When I was a young reporter in Charlotte one of the officials on my beat was a man named Wallace H. Kuralt. When I had time I’d go by his office some afternoons just to say hello and, if he had time, he would light his pipe and we would sit and talk.
Mr. Kuralt –I always called him “Mister” — was the director of the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services. He had a good paying job with a lot of responsibility and seemed to live a comfortable life. He was also the father of sons who were even more successful.
But he worried about his grandchildren.
His namesake, who was called Wally, owned the Intimate Bookstore, a Chapel Hill landmark he eventually built into a nine-store regional chain. His other son, Charles, was a famous television reporter best known for his “On the Road With Charles Kuralt” segments on the CBS evening news.
Mr. Kuralt said his father didn’t go to college. Mr. Kuralt graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but it won’t easy.
He told me that one of his jobs in college was to get up early during the winter and build a fire in the boiler of the building where he lived so that other students’ rooms would be warm when they got up.
He said he sometimes got free milk from the two students who lived next door. They had milk delivered to their door every day but, sometimes, they were away or for one reason or another the milk just sat there, and was wasted.
Mr. Kuralt said he asked them if he could have the milk if it was still there at 8 a.m. and they said he could. He told me that he would check every day at 8, hoping the milk was still there. If it was he would drink all he could and what he couldn’t drink he would curdle and eat later.
Life was easier for his sons and he worried that it would be easier still for his grandchildren. He feared the family’s success might spoil them — ruin them, in fact. Several times he cited to me the proverb, the warning: “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”
Coming Friday: Hiking Backwards
