Category: Newspapering

The Rabbit Doctor

After Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant in December 1967 I was assigned by my newspaper to do a Q. and A. with Charlotte’s foremost cardiologist, Dr. Francis Robicsek.

When would he and his colleagues begin doing heart transplants?

For a while it didn’t look like I would get to pose a single question because Dr. Robicsek imposed an unacceptable condition: He would not agree to an interview unless he was allowed to review the Q. and A. before publication, and make changes.

I said no to that demand, and he said no to the interview.

Dr. Francis Robicsek
Dr. Francis Robicsek

But the newspaper I worked for then, The Charlotte News, said yes. We wouldn’t be giving up editorial control over a story, the editor said. He said Dr. Robicsek  would just be editing his own words, his tape recorded answers.

I didn’t like that, but I wasn’t in charge.

When I went back to Dr. Robicsek to tell him the newspaper had caved [Oh, I know. I didn’t use that exact word. But that’s what The News did.] he imposed a second condition: he wanted control over the headline, too. No paper worth a flip would agree to such a thing but Dr. Robicsek was adamant.

I ask him why.  This is what he told me:

“A friend of mine, a doctor, experimented for years on rabbits and made some great discovery — I forget what it was,” Robicsek said in a heavy foreign accent. He had fled from Hungry in 1956, after Hungry’s unsuccessful revolt against the Soviet Union. “The local newspaper interviewed him and took his picture in a room full of rabbits. Rabbits all around. He was smart, he make them show him the story before they printed it. But he forgot about the headline.”

Bugs“Do you know what the headline said?” Dr. Robicsek asked. “The headline said, ‘What’s Up, Doc?'”

Postscript: The News agreed to the headline condition, too. For what it’s worth, Dr. Robicsek made no changes in the Q. and A. or the headline.

Coming Friday: A Diet That Works

The Good Fairy – Part 2 of 2

The trash can in the third floor men’s room in Charlotte’s city hall was a gold mine.

All sorts of documents were tossed into that can, 0ld records, current records too, slightly delayed. The typewriters used by the secretaries for the mayor and the city manger had once-through carbons and, every few days, they changed the carbon and threw the old one away. You could hold them up the a light and read every word they had typed.

Try to imagine Christmas coming twice a week. That’s the way it was for the fulltime city hall reporter, and me, too, when I filled in for him.

To help protect this source from discovery we called it “The Good Fairy.”    We never talked about where those documents came from –the less said the better– we’d just say they were a gift from the Good Fairy.

One afternoon she smiled on me. In the trash can in the men’s room I found a copy of the city’s plan to break the next garbage strike. That’s a 1A lead.  The problem was, publishing a story about how the city planned to break a strike might precipitate a strike — which we did not want to do. We wanted to cover news, not make it.

My editor, Perry Morgan, had reservations about publishing it, but he left the call up to me. I thought about it and decided to try to have my cake and eat it too.

Bill Veeder was the city manager back then.  By all accounts, he did an excellent job.  But for some reason I never got along with him; he didn’t like me, from the very beginning.

The first time he laid eyes on me — I was fresh out of college and had just gone to work in the “foreign office” in the basement of City Hall, covering county government — he stood in front my desk and told another reporter, “This one’s not going to make it,” meaning me.

Two years later when I switched beats and started covering city hall I did everything I could to turn him around, to no avail. I even tried being extra nice, which was not exactly my nature.

And now I had him in a vice.

I telephoned him and I said, “Bill, I have a copy of your plan to break the next garbage strike. I’m going to put it in the paper this afternoon. Do you have any comment?”

And he said, “No, you don’t.”

And I said, “Oh, yes, I do, Bill. Would you like me to read it to you?”

I didn’t have to read long before he stopped me and asked — his tone was low and ugly — “What do you want?”

Now we’re getting down to business. That mean man was going to have to deal and I must tell you — I loved it.

There were two 1A stories on the horizon that I wanted, and I wanted him to see to it that I got both them first — before any of my competition. Give me those two stories, I told him, and I won’t write about the strike breaking plan until you actually have a strike.

He agreed, and he delivered. Twice in the next couple of weeks his secretary came down to the foreign office, handed me a brown envelope and, “Mr. Veeder said this is for you.”

It was delicious.

Postscript:  The Good Fairy was finally exposed by an unhappy reporter who had been fired. But she sure was good to us while she lasted.

Coming Monday: “Emergency Landing!”