Bob Quincy, whose temper was legendary, was my first editor when I graduated from high school in 1960 and went to work for The Charlotte News.
He was the newspaper’s sports editor and was widely respected, often referred to as “Coach” for his encyclopedic knowledge of sports. When he left The News in 1962 to become sports information director at UNC his going away party was held at Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte to accommodate the crowd.
But, boy, did he have a temper!
Bob was short and round and, I was told, not a good fighter. Even so, he sometimes got physical with a colleague or a complete stranger.
On one occasion, so the story goes, he threw a typewriter out a second story window of the newsroom, into a parking lot. Why? Because he couldn’t change the ribbon. He beat another typewriter senseless because he couldn’t get it to type in lower case keys. It was a wire service typewriter. It didn’t have lower case keys.
His position at the newspaper entitled him to park in a lot next to the building where we worked, a lot guarded by a gate. He had a card that made the gate go up but he couldn’t keep up with it. Didn’t really matter most the time. His convertible was so low slung that when the top was down he could drive under the gate.
On this particular day, however, it was raining and, of course, the convertible’s top was not down – he couldn’t drive under the gate. So Bob got out of his car in the rain, walked around to the other side of the gate, and began jumping up and down on a pressurized rubber hose lying on the pavement. The hose made the gate go up when cars ran over it on their way out of the parking lot, and Quincy tricked it into raising the gate.
Then he returned to his car and started into the parking lot. Before his car cleared the gate, however, the gate came back down, scraping the roof of his convertible.
Oh, boy! That gate had better look out!
Quincy jumped out of his car and ran at it as fast as his short legs would carry him, smashing into the end of the wooden gate, bending it backward. The gate bent, and bent, but it didn’t break. And when it sprang back it threw Quincy on his fanny, in a puddle of water.
Oh, my word! Now that gate was really in for it!
Quincy got up, and he was steaming. He grabbed that gate. He broke it off. He threw it down. He stomped it. He taught that gate a lesson it would not soon forget.
And then he parked his car and went to work.
Continued tomorrow.
