Walter Cronkite once read the news as Walter Wilcox and argued with a puppet
Before he became the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite called games on Kansas City radio under the name Walter Wilcox and once bantered with a lion puppet on morning television. For nearly two decades, from 1962 to 1981, his sign-off on the CBS Evening News, And that's the way it is, closed the national day.
A dentist's son from Saint Joseph, Missouri, born November 4, 1916, Cronkite moved to Houston at ten. He edited his high school paper, worked on the Daily Texan at the University of Texas, where he interviewed Gertrude Stein and acted alongside Eli Wallach, and dropped out in 1935 to report full time. Radio stations then made announcers use false names, fearing listeners would follow them elsewhere, so in 1936, while meeting his future wife Betsy Maxwell, he was on air as Wilcox. In 1937 he joined the United Press wire service.
When Edward R. Murrow offered him a place among CBS's war correspondents, Cronkite first said yes, then stayed at United Press after it raised his pay, and Murrow held a grudge for years. He covered North Africa and Europe for the wire service, sailing on USS Texas during the Operation Torch landings and hitching a seaplane ride home to beat a rival with the first uncensored reports.
Murrow recruited him again in 1950, this time for television. He anchored CBS's coverage of the 1952 party conventions, hosted You Are There, which staged historical events as live news, and on The Morning Show chatted with a puppet named Charlemane, which he said could voice opinions no human commentator dared. He also irritated a tobacco sponsor by correcting the grammar of its slogan on air. On April 16, 1962, he took over the evening news, which in 1963 became the first half-hour nightly network newscast.
Months later, on November 22, 1963, he broke the news that President Kennedy had been shot, reading bulletins over audio while crews rushed to ready a studio camera. By 1967 his ratings were overtaking NBC's Huntley–Brinkley team, and his Apollo 11 coverage in 1969 drew the biggest audiences. During the Iran hostage crisis he closed each broadcast with a count of days in captivity, ending on day 444, January 20, 1981. He retired that year and died on July 17, 2009.
Source: Walter Cronkite
