I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everythi... by Charles Kuralt

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

Charles Kuralt

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What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.

jugs southern dog

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

writing years thinking

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

illinois rain years

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

dating girlfriend boys

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

mother father kids

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

good-luck jobs years

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

morning kids school

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

fun america years

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

workout mother father

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

romantic-love would-be looks

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

trying retirement school

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.

hate boys father

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

covering important interesting

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

baseball book thinking

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

romance lucky people

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

team baseball believe

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.

lines stories thinking

I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.

reputation pressure thinking

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

north-carolina texas perfect