Category: My Favorites

Vintage Jack Hyland

Take a long, careful, look at this picture of Jack and Nell Hyland, my wife’s parents. You see what I see?

In the fall of 1963 Jack and Nell drove from Charlotte to Chapel Hill, N.C., for their first overnight visit with their newly-wed daughter and her husband.

Jack and Nell Hyland
Jack and Nell Hyland

We grilled on the patio at our apartment on Airport Road and Donna, my wife, took pictures — doesn’t she always?   This picture of that happy occasion puzzled me for years.  Why did Jack look like the picture of health while Nell looked like, well, white as a corpse.

Back then the color on colored photographs was quirky, which could explain why Nell’s face looked washed out.  But his face wasn’t washed out.  He looked just fine.

Jack Hyland: He love to laugh, and make other laugh.
Jack  loved to laugh, and make others laugh.

How could that be?

It was a long time before I noticed Jack’s hand.  It looked just like Nell’s face, washed out.

This is so Jack Hyland.  He loved to play jokes. He had been holding his breath, forcing blood to his face, making himself look healthy — and his wife look dead.

Coming Monday: “You’re Fired!”

 

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”