Interview: Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road

Did you always know what you wanted to do with your life?

Charles Kuralt: I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling. But, when I was a little boy -- I mean, six or seven years old -- I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. Young people will not remember that that was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies, with their press cards stuck in their hat bands for easy identification.

From the first or second grade, I thought that's what I wanted to be, a reporter. A newspaper reporter, of course, because there was no television yet. And I never changed my mind. Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was six or seven.

Where do you think it came from?

Charles Kuralt: I can't remember, but there was a cousin of my mother who had always wanted to be a newspaper man and a writer. He had known Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolina novelist, and had lived in New York for a while and tried to make it himself as a writer. I suppose I was a little bit under his influence. He was a great storyteller, as so many Southerners of that generation were.

Maybe it was from him, Ransom Gurganus, that I got the idea. Anyway, kids are always asked, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" And I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.

What attracted you to reporting?

Charles Kuralt: I did a lot of reading when I was a kid, and I remember some collections of good journalism that I had found in the school library, collections of stuff from the golden age of the New York newspapers, The World, and The Herald. I loved reading those exciting pieces of journalism.

As I went along through junior high school and high school, I developed journalistic heroes. Red Smith, the sportswriter, was one of them. I thought he wrote wonderfully. I read the stories of Damon Runyon. I'm sort of embarrassed now to say that I was charmed by all those big city tough guys in Damon Runyon's stories. I could easily imagine myself in that role.

And then, on radio, I developed a great affection for CBS News which, I imagined correctly, was a band of scholar-journalists. Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, and the rest of them, were a superior news organization. I was lucky enough to join CBS News in the mid-'50s and got to know some of those guys, and they lived up to my expectations.

They were just wonderful, and very accomplished reporters. I don't suppose we'll ever see a single small group of reporters with the credentials that crowd had. So maybe just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

Where there values, ideas or experiences that you brought with you from small town North Carolina that helped you in the big city?

Charles Kuralt: I had a little insight into life that most kids growing up in small town North Carolina probably didn't have. My mother was a school teacher, and a good role model for me. But, my father was the real one. He was a social worker and, for years, head of the social services department in my home town. And so, through his eyes I saw the underside of society. I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time. I think that was an advantage for me. I knew a little bit more about real life than most kids did, I think. And then, the storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store or the country courthouse on a Saturday afternoon without running into storytellers. And, I had some favorites. I was charmed to sit and listen. And my father, who was a New Englander and a little more reticent, not a great storyteller himself, also was charmed. And so, he and I would stand around and listen to these old guys tell whoppers. And, I think that appreciation for stories probably helped me.

Did your parents encourage you in your chosen calling?

Charles Kuralt: They encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do. I think back and wonder if I would have done this for a child. I wanted to broadcast baseball games. The Charlotte Hornets are now known as a basketball name, but that was the name of our local baseball team. I had a chance to broadcast the games for two or three summers. The only problem was, I wasn't old enough to drive yet, I was 14 or so. So my father drove me to every single home game of the local baseball team. Though he had other things he would rather do, I'm sure, he would listen to the games. And, around the seventh or eighth inning he would haul himself into the car and come back out to the ball park to pick me up and bring me home, and then get a little sleep before he had to go to work in the morning. That went on for three summers, I believe. That's real encouragement. That was really a help. That's not just saying, "Oh, good, be a reporter, be a broadcaster." That was really a help. When I finally went to work, finally for my hometown newspaper my folks were still very helpful to me. Although, I think my mother had more doubts about my being a reporter than my father did. My father, as I said, was a public figure. He was in the press all the time, trying to keep the county commission from cutting welfare benefits to poor children, and all that kind of thing. And it was a conservative community, so he was on the hot seat constantly, at war with the county commissioners. And my newspaper editorially sometimes supported the other side. My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

Was there a teacher who inspired you?

Charles Kuralt: I was lucky. I had several teachers before college who were encouraging to me. In eighth grade there was a teacher named Ann Batton, who was the journalism counselor to the little school paper that we put out. She made me believe that I could do good work, and there were others.

Thinking back on that, I am pretty sure that's what people of that age -- seventh, eighth, ninth graders -- need more than anything else. Just a little bit of encouragement. They need to believe, "This is something I can do." They need a compliment once in a while. Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will recognize that and put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. I've always felt we don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough. When I look back at my own beginnings I think how very grateful I was for a couple of underpaid teachers taking an interest in me.

Is there a book that especially influenced or inspired you?

