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Like many writers who grew up in frontier towns and achieved national reputations, Eric Sevareid, cbs World War II correspondent and tv commentator of the 1960s and 1970s, viewed his youth in Velva, North Dakota (population 800), with ambivalence. As a small boy he climbed the surrounding hills and gazed over the wheat fields, gaining an early sense of the infiniteness of his human possibilities. In his memoir,
Born Arnold Eric Sevareid on November 26, 1912, son of Alfred Eric Sevareid, a local banker, and Clara Hougen, daughter of a Norwegian Lutheran minister and a regal woman who encouraged him to read widely, Sevareid inherited Norwegian reticence and Lutheran moral integrity.
Young Sevareid crammed more adventure into his youth than most men experience in a lifetime. At seventeen, with an older boy, Walter Port, he paddled a canoe 2,000 miles from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay. He rode the rails to California during the Great Depression to work for the summer in a gold mine. At the University of Minnesota his greatest love was the student paper, the
In 1935 he married Lois Finger, the law student daughter of the university's track coach, and they moved to Paris, where Sevareid became a reporter for the Paris edition of the
Sevareid joined Murrow in London and endured the blitz, then rejoined his family in Washington, amazed to discover that his broadcasts from France and England had made him a celebrity. When his plane crashed in the jungles of Burma on his way to China, he and his party survived two weeks among the Naga tribesmen, and he emerged more famous than ever. He returned to the European front and covered North Africa, the Italian campaign, the invasion of southern France, and the final thrust across the Rhine into Germany.
In the 1950s, in his CBS evening radio news
commentaries, Sevareid developed a unique
journalistic form, the carefully wrought brief
commentary that was erudite without being
pedantic, eloquent but clear. He moved reluctantly
into television, because the lights made
him nervous and because he resented the image
being more powerful than the words. But
his final two-minute commentaries on Walter
Cronkite's
In 1959, unable to cope with Lois's manic depression, he fled to Europe with Belen Marshall, a Cuban songwriter whom he married in 1963. They had a daughter, Cristina, and were divorced in 1973. Later, following retirement in 1977, he married Suzanne St. Pierre, a producer for