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Martha's Vineyard remembers Walter Cronkite

E-mail|Link|Comments () July 18, 2009 02:15 PM

By Jazmine Ulloa and Eric Moskowitz
Globe Correspondent and Globe staff

EDGARTOWN -- Residents and tourists alike today remembered legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, who died Friday night at age 92 after a long illness.

Cronkite became a fixture in American living rooms as a steadying voice throughout much of the 20th century, a time that saw the country steeped in social movements, lunar exploration, and a raging war in Vietnam.

But at his quiet summer home on the waterfront across from Edgartown’s inner harbor, the most trusted man in America could escape fame and sail his boat, his neighbors said.

“He came here to be a normal person, not a celebrity,” said Bo Reily, who owns a summer home near Cronkite's in Edgartown. “You can get away with that at Martha’s Vineyard.”

Reily’s parents first bought the summer vacation home in the 1970s, and he met Cronkite when he was 9, he said.

Now 48, he said Cronkite was like part of his family.

“I could not believe he died,” he said. “He had so much life and was bigger than life.”

In the home just behind Cronkite’s, Jean and William Graham remember their summer neighbor as a down-to-earth man with a passion for sailing.

“He was caring, he really looked out for us,” Jean said.

Cronkite would take their grandchildren along with his own on his boat as they went for ice cream, and the families would get together for softball games and picnics on the neatly trimmed lawn in Cronkite’s backyard.

Along Edgartown’s harbor, Kenneth Yelland of Wellesley was taking a stroll with his wife and friends. Their boat was moored across from Cronkite’s home last night, and they said they found themselves wondering about his health.

This morning a friend called to tell them about Cronkite's death.

“Just as the Beatles were the soundtrack for our lives, Cronkite was the voice of the news growing up,” said Yelland. “He only had 20 minutes to tell us what was going on in the world and we trusted that he could.

The consistent pleasure, privacy, and serenity Cronkite found as he sailed the waters around the Vineyard on his majestic sailboat, Wyntje led the retired anchor to lend his voice in 2003 to the opposition movement to Cape Wind.

In radio and TV spots for the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Cronkite said the plan to build 130 electricity-generating wind turbines on a 24-square-mile area of the Sound would spoil the Sound.

"National treasures should be off limits to industrialization," he said.

But Cronkite ultimately reversed course. After speaking with scientists and reviewing the matter, he acknowledged publicly that his initial position had been an emotional one.

"It sounded like such a ghastly invasion of this wonderful body of water," he told the Globe at the time. "I will confess, also, that I did not do my own homework as I should have before making the statements. I did not and I can only regret that now."

Mark Rodgers, spokesman for Cape Wind Associates, yesterday credited Cronkite for "having the courage to publicly acknowledge that he made a mistake." Cronkite's review, which included a lengthy meeting with Cape Wind president Jim Gordon, was consistent with his evenhanded record as a journalist, and it resonated with the public two decades after his retirement, Rodgers said.

"I would find if people knew two or three things about the project, one of them would be that it was the one Walter Cronkite changed his mind on," he said.

George M. Woodwell, the scientist who founded the Woods Hole Research Center in 1985, wrote to Cronkite at the time of the ads, describing the seriousness of climate change and telling him that Cape Wind could produce three-quarters of the base-load energy needs of the Cape and Islands without any emissions. Cronkite called Woodwell and asked a series of thoughtful questions.

"He's a very reasonable person," Woodwell recalled yesterday. "He was one of the great reporters of all time, and everyone loves him or loved him and everyone respected him, and that was one of the reasons that it seemed to be so important that he realized the seriousness of the issue."