Remember it was the French who gave us that wonderful statue celebrating liberté in New York Harbor, of the lady holding a torch, the one they so aptly named Liberty Enlightening the World.

Liberty is what America has been all about over the years. Most American families came from somewhere else. What all looked for in the United States has been freedom and independence. A meritocracy where anything is possible—a country where striving, regardless of race, creed, or color could pay off. A land where dreams come true. Is that so wild a dream? President Obama is living proof it isn’t. But the idea of “yes we can” did not start with him. Over the years, American inventors from Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, and Robert Fulton, to Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers confronted naysayers who told them it simply couldn’t be done. Of course, they proved otherwise, thanks to a combination of inspiration and perspiration—Edison claimed it was mostly perspiration. Thanks to their tireless efforts and vision, they made life better for themselves and everybody else, too.

And we Americans could not only dream, we could build as well. Not only do we create new machines, we make them run.

Today, we hear sophisticated people say that America can’t make what we create anymore, that we have to outsource manufacturing because Americans don’t want to get our fingers dirty. When I hear that statement, it makes me sad, even angry. And I don’t believe it for a minute. Given half a break and a level playing field, American workers today are still the most productive and efficient in the world. While far from perfect, we are still the nation of dreamers and strivers. And one thing we still dream of and strive for is freedom, not just for a chosen few, but for everyone in America.

Once when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was singing at Lincoln Center, they asked me to write a patriotic poem. The choir hummed “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in the background. Here’s what I wrote:

America, land of the free,

My home sweet home of liberty, of thee I sing;

Let freedom ring for everyone in America:

Freedom from want, freedom from fear,

Freedom to speak, freedom to hear.

And when we bow our heads to pray,

To worship God in our own way,

I have a dream, may it come true

For everyone in America.

Working for Liberty The Saturday Evening Post

I confess to a certain pride
That I won’t attempt to hide.
I’ll admit that it delighted me to hear
That the Father’s Day Committee,
Which is based in New York City,
Has named me one of the Fathers of the Year.

No, it’s not the least bit bad
To be honored as a dad.
Although, you may wonder what I did to win it.
If you ask how I do it,
I will say there’s nothing to it.
To explain it now will only take a minute.

It is absolutely true
That there’s nothing that I do
To make the Father’s Day Committee name me.
It all has to do with Jean
And five kids named Kathleen,
Winston, Annie, Emily, and Jamie.

Three lasses and two laddies,
I’m the luckiest of daddies.
They are wonderful as any kids could be.
And though often I’m not there,
They can hear me on the air
And also see me there on the TV.

I’m sure Jean was pleased to hear
That I’m Father of the Year.
It must thrill her as she goes about her life
To be informed that I am such a splendid guy—
And she’s the Father of the Year’s wife.

Every morning she gets up
To a day that never lets up
To pack lunches for the kids to take to school.
She does that every day,
Although I am far away.
I’m long gone to work by that time,
As a rule.

Yes, it must seem really keen.
I’m sure it must to Jean.
It must fill her with satisfying cheer
To hear that in the city
The Father’s Day Committee
Has picked me as a father of the year.

When she drives them all to school,
Trying hard to keep her cool,
As the rush hour traffic slowly moves along,
She must give a little smile
At this little daily trial
And wonder if she’s doing something wrong.

She tends to them when they’re sick;
When they’re hurt comes running quick.
It is she who helps them with the violin.
I would do it if I could,
I am certain that I would,
Were it not that I am very seldom in.

It is Jean who drives them places,
And makes sure they wash their faces,
And finds their missing jackets and their shoes.
It is she who does it all,
While yours truly has the gall
To be off somewhere gathering some news.

Jean breaks up each fight,
Reads stories every night,
And when they have troubles, takes time to hear.
She does that, truth to tell,
And she does it all so well.
That’s why they named me Father of the Year.

I eagerly await, any day now, a call from the National Grandfather’s Day Committee. Jean will be so pleased.

“Father of the Year” The Saturday Evening Post

It’s one thing to be careful to avoid a nasty fall,

But apart from that, I must say, I’m not risk averse at all.

Taking risks is part of life, or so it seems to me.

And nothing that’s worth doing is entirely risk free.

