Kerry Sipe was a good newspaperman even when he was a student at working on the school paper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I fired him anyway.
Kerry Sipe
He was night editor of The Daily Tar Heel. I was the managing editor, his boss, and he ignored my instructions.
One of our columnists had put a racist “joke” in his column meaning, he told me, to make fun the University of Mississippi. Maybe so, but he missed badly and we had to fix it, or try to.
I required the columnist to write an apology and told Kerry to put the apology in the column exactly where the “joke” had run. But he didn’t do that, he moved the apology to the top of the column. In retrospect, Kerry was right about that but I couldn’t let a subordinate jerk me around.
After I graduated in 1966 I went to work for The Charlotte News and he went to work for The News & Observer in Raleigh.
Now here’s the thing you may find odd:
I told The News about Kerry, and recommended him, and they tried, unsuccessfully, to hire him – twice.
And he told The N&O about me and urged me to apply. They hired me and I stayed at The N&O for 37 years.
Postscript: Kerry left The N&O in the early 1980’s and worked the last 25 years of his career at The Virginian-Pilot. Here’s what his colleagues said about him when he retired on Dec. 31, 2008.
NOTE: Yesterday was the second anniversary of The Final Edition. I’ve posted 208 stories, two stories a week for two years. It’s been fun and the party is not over. I have enough stories to post for another year or so.
Medics rush Lt. Col. George Eyster on a stretcher toward a helicopter after he had been shot by a Viet Cong sniper at Trung Lap, South Vietnam, Jan. 16, 1966. He died 42 hours later.
In 1965-66, when the United States was ramping up the fight in Vietnam and an anti-war movement was gathering steam here at home, I worked at The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina.
I was the DTH sports editor the first semester of my senior year and managing editor the second semester, after the editor, Ernie McCrary, asked me to restore order on the news side. I fired a few left wing reporters, hired some reporters I liked better, and we went on down the road.
I thought the paper had given way too much space to hippies, what they were doing, saying, the whole 40 yards. So I issued an edict of sorts: no more stories about hippies. Unless one of them killed somebody, of course.
Pat Stith: I played cards that afternoon.
So there we were one Saturday afternoon. The veterans –that’s anyone who had worked a summer or two for their hometown newspaper– were playing hearts while the rookies struggled to put out the paper by themselves.
It was pretty late in the day when the boy I had put in charge came to me with a problem — he had a hole on page one the size of a Mack truck and no obvious way to fill it. Since we did not publish papers with big white holes on page one, or any other page for that matter, something had to be done.
I heard the solution, then I saw it.
On the lawn in front of our newspaper office a jug band was doing its thing, playing and singing anti-war songs. A small crowd had gathered. It was news.
So I ordered up a photo and we ran it on page one, five columns wide and five or six inches deep. It was enormous. I didn’t like having to do that but, at that time of day, with deadline looming, I didn’t figure I had a choice.
Page 1, The Daily Tar Heel, March 27, 1966
I wrote the cutline. [Oh, don’t tell me, I know. This was not one of my better days.] The cutline said, “PEACENIKS GATHERED at the foot of the war memorial here yesterday to sing about freedom and how they didn’t want to fight for it in Viet Nam.”
[Was I for the war in Vietnam at that time? How did you guess? I bought the government line: “Stop ’em over there or fight ’em over here.” Years later, in 1988, I read “A Bright Shining Lie,” a Pulitzer prize winning book by Neil Sheehan. It made a Vietnam peacenik of me, about 20 years or so too late.]
Postscript: The next day the jug band members, and their friends, and their friends’ friends, lined up outside The Daily Tar Heel office, waiting their turn to give me hell.
