Voted the Most Trusted Man in America

Following is a passage from "A Reporter's Life," by Walter Cronkite. It is reprinted with permission.

Life and the course we take through it are affected by many circumstances, some beneficial, some considerably less so. This is an observation that is unlikely to be quoted in any compendium of great philosophical thought. Others have even remarked on the fact before me.

But I am inclined to these lofty terms when I think of those events that followed upon meeting Fred Birney, a rather slight man of unprepossessing mien who, despite his glasses, always wore a frown, as if he were looking for something beyond the range of his sight. He was an inspired teacher who directed the course of my life. He wasn't even a professional teacher, but he had the gift.

Fred Birney was a newspaperman who thought that high schools ought to have courses in journalism. That was a highly innovative idea at the time, but by presenting himself as an unpaid volunteer and the program as a virtual no-cost item, he convinced the Houston school board. He spent a couple of days each week circulating among Houston's five high schools preaching the fundamentals of a craft he loved.

His arrival on the scene at San Jacinto was timed as if decreed in heaven. That same year, suffering the disabling shin splints that kept me off the track team and realizing that I'd never make the football team at 110 pounds (and with distinctly limited talent), I had wangled the job of sports editor of the Campus Cub, our semi-occasional school paper.

Adding to the happy confluence of events, I had just read an exciting short story in American Boy magazine. That publication was printing a series of fiction pieces featuring various occupations, a little push toward career guidance. None intrigued me as much as that on the newspaperman.

With my interest thus already piqued, I was a sitting duck for Fred Birney, missionary from the Fourth Estate. I sat enthralled as this wiry man, this bundle of energy, sat on the edge of the classroom desk spinning tales from the world of print. I devoured not only every book he assigned but every one on journalism and journalists that I could find in the library. This turned out to stand me in good stead.

That year he entered me in the newswriting competition of the Texas Interscholastic Press Association. We finalists sat at typewriters as a set of facts was printed on the blackboard. From them we were to write our thousand-word stories. The facts that were presented were from the notorious Leopold-Loeb murder case, in which two brilliant young scions of Chicago's wealthiest, most socially prominent families kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old bobby Franks, another boy from their set.

The Chicago Daily News report on the case had become an entry in the 1924 edition of an annual compilation of the year's best news stories. Purely by happenstance, with no thought of preparing for the contest, I had just read that very story the night before. My competition didn't have a chance as I loaded my entry with descriptive matter that must have amazed, and puzzled, the judges. Always a fast typist since taking a junior high school course in the art, I ripped the last page out of my machine and delivered the completed story to the front of the room while most of the others were struggling with their leads. I won.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

I wasn't the only one in our class to catch Fred Birney's eye. Bill Bell would develop into a superb newspaperman, and David Westheimer would go on to Hollywood to write such classics as Von Ryan's Express and Watching Out for Dulie.

The next year I was editor of the Campus Cub. Birney put its publication on a regular schedule so we would learn something about editing against a deadline, and he took us to the printer's to teach us makeup and composing-room skills.

We were a small group, we student journalists, and maybe that was the secret of Birney's success. But I felt that those spectacles of his were magnifying for him every move I made. I suppose my colleagues felt the same. He led us through our copy, showing us how to tighten here, explain more there, use adjectives and adverbs with caution lest they imply editorial opinion. He suggested questions we might have asked our interview subjects, noted facts we might have developed to improve our report. And every criticism, every suggestion, made clear that there was a sacred covenant between newspaper people and their readers. We journalists had to be right and we had to be fair.

I had a sense whenever I was in his presence that he was ordering me to don my armor and buckle on my sword to ride forth in a never-ending crusade for the truth. Good journalism, journalism that would please Fred Birney, became our Holy Grail. He so inspired us that Charlie Dyer and I, unable to get our fill of journalism, even started what surely must have been one of the country's early unofficial high school newspapers, even before the term "underground" was used. We put out four mimeographed pages that we called The Reflector. It could not be called lofty. In fact, it was a scandal sheet, filled with probably libelous comments on the doings of San Jacinto school society. On occasion, it also dipped into the doings of the school administration. It turned out that its publishers had more gall than courage, an in the face of some rather specific threats to their life and limb, they wisely folded the paper after a few editions.

Birney applauded our enterprise. He frowned at our tabloid style.

Birney, as far as I know, was never taught to teach. His strength was his deep practical knowledge of his subject, his love of it, and his intense desire to communicate that knowledge and that love to others. That must be the secret of all great teachers, and the shame is that there are probably thousands of them out there who are denied a chance to practice that talent because of crowded facilities, disciplinary overload and stultifying work rules imposed by bureaucratic administrations and selfish unions.

From "A Reporter's Life," by Walter Cronkite. Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York, 1996. Graphic (book jacket design) by Archie Ferguson.