"I was sitting home alone one night / in L.A. watching ol' Cronkite / on the 7 o'clock news"

-- from "Black Diamond Bay" by Bob Dylan.

There was something about Walter Cronkite's voice that put me at ease, no matter how horrible or disturbing the actual news he was reporting happened to be. Because of Uncle Walter, I was addicted to the sound of news before I knew what it was. His stentorian voice is entwined in my earliest memories like the thunderclap that always sounded as if it was a little too close to the house during a storm.

I remember watching JFK's funeral procession. The black-and-white television in our living room was always tuned to channel 10, the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia at the time. Uncle Walter provided the only voice of composure in my house during that very sad weekend in November 1963.

When I squealed with delight over the horse-drawn caisson bearing the president's casket, I was shushed, perhaps by Uncle Walter himself transmitting a rebuke from the interlocking threads of the television's speakers. I was awed by the pageantry and, perhaps, more than a little afraid because of the tears it generated among the grown-ups.

Those days made an impression on me primarily in terms of colors and sounds. Gray was dominant. It complemented the sobs in the living room and the sounds of Uncle Walter's voice. He was well on his way to establishing himself as one of the two white men I trusted implicitly in early childhood. The other was Santa Claus.

On April 4, 1968, I was a week and a half away from my eighth birthday when Uncle Walter made another indelible cameo. The sad pageantry that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King struck an even deeper emotional chord for my family. We still had the same black-and-white television set that made JFK's funeral such a haunting memory, but the announcer for the CBS Evening News kept assuring us the program was now in color. It didn't seem fair that there was an important news story about us brown people on the evening news and we were stuck watching it in black-and-white.

When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated two months later, we all knew the next step of the ritual by heart. There would be sadness, a lot of crying by grown-ups, followed by cursing about how the whole world had gone crazy. On the CBS Evening News, Uncle Walter would narrate another funeral procession triggering yet another round of national déjà vu and soul searching. Once again, Uncle Walter would be the voice of steadiness even if the center didn't hold.

I was 9 years old when I was suddenly called into the house to watch the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin taking their first steps on the moon. Once again, it was Uncle Walter bringing it to us.

I had never seen him so happy. I didn't understand why the sight of two astronauts kicking up dust in the Sea of Tranquility had brought him so close to tears. After all, Prince Planet and Astro Boy went to the moon and beyond on "Wee Willie Webber's Colorful Cartoon Club" every day. In the non-cartoon world, the crew of the Starship Enterprise could travel across the galaxy in the time it took the Apollo 11 crew to get to the moon and back.

Granted, we didn't know that "Star Trek" was weeks away from cancellation, but Uncle Walter probably wasn't aware of that, either. Still, he managed to convince us that we were witnessing something extraordinary and that we would always remember where we were the afternoon man first walked on the moon.

That was 40 years ago yesterday. During all the years Uncle Walter was on the air, I never heard him utter a lie. These days, there are whole networks devoted to lying to their viewers. Uncle Walter's noble profession has been overrun by histrionic clowns and cynical Barbie dolls.

When I went away to college, the only ritual from my youth I never cast off was watching Walter Cronkite. I remember telling a prospective girlfriend once that I trusted Cronkite's take on the news more than anything I read in the papers that day. I read newspapers for context, but watched Uncle Walter for clues on how to think about the world. She didn't end up being my girlfriend after that little announcement.

I was sitting alone in a dorm lobby nursing a very large lump in my throat on March 6, 1981 -- Walter Cronkite's last day as anchor of the CBS Evening News. My classmates didn't care. Many of them associated Uncle Walter with unpleasantness after watching his reports about the murder of John Lennon the previous semester. Not me.

I remember exactly where I was when the only man who could say "and that's the way it is" stepped down from the anchor desk. He has been an impossible act to follow ever since.