Now it’s Dan’s
By Dan Earhart / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2009
Here is my work space. The map has no roads. I look at it every day. It used to hang in the KTRH newsroom in Houston during the 30’s when Walter Cronkite worked there. He would have looked at it every day too.
That’s my story.
[Dan Earhart is a former Houston newsman. CBS News legend Walter Cronkite who died Friday, July 18, at the age of 92, grew up in Houston where he was a reporter at the Houston Post and the Houston Press.]
Dan,
Walter was born in 1916. He began his broadcast career as a radio announcer for WKY in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1936, he met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell while working as a sports announcer for KCMO the AM station in Kansas City, Missouri. In KC, he joined the United Press in 1937. Shortly thereafter he became a top WWII correspondent for United Press. In 1950, Cronkite was recruited by Edward R. Morrow and began his on air career TV career at WTOP, the CBS affiliate in Washington D.C.
Don’t believe Walter was ever with KTRH, certainly not in the 1930’s. He did talk to our Alpha Epsilon Rho national broadcasting society in the early 1960’s when I was in Austin.
Larry
From: Myradiodaze:
“KLOL was the sister station of news/talk KTRH AM, the real money maker of The Rusk Corporation. Walter Cronkite worked one of his first early radio jobs there as did Dan Rather. There were still acetate pressings of KTRH News in the hotel basement storage area with Walter Cronkite doing the news.”
(http://myradiodaze.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-radio-daze-move-to-klol-fm.html)
I (Dreyer) was incorrect about Cronkite being a Houston native (just changed it); he came to Houston at the age of 10. My mother went to San Jacinto High with him.
Walter Cronkite preceded Dan Rather as anchor at KHOU, Channel 11, Houston’s CBS affiliate.
Sidenote: My father, Martin Dreyer, worked with Dan Rather at both KTRH and KHOU-TV in Houston. My father was a writer and editor at the Houston Chronicle but he moonlighted as Rather’s weatherman.
At one point he would get off work at the Chronicle and scurry off to Galveston where the weather bureau was and would phone in the weather. His photographer (or another colleague) would drive him; my father didn’t drive, didn’t have a car.
At least that’s MY story.
Thorne
I’ve had a weird distorted memory here. Walter Cronkite was not on television news in Houston. He came to Houston at 10, attended the Univestiy of Texas, and worked for the Houston Post and the Houston Press. He started working in television in the midwest.
I’ve made enough mistakes here to last a month!
Thorne