The Most Trusted Man in America

by Pa Rock
Baby Boomer

Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News throughout the 1960's and 1970's passed away this evening. The 92-year-old former television journalist was known to be near death for the past few days, so the cable networks were ready. MSNBC has been airing a Walter Fest all evening.

The recognition is good, and it is well deserved. They are running old clips of his announcement that JFK had been shot, and minutes later somberly telling America of the President's death in Dallas. There has been footage aired of him tonight with every President from Eisenhower through Clinton, and we have heard his famous on-air editorial in which he concluded that the Vietnam war was not winnable.

I remember all of that stuff because I was in high school and college during those years, and was already a budding news junkie. There were only three television networks at that time, and much of America got their daily dose of national news from Walter Cronkite. I think that my most vivid memory was of the color footage of the Vietnam combat and the daily body counts that Cronkite gave - bringing the war right into our living rooms.

Walter Cronkite was a part of everyone's family. He was giving us the news while we kicked our shoes off after a hard day at work or at school. Through his steady baritone voice we learned what was going on in the world as we set the table for dinner (families used to eat dinner around a table), and settled in for our evening meal. Shortly after retiring from CBS in the early 1980's, Cronkite was voted as the most trusted man in America by a national poll. - and the results of that poll were accepted as an obvious fact by a broad spectrum of the American public.

Even this old news hound learned something new about Cronkite from tonight's television coverage. Dan Rather, his replacement at CBS, told Rachel Maddow that Cronkite had flown into France on a glider shortly after D-Day. Hugh Downs, another news ancient, was interviewed over the phone and quoted Cronkite as saying that a person had to be a liberal in order to be a good journalist. (Need proof? Think of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. There's not an ounce of credibility or journalistic integrity in the lot!)

Walter Cronkite was a native of St. Joseph, Missouri, and still had family ties in the Show Me State. I know that because several years ago I was spending the evening with my friend Millie Crossland, a social worker and political maven in Kansas City. Millie was working in the office of Kay Barnes, the mayor of Kansas City, and her desk was located just outside of the mayor's inner-sanctum. We were in the office that night when Millie took me in to see where Mayor Barnes did her work. There, in the middle of the mayor's desk, was a small framed photo of Walter Cronkite. When I asked about it, Millie told me that he and Mayor Barnes were cousins.

Not surprisingly, no one anticipated the passing of Walter Cronkite in the 2009 Pa Rock's Dead Pool. In fact, most of the entrants were too young to have any clue as to who he was. That is too bad, because the craggy old journalist was, for a very long time, the face of American television news - and perhaps the face of America itself. He will be missed by the Boomers and the hearty few left of the World War II generation. An era is slipping away.

What Price Knowledge?

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

This morning while reading some lefty blog (probably Huffington Post) I came across a review of a tell-all book on the Bush family. I'm not much into gossip, especially gossip about morons, but the author of this blog post was so enthusiastic on the subject of Family of Secrets by Russ Baker that I decided to investigate further.

He talked about Baker's examination of Senator Prescott Bush's dalliance with Hitler's Nazi Party, a topic of which I already had a rudimentary knowledge, and, of course, the tragic presidency (tragic for the nation) of our current President - Prescott's grandson. But what really caught my interest was an implied link between George H.W. Bush (Bush 41) and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. One of my life goals, you see, is to solve the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. I have a decent library on the topic, and one of these days I will get around to it.

Ten years ago I sat in Jesse Auditorium at the University of Missouri one evening listening to Oliver Stone peddling a book. When he finished his talk, he opened the floor to questions, and one of the first out of the chute was an inquiry about some derogatory remarks that the older President Bush had made about Stone regarding his film, JFK. Stone became livid at the question and went totally off-script in a rabid denunciation of the Bush family in general and Pappy Bush in particular. Okay, I thought, that's interesting. (I've seen the movie, JFK, several times and even have a copy of the script, but I never came across any reference to the Bushes. So what got to Bush Sr. about the movie, and what got to Stone about Bush Sr.?)

Because I want to serve my country by clearing up the assassination mess, and because I believe the Bush family has crippled this great nation to the point that my grandchildren will grow up buried under debt and humiliation lavished upon us by these criminal bozos, I wanted to know more about Family of Secrets.

First stop: Amazon.com. The book was priced at $19.80, with free shipping if my order totaled $25 or more. Amazon had seven customer reviews. Each review was thorough and intelligently written, and each gave the book five stars - the highest rating. My instincts, it appeared, were good.

