Austin Strip Clubs: WALTER CRONKITE
Viewers credulously embraced him — two polls, one of them 15 years after he left the air, named him the most trusted man in America — and a generation of TV reporters were awed by him. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who has dodged Iraqi missiles in Tel Aviv and shouted at presidents in Washington during his nearly four decades in TV news, said nothing has ever compared to the thrill of the first time Cronkite introduced one of his stories on the CBS Evening News.
”I was watching at the CBS affiliate Chicago,” remembered Wallace. ‘And when Cronkite said, `and Chris Wallace in Springfield, Illinois,’ there was a big cheer from the newsroom. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven.”
Born in Missouri, raised in Houston, Cronkite became fascinated with journalism in high school and dropped out of the University of Texas to pursue his career. For several years he bounced between newspaper, radio and wire-service jobs throughout the Midwest, not always with momentous results. One of his most memorable interviews, he later said, was with Hinda Wassau, the burlesque star who invented the stripper pole.