William "Bill" Geist (born May 10, 1945) is an American author, columnist, and television journalist.

Early life[link]

Geist was born in Champaign, Illinois, and graduated from Champaign Central High School. He served in the United States Army as a combat photographer with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a BA Communications (1968), and the University of Missouri, graduating with an MA in Communications (1971). He later returned to the University of Illinois, giving the speech at the 2005 commencement.

Career[link]

Geist began his career in 1972 when he joined the Chicago Tribune's Suburban Trib subsidiary, where he worked as a reporter and columnist until 1980. From 1980 until 1987, he was a New York Times columnist; his "About New York" column appeared twice a week during this time. In August 1987, he joined CBS as a correspondent, where he contributes to CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes II and, occasionally, CBS Sports. He appears regularly on CBS Sunday Morning hosted by Charles Osgood, where he offers the Everyman's perspective on American pop culture and current events.^[1]

Geist is the bestselling author of a number of books including:

• Toward a Safe & Sane Halloween & Other Tales of Suburbia (1985)
• The Zucchini Plague and Other Tales of Suburbia (1987)
• City Slickers (1990)
• Little League Confidential: One Coach's Completely Unauthorized Tale of Survival (1992)
• Monster Trucks and Hair in a Can: Who Says America Doesn't Make Anything Anymore? (1994)
• The Big Five-Oh: Facing, Fearing, and Fighting Fifty (1997)
• FORE! PLAY: The Last American Male Takes Up Golf (2001)
• Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America (2007)

Awards[link]

His awards include a 1992 Emmy Award for his report on the 66th anniversary of Route 66 and a 2005 Emmy Award for his report on Greenwood, Mississippi, the headquarters of the Viking Range Company.

On April 15, 2011 he was awarded the 2,437th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honor he had applied for himself, two years earlier, as a joke, while doing a story on the Walk for CBS News.^[2]

Personal life[link]

He married his wife Jody in June 1970. They live in New York City and have two children: a son, Willie Geist, who works at MSNBC as a co-host of the show, Morning Joe, and a daughter, Libby Geist, who is an award-winning documentary film producer (Crazy Love, Black Magic, Ring of Fire).

References[link]

External links[link]

• Bill Geist at IMDB
• CBS News Sunday Morning

Charles Kuralt (September 10, 1934 – July 4, 1997) was an American journalist. He was most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years.

Kuralt's "On the Road" segments were recognized twice with personal Peabody Awards. The first, awarded in 1968, cited those segments as heartwarming and "nostalgic vignettes"; in 1975, the award was for his work as a U.S. "bicentennial historian"; his work "capture[d] the individuality of the people, the dynamic growth inherent in the area, and ...the rich heritage of this great nation."^[1] He shared in a third Peabody awarded to CBS News Sunday Morning.

Early life and career[link]

Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a boy he won a children's sports writing contest for a local newspaper by writing about a dog that got loose on the field during a baseball game. Charles’ father, Wallace H. Kuralt. Sr., moved his family to Charlotte in 1945, when he became Director of Public Welfare in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.^[2] Their house ^[3] off Sharon Road, then 10 miles south of the city, was the only structure in the area. During the years he lived in that house, Kuralt became one of the youngest radio announcers in the country. Later, at Charlotte’s Central High School, Kuralt was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”^[4] In 1948, he was named one of four National Voice of Democracy winners at age 14, where he won a $500 scholarship. He later attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he became editor of The Daily Tar Heel and joined St. Anthony Hall. He worked as a reporter for the Charlotte News in his home state, where he wrote "Charles Kuralt's People," a column that won him an Ernie Pyle Award. He moved to CBS as a writer, where he became well known as the host of the Eyewitness to History series. He traveled around the world as a journalist for the network, including stints as CBS's Chief Latin American Correspondent and then as Chief West Coast Correspondent.^[5]

In 1967, Kuralt and a CBS camera crew accompanied Ralph Plaisted in his attempt to reach the North Pole by snowmobile, which resulted in the documentary To the Top of the World and his book of the same name.

"On the Road"[link]

Kuralt was said to have tired of what he considered the excessive rivalry between reporters on the hard news beats:

"I didn't like the competitiveness or the deadline pressure," he told the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, upon his induction to their Hall of Fame. "I was sure that Dick Valeriani of NBC was sneaking around behind my back — and of course, he was! — getting stories that would make me look bad the next day. Even though I covered news for a long time, I was always hoping I could get back to something like my little column on the Charlotte News."^[6]

When he persuaded CBS to let him try out just such an idea for three months, it turned into a quarter-century project. "On the Road" became a regular feature on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1967.^[7] Kuralt hit the road in a motor home (he wore out six before he was through) with a small crew and avoided the interstates in favor of the nation's back roads in search of America's people and their doings. He said, "Interstate highways allow you to drive coast to coast, without seeing anything".^[8]

According to Thomas Steinbeck, the older son of John Steinbeck, the inspiration for "On the Road" was Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (whose title was initially considered as the name of Kuralt's feature). During his career, he won three Peabody awards and ten Emmy awards for journalism. He also won a George Polk Award in 1980 for National Television Reporting.

