THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410070643
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLES KURALT
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Wallace H. Kuralt, father of television newsman Charles Kuralt, died Thursday in Elizabeth City at the age of 86. Wallace Kuralt was a lifelong social work administrator remembered for his innovative direction of the Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) Department of Social Services from 1945 until his retirement in 1972. His son, Charles, remembers him here for his love of the land and people of the coastal Outer Banks.
The Outer Banks lost a passionate admirer of their beauty when my father died Thursday. He gained deep satisfaction from the play of the sunlight and clouds on the sea and the sand. Just last week, he was able to sit on the porch of the house that he and my mother built for their retirement and call my attention to the changes late September was bringing to a marsh across the inlet.
``A week ago,'' he said, ``the grasses over there were all bright green.'' He peered at them for a while. ``If you look carefully,'' he said, ``you can see a bit of yellow there now.'' He was always trying to educate his children to nature and the seasons. ``It will be all gold in another week,'' he said. ``It will be beautiful.''
Wallace H. Kuralt, my father, and Ina B. Kuralt, my mother, moved to Southern Shores upon his retirement from long years as director of social services in Charlotte. He had spent his whole life in the public arena as an advocate for society's outcasts and for children growing up poor. I thought he would be bored by peace and quiet in a place that had, at the time, no doctors, no supermarkets, none of the trappings of the city he had left.
I underestimated my father. He hadn't lived on Currituck Sound for a year before he had planted pines on the windward side of the house for a windbreak, put in apple, pear and fig trees, planted scuppernong vines to curl up along the porch pilings and filled the front woods with azaleas. ``Always leave a place better than it was when you found it,'' he told his children. The pines have grown to a great stature now, the trees and vines are old and settled and fruitful, and the house has the look of having been there always. It's a better place than the place he found as a muddy, vacant lot 25 years ago.
He lived in retirement as gracefully and vigorously as he had fought the great public battles of his career. He wrote a recipe book for the benefit of the Garden Club; there are families around Kitty Hawk who still follow the Kuralt prescription for the perfect apple pie. He cultivated his asparagus, great buckets of which brightened the tables of everybody he knew every spring. In summer - right through the summer that just ended - he pulled his crab pots two or three times a week, spent long afternoons cooking and picking the blue crabs, and gave the rich crabmeat away to neighbors packed neatly in pint containers or cooked in big scallop shells. There was no shell or cartilage in his crabmeat; he was glad when people noticed that.
All this time, he was a good friend to his friends and a good father to his children - we all paid frequent visits to the house, which had become the ``old home place'' that every Southern family needs - and a surrogate father to dozens of other children who found him a good source of stories and small gifts and small kindnesses.
If there is a child who doesn't have a Wallace Kuralt ``gee-haw-whimmydiddle'' somewhere around the house in Kitty Hawk, I don't know how my father missed him. This is a rural toy with a little sassafras-wood propeller that can be made to reverse directions mysteriously and suddenly - if you know the secret. My father whittled these little contraptions and spread the secret of their operation all up and down the beach.
After his funeral on Monday, we're going to meet the neighbors back at the house, and at my sister's suggestion, we're going to dispense to any children who are there all the surplus whimmydiddles he was holding in reserve.
Wallace H. Kuralt knew most of the ways to live a good life, and this above all: Take an interest in your surroundings, human and natural. Leave the place better than you found it.
The day before he died in the hospital in Elizabeth City, I was down at the empty house with my brother. I looked across at the marsh. It had turned golden, as he said it would. It was beautiful, as he said it would be. by CNB