Feelgood Friend Still Roaming The Landscape, Charles Kuralt Gives Us More Stories Of Simple Pleasures, Good People

“Charles Kuralt’s America” By Charles Kuralt (Putnam’s, 279 pages, $24.95)

Americans are in a funk. We fret over budget deficits (our own and the government’s.) We worry about layoffs. We lament racial discord. We fear crime in the streets. Nothing seems as good as the good old days, whenever they were. Heck, some people can’t even get excited about the World Series anymore.

But then along comes Charles Kuralt to remind us of all that is still good.

That’s always been his job, of course. For much of his journalistic career at CBS News, he traveled the two-lane highways of this nation searching out and then sharing tales of the interesting and the entertaining; of the simple but good folks of this land as they went about their lives. With all those individual stories, he stitched an American quilt as homespun as apple pie and the Boy Scouts.

Kuralt fled the tube for retirement in May 1994, but didn’t give up the road. In fact, he has spent most of his retirement on his latest book, aptly titled “Charles Kuralt’s America.” It has been a busman’s holiday of sorts, but one we all could envy. Imagine getting to spend a year traveling to your favorite places at just the right time to be there: February beachcombing in Key West, Fla.; August sailing off Boothbay Harbor, Maine; October leaf-peeping in Woodstock, Vt.

There are 12 chapters, one for each month. And as you might expect, along the way Kuralt introduces us to some interesting characters. He likes, it seems, just about everybody he meets.

There is Glenn Brackett of Twin Bridges, Mont. (September), master maker of fly rods - “a nice guy who doesn’t mind talking while he works.” Hal McClure of Grandfather Mountain, N.C. (May), a mountain wood-carver with a drooping mustache - “I think it might be worth the trouble of growing a mustache if I could have one like that before I die.”

Just about all these folks live in small towns. The real America for Kuralt is in the small villages and burgs that barely rate a mention on the map. And even in the big ones that are boldfaced on the maps, Kuralt finds the small community: He spends December in his hometown of New York, enjoying the lights and tinsel, but for much of the chapter he describes his small Greenwich Village neighborhood and its inhabitants.

But there is some melancholy to this book, too. Many of the people Kuralt writes about are dying breeds - craftsmen, ranchers, artisans. And the places in Kuralt’s America all seem threatened by the steady encroachment of more people, blacktop and commercialization.

Of Ely, Minn. (July), where Kuralt canoed and tried to spot wolves in the woods, he writes: “They’re building a new Holiday Inn; probably it’s open by now. Since I left, one commuter plane a day has started flying in from Minneapolis, and there are other signs of progress. I’d hate to see the little town at the end of the road become too developed and refined. I’d hate to see it overcome by newcomers”

That, unfortunately in some instances and fortunately in others, has always been the future for the towns and cities of America. You can’t stop progress, even if it isn’t necessarily for the good. And there is just a little too much in this book of Kuralt “preventing the future,” in the old Vermont phrase. His tut-tuttings over the passing of time and the ending of eras can make the reader a little weary.

Still, this is mostly a happy book, a celebration of America much more than a lamentation.

And in our current funk, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the good when we only hear so much of the bad and the ugly. Kuralt may no longer be there for us on television, but this book reminds us that we still have Charles Kuralt’s America.