Widely known as the original host of “Sunday Morning”, the 90-minute broadcast which gained wide attention for breaking new ground in broadcast journalism.  Mr. Kuralt’s tenure on the series began with its first broadcast in January, 1979.

 

Kuralt first set out to see the country in October, 1967.  He and his crew traveled along the rural byways and through the small towns of America in a battered motor home and visited every state many times.

 

His work for “Sunday Morning” and “On The Road” won Kuralt such prestigious honors as the George Foster Peabody Award (three times) and Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.  In 1983, Kuralt was named “Broadcaster of the Year” by the International Radio Television Society.  Time magazine described him as “the laureate of the common man”.

 

Kuralt regularly took part in the CBS News coverage of special events—national elections, international summit meetings and such extraordinary news stories as the 1989 democracy movement in China—often managing to find the “little stories” that helped viewers identify with the great events.  During the crisis which led to war in the Persian Gulf, he co-anchored, with Lesley Stahl, the nightly broadcast, “America Tonight”, which included a series of national town meetings.

 

In his early days with CBS News, Kuralt reported from the far corners of the world:  Africa, Asia and all 23 Latin American nations.  Once, he even spent eight weeks on the ice of the Arctic Ocean, covering the attempt of a polar expedition to reach the North Pole.  He detailed his wanderings in six books, including “A Life on the Road” which became the best selling non-fiction book of 1990.

 

Charles Kuralt joined CBS News as a writer in 1957.  He was elevated to the news assignment desk in 1958 and was named a CBS News correspondent in 1959.  In 1960, he became the first host of the CBS News prime-time series, “Eyewitness”.  A year later, he was named CBS Latin American correspondent, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  In 1963, he became chief west coast correspondent for CBS News, based in Los Angeles.  He held that post until the autumn of 1964, when he returned to CBS News headquarters in New York City.  Soon thereafter, he began his travels on the back roads, which had been largely unexplored on television news.  He interrupted his journey in 1980 and 1981 to anchor “Morning with Charles Kuralt” weekday mornings.

 

Over the course of his career, he won three Peabody Awards and ten Emmy Awards for his broadcast journalism.  Charles Kuralt died in New York City at the age of 62.