Category: Newspapering

Unforgettable Quotes

I was a newspaperman for 42 years and I heard a lot of memorable quotes.  These are three of my favorites.

One

Robert W. [Bob] Scott was governor of North Carolina [1969 to 1973] when I went to work at The News & Observer in Raleigh in 1971 as an investigative reporter.  It wasn’t long before our paths crossed.

Gov Robert W. Scott
Gov. Robert W. Scott

State law gave the governor control of a slush fund at the state highway department he could spend on roads anywhere in the state. I reported that Scott had spent a disproportionate share of that money paving secondary roads in Alamance County, where he grew up and where he owned a dairy  farm. Two of the roads he paved fronted property he owned.  On a per capita basis, Scott gave Alamance eight times as much money he gave the state’s other 99 counties.

In his public response Scott said he was proud of every road he had paved in Alamance: “…I have no apology to make whatsoever.”

Privately, I was told he said: “If you’re not going to help your friends, who are you going to help?”

Two

When James E. [Jim] Holshouser was sworn in as governor  of North Carolina in January 1973 he was the first Republican to hold that office since 1897-1901.   The Republicans had been out of power so long they had no bench, no reservoir of talented administrators, so he had a harder time finding good ones to head up the various state agencies.

He appointed the owner of an appliance store secretary of the troubled state Department of Correction.   It wasn’t long before the new secretary called a press conference to assure the public that he intended to fix the problems he had inherited.

“I’m going to turn this department around 360 degrees,” he said.

Three

A state legislator, furious about an article written by an N&O political reporter, called him on the phone and raised hell.

He finished his tirade with this classic:

“Not only that,” he said, “but you almost misquoted me!”

Coming Monday:  The Ghost

Misadventures

I was looking for something else in a database of cases handled by the N. C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner when I stumbled across a surprising word, in all caps, “MISADVENTURE.”

I was an investigative reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh and I was intrigued.  Was this what I suspected?  Were these people who had been accidentally killed while undergoing medical treatment?

Well, yes, that’s pretty much it.

A medical misadventure is an unlucky event, for everyone involved, an event in which a patient is injured or killed.  All the patients named in that database, of course, were dead.

Some misadventures are due to negligence, some are due to accidents, pure and simple — a doctor punctured something he shouldn’t have punctured and the patient bleeds out on the table or a nurse administers the wrong medicine with fatal results.  Every medical misadventure should be carefully investigated by licensing officials, but that wasn’t happening. 

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems [ICD] devotes page after page to all the things that can go wrong, to “misadventures,”  a word I had never heard used in that context.   No surprise there — there’s a warehouse full of things I’ve never heard of.

But this will surprise you:

Members of the N.C. Medical Board, good doctors who were responsible for weeding out bad doctors, said they didn’t know know about misadventures either. The chairman of the medical board’s investigative committee told me that as “incredible” as it might sound, members of his committee had never heard the term “misadventure.”

I didn’t think think is was “incredible” that none of them had heard about medical misadventures, I thought it was unbelievable.

Postscript: A few days later the N.C. Medical Board voted to gather information about “misadventures” from the Chief Medical Examiner office.

“Investigative analysis of these cases will be promptly carried out, and appropriate action or actions will be taken by the N.C. Medical Board,” the board’s statement said.

Coming Monday: He Remembered Hundreds; I Forgot One