Charles Kuralt: The first books I was interested in as a little kid were all about baseball. There was a children's sports novelist named John R. Tunis, and I read all of his books. I was fascinated by those stories. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way. I loved William Saroyan's stories. I read them pretty early, and I couldn't get enough of the stories in the book, My Name is Aram, about life in the central valley of California. That was a world I didn't know, of course, and I was knocked out by his humor and his style.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along. I remember being in the public library in my hometown and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read, and couldn't. There just wasn't time enough in life to read everything I wanted to read.

Later on I became infatuated with all those old-time New Yorker magazine writers. E.B. White, in particular, I still regard as one of the truly great essayists in English. And Thurber, and E.J. Kahn, and all the rest of them. I loved that kind of writing and regret its passing in America today.

I believe that writing is derivative. I mean, I think good writing comes from good reading. And, I think that writers, when they sit down to write hear in their heads the rhythms of good writers they have read. Sometimes, I could even tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's just experience. It's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

Tell me about your high school essay contest.

Charles Kuralt: It meant a lot to me. It's a contest that still goes on, called The Voice of Democracy contest. You write an essay and deliver it as a speech. I won the competition in Charlotte, North Carolina and went on to the state finals, and won there. Next thing I knew, I was notified that I was one of the four national winners. I was only 14. We got a trip to Washington. We read our speeches in the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, where Patrick Henry delivered some of his speeches and went on to Washington to meet the President. I still have, of course, a photograph of a very congenial President, Harry Truman with my mother and me, both of us wearing neat blue, double-breasted suits, the fashion of 1948. That contest and to my surprise, doing well in it added to my confidence. It made me think, "I can do this. I can write and speak with anybody my age." It was a great confidence builder. It did have an important effect in my life, I think.

Someone else who impressed you read that essay.

Charles Kuralt: Yes. One night at the Statler Hotel in Washington, my mother and I were told to be sure not to miss Edward R. Murrow's radio broadcast that night. Murrow always ended his radio broadcast with a quotation from the news, "a word for the day," he called it. And that night he quoted a couple of paragraphs of my essay. Oh, that was a great thrill because Murrow was a hero in our family. During World War II, my brother and sister and I knew not to cut up or talk loudly when Edward R. Murrow was on the air from London, reporting on the news of the war. I think my mother was especially proud that Murrow quoted her son on the air. Years later, when I became briefly a very junior colleague of Ed Murrow's, I told him that story and it just delighted him. He went about telling it to everybody. To think that he had quoted me on the air, and here I was working for CBS News a few years later.

What were you like in school?

Charles Kuralt: I got along okay. I was elected vice president of the class, and all that. I ran for president of the student body in high school and was soundly trounced by the quarterback of the football team, Slug Clayborne, who is still a friend of mine.

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately. But I didn't have very much spare time, because all through high school I was working, either writing junior high school sports for one of the local papers, or working after school at the radio station as a disk jockey and news reader. That was my greatest interest.

I couldn't wait for school to be out so that I could go uptown, about a mile away and go to work. I loved working. And, I suppose I was, in that way, a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends and really I wasn't a very social boy. But, I just loved writing and working at the radio station. I missed a good deal, I think. I certainly didn't pay as much attention in class as I should have. My family would take family vacations, but I'd always stay home, because I didn't want to miss out on the work. So, I know that I paid a little bit of a price as a look back on it for this passion for working which I had when I was a kid.

Who gave you your first big break?

Charles Kuralt: There was another contest. I took part in, a sports writing contest for kids when I was only 12. There was a sports editor on The Charlotte News named Ray Howe. He took an interest in me and let me write pieces, not identified as being written by a young teenager, just freelance pieces for the sports page. He gave me my first byline on a junior high school basketball championship in our town.

Actually, all of the editors of that paper were very kind to me. And, I worked for the opposition paper sometimes too. I still have a piece of yellow copy paper somewhere with advice on it that I treasure. For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written for the paper that month. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy. That's the way I got paid in the beginning.

Bob Page, the city editor of The Charlotte Observer issued me a check, and one month the check was somewhat too large. It was a few dollars more than I had submitted. Dutiful, honest little boy that I was, I went down and said, "Mr. Page, you paid me too much." He frowned and said, " I'll look into it." The next day I got the check back again with a note that said: "The check is close enough. Please in the future don't ever complain about being overpaid, only about being underpaid." That was good advice.

What do you think these editors saw in you?

Charles Kuralt: I don't know. They saw an earnest, ambitious, hardworking kid, who tried to imitate the sportswriters on the paper.

