Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 15, 1993 TAG: 9312150014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SCOTT WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Other writers watch the CBS News show and envy its images, elegantly strung together by writers whose insight and grace have wrung eloquence even from the silence of the world.
"Words are important, aren't they? Even in a picture medium," Kuralt said, ducking compliments as a heavyweight would slip punches. "We have time to write carefully and think about it a little."
And there is Kuralt's voice, a rich, beefsteak bass as mellow as 12-year-old bourbon and burnished by the unfiltered Pall Malls he taps and tamps and lights at regular intervals. ("I'm an enthusiastic smoker," he confesses.)
Silences close each "Sunday Morning." They're videotaped observations of the natural world, whether beach or prairie or mountainside. The only sounds are birdsong or surf or the mutter of wind.
"It's fair to say that was the idea of Shad Northshield, who was the founding producer of `Sunday Morning,'" Kuralt said.
"We had long talks about it in the days leading up to the first programs and we agreed that, yeah, television goes by too fast, and that Sunday morning was a different sort of time.
"People wouldn't be hurrying off to work. And it might be a good idea to slow down the pace and introduce some silence," he said. "I'm sure, in the beginning it nonplussed people. They'd never heard a television set go silent before. But now it's the one thing that we could never change."
The show is written most weeks by Peter Freundlich. "Then I come in on Saturday and fiddle with his prose," Kuralt said. "Peter has grown used to my ruining his good stuff."
Kuralt himself writes the sports and weather segments Sunday morning because he thinks it's important. A fan wrote: "You have the best weather forecast because you never say anything about `white fluffies.'"
Since its debut Jan. 28, 1979, "Sunday Morning" has won a fiercely loyal following. "It has too few viewers to be called a cult, I guess, but its viewers really are enthusiastic," he said.
"You make a mistake if you try to categorize them. I thought they'd all be college professors with tweed jackets, so it's very rewarding to have the skycap at the airport say, `Man, we never miss that show at our house.'"
The format of the show is pretty much unchanged. The cover story - an angle on the week's big story - for years was handled, masterfully, by Richard Threlkeld. These days, it is done by Terence Smith and David Culhane.
Then comes Kuralt's chat with a CBS correspondent in the field - any correspondent, any field, anywhere in the world. "The rest of it," said Kuralt, "is pretty much whatever we want to do."
That includes "Postcard from Nebraska" correspondent Roger Welsch; the droll feature stories of Bill Geist; the cultural microscopy of media critic John Leonard; the music reports of Eugenia Zukerman and Billy Taylor.
Kuralt said the show has been blessed by good executive producers - Northshield, Linda S. Mason and the incumbent, Missie Rennie - and by an enthusiastic band of mostly young field producers.
And it is blessed in Kuralt, for all his modesty, whose 36-year career at CBS included 20-plus years of "On the Road" segments, exploring the back roads of America for CBS' "Evening News" broadcast.
"I never had an assignment in all those years," Kuralt said. "It was terrific and it sort of carried over here. I don't have an immediate supervisor. I have a hell of a lot of bosses, but none of them know quite what I'm doing."
At 59, Kuralt doesn't have the desire or the energy to go back "On the Road," and admits to no ambition beyond "Sunday Morning."
"I think the program is about as good now as it's ever been," Kuralt said. "Every now and then a story comes along that somebody does - not me - that I'm very proud of.
"Some mornings I come up here and just sit for a few minutes and think about what we just did," he said, smiling almost shyly, "and I think, `You know, that wasn't so bad, today.'"
by CNB