Chapter 26 — Charles Kuralt and the Road He Made Famous

Charles Kuralt spent most of his career as a CBS News correspondent driving the back roads of America in a motorhome and filing reports about the people he found. His On the Road with Charles Kuralt segments aired from 1967 to 1980 and were among the most-watched parts of the CBS Evening News — which, given that Walter Cronkite was anchoring, is saying something.

Kuralt drove Route 66 multiple times and returned to it repeatedly throughout his career. He had a gift for finding the people the interstate highway was passing over — the glass blower in a small Missouri town, the woman who ran a diner in the Arizona desert and had been feeding travelers for forty years, the retired mechanic who could name every car model that had ever broken down outside his station.

What Kuralt was doing on Route 66 was the same thing Steinbeck had done in the 1930s and the TV show Route 66 had done in the 1960s: insisting that the real America was the one you found when you got off the main road and slowed down. The interstate was efficient. The old road was real.

He influenced a generation of travel writers, documentary filmmakers, and journalists who shared his belief that the country was best understood at twenty-five miles per hour, in conversation with whoever was behind the counter at the nearest diner.

Kuralt died in 1997, just as Route 66 nostalgia was beginning its current revival. He would have found the revival interesting and probably a little suspicious. The road he loved was the one nobody was nostalgic about yet. The best version of it always was.

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