They knew though that if I said I'd cover a junior high school game, that I would and that I would quickly get in there and turn my copy in. One of the prizes in the sports writing contest was getting to travel on a road trip with the team, by bus of course, to Knoxville and Asheville. And, they gave me my instructions about filing after the game -- do it as quickly as possible -- and told me the phrase to use when I walked into the Western Union office with my copy. It still gives me a little thrill of importance to say, "The Charlotte News, press rate, collect." [Laughter] That made me feel as adult as anything that ever happened in my youth.

Why do you think you succeeded where others didn't?

Charles Kuralt: Others did, of course, succeed in other things, things that were beyond me. Among my classmates were people regarded as highly successful in life, including the president of the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina, something I certainly never would have been qualified to be. I didn't have any kind of formula. I think it was just genuine passion.

I wasn't thinking about where I was going in life. I was just thinking about what I loved to do and what I loved to do is have that little bit of special privilege that attaches to a reporter. You get to stick your nose in where others don't. You get to interview the coach before the game and, whereas everybody in the stands might like to talk to the coach, you're the one who gets to do it. That pleased me, this notion of being somebody just a little bit special, which is the reporter's privilege.

How do you account for what you have achieved?

Charles Kuralt: I don't know. I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. For one thing, I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air. It's impossible to imagine that happening to a young person today. In those days, television was expanding so quickly that you didn't really have to have much age and experience. Almost any warm body would do.

They were hiring people in those days just about as fast as they're laying people off in broadcast news today. So that was purely a matter of luck. I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along, just because I was the right age. So luck has a part in it.

I keep coming back to the passion for what I was doing. That was the overwhelming thing to me. Not where I worked or where I lived or how high I rose in the profession, but just the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it. That was something I became pretty good at and naturally, when you're good at something, you love doing it. I think that must be true of physicists and of medical doctors and of musicians, all fields in which I am abysmally ignorant. But, I imagine that it's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing that is most important in one's career.

How would you explain to someone who knows nothing about what you do why it is so important to you?

Charles Kuralt: That would be very hard for me to do. I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. I recognize that ultimately it is important in a society like this, mainly so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

For most of my career I didn't do stories about things that go wrong. I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary. I would not argue that it was important to society at large, it was just fun.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So, they were always about somebody I liked, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And, to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism to every corner of every state over and over again -- why, who wouldn't want a job like that? Well, who wouldn't want a job like that is somebody who wants to be home for supper every night and have a settled family life and all that. You do give up some things.

I don't do it anymore, at least not for television, because I woke up one day and decided I'd done it long enough. But looking back on it, I must say, it was a very satisfying life. There is also this element: I didn't know how to do anything else. I really couldn't have succeeded in the wholesale grocery trade. This was one thing knew how to do. Of course, as anyone does, I got better at it as I got older.

What setbacks have you had along the way and what have you learned from them?

Charles Kuralt: Honestly, I didn't have very many setbacks. While working for CBS News I encountered a few bosses who didn't think I was very good at what I was doing, especially when it came to covering hard news. And I recognized myself that I had flaws as a serious, hard news journalist. I didn't like the competitiveness of big time journalism. I was always afraid that Dick Valeriani of NBC was sneaking around behind my back when I was a Latin American correspondent, discovering important stories that I had no clue to. And I was right, of course. That's exactly what he was doing.

I didn't like the deadline pressure. I didn't like being under some assignment editor's thumb, and just when I was finally planning to have dinner with my wife, being told, "No, this afternoon you have to fly off to Bolivia, because there's a military coup in progress there."

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me. A very big setback was a big story that broke, the big earthquake in Alaska. And, NBC managed to get its first film on the air from that event 20 minutes, or half an hour before CBS News did. That was entirely my responsibility. And, I was abruptly -- well, within a few days I was told to forget about it. I could just come home from Los Angeles and return to New York where my bosses can keep an eye on me. They knew I wasn't any good at covering breaking news stories.

What did I learn from it? I don't know. I learned that they were right. I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to stick my nose in where I wasn't wanted, and didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things that real reporters have to do.

Ever have any self-doubts? Any fear of failure?

Charles Kuralt: I must have gone through that, but I was pretty confident that what I enjoyed doing, I could do well.

How do you handle criticism, and how does it affect your work and ideas?

Charles Kuralt: I haven't thought about it before, but truth is that I used to shrug criticism off pretty easily.

TV critics, especially those of The New York Times, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air. But, I figured I knew more about it than they did, and so it never bothered me a lot. I guess it must have bothered me a little bit when Tom Shales of the Washington Post ridiculed me for a whole column one time. Talked about -- I have this fat face -- he talked about my chipmunk cheeks and the light, inconsequential nature of my reporting. And, I guess that bothered me for a day or two. I think you do have to stop and say, wait a minute, does this guy have a point here? But, I finally decided he didn't, that he was right about the chipmunk cheeks, but about the quality of my work, I'd finally decided he was wrong.

