You may know him best as the anchor of the CBS Sunday Morning News, but he also hosted a CBS series called "On the Road with Charles Kuralt" before that. On Fridays, Walter Cronkite loved to finish his newscast with a Kuralt story. Cronkite understood his viewers needed to hear some "good news" after hearing about Watergate and Vietnam.
Kuralt provided them human-interest stories. Ordinary individuals accomplishing amazing things with their lives. I never missed an episode as a high school student growing up in Dallas, Texas. I obtained a job as a "gopher" at the Dallas CBS station, KDFW-TV, when I was 18 and a freshman in college.
I would "gopher" this and "gopher that," but I also learned to use a Bell&Howell Film camera and became quite adept at it. After three months, they recruited another gopher and engaged me as a news photographer.
I was hanging around the newsroom one Sunday afternoon in March 1970, waiting for a crash or anything so I could go out and shoot some 16mm film, bring it back to the station, process and edit it, and put it on the evening news.
I was Johnny On-the-Spot when a report came in regarding a suspected drowning at a nearby lake.
Because there was no reporter available to do an interview with the children they thought had drowned (they were discovered hanging to a tree where they had been all night), I set up the camera on a tripod, pointed it in the approximate direction of the children, and conducted the interview myself.
Then I performed a similar "stand-up" and son-of-a-guy if they didn't utilize my news "package" on the air. Bob Phillips, the journalist, was born. From then on, I conducted my own photography and reporting on topics, referring to myself as a "one man band" in the industry.
Initially, I adhered to the hard news stories that every news director wants to see on his program, but on weekends, I would frequently do stories on regular people, much as my idol Charles Kuralt was doing on the network. Not like the ones Charlie was doing, at least. His were fantastic. Mine were the work of a naive youngster.
But I was enjoying myself while learning the ropes. Then, in 1972, after months of lobbying with management, they finally agreed to allow me and a motley group of reporters and photographers try out a concept we had.
We thought we could produce Kuralt-style stories, but instead of showing them on the evening news, we'd bundle them all together on a weekly half-hour show. “Go out there and do one,” the news director said. I'm quite sure he assumed it would fail and that would be the end of that notion.
To be honest, we figured it might, too, but at the very least, we'd get to do that one episode and have a great time doing it. As a result, the first episode of 4 Country Reporter aired on October 1st, 1972. It has remained on the air since then.
I received a phone call from my idol, Charles Kuralt, about a year after we began our program. I initially mistook Kuralt's voice for a joke played by the men at the television station, but there was no mistake that voice. “Bob, you perform the finest imitation of what I do that I've ever seen,” he said.
He may not have intended it that way, but I thought it was a nice complement. We met, had chicken fried steak, and became friends. We frequently discussed story ideas and even collaborated on advertising materials (“Phillips and Kuralt, only on Channel 4”).
He was a true gentleman in sharing his skills, ideas, and limelight with a child like me who only wanted to be like him. I left that television station in 1986 and began producing the show, renamed Texas Country Reporter, through my own production business.
The other reporters and photographers who started out on the program with me had grown bored of the "fluff reporting" and had returned to serious news, but I remained with it. My hand-picked team and I now syndicate the show in every area in Texas and nationally on the cable channel RFD-TV.
If you haven't seen our program, it's basically tales about individuals you've probably never heard of and may never hear of again. Ordinary individuals accomplishing amazing things with their lives. Actually, that sounds a lot like someone else I know. Charles Kuralt, here's to you.
Thank you for inventing the concept of reporting from the backroads...and for sharing it with me.
