Author: David Stith

Quincy The Terrible – Part 2 of 2

Bob Quincy resigned as sports editor of The Charlotte News in 1962 to take a job as sports information director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I got out of the Navy in the fall of ’62, enrolled at UNC, and worked as his student assistant for three years.

The division of labor went like this: He did stuff like deal with head coaches and produce the football and basketball brochures and I did stuff like mimeograph press releases and take the mail to the post office.

Ehringhaus Dorm
Ehringhaus Dorm

During football season, Bob wrote a column every Monday which I mimeographed, stuffed into envelopes and mailed.

One Monday, after I had worked for him a couple of years, Bob said to me, “You’re going to write the column today.”

All right! Finally!  I thought to myself.  Looks like Mr. Bob Quincy is starting to see the light, starting to figure out just how good I am.  And then I came to my senses and I asked him, “Why aren’t you going to write the column?”

“Because I can’t type,” he said.

“Why can’t you type?”

“Because my hands are too sore.”

I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery if I could, so I pressed on: “Why are your hands sore?”

The football team had played on the road on Saturday and when it returned to Chapel Hill that evening, Bob said he went over to Ehringhaus Dorm, where most of the players lived, to pick up some things he had left there.

He said he got on the elevator and punched four, but it went to the sixth floor.  He punched four again.  The elevator went to five and then to one.

He punched four.  It went back to five.

“And then I beat the hell out of that elevator,” Bob said.

Postscript: Bob Quincy, a five-time winner of the National Sports Writer of the Year for North Carolina, died of cancer in 1984.  He was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 2005.

Coming Friday: “His First Name was ‘Sir’”

 

Quincy The Terrible – Part 1 of 2

Bob Quincy, whose temper was legendary, was my first editor when I graduated from high school in 1960 and went to work for The Charlotte News.

He was the newspaper’s sports editor and was widely respected, often referred to as “Coach” for his encyclopedic knowledge of sports.  When he left The News in 1962 to become sports information director at UNC his going away party was held at Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte to accommodate the crowd.

But, boy, did he have a temper!

Bob Quincy
Bob Quincy

Bob was short and round and, I was told, not a good fighter.  Even so, he sometimes got physical with a colleague or a complete stranger.

On one occasion, so the story goes, he threw a typewriter out a second story window of the newsroom, into a parking lot.  Why?  Because he couldn’t change the ribbon. He beat another typewriter senseless because he couldn’t get it to type in lower case keys.  It was a wire service typewriter. It didn’t have lower case keys.

His position at the newspaper entitled him to park in a lot next to the building where we worked, a lot guarded by a gate.  He had a card that made the gate go up but he couldn’t keep up with it. Didn’t really matter most the time.  His convertible was so low slung that when the top was down he could drive under the gate.

On this particular day, however, it was raining and, of course, the convertible’s top was not down – he couldn’t drive under the gate.  So Bob got out of his car in the rain, walked around to the other side of the gate, and began jumping up and down on a pressurized rubber hose lying on the pavement.  The hose made the gate go up when cars ran over it on their way out of the parking lot, and Quincy tricked it into raising the gate.

Then he returned to his car and started into the parking lot.  Before his car cleared the gate, however, the gate came back down, scraping the roof of his convertible.

Oh, boy!  That gate had better look out!

Quincy jumped out of his car and ran at it as fast as his short legs would carry him, smashing into the end of the wooden gate, bending it backward.  The gate bent, and bent, but it didn’t break. And when it sprang back it threw Quincy on his fanny, in a puddle of water.

Oh, my word!  Now that gate was really in for it!

Quincy got up, and he was steaming.  He grabbed that gate. He broke it off.  He threw it down.  He stomped it.  He taught that gate a lesson it would not soon forget.

And then he parked his car and went to work.

Continued tomorrow.