Hello and Goodbye

Charles Kuralt Turns Over Hosting Duties To Charles Osgood

(CBS)  Here’s what was said when CBS News veteran Charles Kuralt turned over his Sunday Morning hosting duties to Charles Osgood.

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CHARLES KURALT: I am retiring from CBS News. This program, I am happy to say, will be in the good hands of Charles Osgood starting next Sunday morning.

Charles, nobody has ever been welcomed as genuinely as you are welcomed here.

CHARLES OSGOOD: Well, thank you, Charles. A real honor to succeed you, not replace you, on this broadcast. Nobody can replace you. And I'm glad to have this little opportunity on the screen with you to prove that we are two different people because people have confused us very often.

KURALT: Well, that's true, they have. I am the fat and bald one. You are the one who can play the piano and knows how to tie a bow tie.

OSGOOD: No, the truth is that if--unless I realized people out there understand what I understand to be the truth, it's a quote from an old song, which is that 'There will never be another you,' and that most certainly is the case. But I also want to take advantage of this opportunity on behalf, I think, of millions of people out there who are your friends and who love you, who say for all the grace that you have been to us over these years, Charles Kuralt, thank you and God bless you.

KURALT: Oh, thank you, Charles. That means a lot coming from you.

KURALT: Well, we leave you this morning at Tule Lake on the California-Oregon border.

KURALT: Every dawn of every spring, the sky above Tule Lake is made joyous by the sight of snow geese flying North. My heart knows where the wild goose goes.

KURALT: Time for us to part, you and I. Saying goodbye to the viewers of SUNDAY MORNING is like saying goodbye to old friends. That's the way I feel. Thank you for making me feel that way. I aim to do some traveling and reading and writing and to watch this program the civilized way for a change: in my bathrobe while having breakfast.

Charles Osgood appreciates poems and often commits poetry himself. There is a rhyme by Clarence Day which says what I want to say: 'Farewell, my friends, farewell and hail; I'm off to seek the holy grail; I cannot tell you why; remember, please when I am gone, 'twas aspiration led me on; tiddly-widdly-toodle-oo, all I want is to stay with you, but here I go, goodbye.'