None of this would come out, however, until after his death, when his mistress, Patricia Elizabeth Shannon, sued to get a Montana retreat he promised her. Montana’s Supreme Court ruled last month that the woman is entitled to a trial on her claim.

Kuralt was TV’s rumpled Everyman, a bald, pudgy figure renowned for his sonorous voice and eloquent commentary. He died at 62 of complications from lupus on July 4, 1997.

He met the woman he once said “enriched my life beyond all my dreams” the year after he started his “On the Road” travels. At 33, he already was acclaimed for ferreting out quirky vignettes of Americana. He was also six years into his second marriage, to Suzanna “Petie” Flosom Baird, and had two daughters, both from his first marriage.

Shannon was a divorced, 34-year-old social activist and mother of three. She declined to be interviewed, but court documents tell much of their story.

They met in 1968 in Reno, Nev., where Shannon was leading an effort to build a park in a black neighborhood. Tensions were high following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. It was a natural Kuralt story.

He did his reporting job, then asked her to dinner, showing up with three dozen long-stemmed roses. They spent the night sitting and talking in the lounge of Reno’s Holiday Motel.

She knew he was married. But with the freedom his travels gave him, Kuralt called her frequently. He visited for two or three days every few weeks. He doted on her, sending gifts and money. He was there for family gatherings, football games, holidays and graduations.

Back in New York, Kuralt’s wife was aware her husband had a fishing place in Montana. But according to court files, she had no inkling of his second family. She has declined all interview requests.

Shannon estimated Kuralt sent $600,000 during the first decade, when their romance was the most intense and they saw each other often.

“Charles always said, his refrain through all of his life, ‘Don’t worry, we’re rich,’ he would say. … He was the breadwinner of the family,” Shannon recalled. “Charles took care of all my needs.”

He provided Shannon and her children with a succession of homes in San Francisco. He spent as much as $400,000 to help her start a small business that eventually failed and paid for her to study landscaping in London.

He paid for her son, J.R., to attend college in Arizona and put Shannon’s elder daughter, Kathleen Baker, through law school.

He bought Shannon a $50,000 cottage in Ireland and purchased 20 acres along the banks of the Big Hole River in Montana. They built a cabin there.

Kuralt bought an additional 90 acres abutting the land and moved an old schoolhouse to a bluff overlooking the river. He spent $180,000 to renovate the school into an office, where he planned to write after his retirement.

The few letters from Kuralt to Shannon that are in the court file contain little romance. However, a handwritten, undated Christmas poem comes close.

Titled “What I Will Give You (A Christmas IOU),” the verse promised: “A string of pearls, a suit and sweater, a Rubens print, a holly tree, and me. A mixing bowl, a sofa and chair, a set of china, a butcher’s knife. My life.”

Kuralt also inscribed Shannon’s copy of his 1995 book “Charles Kuralt’s America” this way: “To Pat, who enriched my life beyond all my dreams. Love, Charles.”

Kuralt sometimes signed notes to Kathleen and J.R. as “Pop.” In a 1995 letter to J.R., Kuralt enclosed money and wrote: “I love you like a son, even though I have been an often-distracted father.”

“Charles was basically a father to me,” Kathleen said at a court hearing. “He gave me some of my first driving lessons. He was there at all the holidays.”

As the relationship wore on, Shannon became increasingly frustrated with Kuralt’s unwillingness to leave his wife.

“I always thought he would get a divorce at some point,” she said in a deposition. “I went through bouts of despair and there were arguments, but we never directly talked about — about his life in New York. I knew it existed. … I did not inquire into it and he didn’t discuss it with me.”

The situation worsened after Kuralt’s “On the Road” assignment ended in 1980, when he became host of CBS’s “Sunday Morning.” With his schedule less flexible, he traveled less and spent more time in New York.

Still, they would usually rendezvous for three weeks each September. They backpacked the mountains. He loved to go fly-fishing in meandering creeks; she would sit on the banks nearby and read.

Three months before he died, Kuralt orchestrated a mock sale to hide the fact he was giving Shannon the original Montana property. He sent her $80,000; she used it to buy the 20 acres and the cabin they had built.

The court fight is over the other land and schoolhouse, valued at $600,000. Kuralt’s will, written in 1994, left the property to his wife.

Shannon contends his last letter to her, two weeks before his death, conveyed their Montana home to her. It read: “I’ll have the lawyer visit the hospital to be sure you inherit the rest of the place in MT, if it comes to that.”

Born in Budapest in 1949, Kalman and his parents were forced to flee the Soviet invasion in
1956. They settled in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., when he was 8. Kalman was ostracized in elementary school until he learned to speak English.

“Everybody thought I was a geek,” he once remarked to writer Steven Heller.

