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(the great jazz musician).
    In February 1927, the Cronkites packed up their meager belongings and drove their Ford toward the Ozarks. There weren’t even a lot of teary good-byes. The three Cronkites—Walter Sr., Walter Jr., and Helen—sort of eased out of Missouri in a misty sleet without regrets. Texas was booming economically and plenty of well-heeled Houston folks wanted healthy teeth. If young Walter found any solace in leaving, it was that his grandparents were staying put in Missouri. They were his placeholders. For the next decade living in hot and humid Houston in the era before air-conditioning, he often dreamed about Buchanan County’s apple orchards ripe with fruit. Someday, Cronkite vowed, he would return to his real home, Missouri, and pick those apples again.

C HAPTER T WO
    Houston Youth
    ADJUSTING TO HUMIDITY—BUILDING A TELEGRAPH SYSTEM—NO GUNS AND BRUSH FIRE—ODD JOBS—1928 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION—CONFRONTING JIM CROW—THE POLITICS OF BOY SCOUTING—DRIVING A DODGE—GREAT DEPRESSION WOES—AN ALCOHOLIC FATHER—CHILD OF DIVORCE—JOURNEYMAN HEROES—SCRIBING FOR THE CAMPUS CUB —THE ORDER OF DEMOLAY—CUTTING HIS TEETH AT THE HOUSTON POST —DATING BIT WINTER—BALFOUR RING AT LAST
    E ver since Cronkite was a skinny boy delivering newspapers in Kansas City, he had pushed himself out into the world, hungry for opportunity. His curiosity about Houston loomed large when, in 1927, the Cronkites moved into a rented bungalow at 1838 Marshall Street in the suburban-like Montrose neighborhood. In preparation for relocating to the Gulf South, Walter dutifully read up on Houston in his trusty World Book Encyclopedia . To his disappointment, Houston had no El Paso swinging-door saloons or Fort Worth rodeos. Just a lot of gnarled oaks, biting flies, mesquite groves, tangled thickets, and storm drainage canals called bayous. Cronkite had read that Houston was a huge cotton exchange, yet he didn’t see a single boll. “I expected to see an ocean-going ship . . . right on Main Street,” he recalled. “Of course, they were way out of town. It was weeks before we ever got out to the ship channel for me to see a ship. And that was disappointing. As a Midwest boy, I’d never seen a ship or the ocean. And there were no cowboys.”
    Perhaps Cronkite’s most important growing-up moment in Houston, one that signaled a career in telecommunications, was when he erected a telegraph system connecting friends’ houses in the Montrose neighborhood. Cronkite constructed telegraph lines in the same way some kids practice cello or piano five hours a day. Calling the hookup his most constructive hobby, Cronkite rigged the system from a simple blueprint that was published in a boys’ magazine. “We communicated by Morse code and were pretty good at it when it all ended abruptly,” Cronkite recalled. “The telephone company took what we considered to be unnecessary umbrage at our use of their poles to string our wires.”
    Once, Cronkite dug a tunnel on a vacant lot using the gunpowder from a package of firecrackers and started a raging fire. A fire department lieutenant arrived to snuff out the flames, full of reprimands. “If he hadn’t stunted my enthusiasms,” Cronkite later joked, “I might have grown up to help build the Lincoln Tunnel, or, at least, be a pyrotechnics guru like George Plimpton.”
    Two skyscrapers rose above Houston back then. One was the Gulf Oil headquarters; it attested to the pivotal role that “sweet” crude had played in Houston’s fortunes since pay dirt was hit in Beaumont in 1901. Not long after that year, the salt dome oil field known as Spindletop was producing more than twenty million barrels a day, while sparking a regional boom as other fields also yielded black gold. Soon the dirt roads would be paved, world-class art museums built, and universities with large endowments founded. Not a single bank would fail in Houston during the Depression. More than forty oil companies