Retro Baltimore: Legendary broadcaster Charles Osgood spent World War II years in Baltimore

The avuncular, bow-tie wearing Charles Osgood, whose dulcet voice, friendly personality and quirky poetry made him the convivial host of CBS’ “Sunday Morning” from 1994 to 2016, spent the second world war years growing up in Baltimore’s Ashburton neighborhood.

Charles Osgood Wood III — whose radio and TV moniker was Charles Osgood — was the son of Charles O. Wood II, a textile salesman, and Mary Wilson “Violet” Wood. He was born in Manhattan and settled in 1939 on Edgewood Road.

“I was here for my entire grammar school years — those are pretty formative years,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004.

Growing up, Osgood was a Sun delivery boy. While promoting his memoir in 2004, he retraced his old route for a reporter. Time had not dimmed his ability to toss papers from the sidewalk onto porches with pinpoint accuracy.

He told the reporter that was his first lesson in journalism: “the importance of accuracy.”

During his Baltimore years, Osgood studied piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. And in 2004, he returned to Peabody and played piano with then-institute director Robert Sirota, who called him a “natural stride pianist.”

“You can come back here and play anytime,” Sirota said.

Osgood wrote a book, “Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack,” which chronicles the war years and the “irrepressible good cheer” when Baltimore’s war plants and shipyards built Liberty ships, airplanes and other war essentials.

A fan of the old International League Orioles, he wrote of looking up in the phone book the numbers for his favorite players and giving them a ring.

But his professional persona in those pre-TV days was honed by radio, movies and the big band music of the era.

In 1946, Osgood and his family left Baltimore and moved to Philadelphia where he struggled through high school. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in 1954 in economics from Fordham University in New York City. Years later, he admitted he spent more time at the college radio station than with his books.

“I never took a course in journalism,” Osgood told Broadcasting magazine in 1985. “Whatever is unique or different in my style would probably have been drummed out of me in journalism school on the first day.”

He began his career in 1954 at WGMS, a classical music station in Washington. From 1955 to 1958, he served in the Army, where he was staff announcer for the U.S. Army Band at Fort Meyer, Virginia.

After being discharged, he returned to WGMS as program director, and then RKO General, owner of the station, sent him to WHCT in Hartford, Connecticut, before letting him go in 1963.

He worked for four years as a newscaster before, in 1967, joining CBS-AM, which was then going to an all-news format.

In 1971, he joined CBS News where he anchored morning newscasts, and a decade later, was promoted to anchor the “CBS Sunday Night News,” and from 1987 to 1992, was anchor of “CBS Morning News.”

During his radio days, Osgood combed the news wires for off-beat, quirky stories, which became the basis for his notable “The Osgood File.”

One day, he decided to include a rhyming bit of poetry he had written after a news story, and was immediately admonished by news management.

“‘Very nice, Charlie, very clever, don’t do it again.’ But I did,” he told The New York Times in 1994.

He told People magazine that it wasn’t poetry but “rampant doggerel.”

Time magazine once described it as being erratically between “Ogden Nash and Edgar Guest.”

“If you’re writing a four-minute poem and you have about a half-hour in which to do it, you accept whatever the muse lays on you,” he told the old Sunday Sun magazine in 1974.

After a broadcast on the economic doldrums of the U.S. economy, Osgood recited the following:

“Nothing could be finer/Than a crisis that is minor/In the morning.”

When the popular Charles Kuralt retired in 1994 as host of “CBS Sunday Morning,” Osgood took over the anchor chair, and remained there until 2016 when he retired. Osgood died Jan. 23 at the age of 91.

“His long history in radio is really important to who he became on TV, ” said David Zurawik, The Sun’s former TV and media critic. “He was a musician and he understood how he could use his voice as an instrument and developed in ways others found difficult.”

He said that Osgood’s voice made the broadcast “reassuring, peaceful and calm in a world of craziness and out of control. He really was a throwback to the classic days at CBS and he was a part of that tradition and one of the last. He brought sanity to ‘Sunday Morning.'”

Osgood concluded his broadcasts with, “See you on the radio.”