Walter Cronkite died yesterday at his home in New York at the age of 92.
As anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, he has described as the “most trusted man in America.”
According to the New York Times, a private funeral will be held at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York, where he was a member. This was also where the funeral for his wife Betsy was held in 2005.
Walter and Betsy met in 1936 in Kansas City, Missouri while both were working at the KCMO radio station. Betsy was an advertising writer. They were married at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Kansas City on March 30, 1940.
Read more here.
Cronkite’s family was Protestant and changed their denomination three times while he was a child. Cronkite himself joined the Episcopal church as a youth explaining in a 1994 interview:
“I got into a Boy Scout troop that met in an Episcopal church. The church had a wonderful minister who was also the scoutmaster. And I suppose you can say he proselytized me. At any rate, I was much involved with the church, and became Episcopalian – and an acolyte. Later, when I worked for a paper in Houston, I was church editor for a while. The Episcopal House of Bishops met in Houston one year, and I became intrigued by the leaders of the church – fascinated by their discussions and their erudition.”
Addendum. Over at Get Religion, Doug LeBlanc has dug deeper into Cronkite’s religious background. Doug points to a 1994 interview the Christian Century did with Cronkite (the quote in Wikipedia comes from that interview).