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Sunday, July 19, 2009

10 Seconds with Walter Cronkite

When I'd worked at a resort, I had seen and met plenty of famous people - celebrities and politicians - in a service capacity. They usually behaved like anyone else, and there were nearly no instances in which I became awe-struck in their presence (they were just regular people to me who happened to have a lot of notoriety), all save one: Walter Cronkite.

I remember the day he came to visit Orlando and checked into the resort where I worked. It was about 7 years ago, I think. He was helped out of the limo he was riding in, and he seemed so frail. He looked like a freckle factory, with all the age spots he had, and he looked very, very ancient. Yet, he had a fire in his gaze, evidence that the well-used gears behind it still turned as strongly as ever. I was reverent of what he had done in his life, the points in history he shared with the world, and I just couldn't help myself: Even though it was the middle of winter and one of the coldest nights in Florida, I took off my glove first before I shook his hand.

Something so mundane and rote in my line of work then was elevated in those brief seconds with Mr. Cronkite, to a sublime connection to the flow of the universe for me. He wasn't merely a retired journalist: He was one great eyewitness to history, whose veracity in conveying the effects and meanings of the world's events made him tenably peerless.

You may forever rest peacefully on your bountiful laurels, Mr. Cronkite.


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