Search Results for: morgan

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.

Censored

-->

The businessman, whose company was a polluter, asked me, “Is that your typewriter I hear? Are you typing down what I say?”

I said I was.

And he said, “That’s unethical!”

Huh?

Working late at The Charlotte News. Putting in extra hours became a lifelong habit, to my benefit and detriment.
Working late at The Charlotte News. Putting in extra hours became a lifelong habit, to my benefit and detriment.

I was working on a story we called “A Sewer Named Sugar,”  about companies that were polluting Sugar Creek, a creek that runs through the heart of Charlotte and through its most popular park.

I had waded and walked the creek for more than 15 miles, from its headwaters to a point south of Charlotte, along with some tributaries, and I had found a number of polluters. Now I was trying to interview them.

I said to the man, “I told you my name; I spelled my name; I told you I was a reporter, that I worked for The Charlotte News; I told you why I called you, that I was working on a story about polluters; and I told you I wanted to ask you some questions.”

But he said he was done talking and he hung up.  I waited, and I didn’t have to wait long.

The guy I was interviewing was the son-in-law  of a top executive at my paper.  A few minutes later I saw that executive get off the elevator and walked straight into the editor’s office.

I have no idea what he and Perry Morgan, the boss of The Charlotte News, talked about. I wasn’t there.

I do know Perry did not allow me to name that man’s business, or quote him. I could only identify it as a “heavy industry” and the general location.

That was bad, but it got worse.

The newspaper I worked for was also polluting the creek. The News dumped chemical solutions used to develop film into a storm drain that eventually drained into Sugar Creek.

I was not allowed to name my paper either.  Perry told me, “Now you’ve gone too far!”

Postscript: Nothing, and I mean nothing, like that ever happened to me in the 37 years I worked for The New & Observer in Raleigh.  If I could find it and prove it  The N&O would publish it.  No one and no thing was off limits.

Coming Friday: Navy Propaganda