Month: September 2017

Pass A Heart Or Else

One of my brothers-in-law, Sherm Williams, liked to play Hearts and he loved to “run.” He was an excellent card player and he ran a lot. He made a lot of slams in Bridge, too.

But when we played Hearts I don’t think he played to win. He played to run, and “held” to run almost every hand, almost always passing hearts if he didn’t have more than three. That’s all the cards you’re allowed to pass, three, and he would void in hearts if he could.

Sherm Williams: Card player extraordinary.
Sherm Williams: He loved to “run” in Hearts and make slams in Bridge, too.

I can’t teach the uninitiated how to play Hearts right now, but here’s a quick primer on running: To run –shoot the moon, it’s called — you have to capture all 13 hearts and the queen of spades. It may seem odd to people who don’t play Hearts but the best way to get all of them is to start with no hearts in your hand, or only the top hearts, the ace, king, or, if you’re real lucky, maybe even the ace, king, queen, jack.

Why?

Well, if you have a nine, or a ten, or even king of hearts in your hand, without the top cards, how are you going to win that trick? When you play the ten, or the king, someone is going to take it, or should, and your run –and the minus 26 points that goes with it– is gone. Instead of getting minus points, which is good, all the hearts you’ve taken that hand [and, maybe, the queen of spades, too, which counts 13 by itself] are going to count as plus points, which is bad.  In Hearts, the player with the lowest score wins.

Anyway, I got a little tired of Sherm running, especially when he ran after one of my boys, Bo or Mark, had passed to him.

You can really hurt a “runner” by passing him or her a middling heart every time, and, if you have a stopper — a higher heart– keeping it. He’s not going anywhere if you pass him, say, the nine of hearts and you keep the jack and three little hearts.  Even if he has the ace, king, queen, he can’t pull your jack, and when he plays the nine, you take it and stop his run.

[OK, OK, for those of you who are Hearts players, I know,  it is still possible for a “runner” to get away under those circumstances if hearts are led through the player with the “stopper” and the runner has one or more of the top hearts. The “runner” takes the “stopper” card, say, the jack, with the ace and then he or she is off to the races.]

One night before we played I told my boys, listen up: If he runs tonight and you’ve passed to him, and you had a middling heart to give and you didn’t give it to him on the pass, I’m going to deal with you when we get home.

Would I really have really done that, give them licking for not passing a heart? Oh, surely not.

But I got my boys’ attention.

Sherm didn’t run that night.

Coming Monday: Was This God’s Hand At Work?

This Was Not A Real Job

It was cool.

That’s first thing I notice when I walked into The Charlotte News newsroom on my first day, in June 1960. It was not boiling hot like my father’s clothes hanger plant, in the basement of a building on Graham Street, where I worked summers during high school. Besides the air conditioning there was that smell peculiar to newsrooms before computers made them look and sound and smell like any other office. The smell of newsprint and ink and glue — there was a glue pot* on every desk and stacks of old newspapers.  And lots of cigarette smoke.  And that noise I came to love, the clicking keys of typewriters and the constant clacking of the AP and UPI teletype machines.

Occasionally, a reporter would shout, “Copy! Copy boy!” And a boy my age or a little younger, I was 18, would run to his desk, grab copy from them –sometime he would tear it right out of their typewriters — and deliver it to the City Desk on the run.

On deadline the reporters were completely focused, oblivious to anything or anyone around them, punching the keys of their typewriters –one guy with just his two forefingers– and using the cigarette they were smoking to light the next one.

They were working.

Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That's "Hoss" Harris on the right.
Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That’s “Hoss” Harris on the right.

I was assigned to the sports desk so I sat down there and waited. After the first edition deadline, about 9:15 a.m., the sports writers leaned back in their chairs, lit up yet another cigarette or cigar and relaxed. They talked to each other about stuff that had nothing to do with work, or gabbed on the phone.  Some of them were laughing about something, I didn’t know what.

[This was a job? I had had a job, a real job, and let me assure you, this was not one.]

One of them said to me, “Boy, go to that restaurant on Tryon Street and get me a fried egg sandwich and tell ’em not to put so much mayonnaise on it. And, here, get one for yourself.”

And he handed me some money.

I rode the elevator to the first floor, walked out the door of the building onto the sidewalk and headed down Tryon. It was a glorious day. I was just walking along, making $1 a hour, twice what I used to get for real work. And when I got back with the fried egg sandwiches we were going to sit around, on the clock, and eat them?

I decided right then that I was going to be a newspaperman. And that’s what I did for 42 years.

* Computer savvy people know the terms “cut” and “paste” and that’s what reporters were doing, cutting and pasting.  Only they didn’t actually cut, they ripped their copy apart with a pica stick.

Coming Friday: Pass A Heart Or Else