When I was a newspaperman I got to know Sam Garrison, the warden of Central Prison in Raleigh, a maximum security institution that housed many of the state’s most dangerous criminals.
Central Prison was only a mile or so from The News & Observer, where I worked, and sometimes I’d go by and see Sam about something and then hang around and shoot the breeze. I liked him.
One day he told me this story:
He said he grew up in a little town near Raleigh, Garner maybe, I can’t remember. Anyway, he said that when he was a teenager he and his buddies would drive to Raleigh occasionally looking for a little excitement.
On this occasion they were in a convertible, with the top down. Sam said he was sitting on the back of the rear seat, with his feet in the seat, having fun with pedestrians. Sam said they were on Morgan Street, next to the capitol, when he yelled at this young guy and said, “We need directions to the capitol.”
The capitol, of course, was right there, in plain sight. But the guy said, “Sure, turn right on Fayetteville Street, go three blocks and hang a left. You can’t miss it.”
Sam, who was a good size boy, bigger than the boy who had turned his little joke around, said he hopped out of the car and took the first swing. That turned out to be a mistake.
“I had to crawl under the bushes there by the sidewalk to get away from him, to get him to stop hitting me,” the warden said. When the boy stopped Sam said he crawled out of the bushes and introduced himself.
“I’m Sam Garrison,” he said. “Who are you?”
And he said the boy told him, “I’m the middle weight Golden Gloves champion of North Carolina.”
Warden Garrison told me that incident put him on the straight and narrow, took away any desire he had to pick fights with strangers.
NOTE1: Garrison, who worked his way up from prison guard, was the warden at Central for 14 years.
NOTE2: Sam tried to tell me how things worked in prison and one day he showed me. He pointed toward a Styrofoam cup, attached to a string, being pulled rapidly up the tiers of cells. That was one way, Sam said, that the most powerful inmates — the most feared — distinguished themselves from everyone else: they had hot coffee, and a newspaper, delivered to their cells every morning.
Coming Friday: Devastated