The last time I saw him, maybe a year ago, he was a shadow of his former self. He was in midtown Manhattan for an event, and they brought him into the newsroom to say hello. He was feeble, and pale, but there was still that familiar glint in his eye, and the trim white moustache, and that ordinary, grandfatherly look that had made him such a fixture in tens of millions of living rooms.

He was greeted by a warm round of applause and he looked around, smiling politely, at all the young faces he didn’t know, and had never worked with, in an environment (and an industry) that was radically different from the one he’d known, and helped to create, just a few decades before.

They sat him in a chair by the national desk and he greeted a few of the people he did remember, and who had known him way-back-when. Katie Couric came over and beamed; she literally knelt at his feet so they could be eye-to-eye. He made small-talk with everyone and then jauntily called out, “What’s our lead?”

Rick Kaplan, the Executive Producer of the Evening News, who had worked with Walter early in his own career, found an old picture of Cronkite and brought it out, with a Sharpie, and asked him to autograph it. Walter tried. But his fingers couldn’t hold the pen. And he finally admitted, quietly, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

It was a poignant scene: an aging, legendary reporter who could no longer even hold a pen.

I had come to CBS 26 years earlier, just after the Cronkite era had ended. In fact, I began my job at CBS exactly one year after Dan Rather had taken over the anchor chair. Cronkite was a mythic figure, of course, and the news division at that time was divided into camps: the Walter loyalists, and the Dan loyalists. Cronkite in those days was rarely seen on television, and made infrequent appearances in Washington, where I worked. The buzz in the hallways was that Dan didn’t want him around and had, in effect, ordered him banished. In essence, around CBS News, the idea of Walter Cronkite was more tangible than the man himself.

A few years later, in 1986, I had my first and only professional brush with him. He was going to narrate a piece for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty and the producer, Susan Zirinsky, knowing how much I was itching to write, asked me if I’d help her with the script. I was thrilled, and leaped at the chance. It was a feature piece about one of the “tall ships” sailing into New York harbor for the festivities, the U.S.S. Eagle. (Walter was an avid sailor, so it was a perfect fit.) I labored intently over my script, trying to imagine his voice in my head, refining and polishing it for hours on end, and finally turned it in. Susan was pleased. She made a few light edits, and faxed it to Cronkite in New York for him to narrate. Far as I know, he didn’t make any other changes. And a few days later, the piece aired, with that incredible, memorable (often mimicked, never duplicated) voice reading my words. My words!

Young writers live for moments like that.

Later that year, I left Washington, and moved to New York, to begin my writing career in earnest, with CBS News Radio. I never wrote for Cronkite again, but I did see him from time to time. He was usually surrounded by a horde of people. I never got to meet him or even shake his hand.

And so, I see him in my mind’s eye and imagine him like so many Americans do: an image on a flickering screen, a voice heard from tinny speakers in a living room or a kitchen, a waiting room or a diner. How many TV dinners were consumed in front of him? How many hearts stopped when he interrupted the soap operas for a special report in the 1960’s? He was a part of the landscape, a part of America, and Americana, like the Lincoln penny or the Golden Arches. For a time, he was the country’s voice, the voice of information and illumination, part town crier, part herald, part sage.

I don’t know that there will ever be another like him.

Requiescat in pace.