Kalman parlayed his childhood isolation into some of his most successful
design innovations. “He was keenly passionate about things of the American vernacular because he wasn’t American,” Chee Pearlman, editor of I.D.
magazine, remarked shortly after Kalman’s funeral. “In that sense, he
taught the whole profession to look at things that they may not have seen as
closely or taken as seriously.” For example, M&Co incorporated images of coffee cups, chairs and delivery trucks culled from the Yellow Pages into a
menu Kalman designed in 1985 for Florent, a Manhattan restaurant.

Kalman combined his desire to break new ground visually with a passionate commitment to social causes. From his days as an undergraduate at New York University, where he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (he left school to support the Communists in Cuba for a period), Kalman’s radical politics and his radical designs were inextricably linked. “I use contrary-ism in every part of my life. In design … I’m always trying to turn things upside down and see if they look any better,” he told Charlie Rose in a December 1998 interview.

Even in the last stages of his illness, Kalman continued to push his artist-as-agent-of-change agenda. Pearlman recalled
visiting Kalman in the hospital and being subjected to a heartfelt tirade about how the American Institute of Graphic Artists should require members to do charitable work. “He had a huge sense of purpose with
everything he did: It kept him alive and it’s also what drove people crazy
about him,” Pearlman said.

Among the people Kalman drove most crazy were his own employees at M&Co. During its salad days in the ’80s, M&Co was legendary among New York
designers for its entertaining and loose office environment — but M&Co’s pursuit of perfection and Kalman’s sometimes-prickly
personality rubbed many employees the wrong way. “M&Co was known at one
point as the revolving door of graphic design, and not without reason,” recalls Peter Hall, editor (with Michael Bierut) of “Tibor Kalman: Perverse
Optimist” (1998, Princeton Architectural Press). “Tibor was never happy until you couldn’t change anything further. He was the ultimate perfectionist.”

In 1991, Kalman closed M&Co’s New York offices and accepted an offer to
work for Mario Toscani, the creative director of Benetton. The company had
already created controversy with its iconoclastic, multicultural ad
campaign, which featured, among other images, pictures of a nun and priest
kissing, a black woman nursing a white baby and pictures of an AIDS patient on his deathbed, surrounded by his family. Toscani wanted Kalman to create a magazine that embodied the company’s radical chic ethos. Kalman assembled a team of designers and editors and moved, with his wife and two children, to Rome.

With Colors, Kalman found the perfect platform for his ideas — both
visual and philosophical. With its striking, graphics-heavy layout and its
bilingual articles on themes like race and AIDS, Colors was a unique company periodical. The magazine he created existed to promote a multinational corporation’s brand
identity and an expansive, multi-ethnic philosophy. It pushed
boundaries in terms of its editorial emphasis
on politics, and it pushed design to the point of post-literacy by making words secondary to images. One of Colors’ most famous layouts
was the “What if …?” spread from the magazine’s race issue: Using computer
graphics programs, Colors changed the races of several iconic men and women. Queen Elizabeth was made to look black and Spike Lee white. The
issue propelled Colors to international fame, and landed Kalman a spot on NBC’s “Today,” but the catalysts for Kalman’s departure from the magazine were already in place.

After a number of run-ins with Toscani (“That was two huge egos colliding,” Hall says of the two) and the first symptoms of the cancer that would eventually take his life, Kalman left Colors and returned with his family to New York, where he reopened M&Co and continued to work.

In the last years of his life, despite his illness, Kalman enjoyed
a remarkable period of productivity. In addition to doing smaller projects
with M&Co, he oversaw the creation of two books: “Chairman Rolf,” a tribute book for furniture designer Rolf Fehlbaum (1997, Princeton
Architectural Press), and his own retrospective,
the Hall and Bierut book “Perverse Optimist.”

“This is the sort of project he’d been talking about for years,
and people kind of viewed it with trepidation, knowing his reputation,”
Bierut, partner at the design firm Pentagram
and president of AIGA, said of the latter volume. “I think the reason the book actually got
done and the reason I think we were able to do it without killing each other, partly had to do with the fact that he was sick: [With] him at half strength, with that handicap, we were well matched. He was formidable.”

Throughout the book’s creation, it was tacitly understood that “Perverse Optimist”
would be Kalman’s legacy. Indeed, it is a handsomely designed, eclectic
420-page testament to a visionary at work and play: two modes that were never far apart for Kalman.

“He remained charming and prickly and funny literally until the end,” author Kurt Andersen, a close friend, said the day of
Kalman’s funeral. “Since people our age have not yet died in great numbers,
it’s a great model for us all as a way to die, not just with dignity, but
with effervescence.”

The Beat movement, a few college boys like Jack Kerouac joined by a few old-timey bohemians like William S. Burroughs and a few happy or gloomy social castaways like Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke, was a male cult that would have been a footnote to ’50s conformity, not a herd but a boys’ club of independent minds, without Allen Ginsberg’s organizing fervor. It picked up elements of jazz, the drug culture, the normal rituals of adolescent seeking and even grudgingly admitted to its ranks a few young women (then called “chicks”) if they came equipped with black turtlenecks and a willingness to take shit.

