Category: Newspapering

Strange But True – Parts I & 2

No. 1

My Dad gave me this tip in June 1966, a few days after I graduated from UNC and went to work fulltime at The Charlotte News, about a man who could stir molten aluminum with his finger.  It was the only tip he ever gave me, but it was a good one.

In case you’re wondering, the melting point of aluminum is 1,221 degrees Fahrenheit.

Aluminum melting furnace
Aluminum melting furnace

J.C. Champion was grey-headed at 49 with the calloused hands of a man who had worked in a foundry all of his life.  He told me that his Dad, who had also been an foundry worker, taught him how to play with liquid fire when he was 16.

Champ
Champ

“There really ain’t nothing to it,” Champion said.  “All it takes is nerve.  It don’t burn any.  Only about as much as running your finger through a pot of boiling water.”

While I watched, and a News photographer took pictures, Champion stuck his finger in a pot of molten aluminum and pulled it a half a turn, several times, until a little whirlpool of liquid aluminum appeared in the middle.

“If you was to do it just one time,” he said, “you wouldn’t even notice it.  Now, a course, you do it over and over  — it’ll give you a mild sunburn.”

Afterward, was his finger OK, in other words, did he still have it?

It was; he did.

I examined his right forefinger, the one he had used to stir the aluminum.  It was slick and shiny and warm and a little browner than the others, but none the worse for wear.

NOTE: After I examined his finger Champion decided to show off a little.  He walked over to where iron was being poured into a mold, studied it to see if if was hot enough, and then began knocking that stream of molten iron all over the floor with his finger.

“You got to be careful it’s hot enough,” he said. “You have to be sure it won’t stop moving and set up on you.”

Iron, by the way, melts at 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit.

* * *

No. 2

Raleigh’s police chief occasionally flew a psychic into town, at public expense, to consult on major unsolved murder and missing-person cases.

I kid you not.

A psychic, just to refresh your memory, is someone who is “sensitive to nonphysical or supernatural forces and influences; marked by extraordinary or mysterious sensitivity, perception, or understanding,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,

The chief was also experimenting with birthday-based biorhythms, which he said sometimes predetermine a person’s good and bad days in cycles counted from the day of birth. The idea, he said, was to bring suspects in for questioning when they were at the “low point” of their cycle and have them interrogated by a detective who was at the “high point ” of his or her cycle.

I know. It sounds wacky because it is wacky.

Coming Friday: The Bachelor

 

Hexed!

NOTE: This is the three year anniversary of The Final Edition. And to celebrate, I’ve saved one of my favorite stories for today.

*  *  *

I was minding my own business when the City Editor of The News & Observer told me to go over to N.C. State University and interview a member of the faculty who claimed to be a witch.

You heard me right.

That’s one of things I liked best about newspapering — you just never knew what was going to happen next.

I was an investigative reporter, I rarely covered breaking news and almost never wrote a feature.  But when a story  involved someone who might be a little bit crazy I sometimes drew the short straw.

Witches, by Hans baldung, 1508
The Witches Sabbath, by Hans Baldung Grien, 1510.

The stringer who gave us the tip, an N.C. State student, also gave us a picture of this guy with two students from Meredith College, then an all-female college a mile or two from State, who said they were witches, too.

A witch, by the way, is usually a female but can be a male.  

I went to the fellow’s office and got right to the point: Are you a witch?  I asked.  He said he wouldn’t talk to me until I had done my homework, until I had read “The Exorcist,” a best seller in the early 1970’s.  The book jacket said something like, “Read this book with all of the lights on in your house — and all the lights on in your mind.”

It was scary, even with the lights on.

I stayed up half the night, finished, and went back to see him the next day.  But he wimped out, neither admitting nor denying that he was a witch. 

“The jury is still out,” he said.

He wouldn’t give me the names of the two Meredith College students in the photo with him, young women who had said they were witches too, according to our stringer.   So I drove over to Meredith and started showing the picture around.

“Do you know either of these students?” I asked.  It wasn’t long before I had a name and a few minutes later we were face to face, in the living room of her dorm.

“Are you a witch?” I asked her.

“Shssss, not so loud. I’m a white witch,” she said, a “good” witch. She said she didn’t want black witches to find out about her.

I interviewed a number of people, including a psychologist at Central Prison, a maximum security prison in Raleigh, who told me, yes indeed, some inmates claim that the devil made them do it.

And then I wrote the story, a light feature about witches, for the Sunday paper.

It was Friday, the story had been set in type and galley proofs had been pulled so the Sunday Editor could take a final look, when my phone rang. It was the faculty member at N.C State who wasn’t sure whether or not he was a witch.

He had learned that I had talked with one of the Meredith women and he was angry. He wanted me to kill the story.  He said he had told me not to try to talk to them and I had disobeyed.

I explained that I didn’t work for him. Moreover, he hadn’t give me the picture or identified either student. I had broken no confidences. If he wanted the story killed he was going to have to talk to Claude Sitton, The N&O’s executive editor, not that it would do him any good.

Would you like his telephone number? I asked.

Claude Sitton: Hexed
Claude Sitton, in his office.

Sitton, a  widely respected newspaperman who had covered the civil rights movement in the South for The New York Times earlier in his career, called me into his office later that same day. He wanted to talk about the witch story, which surprised me.

Normally he wouldn’t concern himself with a feature.  Editing stories like that was the responsibility of editors way on down the food chain. But I could see from notes he had written on the galley proof laying on his desk that he had a lot of questions.   The first two or three didn’t amount to much but then he asked:  “How many witches are there in North Carolina?”

Huh? Say again?

“I have no idea,” I said.

How could I know?  I  told him there was no Witches Association in North Carolina.  And, last time I checked, the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t count witches.

I ask him, “Do you know where I can find out how many witches there are in North Carolina?”  He didn’t.

But he said if I couldn’t answer that question the witch story was dead.

Claude did not seem to grasp that he had demanded the impossible. No one, no one in this world, could tell him how many witches there were in North Carolina.

“Well, OK, that’s it,” he said. “What’s next?” or words to that effect. And just that quickly the witch story I had spent several days reporting and writing was history, dead.

Now let me tell you the real story, and it didn’t get in the paper either: That N.C. State witch hexed Claude Sitton and made him kill my story.  No other explanation makes sense.

Coming Friday: Broken!