Tag: The News & Observer

Miss Mattie

It rarely snows in my neck of the woods, in Knightdale, N.C., but when it does it reminds me of Miss Mattie, an old lady who worked where I worked, at The News & Observer in Raleigh.

When a big snow or ice storm was forecast, The N&O would rent hotel rooms near the paper for reporters and editors, so we could walk to work the next morning.  You could go home but if you did you darn well better be able to get back to work the next day. I always stayed in town.

Occasionally a snow or ice storm slipped up on us and when that happened you were still expected to get to work — we published 365 days a year.

Miss Mattie was way too old to make it to work on her own so The N&O would send two men in a four-wheel drive vehicle to pick her up , literally, and bring her to work.

I don’t know what her regular job was but on snow days she answered the phone and took messages from employees who called to say that they were not coming, that the roads around their houses were impassable.

One day I had to make that call.

The hill, on a warm, snow-free day.
The hill, on a warm, snow-free day.

There’s only one way out of my neighborhood, up a hill at the end of my street. And when there’s snow and ice you can’t drive up that hill.  That’s all there is to it.  Not even in a four-wheel drive.

Miss Mattie answered the phone. Her voice sounded like she looked, old. I told her there was no way my car was going up that hill.  And eight miles was too far to walk.  

She replied in her creaky, old voice, “That’s OK, Pat. I understand. I’ll tell them the weather too bad for you to come in today.”

I knew exactly why they had assigned an old lady to take messages from people who couldn’t get there.  I also knew how she got to work on snow days.  But she was pushing 80 and however she got there, she was at work.    

“No, wait.  Wait, Miss Mattie,” I said.  “Tell ’em I’m coming, just tell ’em I’ll be late.”

Postscript: I was walking down the shoulder of U.S. 64, toward Raleigh, when a kindhearted soul stopped and gave me a ride into town.

NOTE: The N&O published every day no matter what.  In March 1980, when our presses were heavily damaged in a fire, we published. Rival newspapers came to our aid. The Durham Herald printed our paper that first day and The Fayetteville Observer printed it the next two days, until we could get four of our presses back on line begin limping along on our own.

Coming Monday: The Source Of The Problem

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!