Retirement and death[link]

At age 60, Kuralt surprised many by retiring from CBS News. At the time, he was the longest tenured on-air personality in the News division. Yet he hinted that his retirement might not be complete — in 1995 he narrated the TLC documentary The Revolutionary War and in early 1997 he signed on to host a syndicated, three-times-a-week, ninety-second broadcast, "An American Moment," presenting what CNN called "slices of Americana." At that time, Kuralt also agreed to host a CBS cable broadcast show, I Remember, designed as a weekly, hourlong review of significant news from the three previous decades.

He was hospitalized in 1997 and died of complications from lupus, aged 62, that year.

One of Kuralt's books was titled North Carolina Is My Home. Kuralt's younger brother Wallace, who died in December 2003, was also well known in his home state, having been the owner of The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill for many years. In addition, a portion of land along the Roanoke, Tar, Neuse, Cape Fear Ecosystem — so named for the rivers which flow into the Albemarle, Currituck, and Pamlico Sounds — has been named for Kuralt, honoring his having given as much time to nature and wildlife as to people in his "On the Road" and Sunday Morning stories.

By request in his will, Kuralt was buried on the UNC grounds in Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.^[9] The University uses a Kuralt speech in its television commercials and displays many of his awards and a re-creation of his office in its Journalism School.

Posthumous controversy[link]

Two years after his death, Kuralt's personal reputation came under scrutiny when a decades-long companionship with a Montana woman named Patricia Shannon was made public. Kuralt apparently had a second, "shadow" family with Shannon while his wife lived in New York City and his daughters from a previous marriage lived on the eastern seaboard. Shannon asserted that the house in Montana had been willed to her, a position upheld by the Montana Supreme Court. According to court testimony, Kuralt had met Shannon while doing a story on "Pat Baker Park" in Reno, Nevada, that Shannon had promoted and volunteered to build in 1968. The park was in a low-income area of Reno that had no parks until Shannon promoted her plan. Kuralt mentions Pat Shannon and the building of the park — but not the affair — in his autobiography.^{[10][11][12][13]}

References[link]

External links[link]

• Charles Kuralt Collection, 1935-1997 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Ralph Grizzle, Remembering Charles Kuralt. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2000. (ISBN 0967909600)
• Charles Kuralt's People. Asheville, North Carolina: Kenilworth Media, 2005. A collection of his award winning Charlotte News columns.
• Booknotes interview with Kuralt on Charles Kuralt's America, December 31, 1995.
• CNN, "Charles Kuralt, CBS's Poet of Small-Town America, Dies at 62", a CNN obituary
• In re Estate of Kuralt, 15 P.3d 931 (2000)
• Find-A-Grave profile for Charles Kuralt

Charles Samuel "Chaz" Addams ^[2] (January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two animated TV series, three motion pictures and a Broadway musical.

Biography[link]

Life[link]

Charles Samuel Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Grace M. (née Spears) and Charles Huy Addams, a piano-company executive who had studied to be an architect.^[3] He was known as "something of a rascal around the neighborhood" as childhood friends recalled.^[4] Addams was distantly related to U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and was a first cousin twice removed to noted social reformer Jane Addams.^[4][5]

A house on Elm Street, and another on Dudley Avenue that police once caught him breaking into, are said to be the inspiration for the Addams Family mansion in his cartoons. College Hall, the oldest building on the current campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where Addams studied, was also an inspiration for the mansion.^[6] He was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue.^[7] One friend said of him, "His sense of humor was a little different from everybody else's." He was also artistically inclined, "drawing with a happy vengeance" according to a biographer.^[4]

His father encouraged him to draw, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine, Weathervane.^[3][7] He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930, and the University of Pennsylvania, where a fine-arts building on campus is named for him, in 1930 and 1931. In front of the building is a sculpture of the silhouettes of Addams Family characters.^[7] He then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932.^[3][7]

In 1933 he joined the layout department of True Detective magazine, where he had to retouch photos of corpses that appeared in the magazine's stories to remove the blood from them. Addams complained that "A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were."^[8]

His first drawing in The New Yorker ran on February 6, 1932 (a sketch of a window washer), and his cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1938, when he drew the first instance of what came to be called the Addams Family, until his death. He was a freelancer throughout that time.^[4][4]

During World War II, Addams served at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in New York, where he made animated training films for the U.S. Army. In late 1942, he met his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, who purportedly resembled the cartoon Morticia Addams.^[4] The marriage ended eight years later, after Addams, who hated small children, refused to adopt one.^[4] She later married New Yorker colleague John Hersey, author of the book Hiroshima.^[5]

