The first series I wrote after I became a full-time investigative reporter, in 1969, was successful. It was called “A Sewer Named Sugar” and it exposed polluters of a creek that ran though the most popular park in Charlotte and then south, through its wealthiest neighborhoods.
The Sugar Creek series won some prizes, including the top prize for Public Service from N.C. Press Association, and it got me my first invitation to speak about my work, at what was then known as Queens College.
I didn’t prepare a talk, no need to. It was just class of students and I knew that creek story pretty well — I had just finished reporting it. I’d wing it, answer a few questions, and go back to work.
Well, turns out, it wasn’t a just class of students, it was an auditorium full of students. It was a symposium, and I wasn’t the only speaker. I was just the only one who was not prepared.
I embarrassed myself. If someone had had a hook to pull me off the stage no doubt they would have used it. I was more than embarrassed, I was humiliated.
In the years that followed I got many more opportunities to talk about my work, at more than a dozen universities and a number of journalism conferences. Each and every time I was invited to speak I thought about that Queens College debacle. And I made up my mind –when I finished talking the worst thing anyone was ever going to say about me was this:
“Well, he won’t very good but he sure was prepared.”
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.
