At 78, Bob Schieffer is entitled to reminisce about the “good old days” of reporting. He believes young people coming into the business can also learn from them. Schieffer will host CBS’ Face the Nation today for the last time after 24 years. He’s retiring from a journalism career that began at 20 at a radio station in Fort Worth and landed him at CBS News in Washington when he walked in on someone else’s interview. He’s one of the last of a generation of reporters working at such a high level. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a story that gave him one of the biggest scoops of his career. “I suppose every generation thinks that the kids younger than them aren’t as good as they were and screwed it up in some way,” he said. “I try not to sound like an old goat, but the fact is there will always be a need for reporters, whether they are doing it on television or a website or for a newspaper that is not on paper anymore.”
Hundreds of people filled a church in the Mississippi Delta for the funeral Saturday of B.B. King, who rose from sharecropper in the area’s flat cotton fields to worldwide fame as a blues singer and guitarist who influenced generations of entertainers. King was 89 when he died May 14 in Las Vegas. At his request, his body was returned to his native Mississippi for a final homecoming. Despite rain, about 500 people filled the sanctuary of Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church, a red brick structure that sits in a field off of B.B. King Road in Indianola. More than 200 people who couldn’t get into the sanctuary watched a live broadcast of the funeral in the church’s fellowship hall. The Rev. Herron Wilson, who delivered the eulogy, said King proved that people can triumph over difficult circumstances. “Hands that once picked cotton would someday pick guitar strings on a national and international stage. Amazing,” Wilson said. President Barack Obama sent a letter to be read aloud by Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, a friend of King. “The blues has lost its king, and American has lost a legend,” Obama said.