Tag: The Charlotte News

This Is Why I Don’t Like You

Early in my newspaper career, when I was fresh out of college, I worked side by side with a reporter in his mid-30’s who just plain old didn’t like me. He covered Charlotte city government; I had the county government beat. Our tiny office, which we shared with the cop shop reporter, was in the basement of City Hall in Charlotte.

I liked him OK, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with me.  So I stopped speaking, too.  Our desks weren’t more than six feet apart but sometimes we’d go all day without saying a word to each other.

Finally, after deadline one afternoon, I asked him why he disliked me.  And he told me.

“It’s just your whole attitude,” he said. “You remind me of the way I used to be when I was your age. You think you’re going to be somebody in this business, you think you’re going to be publisher of The New York Times.”

He said he had finally realized that he was never going anywhere, that he would always be what he was, a beat reporter.

“You’re not going anywhere either, but you don’t know that yet,” he said. “And it irritates me.”

Postscript: A year or two later he was promoted to city editor of The Charlotte News.  After that he wrote a political column published in small newspapers across the state. And then he left the newspaper business, at age 48, to become an antique dealer.

Coming Friday: Did We Talk Funny?

Living Life NOW

Henry Woodhead, my partner on three canoe trips down the section three of the Chattooga River, told me this story, about the night he and his wife sat around talking about how much they would like to go to Mexico, a trip that seemed out of the question.

For one thing, they didn’t have any money.  For another they had a small baby.  And besides that, he was a school teacher with a contract to teach a full year.  Impossible!

Lets go!
Lets go!

But the more they talked the more they wanted to go until, by golly, they decided they would go to Mexico, the next day.

He and his wife solved the money problem by selling their refrigerator, that night, to a friend for $75.

Henry quit his job, just called up his principal on the telephone and resigned. The principal told him that if he went off to Mexico, if he didn’t honor his contract, he’d never teach again anywhere. But that didn’t matter to Henry, at least, not right then.

This is what their VW bus looked like.
This is a VW bus like Henry’s.

Next morning they drove to South Carolina, left their child with his wife’s mother, and lit out for Mexico.  Henry told me they spent two lovely weeks there. They slept in their VW bus, used their cash to buy food, and paid for gas with a credit card. When they were almost out of money they headed back to South Carolina, picked up their child, and return to their apartment in Gastonia, N.C.

When Henry got back home he didn’t have a job or money.  Or a refrigerator.

He couldn’t teach any more so he started looking for other work and that’s how he got to be a newspaperman, out of desperation. The Gastonia Gazette, hired him to write features — it turned out that Henry had a way with words, a gift.

For weeks, until Henry and his wife could save up enough to buy another refrigerator, he told me he went to the ice house every couple of days and bought a block of ice for their ice chest, to keep the baby’s milk cool.

After working a while at The Gazette he got a better job writing features for The Charlotte News, where I met him.  And then onward and upward, to a reporting job in the Big City, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Henry and his wife had lived life now, and had come out smelling like a rose.

Coming Monday: The Pipe