Don Michel 'Insight' radio interview with Walter Cronkite, October 18, 1966 - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image


From Don Michel 'Insight' Radio Interviews (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) in CARLI Digital Collections.

Okay, I’m ever so slightly giddy at having learned about this new collection of radio interviews, published just this week by SIUC. For years (literally!) I’ve wanted to promote the audiovisual treasures in CARLI Digital Collections, but I could never quite figure out how. As with other types of resources in CONTENTdm, audio and video files are accompanied by a thumbnail image--often generic, sometimes customized, but still a thumbnail--too small to feature, I thought. Then the good folks at SIUC considerately included full-size images of the thumbnails used for some of the audio files in this collection. Cha-ching, jackpot! Loophole successfully exploited. I am now able to present to you what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first non-image Featured Item from CARLI Digital Collections.

What you’re looking at is the digitized image of a black-and-white photograph of WRAJ radio broadcaster Don Michel greeting CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite as he exits his airplane. What you’ll be listening to, if you click on the image, is Michel’s interview with Cronkite on October 18, 1966. The half-hour interview, which has been converted to digital audio from reel-to-reel audio tape, includes discussion of Cronkite’s career in journalism, his interest in the space program, and the responsibilities and risks of televised news coverage of the Vietnam War. (If you’d like to inspect the image more closely, click here.)

Besides Uncle Walter, the collection contains another 452 interviews with local citizens of Anna, Illinois, Southern Illinois University figures, and national celebrities (from Ann Landers to Colonel Sanders, just to name a couple) conducted by Michel between 1965 and 1977 and aired on his public affairs program Insight.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Associate Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm and http://wiki.carli.illinois.edu/index.php/Portal:CONTENTdm.