My great grandfather, William Hume Stith, had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to work. Two years later, in 1900, he killed himself.
In those days newspapers didn’t publish obituaries. The only way dead people got their got their name in the paper was to get killed or die in some interesting way — or place.
His death became a “reader.”
Nowadays newspapers are always on the lookout for what newspaper men and women call a “Hey, Martha!” story, a story everyone will want to read, to put on the front page, especially on Sundays. Apparently newspapers then were no different. Those mean old newspapermen made my great-grandfather a “reader” on a Sunday.
The headline, on page one of the Richmond paper, said: “Found Dead In An Outhouse.”
I can’t say much about the poison ivy email someone gave me when I was a reporter because it was just too sexually explicit.
It was a written by a young woman who couldn’t type. Back in the old days that was newspaper shorthand for an unqualified female political hire. She had been given a job at the N.C. Department of Transportation and she was writing to another young woman, obviously a confidant.
She worked here, across the street from the capitol.
She told her friend how much she liked her job, how she didn’t have to do anything. And she talked about the state senator who got her the job, a senator she knew intimately. She said she had seen him a day or two before, on her way back from the beach.
The guy had a serious case of poison ivy, she said, and she described the infected area in great detail.
I knew my newspaper, The News & Observer, wasn’t about to publish her email, not in a million years, but maybe I could get the gist of the story in the paper. Anyway, it would be interesting to see what the DOT spokesman had to say.
When I showed him the email he looked distressed but he said nothing, not a word, regardless of how I phrased my questions. And then he asked, “Can we go off the record?”
I wasn’t going to get an on the record comment, so I agreed. I was as curious as you may be — did the senator know the cat was out of the bag?
He did indeed. The senator had heard about that email –bad news travels fast — and telephoned the DOT spokesman.
“He asked me if I had seen it, if I had a copy,” the spokesman said. “I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Read it to me.'”
[Yow!]
“And I did.”
And what was his reaction, I asked?
“The senator said, ‘Well, I guess that puts to rest rumors that I’m a homosexual.'”
Postscript: I did get a sanitized version of the story in the paper but, alas, not the senator’s reaction. That was off the record.
