Early in my newspaper career, when I was fresh out of college, I worked side by side with a reporter in his mid-30’s who just plain old didn’t like me. He covered Charlotte city government; I had the county government beat. Our tiny office, which we shared with the cop shop reporter, was in the basement of City Hall in Charlotte.
I liked him OK, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. So I stopped speaking, too. Our desks weren’t more than six feet apart but sometimes we’d go all day without saying a word to each other.
Finally, after deadline one afternoon, I asked him why he disliked me. And he told me.
“It’s just your whole attitude,” he said. “You remind me of the way I used to be when I was your age. You think you’re going to be somebody in this business, you think you’re going to be publisher of The New York Times.”
He said he had finally realized that he was never going anywhere, that he would always be what he was, a beat reporter.
“You’re not going anywhere either, but you don’t know that yet,” he said. “And it irritates me.”
Postscript: A year or two later he was promoted to city editor of The Charlotte News. After that he wrote a political column published in small newspapers across the state. And then he left the newspaper business, at age 48, to become an antique dealer.
Coming Friday: Did We Talk Funny?