Travels with Charley

One night several months ago, while jetting from Manhattan to Detroit to cover a story, CBS Newsman Charles Kuralt, 33, got to wondering about all those tiny clusters of lights in the darkness below. By flitting from one big city to another to report on the latest disaster, he realized, TV newsmen "miss everything in between." "What," he asked, "about the people who live outside the cities? Is the mood of American life really as unsettled as it appears to be on television?"

To find out, three months ago he and a three-man crew piled into a rented Dodge travel bus crammed with film equipment and four bunk beds, and hit the back roads.

Sconcing Up. The CBS team followed no set itinerary, simply turned on its cameras when and where there was something interesting to shoot. As the autumn foliage turned, Kuralt appeared on Walter Cronkite's Evening News with a two-minute film report from a leaf-strewn country road in Vermont ("It is death that causes this blinding show of color, but it is a fierce and flaming death"). While rolling through Ohio in November, Kuralt noticed that every town in the area except Harrisburg (pop: 360) was plastered with campaign posters. This led to an account of a town that was holding an election but "managed to escape all the unseemly excitement of Election Day by the simple expedient of nobody running for anything." The town treasurer, a lady who keeps the ledgers on her dining-room table, confessed that she "just never got around to putting her name on the ballot." The mayor wearily explained that he was not running for re-election because "we have all the aggravations of the big cities, maybe more. We have dogs, cats, neighbors fighting."

In Rockland, Me., Kuralt went out on a fishing boat and reported: "From Calais down to Kittery, the lobstermen agree: Maine lobsters are, as they say Down East, 'scarcing up.' " The report ended with Kuralt seated before a shore dinner: "We should add, reassuringly, that the lobster has not vanished, though this one is about to. Maine lobsters are more elusive than ever, but just as tasty as ever when consumed with drawn butter on an expense account."

Looking Ahead. Sandwiched between the daily barrage of riots, wars and demonstrations on the Cronkite show, Kuralt's slices of Americana are like a two-minute ceasefire. "It's refreshing to us," he says, "to realize that the country isn't in flames. It turns out that there's a lot of good going on." Viewers agree, and the experimental feature has been extended through next month.

Though ABC and NBC have also stepped up their coverage of offbeat stories, neither so far has matched Kuralt's diversity or unabashed do-goodness. In Holbrook, Mass., he told of a fund drive for the infant son of a Navy pilot who, by diverting his crippled jet away from a school and residential area, sacrificed his own life. In Westerville, Ohio, Kuralt interviewed John Franklin Smith, 87, who upon retiring as a teacher at Otterbein College stayed on as a janitor; the old man remarked that he was still "looking ahead" because there were so many "good books to read and fish to catch and pretty women to see and good men to know."

Soon, Kuralt plans to head his bus for Hinckley, Ohio, where, like the swallows of Capistrano, a flock of buzzards returns every year, for what has become an annual Buzzard Festival. All this is hardly bulletin matter. Yet, if nothing else, the enthusiastic response of viewers to Kuralt's vignettes does prove, as he says, that "the definition of television news needs broadening."

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