
DATE: Wednesday, July 9, 1997               TAG: 9707090629

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LARRY MADDRY

                                            LENGTH:   98 lines

KURALT FELT SPECIAL KINSHIP WITH NORFOLK

CHARLES KURALT.

His grace note of reportage usually came at the end of the CBS Evening News - a half-hour loaded with depressing events of the day: riots, plane crashes, government scandal.

Then we'd get Charles Kuralt on the road, in some God-forsaken backwater interviewing an ordinary American who was extraordinary.

As he chatted with a gas station poet, or a fireman in a station where a light bulb had been burning steadily for 60 years, the burden of bad news we had been asked to shoulder seemed a big lighter. For a few magical minutes.

And when Kuralt was finished, we felt, well, that the country was not in such bad shape after all.

From that moment in October 1967 when he set out in a big, battered motor home to explore the dusty back roads of his country and talk to its people, he made us feel better about ourselves as individuals and as a people.'

It made the North Carolinian with the resonant baritone voice, the wry smile and the casual, neighborly manner famous.

He was once aptly called the laureate of the common man. And the harp strum of poetry gracing his interviews came most often when he was interviewing little people who were trying to make life just a little better on this weary planet:

A man in North Carolina who was trying to bring back bluebirds by building houses for them and encouraging neighbors to do the same, or his friend Granville Hall, who raises daffodils up in Gloucester, Va. Or the folks who were trying to save the wild ponies of the Outer Banks.

On foot, he moved around with a cloudlike grace that was surprising for a man of his heft. And he walked through here often.

He talked about his special relationship with our region when he came to Norfolk last June (paying his own way to help get the Elizabeth River Project under way).

``Some of my eastern North Carolina forebears shipped their pine and pitch and naval stores to Norfolk up the Dismal Swamp Canal into the Elizabeth River, which is how those of us in your neighboring province became known as Tar Heels in the first place,'' he said.

``All we had to sell was tar and turpentine. One of the worst contaminants in the sediments of the Elizabeth River is creosote. I say with no pride that my ancestors probably had a hand in putting some of it there. So I come to you partly in penance.

``Your city has been very hospitable to me. In the twenty years that my parents lived in retirement at Kitty Hawk, Norfolk was my port of entry into the Outer Banks. You know hundreds of thousands of people disembark at the Norfolk airport every year, a statistic that is cited by the Chamber of Commerce with pride, but they are not necessarily different people. Several hundred of them have been me.

``There is on the shelf in the airport barbershop a photographic record of my haircuts there; you are welcome to go count them. My rental car, without being told, knows its way through the Azalea Gardens to I-64 and south to the Great Bridge bypass.

``So often have I missed the last plane back to New York that they call me by my first name at the Hilton on Military Highway; a waiter in the restaurant once asked me if I lived there.

``Norfolk's shops served the consumer needs of my folks. Norfolk's hospitals cured their ailments - once by giving my father a lift by air from Kitty Hawk. When I got to his bedside at the admirable Norfolk General to ask about his first heart attack, all he wanted to talk about was his first helicopter ride. The Norfolk NPR station, WHRV, kept my folks company at night, and The Virginian-Pilot was in their paper box in the morning.

``So if I cannot qualify as a son of Norfolk, I claim to be, at least, a sort of stepson.''

Before retiring from CBS, Kuralt had been presented with every award the television industry could bestow. And his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, even named a building for him.

But nothing made him prouder than the species of daffodil that Granville Hall of Gloucester developed and bore his name.

``With a little luck, the flower named Charles Kuralt will appear from the earth to bloom in the spring long years after the man of the same name is gone,'' he said.

``I guess that's not exactly immortality, but it's as close as I will ever get.''

Our nation will not quickly forget Charles Kuralt, a gentle giant in his profession, who for so many years put a gleam in the CBS eye. And in the eyes of his countrymen. ILLUSTRATION: Associated Press/File color photo

Charles Kuralt made us feel the country was not in such bad shape

after all.

Graphic

TV TRIBUTE

The Travel Channel will pay tribute to Charles Kuralt, who died

July 4, with a special prime-time airing of six episodes of ``On the

Road With Charles Kuralt.''

The half-hour shows will air from 8 to 11 p.m. Thursday, and will

feature some of his most memorable and award-winning stories as

originally seen on the CBS ``Evening News.''

For 13 of his 37 years at CBS News, Kuralt moved away from

conventional reporting by going ``On the Road'' in a motor home and