Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 21, 1994 TAG: 9403190070
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TIM FUNK KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's been Charles Kuralt's dream for the past couple of years. Last week, the 59-year-old CBS anchor finally made it happen: He announced he'll retire from CBS, his home since 1957, on May 1.
"I got tired of debating myself and said it was time to do it," Kuralt said during a phone interview. "I think I've done about all I can do in TV news. I thought it would be fun to have a few years to be footloose and fancy-free."
The 11-time Emmy winner, who was born in Wilmington, N.C., and raised in Charlotte, N.C., became famous as America's roving reporter, celebrating ordinary people and places in his "On the Road" series. But for the last 15 years, as host of CBS' "Sunday Morning," Kuralt has had to spend a lot of his time in New York.
So his first post-CBS project will be that dream book about spending, in his words, "a year of absolute freedom in 12 of my favorite places at just the right time." He had tried to do the book by working on it three and four days at a time, but found he couldn't as long as he was chained to his anchor desk.
Kuralt plans to take to the road in a van and travel solo. Here's how Kuralt's calendar is shaping up: May in the mountains of North Carolina; July near the boundary waters canoe area of northern Minnesota; August on the coast of Maine; September in Montana; October in Vermont; and November in Santa Fe, N.M.
His working title for the book: "The Perfect Year."
"I've rediscovered the pleasures of wandering around with a notepad in my hip pocket," said Kuralt. "I want that ease of being able to make all of my own decisions about where to go and how long to stay. In television, if you stay in one place 18 hours, that's a hell of a long time."
On his first day back at work since his retirement news, Kuralt fielded calls from old friends, colleagues - including Dan Rather, Mike Wallace and Morley Safer - and reporters. By late morning, 75 journalists had called CBS requesting interviews with television's folksiest anchor-reporter.
His best memories? "All those years on the road," he said. "That [period] was the great pleasure of my life." Kuralt said he got the idea for his "On the Road" series from his days at the Charlotte, N.C., News. At the paper, he wrote an 800-word daily column - called "People" - that profiled ordinary men and women.
Is network TV news going downhill? Kuralt doesn't think so. "I go back to the days of 15 minutes of news with Douglas Edwards," he said. "Now you can look around and see `60 Minutes' and `Nightline' and `Sunday Morning.' I think we serve the country a hell of a lot better than we used to."
Any parting thoughts? Stay tuned to his last "Sunday Morning" broadcast, on Easter. "We'll leave 30 seconds at the end for me to say something," Kuralt said.
by CNB