Category: Newspapering

The Lesson

Bob Quincy, my boss at The Charlotte News where I worked the summer after I graduated high school in 1960, taught me my first newspaper lesson.

Bob Quincy
Bob Quincy

Quincy said he was writing a column on deadline when he typed an offensive word to describe someone with a cleft lip. His gut said STOP but he didn’t.  He kept typing, writing as fast as he could, trying to make deadline. Already, he said, his mind was composing the next sentence, and the next. But his gut still said STOP.  Something is wrong.  Find it.  Fix it.

But he didn’t.

After the paper came out that afternoon, Quincy said, he got a telephone call from a father whose daughter was born with a cleft lip. He told Quincy how much the word he wrote in his column had hurt and he asked, “Why did you do that to my daughter?”

The lesson?

Your gut is smarter than your brain, Quincy told me. Ignore it at your peril.

NOTE:  Bob was right.  I don’t know how, but  your gut sees things, knows things, and it will try to warn you:  “Not that way.  This way.”

Coming Friday: A Man And A Half

 

 

“All Aboard!”

I was walking through the woods, following McAlpine Creek south of Charlotte, when two men challenged me. One was older, one a good bit younger, in his 20’s.

What was I doing there, they wanted to know.

I wanted to tell them that what I was doing was none of their business but that didn’t seem like a very good idea at the time. They were serious.

So I introduced myself, told them I was a newspaperman working on a story — I was looking for polluters.

The men, who turned out to be father and son, said they thought I might be a burglar sneaking up on their house. We have a lot of trains, they volunteered.  I hadn’t noticed before but, through the trees, I could see part of a house.

I’m no train guy but I am curious about stuff so I asked to see their collection. They said OK and we walked through the woods to their house, which could have kindly been called “modest.” It was not big, not new, just a little two-bedroom frame house beside a  gravel road.

But inside, Oh my word!

It wasn't this fancy but it was fancy enough.
It wasn’t this fancy but it was fancy enough.

There were trains running around on tables, on the floors, on shelves along the walls. There was a train pretty much everywhere they could put a train.  There were railroad bridges, switching yards, and tiny towns with streets and businesses and train stations and figures of little people waiting to board.    There were six-inch long “logs” stacked beside the tracks, and piles of coal, and rows of little cars all ready to be hauled somewhere.

Who would have guessed? Inside a dinky little house in a woods in the middle of nowhere was a fantasy world for children of all ages.

Coming Friday: Parenting Advice: Pay Attention