Charles Kuralt

Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina.[2] His father, Wallace H. Kuralt Sr. was a social worker and his mother was a teacher.[3] In 1945, the family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where his father became Director of Public Welfare in Mecklenburg County.[9][10] Their house off Sharon Road, then 10 miles south of the city, was the only structure in the area.[11][12][13]

As a boy, he won a children's sports writing contest for a local newspaper by writing about a dog that got loose on the field during a baseball game. When he was 14 years old, Kuralt became one of the youngest radio announcers in the country, covering minor-league baseball games and hosting a music show.[4] In 1948, he was named one of four National Voice of Democracy winners at age 14, where he won a $500 scholarship. Later, at Charlotte's Central High School, Kuralt was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" in his graduating class of 1951.[12]

He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[2] There, he joined the literary fraternity St. Anthony Hall. He also became editor of The Daily Tar Heel and worked for WUNC radio.[2] He also had a starring role in a radio program called American Adventure: A Study of Man in The New World in the episode titled "Hearth Fire", which aired on August 4, 1955. It is a telling of the advent of TVA's building lakes written by John Ehle and directed by John Clayton. During the summer, he also worked at WBTV in Charlotte.[10] He graduated from UNC in 1955 with a degree in history.[3][4]

After graduating from UNC, Kuralt worked as a reporter for the Charlotte News.[2] He wrote "Charles Kuralt's People," a column that won an Ernie Pyle Award in 1956.[3][10] He moved to CBS in 1957 as a writer.[2] When he was 25 years old, he became the youngest correspondent in the history of CBS News.[4] He became the first host of the primetime series Eyewitness to History in 1960.[4] He also covered the 1960 presidential election.[3] Variety said, "Kuralt's a comer. Young, good looking, full of poise and command, deep voiced and yet relaxed and not over-dramatic, he imparts a sense of authority and reliability to his task."[10]

In 1961, he became CBS's Chief Latin American Correspondent, covering 23 countries from a base in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil[14][3][4] In 1963, he became the Chief West Coast Correspondent, moving to Los Angeles.[15][14] The next year, he returned to New York City and the CBS News headquarters.[14] Starting in 1961, he did four tours in Vietnam during the war.[3][4][16] Kuralt said, ""Every time I got sent to Vietnam I seemed to get into some terrible situation without really trying too hard. In 1961, we got the first combat footage of that stage of the war. It was before the U.S. was involved with troops in the field, but we went out with the Vietnamese Rangers and got ambushed. Half the company we were with got killed. We were lucky as hell not to get killed "[16]

He also and covered the revolution in the Congo (now Zaire).[3][4][16] In 1967, Kuralt and a CBS camera crew spent eight weeks with Ralph Plaisted in his first attempt to reach the North Pole by snowmobile, which resulted in the documentary To the Top of the World and his book of the same name.[16]

Kuralt was said to have tired of what he considered the excessive rivalry between reporters on the hard news beats.[17] He said, "I didn't like the competitiveness or the deadline pressure," he told the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, upon his induction into their Hall of Fame. "I was sure that Dick Valeriani of NBC was sneaking around behind my back—and of course, he was!—getting stories that would make me look bad the next day. Even though I covered news for a long time, I was always hoping I could get back to something like my little column on the Charlotte News."[17]

• 1998: Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for Winnie the Pooh
• 1997: Citizen's Award, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (award posthumously)[27]
• 1997: Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Charles Kuralt's Spring[22]
• 1996: Audie Award for Nonfiction for Charles Kuralt's America[28]
• 1996: Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism[29]
• 1996: Television Hall of Fame, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences[5]
• 1995: Columbia Journalism Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism[14]
• 1995: Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, Silver Baton for reporting on CBS News Sunday Morning
• 1994: TCA Career Achievement Award, Television Critics Association
• 1994: Paul White Award, Radio Television Digital News Association[30]
• 1993: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement[31][32]
• 1985: Broadcaster of the Year, International Radio & Television Society[3]
• 1982: Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, Silver Baton for CBS News Sunday Morning
• 1980: George Polk Award for national television reporting[3]
• 1979: George Foster Peabody Award (shared) for CBS News Sunday Morning[8]
• 1978: Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Broadcast Journalism for On the Road[5]
• 1975: George Foster Peabody Award (individual) for his work on On the Road to '76[7]
• 1973: Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award (shared) for "CBS Reports: ...But What If the Dream Comes True?"[14]
• 1968: George Foster Peabody Award (individual) for On the Road[6]
• 1956, Ernie Pyle Award from Scripps-Howard for newspaper writing[16][10]

• Kuralt received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 1995.[33]
• The Charles Kuralt Trail along the Roanoke–Tar–Neuse–Cape Fear Ecosystem in Virginia and North Carolina honors his many On the Road and Sunday Morning stories about nature and wildlife.[27]
• In 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used Kuralt's speech from its 1993 Bicentennial Celebration in a television commercial[34]
• The University of North Carolina's Journalism School displays many of Kuralt's awards and a re-creation of his New York City office[35]
• Kuralt's papers are archived at Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[2]

Gravestones for Kuralt and his wife Suzanne at the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Kuralt married Jean Sory Guthery on August 25, 1954. She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Val John Guthery of Charlotte, North Carolina.[36] Both Kuralt and Sory were seniors at UNC.[37] They had two daughters, Susan Bowers and Lisa Bowers White.[3][4] The marriage ended in a divorce in 1960.

He married Suzanne "Petie" Baird in 1962.[3] They lived in New York City.[4]

Kuralt refused to alter his habits in favor of healthier ones; he ate unhealthy food, drank and smoked. He was once pulled over for driving under the influence.[38]

Late in his life, Kuralt became ill with systemic lupus erythematosus.[4] In 1997, Kuralt was hospitalized and died from heart failure at the age of 62 at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.[4] By request in his will, Kuralt was buried on the UNC grounds in Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.[39] His wife Suzanne died in 1999 and is buried next to him.

After Kuralt's death, questions about his estate led to the discovery of a decades-long companionship with a Montana woman named Patricia Shannon becoming public. Kuralt had a second, "shadow" family with Shannon of which his wife was unaware.[40] Shannon asserted that the house in Montana had been willed to her, a position upheld by the Montana Supreme Court.[41][42][43][44][45] According to court testimony, Kuralt met Shannon while doing a story on Pat Baker Park in Reno, Nevada, which Shannon had promoted and volunteered to build in 1968.[46] The park was in a low-income area of Reno that had no parks until Shannon promoted her plan. Kuralt mentions Pat Shannon Baker and the building of the park—but not the nature of their relationship—in a book he published in 1990 chronicling his early life and journalistic career.[40][47][48][49][50]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Charles Kuralt.

• Ralph Grizzle, Remembering Charles Kuralt. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2000. (ISBN 0967909600)
• Charles Kuralt's People. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2005. A collection of his award-winning Charlotte News columns.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• In re Estate of Kuralt, 15 P.3d 931 (2000)