And That’s the Way It Was
And That’s the Way It Was by Walter Cronkite, published by Random House, Inc., New York
Long before he narrated our nation’s milestone events as the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite was a cub reporter in Houston. In these excerpts from his forthcoming memoir, A Reporter’s Life, the eighty-year-old recalls his early days in the newspaper business—and the dark days of segregation.
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Whites who are anxious to help eliminate racial bias have had some difficulty keeping up with the nomenclature the blacks themselves prefer. We went from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” and are now advised that the proper designation is “African American.” Even the most sympathetic among us must feel on occasion that the activists who perpetrate these changes do so with a certain pleasure in their power to make whites conform.
The culture shock for us Middle Westerners newly arrived in the South was augmented my first day in the fifth-grade class at Woodrow Wilson elementary school. In Kansas City, aside from my propensity in the first weeks of first grade to slip away and go home, I had a spotless record for conning my teachers into believing that I was a perfect angel.
Thus, when I raised my hand and answered my first question in Houston—something as simple as two times two—I was more than startled to hear Mrs. Jung say, “That is not the answer. What is the answer?”
I was certain I was right. “Four,” I repeated.
“Come stand here in the front of the class until you think of the answer,” Mrs. Jung hissed. There I was, in the best go-to-school clothes my mother could prepare for me, facing snickering classmates I hadn’t even met yet, trying to will away the welling tears.
I dared not even look at Mrs. Jung, although her features in an hour had been fixed in my memory for a lifetime. Medium height, reddish-brown hair worn in a boyish bob, and teeth scarred by drastic periodontal surgery. At last—had I been standing there a week? a month? a lifetime?—the bell rang for recess. And Mrs. Jung said in a tone as unkindly as only she could muster, “Now, then, have you thought of the answer?” When I confessed that I had not, she enlightened me.
“The answer is, ‘Four, ma’am.’”
That night Dad’s indignation, still raw from the events at Dr. Smith’s, burned furiously again. “You may say ‘Yes, Mrs. Jung,’ and ‘No, Mrs. Jung,’ but you won’t say ‘ma’am.’ You go back and tell her that no son of mine will yield to this sectional ignorance.”
That was easy enough for him to say. It was more difficult for me, and I was sent home at recess. Dad complained directly to the school board, and the case was compromised in his favor—but it was fortunate I had only two more months to endure the wrath of Mrs. Jung, who, I can now judge in retrospect, probably thought she was doing her part to maintain a fading Southern gentility.
Or perhaps she just hated Yankees.
If America is a melting pot, so is each section of it, and we Northerners, flooding into Houston in the vanguard of its boom years, were accepted, gracefully by most of the natives, even as we preached some of our own values.
This was my background as, Mrs. Jung and Dr. Smith four years behind me, I sat with Louis and George and Tad outside the drugstore waiting for the next call. It went to Louis, and he rode off with a quart of ice cream for a distant address. It was the last I would see of him.
We didn’t learn that night why he failed to return from that trip. No one from the police morgue took the time to call the drugstore. Only the next day did the police tell the owner of the drugstore that Louis had been shot.
All of us, but particularly George, the other black delivery boy, knew exactly what had happened. George and Louis had talked about the problem and their fears many times. Louis, George was certain, had looked for an alleyway or another path to reach the customer’s back door. Finding none, he took the route he and George knew to be as dangerous as a Comanche trail. As he passed between the houses, the customer’s next-door neighbor killed him with a single shotgun blast.
The neighbor said Louis was a peeping Tom. The police and the newspaper accepted that—I don’t believe the incident was even mentioned in the papers—and the neighbor was never charged. No white was ever indicted for assaulting, or even killing, a black.
It is not impossible, and it is even likely, that if there was something to see in the neighbor’s house, Louis might not have averted his eyes. But that wasn’t why he was there. He was following Dr. Smith’s standards for the black man’s conduct. Trying to avoid a punch in the nose, he lost his life. His executioner was excused by the unconscionable code of racial injustice. I was learning early the ways of the South, although in this particular case they probably were different from those in the North only in their ingenuousness. My lessons on racial discrimination came early and had a lifelong impact, but at the time, of course, they were only incidental to the process of growing up in the South.
While attending the University of Texas, Cronkite got a job covering the Legislature for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain; he eventually dropped out of school to pursue journalism full time. In 1935, during the halcyon days when Houston was a three-newspaper town, the young reporter was recruited by Scripps Howard’s Houston Press, taking home $15 a week.
The year on the Press was a learning time. Perhaps my first lesson came at the end of my first week, when I put in an expense account for a dollar or two. Carefully itemized were several phone calls at a nickel each.
“What are these doing on here?” city editor Roy Roussel demanded as he waved the account under my nose. “Don’t you know how to make a phone call? Harold, show the kid how to make a phone call!”
So Harold took me downstairs to the lobby pay phone and showed me. He had two straight pins inserted into the underside of his coat lapel. He removed them and stuck one pin in one of the pair of twisted wires leading into the phone box and one into the other. Holding them together, he made the connection. The telephone company got wise to this a short time later, and always the spoilsports, put all the wires in impenetrable cables. It must have nearly broken Scripps Howard. I learned, too, the serious lessons of daily journalism. The need for accuracy, for instance. We competed in the afternoon with the Houston Chronicle, and we each published several editions a day. At press time each paper had a copy boy standing by the loading dock of the opposition to grab several copies literally hot, or at least warm, off the press. He then ran the eight blocks to his paper to breathlessly drop copies on the desks of the key editors.
Roy Roussel spread the Chronicle out on his desk and stood over it, flipping the pages, exclaiming when he thought we had bested them, frowning when the shoe was on the other foot—frowning until his heavy, graying brows almost covered his eyes.
Then, if there was hope of catching up in the next edition, he’d get the reporter on the phone or in front of his desk for a hurried conference. The cry from the city desk had a different tenor, though, when Roussel found what he thought might be an error. The call penetrated the clatter of the city room.
“Cronkite!”
The barely-innocent-until-proved-guilty hastened to the dock.
“The Chronicle spells this guy’s name S-m-y-t-h. We’ve got it i-t-h. Which is it?”
Or: “The Chronicle says it was at 1412, we say 1414 Westheimer. Who’s right?”
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