The Retort

The woman who came to see me was in her late 40’s or early 50s but she looked older and dressed younger, a lot younger.  She was still attractive, sort of, but she looked, how shall I say — different.

Her hair was peroxided.  Her skin was a deep leathery brown — she had spent way too much time in the sun. But, if I noticed such things, I would have said she still had a nice figure.

Dudley Price
Dudley Price

She had come to The News & Observer to see me about a story and we sat in one of the interview rooms talking.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see she was getting a lot of attention.  As reporters walked up and down the hall outside they could see her through the window of the interview room. Several times I saw a head jerk around to look. Some of my colleagues paused to get a second look.

As soon as I returned to my desk up walked Dudley Price, a friend, a reporter, and the newsroom’s most notorious character: Dudley would say almost anything to almost anyone at almost any time.

“Who was that whore you were talking to?” he asked loudly.

And for once in my life I had a response.

“That wasn’t a whore, Dudley. That was my sister.”

Dudley staggered backwards a step or two — he actually staggered — like I’d hit him in the face with a wet towel. He mumbled an apology and left.  He came back a minute or two later and apologized again.

I was loving it.

I didn’t give Dudley a heads up, not that day, or the next, or the next. And then my phone rang. It was Brooke Cain, a researcher at the paper, and a good one. For years she had help me on almost every story I had worked.

“Why is Dudley doing a background on you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “What does he want to know?”

“He wants to know about your sisters,” Brooke said.

Coming Friday: “Vintage Jack Hyland”

 

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’”