We cannot read the future. It’s behind a heavy curtain.

So how things will turn out is never absolutely certain.

And yet we must make choices and through our lives proceed

To either change direction or go where our choices lead.

To fall in love with someone is always to take a chance,

But to be afraid to do so would deprive life of romance.

To pick a field of study or set out on a career

Is to gamble, yet we do it, moved by passion and not fear.

We do not know what will happen or what lies around the bend.

What tomorrow has in store, much less how it will end.

Every time we choose a place to live or work or play,

Or meet someone who may become a good old friend some day.

When we take a job or hire someone, invest or make a plan,

We can’t be sure it won’t go wrong because we know it can.

There is the possibility our choices may be wrong,

But we’re all creating our own futures as we go along.

Risk does carry danger, and that cannot be ignored,

Yet risk will often carry a commensurate reward.

Though there’s wisdom in restraint and trying not to be too frisky,

If you want to really live, remember life itself is risky.

Some say better safe than sorry, but it still can be maintained

That it’s just as true to argue nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Risk (A Verse) The Saturday Evening Post

Mary Ann is my sister. We were both 8 years old at the time, but we weren’t twins. We were what everybody called “Irish Twins,” born in the same year; I in January, and she in December. My folks talked up this move to Baltimore, telling us we’d be living in a place with a lawn. This seemed pretty exotic to us, and we were really looking forward to that. On the day we moved in, while the moving men were unloading furniture from the van, Mom looked out an upstairs window and saw the two of us lying on our backs on the little postage stamp of a lawn, looking up at the sky. But the front lawn didn’t look small to us. It looked like the country. Imagine our delight to find out the place had a backyard, too. Also small, the backyard provided a little more privacy and enough room for playing tag and hide-and-seek with neighborhood kids. We’d bounce a rubber ball off the steps, use a bamboo clothesline stick as a pole vault, and hide Easter eggs when that season came. Big enough for games and growing a victory garden—mostly tomatoes, pumpkins, and radishes, as I recall. And sure enough, victory did come, didn’t it? We did win World War II. Around that time, our baby brother was born, and sharing his growing up would be a big part of our life story, too. While there would be other houses we’d call home, our first home on Edgewood Road is the one that always comes to mind.

The author and his sister, Mary Ann. Courtesy of Charles Osgood.

Inside, of course, was the kitchen. I remember Mom putting newspapers on the kitchen linoleum and spraying us both with calamine lotion, head to toe with a flit gun, when we accidently rolled around in some poison ivy. In that room, I also remember the more pleasing aroma of dinner being cooked. They say smell is the strongest sense memory. I can still smell mushrooms being sautéed and the aroma of split pea soup simmering on the stovetop. Whatever the dinner was, the family would always eat it every night in the dining room when Dad was home. Afterwards, Mary Ann and I would help with the dishes: I’d wash, and she’d dry, or vice versa. There was a lot of singing going on, too.

In the living room was the piano, which always got a workout. Mom played “That Old Silver Moon Shining Down Through the Trees.” Both Mary Ann and I were taking piano lessons from Miss Matilda Dietch so there was much practicing. Usually we played a duet; “Voices of Spring” is one I remember as well as “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” When the piano wasn’t playing, the radio was. No TV of course in those days. But to this day I can tell you who sponsored which shows: The Shadow was Blue Coal; Jack Benny, Jell-O; and The Lone Ranger, Silver Cup Bread.

The expression “Home Sweet Home,” to me, is the memory of voices and faces in that place on Thanksgiving and Christmas, of friends and relatives—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and a little dog named Inky.

It’s not the rooms of that house I think of so much as what went on there. It’s always the people; the singing, laughing, and joking—and occasionally quarreling and crying. Quite often, actually, come to think of it. You go back and look at a house all these years later, and it seems so different now, much smaller than you remember. And you realize that if it’s still there at all, it has to be basically what it was. It’s us who have changed. It’s not the brick and mortar, the shape, or size that matters. It’s the people; it’s the life. Old Edgar Guest had it right when he wrote, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.”

