Category: Newspapering

You May Find This Odd

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,
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.

Coming Monday: My Father’s Finest Hour

Not A Smart Thing To Say

NOTE: For the record, today’s post is #300.

Occasionally Frank Daniels Jr., the publisher of The News & Observer for most of my time there, would stop me on the back steps of The N&O and ask me about a story I was working, or had worked. A few times, not many, he sent for me to come to his office.

He never gave me instructions, do this, don’t do that, I guess he just wanted in on the news.  And, after all, it was his newspaper.

Frank Daniels Jr.
Frank Daniels Jr.

On one  occasion, I don’t remember what the story was about but I clearly remember that it involved a rich guy, Frank’s secretary called me on the phone and said he wanted to see me.

I was not raised around money —brother, sister, that’s an understatement — and although I’ve met a few rich people I like, Frank Jr. foremost among them, I’m not comfortable around those kind of people. I prefer the company of “mortgage payers,” the term one multimillionaire I interviewed used to describe me and my kind.

The fact is, I guess, I’m biased against rich people.

Anyway, I went down to the second floor, to Frank’s office. We talked about a story I was working and I told him,  “This guy is as rich as Midas and I never saw a rich guy you could trust as far as you could throw him.”

Those words were not out of my mouth before I realize that was not the smartest thing to say to a man whose family owned newspapers worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Frank didn’t even blink.

Coming Friday: You May Find This Odd