Walter Cronkite is dead

 

Sunday, July 19, 2009

 

Walter Cronkite is dead.

So is the world’s oldest man (although the poor fool only managed to hold onto the distinction for about a month – the last WW I vet from England, news reports tell us).

Cronkite had been ill for the last few months so that at 92 his demise did not come as a great surprise.

You have to wonder if he was trying to hold out until tomorrow’s 40th anniversary of man’s first visit to the moon.

Since his voice is THE VOICE I heard on July 20, 1969, I’ve always associated Cronkite with the moon.

Like everybody else, he was my TV grandfather, on the boob tube every night telling me about the events of the world.

But in this case, on that day, he had followed me into the U.S. Army, and accompanied us in that Fort Dix hospital ward to tell us of man’s greatest accomplishment so far.

Some men on the ward who were to die shortly even sat up for that, their faces showing joy even through the pain.

The ward captain – a cool bureaucrat we all hated – could not keep this from us and let the TVs stay on hours after lights out so that we all could share the moment together.

In some ways, it doesn’t feel like 40 years has passed, but in many more important ways, it has since most members of my family have died over those years, as has one of my closest friends.

I keep thinking of the line from the latest Indiana Jones movie which says, “There comes a point when life stops giving and starts taking away.”

As with many of the great people who have left us lately, Cronkite remains one of a kind, someone’s who leaves a personal as well as historic legacy in our lives. He was the friend most of us never met, the voice we will hear until in the back of our heads documenting moments that for others is ancient history, and even though I have not heard his voice in many years, I cherish it.

 

************

 

This week we’re getting all of the historic stuff about the moon landing.

As an SF buff as a kid, I had high hopes for the 21st Century, always thinking the way Kubrick envisioned, that we would be much farther along in space than we are.

I kept thinking how 2001 would be – much in the way Back to the Future saw the future as an episode of the Jettisons.

We have advanced, but in ways none of us could have predicted, becoming more like elements of a circuit board than Star Wars heroes, each of us plugged into a central data base from which we drew sustenance.

I’m not so much appalled as disappointed, even though at my age, I could not go into space the way I so much craved when I was a kid.

I haven’t even seen any UFOs, the way Pauly and Hank have.

Of course, I’ve tried asking my family members what they saw the future as when they were young, growing up in the Great Depression.

They were not aching so much for space as for a job, for a home of their own, for food on the table.

What they got was another great war and the aftermath of knowing they had accomplished something of significance in their generation.

We started out with great hopes and puttered out in the end, unable to exactly see what it was we did.

We grew up with the Vietnam War and moon landings, and conclude our lives witnessing things like 9/11.

Some generations are luckier than others, getting to see a positive conclusion, while others see only the perpetual fog.