To Absent Friends - Charles Osgood

 

Charles Osgood

1933-2024

The passing of Charles Osgood last month at the age of 91 must be noted.  A CBS newsman for over fifty years, I first became aware of him from his daily "Osgood File" commentary on CBS radio.  It aired here in Pittsburgh on station KQV, and at 8:30 every morning while sitting at my desk at work, I would tune in to hear it, and hope against hope that the phone wouldn't ring until it was over.   The Osgood File ran on the radio from 1971 to 2017, when he finally retired from CBS.

He will probably most be noted for his over two decade tenure as host of the excellent CBS Sunday Morning Show.  Remember how he would always close the show by saying "Until next Sunday morning, I'll see you on the radio."  The Sunday Morning Show devoted the entire ninety minutes of its January 28th show to Charles Osgood.  It was excellent, and if you haven't seen it, you can no doubt find it on YouTube or some streaming service.   If you were fan of the show, you need to see it.

One of Osgood's specialties was delivering his commentaries in bits of doggerel or short pieces of poetry.  I trying to find some of these online to reproduce here, I came instead to to longer poems that I would like to have you read.

The first is called "The Responsibility Poem"....

There was a most important job that needed to be done,
And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none.
But in vital matters such as this, the thing you have to ask
Is who exactly will it be who’ll carry out the task?

Anybody could have told you that Everybody knew
That this was something Somebody would surely have to do.
Nobody was unwilling; Anybody had the ability.
But Nobody believed that it was their responsibility.

It seemed to be a job that Anybody could have done,
If Anybody thought he was supposed to be the one.
But since Everybody recognized that Anybody could,
Everybody took for granted that Somebody would.

But Nobody told Anybody that we are aware of,
That he would be in charge of seeing it was taken care of.
And Nobody took it upon himself to follow through,
And do what Everybody thought that Somebody would do.

When what Everybody needed so did not get done at all,
Everybody was complaining that Somebody dropped the ball.
Anybody then could see it was an awful crying shame,
And Everybody looked around for Somebody to blame.

Somebody should have done the job
And Everybody should have,
But in the end, Nobody did
What Anybody could have.

And then there is this one called "Pretty Good"....

There once was a pretty good student
Who sat in a pretty good class
And was taught by a pretty good teacher
Who always let pretty good pass.
He wasn’t terrific at reading,
He wasn’t a whiz-bang at math,
But for him, education was leading
Straight down a pretty good path.
He didn’t find school too exciting,
But he wanted to do pretty well,
And he did have some trouble with writing
Since nobody taught him to spell.
When doing arithmetic problems,
Pretty good was regarded as fine.
5+5 needn’t always add up to be 10;
A pretty good answer was 9.
The pretty good class that he sat in
Was part of a pretty good school,
And the student was not an exception:
On the contrary, he was the rule.
The pretty good school that he went to
Was there in a pretty good town,
And nobody there seemed to notice
He could not tell a verb from a noun.
The pretty good student in fact was
Part of a pretty good mob.
And the first time he knew what he lacked was
When he looked for a pretty good job.
It was then, when he sought a position,
He discovered that life could be tough,
And he soon had a sneaking suspicion
Pretty good might not be good enough.
The pretty good town in our story
Was part of a pretty good state
Which had pretty good aspirations
And prayed for a pretty good fate.
There once was a pretty good nation
Pretty proud of the greatness it had,
Which learned much too late,
If you want to be great,
Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.

Not spectacular, perhaps, but both worth reading and each delivers a message worth remembering.

RIP Charles Osgood.