Author: pat Stith

Goodbye Charlotte, Part 2 of 3

Wednesday morning, May 12, 1971

Perry Morgan,  editor of The Charlotte News, called me into his office to questioned me about the lede I had written on a story The News had published the previous afternoon.

My lede said the Mecklenburg County Clerk of Superior Court had  refused to explain why an arrest warrant had been issued for a doctor after he had waived his right to trial on a minor boating violation and paid the $15 fine.

Charlotte police subsequently arrested the doctor in the middle of the night for failure to appear in court, took him to jail, fingerprinted him, and released him on a $50 bond.

Perry asked me to tell him how the clerk of court’s office was responsible.  I didn’t know how the mistake had been made –the clerk  wasn’t talking– but I had covered that beat and I knew how the system worked.    The clerk’s office collected fines, the clerk’s office scheduled the trials of those who did not pay their fine, and the clerk’s office issued arrest warrants for defendants who did not appear for trial.

That didn’t satisfied Perry.  He wanted to know exactly what the clerk’s office had done in this case. I didn’t know exactly.  Finally Perry told me he was going to retract my  story — retract, correct, and apologize.

Wednesday afternoon

RetractionAt Morgan’s direction The News published a retraction that afternoon.  I think he wrote it himself.

“A story published in The News Tuesday left several false impressions reflecting on Clerk of Superior Court R. Max Blackburn,” the retraction began.   It said my story “implied that Blackburn was concealing information known to him, and, may have left the impression that the clerk of court was responsible for issuance of the warrant. Neither implication was correct.”

“The News regrets that this false impression was created and apologizes for it.”

I was floored.

I couldn’t prove it yet, but I knew the clerk of court’s office was responsible and the clerk’s “No comment” had conceal information.

What had I done wrong?  The story was correct.   If it implied that the clerk’s office was responsible for the issuance of the arrest warrant, so what? His office was responsible.

I was beyond angry — I was done with The Charlotte News.

But I wasn’t done with that story.

Continued tomorrow.

Goodbye Charlotte, Part 1 of 3

When The Charlotte News retracted a story I wrote in May 1971 I resigned and went to work for The News & Observer where I remained until I retired in 2008, 37 years later.   It didn’t seem so at the time but I realized later that this was the hand of God at work in my life. I know, I know. Many of you, maybe most of you, doubt that God does such things. But I urge you: Keep an open mind until you’ve finished reading this story.

* * *

I interned at The News in the summers of 1960, 1963, and 1965 and when I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I went to work there full time in the summer of 1966.  They started me at $120 a week [$49,622 a year in 2018 dollars] and told me I had better turn to —i.e., hit the ball– because that was the most money they had ever paid anyone straight out of college.

It was a fun place to work and for the most of the next five years I was treated like the fair-haired boy.   The N&O approached me twice during those years about coming to work in Raleigh, but I wasn’t interested. Why would I be?

**My wife, Donna, and I had three children and had bought a house not far from where we had gone to high school together.

**Both of us had family in Charlotte, parents, siblings.

**Donna was a Charlotte native; my family had moved to Charlotte when I was 11 years old.  It was home.

**I was getting good assignments.  My salary had increased 77 percent in four years and I was due another raise.

**Perry Morgan, the editor, had taken me under his wing and was teaching me the craft.

**When I needed more money I could work nights and weekends assembling partitions at my brother’s box shop, a part-time job I could not duplicate anywhere else.

No,  forget Raleigh.  I wasn’t going.

***

Tuesday, May 11, 1971

Our county government/courts reporter was out that day and I was assigned to fill in for him. It was beat I had covered and I knew the ropes.

The Charlotte Observer had burned us that morning and I was going to have to do the rewrite. The police had arrested a doctor over the weekend, during the wee hours of the morning, for failing to appear in court on a charge of operating a motorboat without identification numbers, The Observer story said.

But the doctor had paid his ticket and waived his court appearance, the story said. His arrest was a huge mistake.

The first three paragraphs of the rewrite.
The first three paragraphs of the rewrite.

I tracked down the Mecklenburg County Clerk of Superior Court to get an explanation, but he wouldn’t answer my questions.  All I had was The Observer story and the clerk’s “No comment.”  I knew how the system worked. I knew the clerk’s office was responsible, but I didn’t know how the mistake had happened.

So I wrote:

“Clerk of Superior Court R. Max Blackburn refused to explain today why a warrant was issued for a Charlotte doctor after the doctor waived his right to trial on a minor wildlife violation and paid a $15 fine.” 

Late that afternoon, after my story was published, I received an alarming note from Morgan, the top editor at The News and my mentor.  He said he was “amazed” at my story.

this is a 1986 file photo of perry morgan, former publisher of the virginian-pilot and the ledger-star. photo was taken in march, l986.
Perry Morgan. Photo courtesy of the Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star.

“A lede that implied without a shred of substantiation that Blackburn was at fault and was deliberately trying to take a public-be-damned attitude leaves the reader with the impression that we were taking a cheap shot,” he said.

“Were we?”

Continued tomorrow.