A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur's Story

by John S. Hendricks

Walter Cronkite also played a featured role in our living room. My parents seldom missed the CBS Evening News, which Cronkite began anchoring in 1962. But I had known his resonant voice and presence since the fifties, as he had hosted one of my favorite series, You Are There, in which he treated key historical events as if they were breaking news. You Are There transported kids like me to historical events such as the Salem Witch Trials, the signing of the Magna Carta, the Boston Tea Party, the capture of John Wilkes Booth, the Hindenburg explosion, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the fall of the Alamo. Cronkite ended each You Are There episode with words I can still recite: “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times . . . and you were there.” From 1957 through 1966, Walter Cronkite also narrated the great CBS documentary series The Twentieth Century. I tried not to miss a single one of its 222 episodes. “The Doolittle Raid,” “The Times of Teddy Roosevelt,” and “Paris in the Twenties” . . . it was my full immersion program in modern history. Even better were the science episodes: “Vertijets,” “Reaching for the Moon,” “The Satellite That Talks,” and “Mach Busters.” In 1967, when I was fifteen, CBS changed the series’ name to The 21st Century, with topics focused on the future. I was off to college in 1970 when the series ended its run. As such, it had been part of my entire childhood, its impact on my ...