Second stop: Barnesandnoble.com. The customer ratings averaged 4.5 stars. Barnes and Noble were prouder of their copies than Amazon, with a sale price of $24 each.

But I really wasn't in the mood to wait, so this evening I pulled into the Barnes and Noble that is across the street from where I live. I have their customer card which is good for 10 percent off, and I had a coupon good for an additional 15 percent. Employing my basic math skills, I realized that 25% off of $24 would be a sweet $18, even less than Amazon - and I could take it right home! Imagine my puzzlement when I picked up a copy of the book and found that it was a pricey thirty dollars! I marched right up to the counter, as old farts are prone to do, and told the man that I could get the same book from their company over the Internet for $24. Yeah, he replied, we can't compete with our Internet price.

Say what!

Then I told him that I could get the same book from Amazon for $19.80 - and he told me to have a nice day!

So I guess I will - maybe tomorrow!

The Death of Innocence

Thanksgiving Day, 2007. A day for festive food and football, family and friends, and that perennial favorite, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It is the one day each year when people are most likely to spell my last name correctly. It’s not Macey, Masey, Massey, or even Mason, but just a simple four-letter-word: Macy.

But this post isn’t going to focus on family history, it is going to examine an intersection between personal and national history. I want to ramble about one of those highly significant days that was so cataclysmic and historic that anyone who lived through it, and was old enough, can remember exactly what they were doing at the time. The date: November 22, 1963, forty-four years ago today. The event: the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I was a sophomore in high school in the resort town of Noel, Missouri, that November. Our class was small, twenty some young people in a school population, 1st grade through 12th grade, of probably less than 300 students. Our school was four blocks off of Main Street, in a quiet part of a quiet town. Many of the students walked home for lunch every day, and some even walked down to Main Street and ate at the local drug store. We had an hour for lunch, and the concept of a closed campus was unheard of.

I had eaten lunch at school that day and was sitting in the study hall room talking to friends when the news first started to come in. Melvin, a senior who had just returned from having lunch at home, began spreading the word that he had seen on television that President Kennedy had been shot. Ten minutes or so later when the bell rang to go back to class, the word had filtered throughout the school.

My memory of the rest of the day is that everybody was too stunned to focus on school. Some kids were openly sobbing, and most of the others had a bewildered look that seemed to say, “What do we do now?” The school had no televisions to wheel into the classrooms in 1963, so we were left knowing something terrible was occurring, but unable to follow events. Some kids did go home to watch the story unfold on television, but most of us stayed in class and tried to concentrate on school.

Sometime that afternoon our superintendent, Mr. Bill Spears, held and all-school assembly and we all marched into the bleachers in the gymnasium. There he told us that President Kennedy had died. The crying spread through much of the student body as he tried to continued by letting us know that school would dismiss at the regular time that day. My dad was on the school board, and I learned later that Mr. Spears had contacted all of the board members and asked if he should let school out early. Somehow they had come to the conclusion to keep school in session in the pursuit of normalcy.

Years later I was principal of that same little school, by then a K-8 facility. Our music teacher was Coradell Alexander. She had been teaching music at Noel for decades by the time I came back to lead the school. Mrs. Alexander and I were visiting one day about the assassination, and she told me that Mr. Spears had been bewildered and had told staff that he had no idea what to do that day. No one had ever been through a presidential assassination before.

Two days after the President was killed I was quail hunting with my dad and a family friend when we heard the news that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. I had been stunned by the death of the President, but the shooting of Oswald made me feel that the world was suddenly very out of control. (Somehow I think that feeling has persisted from that day to this.)

Mr. Spears cancelled school on the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. It was a nationally televised event and I was glued to the set. I remember scenes of Charles DeGaulle, Prince Phillip, Haile Selassie, and scores of other world leaders marching in somber cadence behind the catafalque that was carrying the President. I also remember a television image of Lady Bird Johnson sitting in the White House, sipping a drink, and laughing with a group of dignitaries. It looked very uncaring, and my first thought was how did they get Jackie and the kids moved out so quickly. (I went on to become a great fan of Lady Bird’s, but I always thought that she looked a little to eager that day to be the Queen Bee.)

And life went on after that. Everyone, even high school kids in the Ozarks, seemed to know that our country had changed in irreversible ways. We had crossed a drawbridge and were stepping into a very different place, and in the background we could hear the bridge being raised. It was severing us from our innocence.