Criticism never bothered me much, but then I never suffered a real drumbeat of criticism. On the contrary, I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

In the nature of the stories I was doing, there was very little to criticize. They were simple, innocent stories. I thought at the time that they were successful in their own terms. I recognize that they were not vitally important ones, but I don't think the occasional criticism bothered me very much.

What personal characteristics do you think are important to success?

Charles Kuralt: I've changed my mind about that over the years. I have certainly grown older, and I think I've grown a little bit wiser. I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.

As I look back on it now, I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed in my life. If I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep. I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures. And, I think I probably could have done a better job if I had been more mature and been able to take a deep breath and just say, "Come on. Whether this story gets on the air tonight or not is not really the end of the world. We'll do our best and that's all we can do."

But I was driven. Not on the surface maybe, but I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I don't think I could get an ulcer anymore. I think I've learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.

I had terrible migraine headaches. The funny thing is, they always came on the rare day when I had a day off. I thought of them as Sunday headaches, because as long as I kept that spring tightly wound, I was fine. When I let it relax, then I suffered, because it was such a change.

What did you think you learned about achievement and how to measure success from the people that you met on the road?

Charles Kuralt: It's funny. From my experiences on the back roads and in the small towns, never doing stories that would have made page one, or would have been the lead story on the evening news, I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country.

I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I'd been forever covering the civil rights struggle, or all of those tough stories of the '50s, and '60s, and '70s. I concluded that there is such a thing as a national conscience, and that it can be touched. In my time as a reporter it was touched by Ralph Nader, for example, who was a young lawyer in his 20s who nobody had ever heard of, and who gave us seat belts, and air bags, and sturdier automobiles to ride in.

There are so many such people. Betty Friedan, who wrote The Feminine Mystique, a book that Alvin Tofler said, "pulled the trigger of history," and started the whole business of women leading a much fairer life than they did when I was coming along. Of course, most important of all were the changes that accompanied the civil rights movement.

The country can be touched by a handful of people who are sure they're right. A Martin Luther King can finally get inside the skin of nearly everybody. I think that's what I learned the most, that there is a belief in fairness, if you can just get people to stop and think about it in this country. It's part of our tradition. There are a lot of people in small towns, big cities too, who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority of the kind that some people suffered from once in our society. I became much more confident and much more reassured about America, I think, than I would have if I had been stationed in Washington covering the Congress, or the White House, or stationed overseas covering wars, and riots, and politics. I gained a genuine appreciation for the goodness of most people in this country.

Did you learn how people measure success and achievement?

Charles Kuralt: I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them. They got a kick out of it, and very often they didn't much care what the neighbors thought. I met a man who thought there ought to be a straight highway from Duluth to Fargo. The state wouldn't build it, so he just decided he was going to build it himself. He worked on it for 25 or 30 years, all by himself. He finished 11 or 12 miles of it, he had 180 miles to go. He was 78 when we met him, but he was a success in his own eyes. He thought he was doing something that needed to be done, and he was the only one visionary enough to see that it needed doing, so he set out to do it, all alone.

I think that's the great achievement, achieving satisfaction with yourself, satisfaction in your own life. The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege in my experience. "Money can't buy happiness," we were told when I was a little boy, and I'd say that's so.

Is there some idea or problem that you'd want to do something about?

Charles Kuralt: Oh, there are lots of them.

I'm still interested, as I was when I was 10 or 11 years old in this thing that so much interested my father, injustices in society and the unfairness that still exists. I mean, that a country so rich that it can reach out and touch the stars and send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read and who really haven't any way of making a way for themselves in society. That's terribly troubling to me. In recent years, since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to be of help to the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina, my father's old school because I realize, and I now have time to do something about it, that a society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens. We just can't afford it.

That's something that's much on my mind.

I'm not any kind of social reformer myself, but looking back on it, I'm much prouder of my father and what he did, mostly quietly, than I am of anything I have ever done because what he did was back in the '40s, before anybody else had the idea, he started day care centers for the children of poor women. He sold it to the local government on the basis of getting these welfare mothers back to work. Well, what he really had in mind was giving those children a chance by educating them a little bit, giving them a head start, as it is now called.

There were other initiatives that he took which really changed people's lives. That's something. I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

Do you have any unfulfilled wishes?

Charles Kuralt: I'd like to write something that would live. It's getting a little late. I'd better get at it if I'm going to do that. In television, you know, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality, because your stuff, by and large, doesn't live on.

