Walter Cronkite, My First Boss

In the summer of 1980, I was a college graduate with no job and no plan.

I was the boomerang generation before being the boomerang generation was cool.

I remembered I had seen an opinion piece in the New York Times written by a college student, and I knew I wanted to write, so I figured I’d start at the top.

I wrote a silly opinion piece about how the rich oil companies should buy the poor auto manufacturers, mailed it to the Times (that’s with an envelope and a stamp, kids) and sure enough, they ran the thing.

I described myself as a “gainfully unemployed” recent graduate, and someone at CBS News considered the opinion piece the world’s largest want ad.

He asked me to come in, and he hired me to work in the Bureau of Broadcast Research, for the princely sum of about $13,000 a year.

I had grown up reading about the exploits of Murrow’s Boys (the legendary CBS News reporters who had covered World War II.)

I had grown up listening to the local CBS News outlet, and actually gotten my dad to arrange a private tour of the WCBS-AM newsroom when I was in junior high school.

So off I went to work at CBS News, where one of my jobs was making sure the facts were right on the little maps and on the images that would pop up behind Walter Cronkite’s head on the CBS evening news.

My boss told me, “It we get the map of Utah wrong on the location of a forest fire, how are people going to trust us on foreign events?”

So every night, I would look at the images, and make sure that the fire in Utah was where we said it was.

On a number of occasions, I got to sit in the control room and watch Cronkite deliver the evening news live.

Cronkite was in his last months on the job, about to turn it over to Dan Rather, whom I also got to see up close and personal back then, drafting material for him to read on the air.

Cronkite’s nickname in the control booth was “Old Ironpants,” because he could stay on the air for legendary numbers of hours without ever having to get up to go to the bathroom.

Word had it that he was afraid that if he got up, someone else would take his seat, and he would never get back on the air.

Cronkite also had a really cool trick that he liked to play on his director.

He would sit in his chair in his shirtsleeves, his jacket draped on the back of his chair, until there were literally seconds to go until the broadcast began.

His director would be freaking out, because Cronkite would be inappropriately dressed for the start of the show.

And then, with literally microseconds to spare, Cronkite would get out of his chair, spin, put the jacket into place, sit back down, and calmly start the news.

He did that for one simple reason…to mess with his director.

We all loved it.

These memories come to mind because this past weekend, people noted that Cronkite had signed off for the last time 40 years ago.

My mother loved Walter Cronkite.

She loved the fact that I worked there.

She didn’t like his successor, Dan Rather, whom she called “Dan Rather Boring.”

By contrast, she called me “Michael Never Boring.”

One of my regrets in life is that I didn’t stay at CBS News longer, but I had a strong pull to go to Jerusalem, enter seminary, and study the ancient texts.

And that’s what I did.

I was never one of Murrow’s Boys, but I did get to do things for Cronkite, Rather, and Andy Rooney.

Pretty cool for a kid who, until then, had no job and no plan.

And that’s the way it was.