I was in Navy boot camp in San Diego so there was no staying in bed. I got up, dressed, mustered with my shipmates and marched to chow even though I couldn’t couldn’t eat or drink. The order I was waiting for came after breakfast but, thankfully, before calisthenics: “Sick, lame or lazy, fall out!”
I fell out.
Seaman Recruit Stith
In boot camp no sympathy is wasted on sick sailors, some of whom, those in charge firmly believe, are not sick at all, just lazy.
I marched to the spot reserved for sailors who said they were sick [or lame or lazy] and stood at parade rest for more than an hour before Navy corpsman put a thermometer in my mouth.
When he took it out, and looked at it, he called an ambulance and they took me away. I stayed in sick bay –the hospital — for seven days, getting penicillin shots in my bottom.
Postscript: Normally, because I had been in sick bay for a week, the Navy would have sent me to a new company, a week behind mine, so I wouldn’t miss any training. Lucky for me my company was assigned to KP that week, so the only thing I missed was my turn washing dishes.
In the late 1960’s I went to my editor at The Charlotte News, Perry Morgan, and asked him to keep his promise.
Perry Morgan: He was older and smarter. Photo courtesy of the Virginian-Pilot where, later on, Morgan was publisher.
Perry had promised me that if I worked hard, after two or three years he would help me move up, get a job at a bigger paper anywhere in the country. I told him I wanted to go to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Because it was another Knight newspaper I knew he could make that happen.
Problem was, I was a pretty good reporter and he didn’t want me going anywhere. This, in essence, is the exchange we had:
“Nobody here treating you bad, are they?
“No sir.”
“Getting raises. Getting moved from beat to beat, getting good assignments.”
“Yes sir.”
“You married a Charlotte girl, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Her family is here. Your family, your Mom and Dad, they live here?”
“Yes sir.”
“Got three kids. Just bought a house here, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“But you want to go to work for a big city newspaper, don’t you. You want to show them you’re just as good as they are, better even. Isn’t that true. Isn’t that the reason you want to go to Philadelphia, to prove something.”
“Yes sir, that’s true.”
“Well, boy, if you had as much confidence in yourself as I have in you, you wouldn’t have to sell your house and uproot your wife and kids and move away from your kinfolk to some big city up North where you don’t know anybody. You wouldn’t have to prove anything.”
Postscript: I didn’t apply for a job in Philadelphia or anywhere else, I stayed in Charlotte another two years. I used to think about Perry quite often and wish that I could have encountered him when I was a lot older and little smarter.
NOTE:
Jim Waddelow
One of our own, Jim Waddelow, who is married to Chelsea Stith, was on national television last Sunday.
How about that!
Pam Stith was watching CBS Sunday, which she had recorded while she was at church, when she saw a familiar face and heard a familiar voice.
Pam was watching a tribute to a Ponca City, Oklahoma, music teacher, a real life version of the movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus. Nearly 300 of the students Robert Moore taught in a 30-year career, from all over the United States and three foreign countries, had gathered to honor him — and sing to him.
Jim, an associate professor of music at Meredith College in Raleigh, is conductor and music director of the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, a job he would not have, he told CBS, were it not for his high school music teacher.
If you take a look I think you’ll watch the whole 3 minute, 58 second segment. Jim shows up at the two minute, 10 second mark.
BTW, Jim told me that Moore’s choral group was named best in the state for 25 of his 30 years. The other five years? They finished second.