An Ordinary House The Saturday Evening Post

I remember when I was a kid seeing a sign in a hardware store in Baltimore: “The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.” Even then that struck me as a great attitude. “We Shall Overcome” would be the anthem of the American civil rights movement. Pete Seeger showed the old song to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., suggesting one little change. Originally, it was we “WILL” overcome. Nothing philosophical, Seeger once told me. He just thought “SHALL” would sing better. It sang very well indeed.

By then Johnny Mercer had written the words to another very popular song referencing the biblical stories of Jonah in the whale and Noah in the Ark. “What did they do, just when everything looked so dark?” The answer, you may recall, was to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.” Of course in real life you can accentuate the positive all you want, but the negative keeps popping up, as does that ubiquitous “In-Between” guy you don’t want to mess with.

I’ve done a number of commencement addresses over the years, and one year I did two. One was at a full-fledged university in upstate New York, and the other at a private elementary school about a block and a half from our house in New Jersey. I wanted to say the same thing to both graduating classes, even though the average age of one class was 21, and the average age of the other was 11. What I wanted both groups to understand was that people would keep warning them that the “hard part” was coming right up, and that they should adjust their expectations accordingly.

At each level, they would be told that things would be a lot more difficult at the next level. Most of us go through each stage of our lives worrying that we won’t be good enough to measure up to the demands and requirements of the next.

My own experience has been that each successive level failed to be as oppressive as advertised. Same thing in the military where I would be assigned the duties of announcer for The United States Army Band (a tough job, but somebody had to do it). And same thing in the world of professional broadcast journalism where I’ve found steady employment for 54 years now, although, I never took a single course in journalism or broadcasting. My degree at Fordham was a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Economics. In more than a half a century of broadcast experience, I have discovered that a little B.S. will take you a long way. Although, it’s still true I continue to worry that the hard part is not far off, and that I’ll be found out any day now.

I wanted the young graduates to know that if they were worried about the future and felt a bit insecure, they had plenty of company and that everything would work out for the best. I offered both this little poem, which I’ve updated for you:

Life is earnest; life is

But after you have done so, that’s when the hard part starts.

The Hard Part The Saturday Evening Post

And as I suspected, the minute I’d try it,
I could not resist the temptation to buy it.
For I knew that the new thing would bring
about change.
Looking back, I admit that it seems a bit strange;
How the words “new” and “change” had such
magic appeal then.
But when you are young, you can’t help how you
feel then.

So I was all for it, and in that pursuit,
I acquired that fashionable new Nehru suit.
With my sense of the future, I realized, I guess,
Guys would always be dressing that way, more or less.
It just didn’t work out in that way somehow.
Millions of Nehru suits, where are they now?

As years before, I was quick to order
That audio breakthrough,
The wire recorder.
The LPs, 33 1/3 rpm,
No more 78s;
It was better than them.
And whatever happened,
It still is a riddle,
To the 45s with the big hole in the middle?

I was the very first guy on the block,
You will not be surprised,
It won’t come as a shock,
To go quadraphonic — I was into “quad,”
Which came and went quickly,
And though it seems odd,
I really believed I would be in great shape
With eight gorgeous channels of stereotape.

I remember the thrill of my Polaroid camera,
3D movies at drive-ins, and Cinerama.
The Gershwins warned us in a song
A good, longtime ago:
“The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May be passing fancies and in time may go.”

They haven’t gone completely; they have obviously not.
But it’s also true that all of them sure have changed a lot.
Radio and television still both keep on giving.
(Thank goodness, or I don’t know what I’d do to make
a living.)
That is a reality nobody can ignore.
Change still comes today, even more quickly than before.

I’m not a young man anymore.
We are grandparents now.
But we have such simple pleasures
As our ages will allow.
We love seeing our grandkids,
But please don’t stereotype,
Not on our laps, but laptops
With a little help from Skype.

From anywhere around the world,
I watch lots of baseball, too.
It’s amazing with a SlingBox the things
you can do.
I’ve got pictures on my iPhone
And my iPod music, too.
So I haven’t changed that much, you see,
And I’m nobody’s fool.
I’m still into exciting things.
Innovation’s cool!

Innovation’s Cool The Saturday Evening Post

We’ve had setbacks along the way of course; hard times and wars, struggles against the enemies of human liberty including ignorance, intolerance, injustice, and even slavery. We’ve come through though. We have “overcome” as the song says. And, taking full advantage of our birthright, we’re still here in every part of this country, thinking, working, playing, praying, and pursuing happiness in our own ways. The journey isn’t over, but look how far we’ve come!

