Tag: Red Man

You Need To Check My Contract

I’d been working at The News & Observer for at least 10 years when a new assistant managing editor told me I had to quit spitting tobacco juice in newsroom trash cans. That was a nasty habit, he said. The cleaning crew didn’t like it and ought not have to put up with it.

That bulge in my face is not bubble gum.
That bulge was Red Man.

Oh, sure, I know, he was right.  And I knew that then.  But I had issues with him so I told him he needed to check my employment contract — I had permission from the executive editor.

I didn’t actually have a contract, not a written one anyway. But I did have a verbal agreement that gave me the right to spit in any trash can in the newsroom –mine, yours, anybody’s.

When Executive Editor Claude Sitton offered me a job in 1971 I told him I chewed tobacco, Red Man mostly, and I asked him, “If I come to work here can I spit in the trash cans?”

He said yes. 

I don’t know if that AME talked to Sitton, I guess he did because I didn’t hear any more about it. I did notice, however, that within a day or two the trash cans in the newsroom had plastic bag liners.

Coming Monday: The Football Coach Made More Than Dean

You Did WHAT?

Theresa Saunders, one of my son Mark’s sisters-in-law, was an operating room nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C.  One day when she was down here visiting we got to talking and I asked her how work was going. She told me she had just helped fillet a man’s face.

The man had cancer.

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Theresa Saunders

She said the surgeon cut down the middle of his face, peeled half of it off and laid it over on his ear.  Then he took out some teeth and part of his jaw, wired him back together best he could, and sewed him up.

“How often do you do an operation like that,” I asked.

“Oh, about once a week,” she said. “There are a lot of tobacco chewers in the mountains.”

Postscript: I had chewed tobacco for years, “Red Man,” mostly.  Or “Apple.” I quit that day.

Coming Monday: Quincy The Terrible – Part 1