Charles Osgood

Charles Osgood, one of America's favorite news personalities, offers a hilarious compendium of anecdotes from the last seventy years of presidential campaigns. With anecdotes from Harry Truman to JFK to George W. Bush, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House captures the wit and humor of the campaign trail. Culled from speeches, interviews, press conferences, as well as articles written by and about the candidates—no source is left untapped. From Bob Dole telling reporters after a loss in the primary that "I slept like a baby—every two hours I woke up and cried," and Barry Goldwater's comment that his talkative opponent Hubert Humphreys "has been clocked at 275 words a minute with gusts up to 340," to Adlai Stevenson declaring that "If I talk over the people's head, Ike must be talking under their feet," this is the go-to source for campaign humor. Just when America most needs a good laugh, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House makes the seemingly endless race to the presidency a lot more fun.

The year is 1942, and while America is reeling from the first blows of WWII, Osgood is just a nine-year-old boy living in Baltimore. As the war rages somewhere far beyond the boundaries of his hometown, he spends his days delivering newspapers, riding the trolley to the local amusement park, going to Orioles' baseball games, and goofing around with his younger sister. With a sharp eye for details, Osgood captures the texture of life in a very different era, a time before the polio vaccine and the atomic bomb. In his neighborhood of Liberty Heights, gaslights still glowed on every corner, milkmen delivered bottles of milk, and a loaf of bread cost nine cents. Osgood reminisces about his first fist-fight with a kid from the neighborhood, his childhood crush on a girl named Sue, and his relationship with his father, a traveling salesman. He also talks about his early love for radio and how he used to huddle under the covers after his parents had turned off the lights, listening to Superman, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and, of course, to baseball games. Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack is a gloriously funny and nostalgic slice of American life and a moving look at World War II from the perspective of a child far away from the fighting, but very conscious of the reverberations.

A selection of the author's commentaries from the past eight years of CBS Radio News' "Osgood File" broadcasts.

The Osgood Files gathers together the best of Osgood's printed work, ninety-eight essays on everything for pollsters, procrastination, fatherhood, and factoids. In all it is a book of pure delight, further evidence of why, in the words of Walter Cronkite," Charles Osgood is one of the greatest talents in broadcasting today."

A collection of topical verse and prose originally written by Charles Osgood for his "Newsbreak" spot on the CBS Radio Network.