Biography

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Charles Kuralt page on 29 May 2024, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Charles Bishop Kuralt was an American television, newspaper and radio journalist and author. He is most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years. In 1996, Kuralt was inducted into Television Hall of Fame of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Tired of covering war stories, Kuralt proposed to his bosses a new project: "How about no assignments at all? How about three months of rolling down the Great American Highway, just to see what he could see?" When he finally persuaded CBS to let him try out the idea for three months with a three-person crew. It turned into a quarter-century project, with Kuralt logging more than a million miles. "On the Road" became a regular feature on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1967 and ran through 1980.

Kuralt hit the road in a motor home (he wore out six before he was through) with a small crew and avoided the interstates in favor of the nation's back roads in search of America's people and their doings. He said, "Interstate highways allow you to drive coast to coast, without seeing anything".

According to Thomas Steinbeck, the older son of John Steinbeck, the inspiration for "On the Road" was Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (whose title was initially considered as the name of Kuralt's feature). During his career, he won three Peabody Awards and ten Emmy Awards for journalism. He also won a George Polk Awards in 1980 for National Television Reporting.

In 2011, Kuralt's format was revived by CBS News, with Steve Hartman taking Kuralt's space. As of 2023, Hartman continues to host the segment weekly on the CBS Evening News.

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