Cronkite Read Online Free PDF

had offices in Houston, and refineries sprang up just south of downtown near Galveston Bay. “The ship channel had been completed and the East Texas oil finds had come not so many years before,” Cronkite recalled. “And the job boom was beginning.”
    Buffalo Bayou, a sleepy waterway that connected Houston with the Gulf of Mexico, became Cronkite’s fishing hole, albeit not a very profitable one (except for bottom-feeders). Before too long the oceanside world of Galveston and League City had an impact on Cronkite’s life that was both immediate and unending. Each summer, he and his family explored the sandy beaches along the Bolivar Peninsula, where Cronkite collected seashells and watched the mind-boggling array of wintering birdlife around the tidal marshes of Galveston Bay. Audubon’s Birds of America was now his favorite book. An amateur ornithologist, Cronkite one day shot a bird with a BB gun and gave up killing animals for the rest of his life. Firearms, the very thought of them, became anathema to him. “I hit a sparrow,” he recalled, “[that was] sitting on the telephone line in the back of our house. It fell to the ground. And I picked up the sparrow, who looked at me mortally wounded with this look like, ‘Why did you want to do that?’ You know it turned me all funny. I never—I didn’t do it again.”
    While the Cronkite family, considered Yankees, loved Houston, one aspect of the city sickened them: Jim Crow laws and rules. The Ku Klux Klan was thriving in America in the 1920s; more than two thousand Houstonians were inducted in a single ceremony. The KKK reflected the institutionalized racism and religious antagonism that existed throughout the nation. Jews were disdained. Blacks were segregated from whites in many aspects of daily life, from medical care to sporting events and public transportation to education. While there had been black students at Cronkite’s Kansas City school, there were none in his new school in Houston. Furthermore, by both law and tradition, the facilities accorded to black people were inferior to those for whites. Jim Crow made Houston an ugly new world for the Cronkites, one that young Walter dutifully accepted but never fully understood. “My natural sympathy,” Cronkite recalled, “was with blacks.”
    As a liberal Jayhawker who considered John Brown a hero of the Civil War era, not a terrorist, Dr. Cronkite professionally refused to adhere to Jim Crow, taking black as well as white patients. As his son later told Ron Powers of Playboy , this ethic was reflected in a wrenching episode on one of their first nights in Houston. Dr. Finis Hight, president of the Texas Dental School, had asked the Cronkite family to dinner at his River Oaks home. After the steak-and-potatoes meal, the group moved to the porch to savor the breeze and await the delivery of homemade ice cream from a nearby drugstore. In those days, there was no air-conditioning and residential refrigeration options were limited. The Jim Crow “rules” of Houston said that African Americans could not approach the home of a Caucasian from the front. Years later, Cronkite recalled what happened next: “The black delivery boy drove up on his motorcycle and looked with his flashlight, clearly for some way to go to the back of the house.” Not finding a driveway or alleyway to deliver the ice cream, the young man started up the sidewalk. When he hit the first step to the porch, Dr. Hight, in Cronkite’s words, “jumped out of his chair like a cat, and hit him right in the middle of his face, wham!—knocked him back into the grass, ice cream cart spilling—and he said, ‘That’ll teach you, nigger, to put your foot on a white man’s front porch!’ My father said, ‘Helen, Walter, we’re leaving.’ ”
    The three Cronkites marched out of Dr. Hight’s house. When the embarrassed host tried to coax them into staying, Dr. Cronkite said “get lost” and kept walking. After that incident, Dr. Hight