It's not easy for me to admit, but I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think. You begin to think, "Well, what have I ever done to benefit society? What have I ever written that would excite a young reader years from now, the way Mark Twain's journalism still excited me when I first read Roughing It and Innocence Abroad ?" So we can't all be Mark Twain. In fact, I guess it's fair to say none of us can be Mark Twain, except Mark Twain. But, you do begin to yearn to write some thing that gains a little permanence. I guess, being frank, I have to say that.

What is your advice to young people just starting out?

Charles Kuralt: Oh, dear. I know that's the whole purpose of this, but I would be very reluctant to offer them advice. Many young people today are really in a position to offer me advice.

I have a 10-year-old grandson who has an e-mail address. I don't know anything about the Internet, or all of that stuff. He knows all about it. He's a dinosaur buff. We went to a store around the corner from the Museum of...of Natural History in New York and he started calling off the Latin names and dining habits of all the dinosaur models in the place. "Oh, there's a brachiosaurus!" or something, and the guy behind the counter said, "You're right about that one. You're right, you're right." Finally he said, "Okay, kid, you start at 10 o'clock Monday. You bring the bagels."

This is a grandfather bragging about his grandson, of course, but it's true that at that age I was nowhere near so accomplished as my 10-year-old grandson. When you hang around with some of these dazzling youngsters, you realize that they're way ahead of you in lots of important ways.

Look for joy in your life, it's not always easy to find. I have a daughter who spent years going back to school, because she was really puzzled about what she wanted to do with her life. She tried being an assistant professor of English, because she liked literature, but she found she didn't like teaching. And so, back to school again.

Finally, as she turned 30 or so, she discovered that what she really loved and could be passionate about was the advertising business. She's a very happy, very hardworking, and very creative person in the advertising field today. It never occurred to her that that's what would finally challenge and interest her in life.

So it takes a little searching. But I don't think one should ever come to my stage of life, retired, 60, and have to look back and say, "Gosh. I wish I hadn't spent all those years doing that job that paid so well, but which I was never really interested in." That's something approaching tragedy. Even if it means ignoring the advice of family and friends, it's far better to leap into something you know you love, something you know gives you joy. You might change your mind later, but that is especially the privilege of youth.

Is there one book that you would read to your grandchildren?

Charles Kuralt: I can't really think of one book. I don't think that any one book contains the wisdom of the ages. For what purpose would I be reading it to them? For love of language I would choose a Shakespeare play -- for other purposes, other works.

The Bible, of course, jumps to mind, but again, it's for the literature in it. I think there are passages of Ecclesiastes, for example, that are almost enough to persuade you that the book was divinely inspired, because they're so beautifully, beautifully composed.

Far more likely that a young person would be reading a book to me. Microsoft Word For Dummies comes to mind. I still have a lot to learn.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

Charles Kuralt: Let me answer with an anecdote.

We did a story about a black family in the poorest part of Mississippi one time, the Chandlers. There were eight or nine children and the oldest of them decided he wanted to go to college, which had never happened in that family, I assure you. All his parents could do for him was hitch up the mule to the wagon -- they didn't own either the mule or the wagon -- and go into town and borrow two dollars for bus fare to send him off to college. From that beginning he became Dr. Cleveland Chandler, the head of the Department of Economics at Howard University. And, each of his younger brothers in sisters in turn went on to college, most of them to graduate degrees. There was a Baptist minister from Colorado and the head nutritionist of a veteran's hospital in Kansas City, people of accomplishment in every case. And, one of them wrote me a letter and said, "You really ought to come see us because we are something." Their parents' 50th anniversary was coming up, it happened also to be Thanksgiving Day. From all over America, all the children came back to the new house they had built to replace the shack they had grown up in. And, looking back on those days of picking cotton all summer to afford to go back to school, helping the younger brothers and sisters accomplish what they had accomplished and looking back on the humblest beginnings that any family could ever have, all we did all afternoon was cry.

Mr. Chandler couldn't get through the blessing at the Thanksgiving dinner. I looked over at Izzy Bleckman, the camera man I worked with all these years and he was not able to look through the viewfinder of the camera and I was weeping too, everybody was. And, what were we weeping about? The American Dream, this notion that, if you really want to in a country like this, you can start from nothing and make a success of yourself. Maybe not a rich man or a rich woman, but a success. The kind of success that you look into your own heart and find is there. That is not possible in most countries of the world to this day, but it still is possible here. That's something very precious. I've kept up with the Chandlers. One of the grandchildren played violin in Carnegie Hall last year. It goes in circles. The dream doesn't stop. It makes me cry to think about it.

Me too. Thanks for that story, and all your stories.