral of the WKY story for Cronkite was profound. “If you’re going to be doing an ad-lib extemporaneous broadcast never depend upon anybody to do any part of your work. From there on out, I spent twelve hours a day learning the names and numbers of each player on each squad of the team we would play. And I knew their hometowns, their ages, their weight, and probably their mother and father’s names and how many brothers and sisters they had.”
Not long after football season, Cronkite accepted a job as a K.C. manager at Braniff Airlines—founded in 1928—whose corporate headquarters were in Dallas. The job gave Cronkite a chance to stay close to Kansas City and seriously date Betsy Maxwell, whom he wanted to marry. The pay wasn’t impressive, but it was higher than journalism offered. Although Cronkite was only twenty-two, he was a bona fide executive, with real coat-and-tie responsibilities. One part of the Braniff job was a seat at the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. Cronkite could see how the powerful and rich held themselves and exerted their societal influence, and he learned how to approach them with ease. Cronkite never tried to hide his middle-class roots, but he didn’t allow them to hold him down, and this coveted opportunity to mix with movers and shakers in K.C. was invaluable.
At some other juncture, it’s possible Cronkite might have been lulled into a long career at an airline such as Braniff, with the good life in Kansas City it promised. But like millions of Americans, he was catching Edward R. Murrow’s courageous reports from Europe on CBS Radio News and in his case his life was altered. Murrow wasn’t a mindless recorder of facts like UP reporters. He was a voice—the voice—of America on the precipice of World War II. He was to electronic journalism what George Washington had been to the Revolutionary War: the deity. Murrow’s father, a railroad worker, moved the family from Polecat Creek, North Carolina, to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington in 1914, when his son was still in britches. Tall, energetic, content to be alone in the evergreen wilderness, and steady-eyed about how the world worked, Murrow had fallen into radio by accident while he was a student at Washington State in Pullman. He had originally gone to Europe in 1932 to oversee the International Educational Association (which arranged student exchanges from European nations), a job that Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy would use to smear Murrow in the 1950s as a communist sympathizer. While working as CBS’s director of talks in the 1930s, Murrow fell in love with Great Britain, wore suits cut in the English style, and took on the unflappable demeanor of the British in the face of the evil aggression of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
In the world of journalism, Murrow had created buzz by hiring ambitious young correspondents to broadcast for CBS News in the late 1930s. Cronkite was envious. Many of America’s most aggressive journalists—like Eric Sevareid (formerly of the Minneapolis Journal) and Howard. K. Smith (a Tulane University graduate and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University)—understood that working in Europe under Murrow was a hot ticket. Cronkite, stuck at Braniff, couldn’t possibly compete with college-graduate world travelers such as Murrow, Smith, and Sevareid. In the first place, he never dreamed of foreign locales. He didn’t even have a passport. As the folks of Kansas City learned, he was good at gumshoe reporting, investigating, editing, and announcing. But he wasn’t a standout. His raw talent had not taken charge of his career like Murrow’s and Shirer’s had. While others in his generation of budding journalists were following their instincts and strategica
lly positioning themselves for the rising tide of World War II, Cronkite was lagging behind as a Braniff meet-and-greet man. By 1939, Cronkite, ever the revolving-door opportunist, finally saw where he needed to be. He once again decided to embrace the news business, preferably at United Press. “I loved the United Press,” he realized, “and I had missed it ever since I left.”
The twenty-three-year-old Cronkite groveled at the UP altar to be rehired, throwing himself on the executives’ mercy. “The management had not been happy about my leaving so precipitously a couple of years before,” he said. “But they welcomed me back.” Once again joining the Kansas City bureau, Cronkite picked up where he had left off as a junior reporter-editor, usually on the UP night desk. Virtually every day a new revelation about Tom Pendergast, chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Club, and his political machine, with its connections to mafiosi and grifters, shocked K.C. citizens. But Cronkite pursued a different journalistic track. A half year after returning to the UP office, he finally got a story with national potential. Circumstances worked in his favor; he received the reportorial assignment mainly because he happened to be working the night desk when it broke.
Before dawn on a Saturday morning, October 28, 1939, word arrived from rural Missouri of the overnight search for an airplane that had taken off and never returned. Cronkite rushed to the town of Brookfield, north of Kansas City, and started filing stories for the afternoon newspapers, hour by hour.
BROOKFIELD, MO., OCT. 28—(UP)
Officials of airfields throughout the nation were asked today to watch for a small yellow monoplane in which, state police believed, Carl Bivens, Brookfield flying instructor, was being held prisoner by a student.
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