This piece from Sunday Morning is heartbreakingly good.
CBS News Radio blazed a trail in broadcasting and now it’s all but finished. Its owners are about to pull the plug. It seemed like it would be around forever. I remember listening to the World News Roundup every morning as my father drove me to Pallotti High School in Laurel, Maryland. I think Reid Collins was the anchor back then. Little did I know I would one day work in the same newsroom where he worked, and breathe the same air as legends like Douglas Edwards, Charles Osgood and Christopher Glenn.
I arrived there in 1986, after four years of working as a production assistant for the CBS Evening News in Washington. Radio offered me a job in New York as a writer, and I jumped at the chance. I worked there, at all hours, in a variety of writing and producing gigs (interrupted for several weeks when I walked a picket line for a WGA strike in 1987) until 1991, when I moved to the TV side. I can’t begin to describe the impact those years had on my life — as a writer and, now, as a deacon. I’m the preacher I am today because of what I learned about writing and speaking toiling away in that newsroom. I like to tell deacons, “Every moment of your life, you are in formation, whether you realize it or not.” I know that is true for me.
Back in the day at CBS, we used to prepare obits of famous figures, years before they departed this world, just to have them recorded and ready. It was dubbed “Pinebox Productions.” I thought of that enterprise this morning, watching this report. What Mo Rocca has done here is a kind of well-crafted obit about a legend who had a profound impact on American life. (For Sunday Morning, this is more like reporting on a death in the family. It hits close to home.)
That legend isn’t gone yet; it signs off officially on May 22. But those of us who were touched by it can’t help but feel emotional about its passing — and we can’t help but marvel that we had the privilege of being a part of it, even for just a short time.
We’re losing something precious and important. I’m grateful someone at CBS News took the time to say that and make sure the world doesn’t let this just slip away.
