Tag: The Charlotte News

Lunch Is On Me

During the late 1960’s, when I worked for The Charlotte News, I thought seriously about leaving the craft for a higher paying job. Comparatively speaking I was well paid, but it just wasn’t enough. My wife, Donna, and I had three children, we were buying a new house and car and I had to work three nights a week and all day Saturday at a second job to make ends meet.

Once I actually accepted a job covering news for WAYS radio, and then backed out when The News made me a good counter offer.

I interviewed for a job as sports information director at Davidson College. I had worked three years in UNC’s sports information office when I was a student there and I thought I was well qualified. But I didn’t like them very much and, apparently, they didn’t didn’t like me either. Davidson did not offer me the job.

And once I went to lunch with a flack for Duke Power Co. who was trying to recruit me to work in “public relations” at Duke.  I finally came to my senses and told him, “No, thank you.”

But lunch was interesting.

The Duke fellow took me to a Chinese place. He was a former sports writer for The Charlotte Observer so conversation was easy, we had a lot in common.

chinese foodThe food was excellent and so was the service. At one point, the owner came by to say hello to the Duke Power man. It was pretty obvious that he was a regular and that the two men were friends.

When it came time to pay the bill the owner would not allow my host to pay.  He held his hands up, palms out, as if he was going to push him away. No, no, he said.

When we got in the Duke Power man’s car and he headed back to my newspaper, to take me back to work, I asked why, why had the owner refused payment?

This is what the Duke guy told me:

The restaurant owner liked to gamble and my host, who has been a sports writer remember, was able to give him a leg up, a big advantage.

[You do know, of course, that this happened long before the Internet and the age of instantaneous information.]

The restaurant owner would call The Charlotte Observer’s sports department and ask my host for the scores of baseball games that had just started, looking for a game that wasn’t on the radio where one of the teams had taken a big lead in the first inning. Inning by inning results of all the games came in on the sports department’s teletype machine so that information was readily available to sports writers.

When the restaurant owner found a game where the score was already lopsided he would place a bet on the team with the big lead.

Several years had passed but restaurant guy still remembered those money making favors fondly and told the former sports writer, in effect, “Lunch is on me.”

Coming Friday: The Best Answer

The Hard [But Good] Lesson

I thought for a while there I was going to be fired.

In August 1960, barely two months into my newspaper career, I wrote what newspaper people call a “color” story on a Southeastern Regional Babe Ruth tournament game – Ocala, Florida vs. Charlotte, North Carolina. The game had ended with a controversial strike three call against a Florida player and the home team won, 3-2.

The coach of the visiting team was pretty mad. He told me that the home plate umpire was a “blind man” who had committed “highway robbery.”

“You tell Charlotte,” the Florida coach said, “to keep that umpire and they’ll win the World Series.”

I wrote a story for The Charlotte News in which I quoted the Florida coach and identified the blind robber as Ronald Flie.   But, it turned out, Mr. Flie wasn’t a blind robber. The umpire behind the plate that day was another man named Bob Moore.

Yow!

Umpires are called bad names all the time but not like that, not when they weren’t even in the game.

* * *

The retraction.
The retraction.

My boss, Sports Editor Bob Quincy, was out town so, next day, the other guys had to make the call. They decided to retract the story, which is not the same thing as a “correction.”  I think a retraction was overboard but, whatever.   Let’s just say they erred on the side of caution.

The day after that Quincy The Terrible  came back and, after the first edition deadline, he called everyone over to his desk.  He was steaming.

Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That's "Hoss" Harris on the right.
Bob Myers, sports writer at The News, my first mentor. That’s “Hoss” Harris on the right.

The error was mine and mine alone, but Quincy did not say one word to me.  I guess I was just too far down on the totem pole for him to mess with.   Instead, he went after Bob Myers, who had covered the game and who, Quincy said, should have kept me out of trouble.

How could Myers have done that?  I have no idea.

Bob Quincy
Bob Quincy

Quincy didn’t like that retraction either.  He said they should have corrected my error in the next day’s tournament story and moved on.  That, in my opinion, would have been too little — we should have just run a correction.

That error turned out to be one of those blessings in disguise — I never forgot that sick feeling it gave me. Over time, especially when I began doing investigative work and dinging people on a regular basis, I became a fanatic about accuracy. I am not saying I never made another mistake.  I did.  But not often.

NOTE:  I was so lucky to have started out on the sports desk of The Charlotte News. It was a small staff, only five guys, but they were all good ones. Three of them were later inducted into what is known now as the N.C. Media and Journalism Hall of Fame: Max Muhleman, Ronald Green Sr. and Quincy, posthumously in 2005.   How I wish Bob had lived — he and I were inducted on the same night.

Coming Friday: Studying for the GED