In the old days our newsroom bulletin board was sometimes — OK, a lot of times– a better read than our newspaper. Some reporters and columnists had a wicked sense of humor that was not allowed, for good reason, to show up in the paper.
Take this accident story, for example.
The News & Observer was located at 215 S. McDowell St. in Raleigh when I went to work there in 1971. Next door there was a dilapidated old hotel called Park Central, built in 1893. The N&O bought it in 1975 and tore it down the next year. Obviously, Raleigh needed another parking lot more than it needed a historic old hotel with a turret.
Some of the debris was thrown down chutes into trucks parked below. Some was hauled out in wheelbarrows, taken down to the first floor in an antique elevator. It was the kind of elevator I haven’t seen for decades, the kind with narrow, head-wide windows in the elevator doors. One window had been smashed.
When a worker was accidentally killed on the job N&O reporter Bob Lynch wrote a story about his death for the newspaper. N&O columnist Jack Aulis also wrote three graphs and thumb tacked his story to the bulletin board in the newsroom.
I’m pretty sure no one remembers Bob’s story but anyone who saw it remembers Jack’s. Here’s what he wrote, more or less:
“A worker hauling debris out of the Park Central Hotel Tuesday stuck his head though a broken window in the elevator door to see if the elevator was coming.”
“It was.”
“He was 55.”
NOTE: That accident ranks right up there with a veteran sky-diver –he had more than 800 jumps –who was killed near Raleigh when he forgot to put on a parachute. He had been filming another jumper and he continued to film on the way down, 10,500 feet. His video equipment and battery were in a satchel strapped to his back, an FAA spokesman said, and he may have mistaken the weight and feel of the satchel for a parachute. A police officer, who saw the video the dead man made as he fell, said his last words sounded like: “Oh, no!”
Coming Friday: The Sweat Shop