As I’ve written here before, Walter Cronkite was a nightly presence in our house, just as he was in millions of others during the 60s and 70s. (I have always wondered if the years since would have seemed quite so barking mad if he’d been there every night to tell us about them.) Historian Douglas Brinkley recently published a biography titled Cronkite, and I can’t recommend it enough. The outlines of Cronkite’s anchorman years, from the early 50s to the early 80s, are pretty well-known, yet riveting anyhow in Brinkley’s telling. But the stories of his life after leaving the CBS Evening News in 1981 are the most interesting of all.

Late in life, Cronkite made an unlikely friendship with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. In 1987, Hart and Stephen Stills had been hired to score a sailing documentary Cronkite was producing. They bumped into one another at the studio one day, and Hart asked to hear Cronkite’s narration so he could write the music around it. At the end of the day (on which Stills failed to show), the two men ended up having dinner. A mutual interest in sailing and environmentalism cemented their friendship. When the Dead played shows in New York that year, Cronkite and his wife Betsy attended. After that, Cronkite and Hart occasionally sailed together. And not only that: “We played drums together a lot,” Hart said. “I was amazed one time to see that he had twenty drums set up in his living room.” Hart believed that drumming had positive health effects for Cronkite; after Cronkite’s 1997 open-heart surgery, Hart brought him 17 different drums to play. “The music made him alive as he as losing his facility,” Hart said. “The music connected him to life and the world at large.”

Cronkite befriended another fellow sailor during this period: Jimmy Buffett. The two men met at the America’s Cup race in Australia in 1987 and remained friends for the rest of Cronkite’s life. “I’d have him as my guest at Madison Square Garden,” Buffett said of his New York shows. “I knew how to make him happy. I sat him by the showgirls.” When Cronkite worked CNN’s coverage of John Glenn’s 1998 space-shuttle flight, Buffett dropped by the anchor booth in Florida. Cronkite invited him to sit in for a while, on the air. “Son of a Son of a Sailor” became one of Cronkite’s favorite songs, and Buffett performed it at Cronkite’s funeral in 2009.

Cronkite had been an admirer of Rolling Stone‘s journalism since Hunter S. Thompson battled Richard Nixon, and in later life he befriended the magazine’s founder and publisher, Jann Wenner. He briefly collaborated with jazz pianist Dave Brubeck on a documentary project, and he got to know Andy Warhol a little. After Betsy Cronkite died in 2005, he spent the rest of his life in the company of Joanna Simon, sister of Carly Simon, a trained opera singer who’d been his New York realtor.

Any person as famous as Walter Cronkite moves in a celebrity-filled circle. Nevertheless, his musical connections are interesting. The Most Trusted Man in America was neither a marble monument nor a model of propriety: one of his producers affectionately called him a dirty old man, and he liked to recite obscene limericks in the same tone he used on TV every night. He was, in fact, an everyman as regular as the guy next door. If nearly everybody who watched him on TV liked him, the same seems to have been true of everyone who met him in the flesh.

Last week, I wrote about the Rolling Stones’ six appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show between 1964 and 1969. All six are available on DVD, and the DVDs contain not just the Stones’ performances, but other acts from the shows on which they appeared. They aren’t quite the complete shows, as you’ll read below, although they do include some of the national commercials that ran.

The October 7, 1964, show features comedy performances by Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara and by London Lee, who appeared with Ed 32 times over the years. Also appearing that night, but not on the DVD: the Cambridge Circus, which featured John Cleese and Graham Chapman years before Monty Python. There was classical music by Itzhak Perlman, tap dancing by Sullivan regular Peg Leg Bates, and the international acts Ed loved: the Kim Sisters from South Korea (doing the spiritual “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”) and the Berosinis, an acrobatic troupe from Czechoslovakia. The oddest guest spot belonged to actor Laurence Harvey, who recited Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

On May 2, 1965, the hipness factor was slightly higher. The Stones shared the musical bill with Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones, although their performances on the DVD are apparently not the ones broadcast that night, but other songs from other shows. There was also the usual round of kinetic acts, including Gitta Morelly, who’s described by the Internet as either as a balancing act or a contortionist, and the Half Brothers jugglers. British comedians Morecambe and Wise and another frequent Sullivan guest, Totie Fields, provided the comedy. The show opened with Topo Gigio, the puppet mouse who became an international sensation after appearing with Ed, and who was very popular at our house. (Wikipedia claims Joan Rivers wrote some Topo Gigio sketches as one of her first professional gigs, but I’m skeptical.)

On February 13, 1966, the comedians were Senor Wences, old-time comic and Sullivan regular Eddie Schaeffer, and Sandy Baron, best remembered now for playing the curmudgeonly Jack Klompas on Seinfeld. The kinetics were provided by the Romanian Folk Ballet, and there’s an act listed as “Les Olympiades–Adagio Act,” about which I can find nothing. And on a show where the Stones performed “Satisfaction,” “As Tears Go By,” and “19th Nervous Breakdown,” Hal Holbrook recited Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

Later that year, on September 11, the Stones got the opening slot on a star-packed season premiere, alongside Louis Armstrong, Robert Goulet, Red Skelton, and Joan Rivers. Also on the bill: Holiday on Ice (another performance snipped from the DVD, replaced by a pair of Italian opera singers) and the Muppets.

On the famous January 15, 1967, show (broadcast on the night of the first Super Bowl game), it looked as though Ed Sullivan was catching up with the times. In addition to the Stones, singer Petula Clark appeared, riding a long string of hits over the previous couple of years. A group of 44 Pennsylvania nuns called Sisters ’67 sang “Kumbaya,” then gaining popularity thanks to the counterculture. Flip Wilson, about to become a major star, was also on the show, but so was more traditional comic Alan King. The Muppets were back along with clog dancers and acrobats.

The Rolling Stones’ last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was on November 23, 1969, taped in Los Angeles. Apart from the Stones, the other musical guest was Ella Fitzgerald. Rodney Dangerfield appeared; so did Robert Klein, then just beginning a standup career that would influence a large number of big-name comics of the 70s and 80s. Topo Gigio was back, along with a couple of novelty acts that sound made-up: from the Hawthorne Circus, a tiger riding a horse, and Lucho Navarro, a Mexican comedian whose main schtick seems to have been making car noises.

The list of performers on these episodes of Sullivan are pretty typical. The lineups open another fascinating window into the small-d democracy of variety television in the three-channel universe. There was once a time when it wasn’t possible to personalize every aspect of one’s world—when, as the Stones sang, “you can’t always get what you want”—but if you sat through the Czechoslovakian acrobats, you eventually might get what you need.