Assignment to Hell Read Online Free Page B

RONKITE WAS A K ANSAS C ITY kid, too, but his family moved to Houston, Texas, when he was eleven. What should have been a comfortable upbringing sadly went awry. He was the only child of Walter Leland Cronkite, Sr., a dental surgeon sent to the Great War’s front lines with a Missouri artillery unit headed by Lieutenant (later Captain) Harry S Truman. The ghastly sights that Dr. Cronkite witnessed in the Argonne Forest contributed, his granddaughter believes, to post-traumatic stress and an enervating bout with alcoholism that ultimately broke apart his little family. 41
    Cronkite’s mother was an arts devotee who doted on her only child. As her husband’s drunkenness grew worse and the Depression deepened, her son was forced to grow up in a hurry. Young Walter became increasinglyprotective of his mother and began taking paternal care of the people who came into his orbit—a generosity of spirit that grew larger as the years went on.
    Like Boyle, Cronkite was bitten by the journalism bug early in life. A retired newspaper reporter taught the fundamentals of reporting to students at San Jacinto High School. Young Walter showed so much promise that his teacher entered him in a newswriting competition sponsored by the Texas Interscholastic Press Association. Cronkite won the contest going away, dramatically ripping his copy out of the typewriter while other kids were still agonizing over their opening paragraphs. 42
    At the University of Texas in Austin, Cronkite wrote for the
Daily Texan
and broadcast sports scores for the campus radio station. KNOW couldn’t afford a sports ticker, so a half hour before he was scheduled to go on the air, Cronkite would wander into a combination smoke shop/saloon. Afraid he’d get nabbed if he wrote anything down, he’d sip a three-point-two beer while feigning nonchalance as he glanced at the ticker a few feet from the bar. He’d yawn as the bartender posted scores on a blackboard. Then, a couple of minutes before airtime, Cronkite would sprint to the station, relying on his memory to relay that day’s sports headlines. “It was one of the best bits of journalistic training I ever got,” Cronkite recalled. 43
    One semester Cronkite announced scores at a “sports club” that turned out to be a thinly veiled bookie operation. Fearing that the cops would bust the joint, Cronkite eventually quit, but not before he pocketed some nice cash.
    Not unlike Rooney a few years later, he flirted with a left-wing clique but was too busy to become a campus crusader in the mold of future CBS colleagues Eric Sevareid at the University of Minnesota or Ed Murrow at Washington State. Cronkite joined the Curtain Club, a thespian troupe whose leading light was Cronkite’s fraternity brother (and future movie star) Eli Wallach. Cronkite didn’t act in a lot of plays but learned how to project his baritone.
    He also landed a part-time position with the Austin bureau of Scripps Howard’s
Houston Press
, covering the state legislature and learning how to place gratis calls from a pay phone by inserting a hairpin instead of anickel. When the
Press
offered him a full-time job in Houston, Cronkite leapt, leaving school before earning his degree. The country was caught in the vise of the Depression; his parents, struggling with Walter Senior’s substance addiction and flagging dentistry practice, needed financial help.
    In 1936, Cronkite returned to his boyhood home to take a job as a rookie broadcaster at Kansas City’s KCMO Radio. The term always used to describe prewar Kansas City was “wide-open”—a euphemism that covered a variety of “forbidden” pursuits, from bootlegging and black jazz to strip clubs and illicit gambling—all of it enriching the coffers of Boss Pendergast. KCMO was owned by a crony of Boss Tom’s; thanks to Pendergast’s muscle, it enjoyed one of the Midwest’s most powerful broadcast signals.
    The station also insisted that its “talent” take stage names, so Cronkite