Tag: Hoss Harris

The Hard [But Good] Lesson

I thought for a while there I was going to be fired.

In August 1960, barely two months into my newspaper career, I wrote what newspaper people call a “color” story on a Southeastern Regional Babe Ruth tournament game – Ocala, Florida vs. Charlotte, North Carolina. The game had ended with a controversial strike three call against a Florida player and the home team won, 3-2.

The coach of the visiting team was pretty mad. He told me that the home plate umpire was a “blind man” who had committed “highway robbery.”

“You tell Charlotte,” the Florida coach said, “to keep that umpire and they’ll win the World Series.”

I wrote a story for The Charlotte News in which I quoted the Florida coach and identified the blind robber as Ronald Flie.   But, it turned out, Mr. Flie wasn’t a blind robber. The umpire behind the plate that day was another man named Bob Moore.

Yow!

Umpires are called bad names all the time but not like that, not when they weren’t even in the game.

* * *

The retraction.
The retraction.

My boss, Sports Editor Bob Quincy, was out town so, next day, the other guys had to make the call. They decided to retract the story, which is not the same thing as a “correction.”  I think a retraction was overboard but, whatever.   Let’s just say they erred on the side of caution.

The day after that Quincy The Terrible  came back and, after the first edition deadline, he called everyone over to his desk.  He was steaming.

Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That's "Hoss" Harris on the right.
Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That’s “Hoss” Harris on the right.

The error was mine and mine alone, but Quincy did not say one word to me.  I guess I was just too far down on the totem pole for him to mess with.   Instead, he went after Bob Myers, who had covered the game and who, Quincy said, should have kept me out of trouble.

How could Myers have done that?  I have no idea.

Bob Quincy
Bob Quincy

Quincy didn’t like that retraction either.  He said they should have corrected my error in the next day’s tournament story and moved on.  That, in my opinion, would have been too little — we should have just run a correction.

That error turned out to be one of those blessings in disguise — I never forgot that sick feeling it gave me. Over time, especially when I began doing investigative work and dinging people on a regular basis, I became a fanatic about accuracy. I am not saying I never made another mistake.  I did.  But not often.

NOTE:  I was so lucky to have started out on the sports desk of The Charlotte News. It was a small staff, only five guys, but they were all good ones. Three of them were later inducted into what is known now as the N.C. Media and Journalism Hall of Fame: Max Muhleman, Ronald Green Sr. and Quincy, posthumously in 2005.   How I wish Bob had lived — he and I were inducted on the same night.

Coming Friday: Studying for the GED

 

 

 

 

This Was Not A Real Job

It was cool.

That’s first thing I notice when I walked into The Charlotte News newsroom on my first day, in June 1960. It was not boiling hot like my father’s clothes hanger plant, in the basement of a building on Graham Street, where I worked summers during high school. Besides the air conditioning there was that smell peculiar to newsrooms before computers made them look and sound and smell like any other office. The smell of newsprint and ink and glue — there was a glue pot* on every desk and stacks of old newspapers.  And lots of cigarette smoke.  And that noise I came to love, the clicking keys of typewriters and the constant clacking of the AP and UPI teletype machines.

Occasionally, a reporter would shout, “Copy! Copy boy!” And a boy my age or a little younger, I was 18, would run to his desk, grab copy from them –sometime he would tear it right out of their typewriters — and deliver it to the City Desk on the run.

On deadline the reporters were completely focused, oblivious to anything or anyone around them, punching the keys of their typewriters –one guy with just his two forefingers– and using the cigarette they were smoking to light the next one.

They were working.

Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That's "Hoss" Harris on the right.
Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That’s “Hoss” Harris on the right.

I was assigned to the sports desk so I sat down there and waited. After the first edition deadline, about 9:15 a.m., the sports writers leaned back in their chairs, lit up yet another cigarette or cigar and relaxed. They talked to each other about stuff that had nothing to do with work, or gabbed on the phone.  Some of them were laughing about something, I didn’t know what.

[This was a job? I had had a job, a real job, and let me assure you, this was not one.]

One of them said to me, “Boy, go to that restaurant on Tryon Street and get me a fried egg sandwich and tell ’em not to put so much mayonnaise on it. And, here, get one for yourself.”

And he handed me some money.

I rode the elevator to the first floor, walked out the door of the building onto the sidewalk and headed down Tryon. It was a glorious day. I was just walking along, making $1 a hour, twice what I used to get for real work. And when I got back with the fried egg sandwiches we were going to sit around, on the clock, and eat them?

I decided right then that I was going to be a newspaperman. And that’s what I did for 42 years.

* Computer savvy people know the terms “cut” and “paste” and that’s what reporters were doing, cutting and pasting.  Only they didn’t actually cut, they ripped their copy apart with a pica stick.

Coming Friday: Pass A Heart Or Else