His entrance into broadcasting began as a radio announcer in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma after dropping out of college in his junior year 1935.   Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., originally from Kansas City , Missouri, moved to Houston, Texas with his family when he was ten.  He later attended college at the University of Texas at Austin and worked on the student newspaper The Daily Texan.  It was in 1936, while working under the broadcast name “Walter Wilcox” as a sports announcer in Kansas City, Missouri, that he met his future wife Mary Elizabeth Maxwell known as “Betsy”.  The name “Walter Wilcox” came at the request of the radio station, who at the time, didn’t want people to use their real names for fear of taking listeners with them when they left.  He joined the United Press in 1937 and became one of the top American reporters in World War II, covering battles in North Africa and Europe.  Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Force to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress, part of a group called the Writing 69th.  He actually fired a machine gun at a German fighter during one of the missions.  In addition, Walter landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne in Operation Market-Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg trials and served as the United Press main reporter in Moscow from 1946 to 1948.

Read the article in its entirety in the May 2014

Bevil newsletter, which accompanies the cover.