On his way into a Cracker Barrel in Maumee, Ohio, 8-year-old Myles Eckert found a $20 bill.
He first thought about buying a video game. Then he saw a man in uniform sitting in the restaurant. He wrapped the money in a note that said, “Dear Soldier — my dad was a soldier. He’s in heaven now. I found this 20 dollars in the parking lot when we got here. We like to pay it forward in my family. It’s your lucky day! Thank you for your service. Myles Eckert, a gold star kid.”
By this point of the story, reported by journalist Steve Hartman on “CBS Sunday Morning,” you’re likely misting up.
Then it’s revealed that, afterward, Eckert told his mother he wanted to visit his father. Army Sgt. Andy Eckert was killed in Iraq just five weeks after Myles was born. When Hartman shows you the picture Myles’ mother took of the child, in the snow, embracing his father’s gravestone, everyone’s in tears.
From its bow-tie-wearing host, Charles Osgood, to the one minute “moment of nature” that ends each program, “CBS Sunday Morning” may be the most old-fashioned show on television — an hour-and-a-half of art, culture, history and personal stories delivered without snark.
The centerpiece is Hartman’s tales of charity, your weekly cry. Wherever there’s a kid who wants to win the wrestling championship for his dying father, a hard-nosed math teacher who secretly cuddles premature babies, a man walking the street with a sandwich board to find an organ donor for his wife, Hartman is there.
Hartman grew up in Ohio and came up as a local reporter for stations there and in Minnesota, which he credits for his style.
“That honed my sense of what makes a good story,” Hartman says. “I still think, how will this play in the Midwest?”
He started out as the guy doing the “wacky” stories at the end of nightly news broadcasts but then, “I think I just grew up.” Part of that maturity came from becoming a father — the 50-year-old lives in the Catskills with his wife and three young children. The worst part of his job is that he spends three days a week away from them, as he travels to small-town heartbreakers his producer finds searching local papers and websites.
There’s the school janitor who worked his way up to principal. The goose who befriended a man in Los Angeles. The elderly cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy who greets and hugs other chemo patients five days a week. A little schmaltzy maybe, but never manipulative, because Hartman delivers each so earnestly.
Though Hartman’s stories also appear on the evening news, he’s almost always recognized from “Sunday Morning.”
“There’s such devotion,” he says. Fans “refer to it as their church.”
Conceived as a Sunday newspaper magazine section on television, the show celebrates its 35th anniversary this year — and, impressively, its ratings have increased of late. Viewers for this year are up 14%, to more than 6 million. Even more amazing: A show that sprinkles in bits about the invention of the steamboat and a profile of Millard Fillmore has roped in more young people — a 17% increase in viewers under 54 since last year.
It’s not perfect. Some of the celebrity interviews are puffy to the point of unwatchable. “Synergy” means some profile subjects just happen to star in something CBS airs — or a book they’ve published.
But the secret to the “Sunday Morning” success is what it doesn’t have. Its stories — and it only runs positive stories — are delivered without a hint of cynicism.
“Can you imagine,” Hartman notes, “if they tried to put a show like that on TV today?”
Hartman tries not to cry when he’s reporting, but it happened once, in Olivet, Mich. He was covering a middle-school football team that decided to stop on the 1-yard line — so that a teammate with special needs could come in for one play and score a touchdown.
One of the students he interviewed admitted to picking on the kid before, but that play had changed him. “I went from being someone who mostly cared about myself and my friends to caring about everyone.” It was, Hartman says, not the kind of thing a middle-school kid usually admits.
“I was crying. The cameraman is crying. We’re filming in the school library, and I look back and the librarian is crying,” he says.
It was, Hartman says, “the way we want the world to be,” which is not that far from how the world really is.
Hard news is important, but by definition it focuses on conflict, death, turmoil. And that, “is not an accurate reflection of who we are,” Hartman says.
“That’s what I want my stories to show — that the world is better than we think it is.”