A Texas exhibit on the life and times of late TV newsman Walter Cronkite

"His mother saved a lot of stuff," Carleton said.

Much of the archive already had been donated to the Briscoe Center, but Cronkite's will instructed relatives to search his home for other items. His son Chip found his father's war correspondent uniform from World War II buried deep in a closet.

"It was like seeing superman's cape in Clark Kent's closet," Chip Cronkite said by telephone from New York. "It was a thrill to see."

The uniform and some other items will go to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., or the Paley Center for Media in New York after the exhibit closes in January, Chip Cronkite said.

Film clips include Walter Cronkite's famous newscast of the 1963 Kennedy assassination when Cronkite announced the president had died, then paused several seconds to compose himself before continuing with the news.

The Kennedy assassination marks the beginning of the most powerful sequence that runs from the early 1960s to Cronkite's reporting from Vietnam and on the Watergate break-in that would ultimately led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.

Also on display are personal items, including several Emmy awards, a traveling typewriter, the cap Cronkite wore while sailing and a moon rock presented to him by NASA.

Mounted behind glass is Cronkite's application to NASA to be the first journalist in space, a concept scuttled after the Challenger disaster in 1986 that killed the crew and school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Not getting to space, "was one of his great disappointments in life," Carleton said.

IN PICTURES: Walter Cronkite

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Walter Cronkite: From Depression-era newspapering to blogging

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