Kerry Sipe was a good newspaperman even when he was a student at working on the school paper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I fired him anyway.
He was night editor of The Daily Tar Heel. I was the managing editor, his boss, and he ignored my instructions.
One of our columnists had put a racist “joke” in his column meaning, he told me, to make fun the University of Mississippi. Maybe so, but he missed badly and we had to fix it, or try to.
I required the columnist to write an apology and told Kerry to put the apology in the column exactly where the “joke” had run. But he didn’t do that, he moved the apology to the top of the column. In retrospect, Kerry was right about that but I couldn’t let a subordinate jerk me around.
After I graduated in 1966 I went to work for The Charlotte News and he went to work for The News & Observer in Raleigh.
Now here’s the thing you may find odd:
I told The News about Kerry, and recommended him, and they tried, unsuccessfully, to hire him – twice.
And he told The N&O about me and urged me to apply. They hired me and I stayed at The N&O for 37 years.
Postscript: Kerry left The N&O in the early 1980’s and worked the last 25 years of his career at The Virginian-Pilot. Here’s what his colleagues said about him when he retired on Dec. 31, 2008.
Coming Monday: My Father’s Finest Hour