One was an award winning writer, the other an iconic newsman. This weekend, each was linked with the other as both author Frank McCourt and journalist Walter Cronkite passed away, continuing a morbid year in which it seems every single week, more famous people pass on.
Cronkite, once “the most trusted man in America,” was a television anchor on CBS News for most of the 1960s and 1970s. His voice was the soundtrack to some of the most important and tragic moments in American history including Vietnam, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Moon Landing, Watergate and others. At a time when so many people depended on the nightly news to find out what was going on in the world, Cronkite was the voice among voices. After retiring in 1981, he passed the anchor torch to Dan Rather and began an equally fulfilling life as an activist and more. He was 92.
McCourt was an Irish writer whose major claim to fame was the incredible best seller “Angela’s Ashes.” That book, which was also adapted into a movie, won the Pulitzer Prize and told the harrowing tale of his own childhood growing up in both Ireland and New York. In the book, McCourt lost his siblings, was incredibly poor and disheveled but eventually turns his bad luck around. After “Angela’s Ashes,” McCourt wrote three more books but spent a good amount of time teaching and passing on his gifts. He was 78.
Both great men. I admit I was more familiar with Frank McCourt, having read and loved “Angela’s Ashes” in high school and being too young for the central years of Cronkite, but both men had accomplished quite a lot and were men with big hearts.
R.I.P. you two.