It’s understandable if you know Bill Kurtis only as an anchorman.
That was his profession for decades, polished with that sonorous voice alongside Diane Sawyer on the CBS Morning News or, on the less serious side of things, narrating the Will Ferrell romps “Anchorman” and “Anchorman II,” or as the official judge and scorekeeper of NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”
Kurtis comes at you in substance and even swashbuckling style in his new autobiography, “Whirlwind,” where the past is brought forth in compelling detail.
He writes, “Every person who appears in these pages deserves my thanks. While writing it, I could see their faces again. … They all linger in my memory with the clarity of a sunny morning.”
“Whirlwind” gives us the beginning and early parts of his career, a justifiable perspective because he was at the center of many of the biggest stories of the last half century. The Charles Manson murder trial? He was there for that, and in the courtrooms of political activist Angela Davis and serial killer Juan Corona. He was the first American to return to Vietnam after the war’s end and reported on the effects of Agent Orange (“The biggest story of my career,” he writes), and on the tens of thousands of children fathered by U.S. soldiers who were left behind in Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal in 1975.
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During his time in Chicago with CBS affiliate WBBM-Ch. 2, he was there when the city exploded in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; he covered the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial of the Chicago Seven; he got the first interview with Iva Toguri, better known as Tokyo Rose, who lived in the city and would become, Kurtis writes, “a wonderful auntie to my two kids.” He covered the trial of killer Richard Speck, and years later came into possession of a tape that showed Speck having such a grand old time in prison that it would put “a knife in the heart of the Illinois penal system.”
He tells these stories without self-aggrandizing or hyperbole.
Among the most personal concerns his first wife, Helen. They had known each other since second grade and were high school sweethearts of the storybook kind: she a cheerleader and homecoming queen, he the football team’s quarterback. They married and had two children: Mary Kristin and Scott.
Then came cancer and a tragic end for Helen, as he writes:
“Over the next week, I read to her, which she enjoyed. She would stay awake as long as she could and then close her eyes. Once she woke up from her drifting consciousness to whisper to me, ‘I’m dying.’
‘I said, ‘I know. Don’t worry about the kids. Everyone has been great. It will all work out.’ And then, as I was holding her hand, she passed away in her sleep.”
By “Whirlwind’s” end, you will have a fuller portrait of Kurtis but also will be left wanting, eager to learn more about his and his parents’ connection to the “Little House on the Prairie” site; his lengthy relationship with wife Donna LaPietra, more than a romantic companion but a collaborator not only in love but business and in restoring natural woodlands and prairies near their home; about his two children as they grew up; his successful documentary career, launched with Kurtis Productions in 1994, manifested in “The New Explorers,” “Cold Case Files,” “Investigative Reports” and “American Greed.”
It has been a rich and rewarding career and life. This is not a book about score-settling or nasty stories or gossip. Kurtis is a gentleman, complimentary about, well, almost everything and everybody.
At the beginning of “Whirlwind,” he writes, “Only now is the storm of life that I’m still caught in starting to come into focus. … Events become memories, and memories become stories. Time can tame the whirlwind into a summer breeze.”
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