Reading Walter Cronkite's obituary in today's NY Times, I was delighted to learn that, amongst his many accomplishments, was his unwillingness to put up with bad grammar:
In 1954, when CBS challenged NBC’s popular morning program “Today” with
the short-lived “Morning Show,” it tapped Mr. Cronkite to be the host.
Early on he riled the sponsor, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, by
grammatically correcting its well-known advertising slogan, declaring,
“Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”
As someone driven to distraction by the mangling of grammar (mis- and creative spellings, I am OK with; language, after all, is labile. But "it's" for "its"? No), I adore this.
I can't say I have the sorts of memories of Cronkite that I am hearing recalled today; I was too young to see him broadcast Kennedy's death, and though I remember Martin Luther King's, what I most see is my mother crying, and earlier, watching the race riots on TV, fire hoses being turned on young black people in the streets (of Alabama, I think) at night, the force pinning them to a building, and my thinking, how is this possible? How can they do this? I remember RFK being assassinated, and the moon landings, and Kent State, and Woodstock, and the Nixon/Humphrey election, all of which happened before I was ten years old. And of course the Viet Nam War, from which my uncle, a 22-year-old Marine, came home without his legs and eight of his fingers. This is a lot of news in a few years.
I see I have detoured from the title of this post. But I have been thinking how, Cronkite was the person who delivered all this news, even if I don't recall the moments he told it, I do recall him always being there. He was the man who told you what was happening. Very steady. I don't think our children have this, unless it's Jon Stewart, and then we're not really talking about the same thing, are we.