Free Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley Page A

intervals that the broadcast was a re-creation based on wire reports, yet Cronkite continued to hone the masquerade of play-by-play broadcasts. It was fake sports announcing by a fake Walter Wilcox. Four words on the ticker were turned into a solid minute of description over the radio. It was exactly the opposite of his work during the week, when he turned long newspaper articles into three- or four-sentence news briefs for the radio. “I didn’t need many facts,” Cronkite told The Oklahoman in 2002. “I just used my imagination.”
    Cronkite’s KCMO sports broadcast re-creations were successful, even if the station was still by far the weakest on the Kansas City radio dial. The proof came when an official from the FCC told the station to increase the number of advisories that the broadcast was not actually live, but a re-creation from telegraph reports.
    After Cronkite relocated to Kansas City, his mother returned there to be near her son. Walter didn’t live with her, instead taking an apartment with his KCMO coworker Harry Bailey. Cronkite explored local bars and jazz haunts, sometimes with Bailey, who wrote commercials at KCMO. The waitresses at the Chesterfield Club were naked, though that was not entirely uncommon in the clubs, where serving drinks and prostitution were often blended into one profession. At Chesterfield’s, the waitresses’ pubic hair was shaved to reflect the suits in a deck of cards: clubs and spades for the African American waitresses, hearts and diamonds for the Caucasian ones. That innovation seemed almost innocent when compared with the scheduled onstage sexual performances, at some clubs, that might feature any combination of humans—and animals. “The joints were shoulder-to-shoulder, and there wasn’t any closing hour,” Cronkite recalled. “There were girls in most, transvestites in a few and, the street’s real glory, great jazz in many. . . . If there was anything comparable in Houston, it had certainly escaped my attention. I was nineteen when I hit Kansas City. The visits to Twelfth Street and the brief associations with its denizens helped me grow up in a hurry.”
    Soon after starting at the radio station in early 1936, having finally worked Bit Winter out of his emotional system, Cronkite met a beautiful young advertising copywriter at KCMO. Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Maxwell was a recent graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. Cronkite couldn’t take his eyes off her when she glided into the station. Although he wanted to flirt with Betsy, he was tongue-tied by her comeliness. “I watched her coming down the hall,” he later recalled, “and I was stricken, absolutely stricken.” But Betsy could feel Cronkite’s gaze, and reciprocated with a smile worthy of Veronica Lake. “It was,” she recalled, “love at first sight for both of us.” The two began dating a few days later, and within months they were seriously considering marriage. “Betsy and I went from the studio to lunch, from lunch to dinner,” Cronkite wrote, “and from KCMO through life together.”
    Betsy was bright, feisty, and rapt with words. A native of Kansas City, she was, in the parlance of the time, a looker . At the University of Missouri, while earning As in journalism courses, she became runner-up in the campus election of Agriculture Queen. About five foot four, with a lithe, nimble figure, slightly pale, with large eyes and a profusion of curl-ironed hair, Betsy exuded a girl-next-door allure. Blessed with a wicked sense of humor and the gift of putting everyone at ease, she was the unusual combination of homespun sweet and scorpion sting. After graduation, she took the job at KCMO, but her goal was to join the staff of a newspaper. The first time Walter and Betsy bonded was when they were co-reading a radio commercial script for the Richard Hudnut Corporation, a cosmetics company. They performed together on air, selling makeup, courtesy of a come-on