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had the long knives out for Dr. Cronkite because of his “pro-Negro” sympathies. “I was horrified about the incident,” Cronkite recalled. “Terrified by the walk through the oak trees with their long Spanish moss dripping in them. It looked like a Walt Disney forest that I would expect all the animals jumping at us. We finally got a ride from somebody on a street corner. Got back to our hotel. But from that moment on I was wholly aware of the racial bigotry, prejudice, and treatment of blacks in that part of the world.”
    In the fall of 1927, Cronkite put on a uniform: that of a Boy Scout. Being a Scout in 1920s Houston primarily meant building fires, camping, and fishing. But when the Democratic National Convention convened there in 1928, Walter and other Boy Scouts worked the convention floor at Sam Houston Hall. They served as ushers for the delegates. Without proper ventilation in the hall, let alone air-conditioning, the heat was stifling. Cronkite was tasked with distributing hand-fans with the faces of Cordell Hull, Walter George, James Reed, and Houston’s own favorite son, Jesse Jones, on them. The Democrats nominated Al Smith for president, the candidate of the “wets” (who promised to repeal the then ten-year-old Prohibition law). But Cronkite’s heart was with the polio survivor FDR, who fought for Smith’s nomination at the convention with oratorical zeal.
    A month later Cronkite was able to observe the political process again, when Uncle Edward Fritsche took him to the GOP Convention in Kansas City. Cronkite witnessed the nomination of Herbert Hoover. He remembered liking Hoover’s campaign slogan a lot: “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Not many people, and certainly few other eleven-year-olds, could boast of attendance at both 1928 conventions. “I got hooked on them for a singular reason,” Cronkite recalled. “Somewhere in the convention hall would be a future president. The trick was in picking him out.” When on Election Day (November 6), Hoover defeated Smith (444 electoral votes to 87) to become America’s thirty-first president, Cronkite listened to the results on the radio with his father.
    With its boomtown atmosphere in the 1920s, Houston devoted large amounts of money to modernizing its public school system. Forward-thinking educators adopted the system of creating separate junior high schools and hired one of the region’s finest architects as a full-time employee to design them. Young Cronkite was lucky in this regard: in 1927 he was a first-wave student enrolled in the brand-new Sidney Lanier Middle School. The school served several affluent Houston neighborhoods, drawing prep-school-quality students. Lanier boasted a progressive environment from day one. The brightest Houston students chose it over all others. The ultimate compliment came from other Houston public school kids, who dubbed Lanier students “woodenheads” (i.e., nerds with minds full of facts).
    Lanier offered a full range of extracurricular activities for the students, including a student newspaper called (like the school’s mascot) The Purple Pup . Cronkite—who attended the junior high for three years—was on a reportorial team that won a statewide journalism contest for Lanier. Cronkite continued to take all sorts of odd jobs, including one with The Houston Post that trumped all others in educational value. The Post city room was just ten or twelve desks crowded into a crammed second-story office, the floor littered wih the wadded-up debris of rejected leads and spent cigarettes. But to Cronkite it was Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden. “It had a wonderful aura,” he remembered, “the model of every newspaper movie you saw.” Rather than peddle papers on a street corner, as he had in Kansas City, he delivered copies of the Post on a regular bicycle route to customers between West Alabama and Westheimer, Woodland, and Hazard. When his boss discovered that he was rolling