When The Charlotte News retracted a story I wrote in May 1971 I resigned and went to work for The News & Observer where I remained until I retired in 2008, 37 years later. It didn’t seem so at the time but I realized later that this was the hand of God at work in my life. I know, I know. Many of you, maybe most of you, doubt that God does such things. But I urge you: Keep an open mind until you’ve finished reading this story.
* * *
I interned at The News in the summers of 1960, 1963, and 1965 and when I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I went to work there full time in the summer of 1966. They started me at $120 a week [$49,622 a year in 2018 dollars] and told me I had better turn to —i.e., hit the ball– because that was the most money they had ever paid anyone straight out of college.
It was a fun place to work and for the most of the next five years I was treated like the fair-haired boy. The N&O approached me twice during those years about coming to work in Raleigh, but I wasn’t interested. Why would I be?
**My wife, Donna, and I had three children and had bought a house not far from where we had gone to high school together.
**Both of us had family in Charlotte, parents, siblings.
**Donna was a Charlotte native; my family had moved to Charlotte when I was 11 years old. It was home.
**I was getting good assignments. My salary had increased 77 percent in four years and I was due another raise.
**Perry Morgan, the editor, had taken me under his wing and was teaching me the craft.
**When I needed more money I could work nights and weekends assembling partitions at my brother’s box shop, a part-time job I could not duplicate anywhere else.
No, forget Raleigh. I wasn’t going.
***
Tuesday, May 11, 1971
Our county government/courts reporter was out that day and I was assigned to fill in for him. It was beat I had covered and I knew the ropes.
The Charlotte Observer had burned us that morning and I was going to have to do the rewrite. The police had arrested a doctor over the weekend, during the wee hours of the morning, for failing to appear in court on a charge of operating a motorboat without identification numbers, The Observer story said.
But the doctor had paid his ticket and waived his court appearance, the story said. His arrest was a huge mistake.
I tracked down the Mecklenburg County Clerk of Superior Court to get an explanation, but he wouldn’t answer my questions. All I had was The Observer story and the clerk’s “No comment.” I knew how the system worked. I knew the clerk’s office was responsible, but I didn’t know how the mistake had happened.
So I wrote:
“Clerk of Superior Court R. Max Blackburn refused to explain today why a warrant was issued for a Charlotte doctor after the doctor waived his right to trial on a minor wildlife violation and paid a $15 fine.”
Late that afternoon, after my story was published, I received an alarming note from Morgan, the top editor at The News and my mentor. He said he was “amazed” at my story.
“A lede that implied without a shred of substantiation that Blackburn was at fault and was deliberately trying to take a public-be-damned attitude leaves the reader with the impression that we were taking a cheap shot,” he said.
“Were we?”
Continued tomorrow.
