Bob Quincy resigned as sports editor of The Charlotte News in 1962 to take a job as sports information director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I got out of the Navy in the fall of ’62, enrolled at UNC, and worked as his student assistant for three years.
The division of labor went like this: He did stuff like deal with head coaches and produce the football and basketball brochures and I did stuff like mimeograph press releases and take the mail to the post office.
During football season, Bob wrote a column every Monday which I mimeographed, stuffed into envelopes and mailed.
One Monday, after I had worked for him a couple of years, Bob said to me, “You’re going to write the column today.”
All right! Finally! I thought to myself. Looks like Mr. Bob Quincy is starting to see the light, starting to figure out just how good I am. And then I came to my senses and I asked him, “Why aren’t you going to write the column?”
“Because I can’t type,” he said.
“Why can’t you type?”
“Because my hands are too sore.”
I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery if I could, so I pressed on: “Why are your hands sore?”
The football team had played on the road on Saturday and when it returned to Chapel Hill that evening, Bob said he went over to Ehringhaus Dorm, where most of the players lived, to pick up some things he had left there.
He said he got on the elevator and punched four, but it went to the sixth floor. He punched four again. The elevator went to five and then to one.
He punched four. It went back to five.
“And then I beat the hell out of that elevator,” Bob said.
Postscript: Bob Quincy, a five-time winner of the National Sports Writer of the Year for North Carolina, died of cancer in 1984. He was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005.
Coming Friday: “His First Name was ‘Sir’”