He married his second wife, Barbara Barb (Estelle B. Barb), in 1954. A practicing lawyer, she "combined Morticia-like looks with diabolical legal scheming," by which she wound up controlling the "Addams Family" television and movie franchises and persuaded her husband to give away other legal rights.^[4] At one point, she got her husband to take out a $100,000 insurance policy. Addams consulted a lawyer on the sly, who later humorously wrote, "I told him the last time I had word of such a move was in a picture called Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I called to his attention." In the movie, Stanwyck's character plotted her husband's murder.^[4] No one has accused Barbara Barb Addams of attempting the same. They divorced in 1956.^[5]

The Addams Family television series began after David Levy, a television producer, approached Addams with an offer to create it with a little help from the humorist. All Addams had to do was give his characters names and more characteristics for the actors to use in portrayals. The series ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1964 to 1966.^[7]

Addams was "sociable and debonair," and described by a biographer as "A well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a fiend." Figuratively a ladykiller, Addams squired celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions.^[4]

Later, he married his third and last wife, Marilyn Matthews Miller, best known as "Tee" (1926–2002), in a pet cemetery.^[3] In 1985, the Addamses moved to Sagaponack, New York, where they named their estate "The Swamp."^[9]

Death[link]

Addams died September 29, 1988, at St. Clare's Hospital and Health Center in New York City, having suffered a heart attack while still in his car after parking it. An ambulance took him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room.^[3] As he had requested, a wake was held rather than a funeral; he had wished to be remembered as a "good cartoonist." He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the pet cemetery of his estate "The Swamp."^[5]:318

Cartoons[link]

His cartoons regularly appeared in The New Yorker, and he also created a syndicated comic strip, Out of This World, which ran in 1956. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered (1942) and Monster Rally (1950), the latter with a foreword by John O'Hara. Typical of Addams's work, one cartoon shows two men standing in a room labeled "Patent Attorney." One is pointing a bizarre gun out the window toward the street and saying, "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up!"

Dear Dead Days (1959) is not a collection of his cartoons (although it reprints a few from previous collections); it is a scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to Addams's sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements and a boyhood photograph of Francesco Lentini, who had three legs.

Addams drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life. Those that did not appear in The New Yorker were often in Collier's and TV Guide.^[7] In 1961, Addams received, from the Mystery Writers of America, a Special Edgar Award for his body of work. His cartoons appeared in books, calendars and other merchandising. Singer-guitarist Dean Gitter's 1957 recording Ghost Ballads (Riverside, RLP 12-636), folk songs with supernatural themes, was packaged with album art by Addams showing a haunted house.

In 1946, Addams met science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury after having drawn an illustration for Mademoiselle magazine's publication of Bradbury's short story "Homecoming", the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois vampires named the Elliotts. The pair became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family's complete history with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury's stories about the "Elliott Family" were finally anthologized in From the Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams' 1946 Mademoiselle illustration used for the book's cover jacket. Although Addams' own characters were well-established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview Bradbury states that "(Addams) went his way and created the Addams Family and I went my own way and created my family in this book." ^[10]

Janet Maslin, in a review of an Addams biography for The New York Times, wrote, "Addams's persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers... was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye," noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, "but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike."^[4]

In Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Cary Grant references Charles Addams in the auction scene. Discovering Eve with Mr. Vandamm and Leonard, he says, "The three of you together. Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw." The filmmaker was a friend of Addams', and owned two pieces of original Addams art.^[11] Addams is also mentioned as "Chas Addams" in Edward Eager's fantasy novel Knight's Castle.

Bibliography[link]

By Addams[link]

Books of Addams's drawings or illustrated by him^[12]

• Drawn and Quartered (1942), first anthology of drawings (Random House)
• Addams and Evil (1947), second anthology of drawings, (Simon and Schuster)
• (illustrations) Afternoon in the Attic (1950), John Kobler’s anthology of short stories
• Monster Rally (1950) third anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Homebodies (book) (1954) fourth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Nightcrawlers (1957), fifth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Dear Dead Days: A Family Album (1959), compilations book of photos (G.P. Putnam & Sons)
• Black Maria (1960), sixth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Drawn and Quartered (1962) re-released (Simon & Schuster)
• The Groaning Board (1964), seventh anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• The Chas Addams Mother Goose (1967) Windmill Books
• My Crowd (1970), eighth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Favorite Haunts (1976), ninth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• Creature Comforts (1981), tenth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)
• The World of Charles Addams, by Charles Addams (1991), posthumously compiled from works with the copyright owned by his second wife, later named Lady Barbara Cloyton (Knopf) ISBN 0-394-58822-3
• Half - Baked Cookbook, by Charles Addams (2005), anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster) ISBN 0-7432-6775-3
• Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One, by Charles Addams (2006), anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster) ISBN 978-0-7432-6777-9
• The Addams Family: An Evilution (2010), about the evolution of The Addams Family characters (arranged by H. Kevin Miserocchi) ISBN 978-0-7649-5388-0

About Addams[link]

• Davis, Linda H., Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life (2006), Random House, 382 pages

See also[link]

• Edward Gorey, contemporary American cartoonist with similar macabre style

References[link]

External links[link]

• Charles Addams Foundation