The people of France grasped the essence of what this country is about more than a century ago when they gave us Bartholdi’s famous statue that stands in New York Harbor, a woman holding high a lamp. We call her the Statue of Liberty. They named her La Liberté éclairant le Monde or “Liberty Enlightening the World.” I think she’s still beautiful, don’t you?

So did a man I knew who spent years on the road, traveling to every state in the union, discovering America and Americans. Charles Kuralt died on the Fourth of July, 1997. He was my friend, longtime CBS colleague and predecessor on CBS News Sunday Morning. The “road” for him did not mean the interstate. And the people he sought out were not in the big-city centers of finance, industry, and mass media. Kuralt and his camera crew used the back roads to get to the small towns where they found those wonderfully colorful individuals whose stories would often end the CBS Evening News. Kuralt believed that these Americans could tell us at least as much about the character of this country as the politicians and other supposed leaders who populate most of the rest of the news stories on a given day.

When people asked Kuralt about the mood of the country or how Americans felt about some burning issue of the day, he would always smile and tell them that America is much too big a country, too diverse, too free to pigeonhole people the way the pollsters try to. “It depends on who you are and where you are, what’s going on in your life, and what your dreams are,” he’d say. Kuralt hated the idea of dividing the people of this country into voting blocks or into red states and blue states.

After traveling around this country so much, Kuralt used to say he didn’t think in terms of state borders anymore. He thought instead of geography and geology. He thought of the great natural formations of rock and water, the mountain ranges, the lakes and rivers. He thought of canyons and forests, starkly beautiful deserts, and fertile plains. These were what shaped not only the land, but the people too, and determined what was important to them, how they would live, what they would love, the mouth-watering regional foods they’d eat, and the delicious accents in which they’d speak. These things meant much more than lines on a map. With modern technology comes some creeping homogenization of course. You’ll see the same signs in the airports and on the interstates, hear the same accents on the radio and TV, and eat the same burgers, pizzas, and fried chicken at the fast-food chains coast to coast. But you can still find the real thing, the real accents, foods, music, and people of the real America. They’re out there if you look for them. Kuralt was always looking for them.

As Kuralt and his crew would pull into a small town, there’d be a welcome sign telling travelers what the locals wanted to boast about. What year it was founded in New England, population in the rural south, elevation in the mountain states. Once at a CBS Radio convention in Phoenix, a station owner from Montana came up to Kuralt and me, introduced himself, and said, “I want to ask you two Charleses a question. How far can you see from your house?”

I was living in New Jersey at the time, and Kuralt in Greenwich Village. “Not much more than across the street,” we admitted.

The Montana man beamed and told us, “Well, I can see four states from my house.”

Kuralt nodded and said, “Elevation is important!” and went on to tell us about how he and the crew went up to Pikes Peak in Colorado, 14,000 feet. “Great view from there,” he said, “makes you feel you were looking clear across the country!” He then told us how in the summer of 1893, an English instructor named Katharine Lee Bates from Wellesley College went west to teach a short summer course at Colorado College. And one day a group of teachers took a covered wagon ride to Pikes Peak. Miss Bates was worn out from the wagon ride and the walk to an observation deck at the pinnacle. But when she looked out and saw the sight, she was so thrilled and inspired that she pulled a piece of paper out of her bag and started writing a poem which she called “Pikes Peak” to be published two years later in the Fourth of July edition of The Congregationalist newspaper. The poem has since been engraved on a tablet at that viewpoint, and when visitors see it they smile in recognition because they already know the words. And so do you:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

The whole country got to know those words when they were combined with the music of a Samuel A. Ward hymn into the song we now know as “America the Beautiful.” Miss Bates wrote several more stanzas. If you’ll indulge me, it may be time for another:

O beautiful for liberty
Whose light shines for us now
As through the years of pioneers
It shined to show them how
America! America!
God’s Grace is with us still
With brotherhood each dream of freedom’s promise
We’ll fulfill.

Charles Osgood: As I See It The Saturday Evening Post