Eventually there were outposts of Beat everywhere. In my hometown of Cleveland, the Paris of northeastern Ohio, I spent a night in jail after the tragic bust of a coffeehouse. The charge seemed to be interracial checker playing and felonious guitar plucking while a local Ginsbergling moaned into the microphone: “Hart Crane was a poet who committed sigh-a-sood.” The judges at my trial asked me why, if I was a decent person, I had a beard.

In fact, all this fun was serious business. The Ginsbergling of Cleveland was hounded into killing himself. The Ginsberglings of Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco fought their guerrilla actions against the ways things were until infantry hordes of flower children came to win some of the battles of the ’60s. Throughout this time, Allen led the way, protesting limitations on drug experimentation, protesting the Vietnam War, getting himself crowned Queen of the May in places like Stalinist Czechoslovakia. He and Peter Orlovsky were the only all-male couple to be listed as man and wife in Who’s Who. Allen liked getting naked when words failed him and also when they didn’t.

Yet he was a loyal son, whose most moving work is the long poem “Kaddish,” in honor of his lost mother, bludgeoned by shock treatments. In his father’s last years he invited the old high school English teacher and dotty poet to tour with him. With his father, he visited my new wife and child, and what we saw was a kind man, a son, a gracious old friend. It seemed that his Jewish sense of duty on earth, to heal and nurture, had joined his Buddhist desire to accept what was his lot. When I heard he was terminally ill, I wrote him a long letter, sure that he would make the best use of the time remaining to him, reminding him of the Buddhist country rock song he sang to me over stewed eggplant at the Auberge Inn in Paris:

Talk when you talk

Cry when you cry

Lie down, you’ll lie down

Die when you die

He was studying how to become an elderly gentleman, even willing to admit his past errors. He regretted smoking, chanting songs against tobacco. He even regretted his rage against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs are so much worse. He didn’t expect to be always right.

We enjoyed 51 years of a quarreling and exasperated friendship. When he led frantic publicity-seekers like Jack Kerouac in raids on publishing and broadcasting offices, demanding attention and then more attention, I wrote about the Beat movement as a shuck. When Kerouac retreated into alcohol and paranoia, Allen kept vivid the image of the beautiful young man, the James Dean of literature, although the T-shirts didn’t depict the bloated mama’s boy hiding in Florida and occasionally emitting right-wing noises. When Jack died, Allen kept the cult alive. When Timothy Leary informed on his friends, denounced Bob Dylan in the National Review for corrupting the youth of America, Allen shrugged and said, “Well, that’s just Tim, he’s a rogue.”

In public performance Allen was an Olympic-class ranter, but he was truest to himself and most moving when he loved. He attacked the obvious targets, such as the CIA in its role as corrupter of foreign governments, and defended the difficult-to-defend, such as men who ask for sex from boys. Because of Allen Ginsberg, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, David Meltzer and a few others, the Beat emblem is spoken poetry. (Wailing to jazz tended to cause throat problems.) The emblem of the hippie, flower-child, Aquarian epoch is rock music. The hyphen between the two periods, one rooted in the ’50s, the other in the ’60s, is Allen, the bard, apostle and mother figure. His beat passion for both public and private despair, public and private celebration, carried forward a long lyric tradition. He saddled up his hard-won sense of delight and spurred it on. Surely Bob Dylan is unimaginable without this predecessor.

Dissidence is as American as hemp brownies. Sherwood Anderson saw himself as “a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.” The counterculture, the underground, whatever label it’s given (New Wave, Punk, Slacker or Gen-X, Y or Z), the long tradition of American bohemia enriches, deepens, performs an act of rescue for an increasingly massified culture. Montana is colonized by Beverly Hills, but the East Village and the Mission District of San Francisco are still frontiers. Think back to Tom Paine and Thoreau, Walt Whitman and the Wobblies — the American pot always bubbles, even if it doesn’t always melt its contents. Probably no contemporary artist has been so needy, tender and ironic about his revolutionary fervor as Allen Ginsberg, who announced, “America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

Your queer shoulder, dear Allen, turns out to have been just what we needed.

Fifty-one years ago Allen and I, in our college-boy innocence, tried to propagandize each other at the West End Bar near Columbia University, he thinking to convert me to man-love by terrifying argumentation (the ancient Greeks) and I seeking to counter with my own fatal predilection (oh, so many men who loved women through history). A few decades later it dawned on us that we both had a point. People will make love as they make love, but they’ll still go on talking about it.

Despite the fragility of words, they still matter desperately to some, and will never stop mattering, and “Howl,” “Kaddish” and many other of Allen’s incantations will go on mattering for a good while. Just now, alas, Allen’s prophecy has come true: “Death is that remedy all singers dream of.”