See more photos | Information, more about boat show | Downtown West Palm Beach traffic, activities detour for boat show

WEST PALM BEACH — On the waterfront Saturday, Pleasure was for sale at a cool $3.3 million. Temptation was $7.75 million. Serendipity, $1.49 million.

But Blind Date, of the Cayman Islands’ George Town, was coy. No price was posted. (“She’ll run you 29.5,” a nearby salesman revealed. No unit necessary.)

Thousands of people flocked to West Palm Beach’s waterfront, at Flagler Drive and Clematis Street, Saturday for day three of the Palm Beach International Boat Show, which concludes today, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Awaiting them were these sleek yachts and others also for sale or for charter, among them Splash and True Grit and Gotta Go and Silver Lining.

Some were so big they had room for smaller boats inside. The biggest of them all, Casino Royale, is 170 feet long, sleeps 14, has six staterooms, three washing machines and an exercise area. Its price: $24.5 million.
Read the full story

Post archive: Cronkite tells it like it is at Kravis Center
Former chef and Boynton journalist rush to finish tome about Cronkite’s darker side
Remembering Walter Cronkite: He was America’s reporter
Photos: The Most Trusted Man in America | Video | More coverage
Cronkite announcing Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon on July 20, 1969
Cronkite ended his long stint in the CBS anchor chair

There’s an old newsman’s adage that all big stories connect back to Florida, and as it happens, that was also true of the biggest old newsman of them all.

Iconic CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite died Friday, and though he never lived here, over the past three decades, he made a habit of stopping in.

There’s Cronkite the speaker, at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach in 2002, trashing the state of modern journalism and quipping: “I think I could handle a butterfly ballot today.”

There’s Cronkite the almost-spaceman, who made the semifinals of NASA’s reporter in space program before it was canceled and for years enthusiastically covered shuttles soaring away from our own Cape Canaveral.

There’s Cronkite the sailor, a board member of the Charles F. Chapman School of Seamanship and Maritime Arts on the St. Lucie River in Martin County. In 1983, he bemoaned his luck: “I’ve been in Florida waters for about a month and, with the exception of a gale, I don’t think I’ve actually sailed for more than two hours. I think I’m going to give it up.”

He read the news for years, and by the time he retired, he also made it, peeking through the headlines with his rebukes and praises and worries.

In 1981, he asked a dinner audience in Palm Beach: “How could our friends in these industrial societies be so blind to go on polluting and hope something will develop to magically clear our air and water?”

And in 2002, there was Cronkite, telling The Palm Beach Post’s Kevin Thompson that he wished he’d had the timing to make Katie Couric money; that he’d been “mad about” Mary Tyler Moore, once; and that “all the time,” younger people don’t know who he is, but he’s “really very pleased” that also, sometimes, they do.