Mourning ‘Uncle Walter’

Ever dignified on the air, on the Vineyard he exhibited a vibrant and playful side even as he maintained that Cronkite gravitas. He waved to tourists from the deck of the Wyntje, spoke to schoolchildren, chatted with passersby in town, became active in local causes. He cherished the pace of life on the island, the smell of the sea air, the freedom and privacy of sailing.

“He was such a guy that loved life. People probably didn’t know that side of him, but he was a funny guy, really hilarious and quick-witted as can be,’’ said Ed Jerome, a friend who retired as principal of Edgartown School and now works as a charter captain. “He just enjoyed the Vineyard immensely.’’

Across the Vineyard yesterday, friends and locals recalled Cronkite, who died Friday at 92, as a summertime fixture who appreciated the quieter life of Dukes County when not in the anchor’s chair.

“He came here to be a normal person, not a celebrity,’’ said Bo Reily, whose family has owned a summer home near Cronkite’s since the 1970s.

Cronkite and his wife, Betsy, bought their rambling harborside home in 1977 but had been coming to the island for many years before that. In 1973, Cronkite entered negotiations with CBS to renew his contract with a single demand - rather than a raise, he wanted summers off on the Vineyard.

“They said, ‘That’s impossible,’ ’’ Cronkite recalled in a Globe interview six years ago. “I said, ‘Well, then, I might have to find some other occupation.’ ’’

The network quickly agreed.

The Cronkites often took the ferry over from Woods Hole with fellow TV journalist Mike Wallace, Wallace’s daughter, Pauline Dora, recalled yesterday.

“It’s a very special place for both of them,’’ Dora said. “They ran at full speed [in New York], and I think here they could just stop and smell the roses.’’

Ray Ellis, an Edgartown artist, had never met Cronkite when the newsman called him in the mid-1970s, his slightly gravelly baritone unmistakable, to join him for tennis. Cronkite had seen Ellis on the courts at the local yacht club and decided their games were about equal.

That was the start of a regular tennis match - often they’d play doubles with Wallace and Art Buchwald, the latter always with a cigar dangling - and a friendship that would deepen over the years. Ellis and Cronkite sailed together and collaborated on three coffee table books about American coastlines.

“He was so serious about his job, but he had an incredible sense of humor. And whenever we were together, we ended up laughing half the time, and it was wonderful,’’ said Ellis, 88. “And I [would] pinch myself to realize that I’m doing this with the most trusted man in America.’’

Ellis said Cronkite preferred the privacy of early morning tennis. “If he played late, he said, all these gals would ask him for dinner,’’ he recalled, chuckling. But Cronkite always indulged strangers, Ellis said, adding that requests to say, “And that’s the way it is,’’ came more frequently offisland.

“He was everybody’s Uncle Walter,’’ said Ellis, who designed three holiday greeting cards for the Clinton White House. “He was never one of these people who said, ‘I don’t have the time.’ ’’

Cronkite was there in 1998 when the Clintons made their first joint public appearance in the aftermath of the president’s confession about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. They sailed together on Cronkite’s blue-hulled, 60-foot yacht Wyntje, named for the first woman to marry one of Cronkite’s paternal ancestors in the New Amsterdam colony in the 1640s.

“His love for his boat ran just incredibly deep,’’ said Alison Shaw, a photographer with a gallery in Oak Bluffs who served as house-sitter for the Cronkites after college and who recalled that it had just one seldom-used TV.

“I think he went sailing every day on that boat and just loved Edgartown harbor and just loved being out on the water.’’

Although many of the boats in the harbor are trophies that sit unused much of the year, Cronkite could regularly be seen at the helm, handling the wheel from a swivel chair in the cockpit.

“He was a yachtsman,’’ said Charlie Blair, Edgartown’s harbormaster. “He started sailing about 25 years ago, and every year the boats got bigger and he got better.’’

Cronkite frequently offered to take people out on the Wyntje as a prize for local charity auctions. He delighted in waving back to those who hailed him, and once buzzed a tugboat Jerome was using for a prewedding party to bellow a congratulations.

“That juiced it up for us,’’ said Jerome. Later, Cronkite visited the local K-8 school, where Jerome was principal, to talk to seventh- and eighth-graders about history. The man who had narrated many of the events for earlier generations had the 80 adolescents enthralled.

“Any question they wanted to throw at him,’’ said Jerome. “For an hour and a half those kids had an experience that I’m sure they won’t forget.’’

Cronkite lent his name and time to several island causes, writing a letter as recently as April to raise money for the expansion of Edgartown Library.

But Cronkite drew the ire of some scientists and environmentalists when he recorded radio and TV spots for the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, in opposition to the Cape Wind project in 2003.

“National treasures should be off-limits to industrialization,’’ Cronkite said.

The sailor in Cronkite had made an emotional decision to protect his beloved Sound from the plan to build 130 electricity-generating wind turbines, he later acknowledged. After considering the matter more fully, he requested that his ads be pulled.

“It sounded like such a ghastly invasion of this wonderful body of water,’’ Cronkite 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.’’

After mourning the loss of his wife, who died in 2005 after 65 years of marriage, Cronkite began dating fellow Vineyarder Joanna Simon, a widowed opera singer and the sister of Carly Simon. Cronkite met the family in the 1970s through their brother, Peter, a photographer.

“To have a man of his stature come into our humble abode when I was just a barefooted hippie was very amazing and humbling,’’ Peter Simon said.

After Cronkite and Joanna Simon lost their spouses, their friendship grew as they sailed and spent time together in recent years, Carly Simon said.

“He was already in touch with who he was and was content with who he was,’’ Carly Simon said, calling Cronkite quick-witted, authentic, and solid.

“Just as the Beatles were the soundtrack for our lives, Cronkite was the voice of the news growing up,’’ said Kenneth Yelland of Wellesley, who was strolling with his wife by Edgartown Harbor. “He only had 20 minutes to tell us what was going on in the world, and we trusted that he could.’’

A private funeral service is scheduled for Thursday at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York, with a memorial planned within the next month at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He will be buried next to his wife in Kansas City, Mo., the Associated Press reported.