Tag: The News & Observer

Not A Smart Thing To Say

NOTE: For the record, today’s post is #300.

Occasionally Frank Daniels Jr., the publisher of The News & Observer for most of my time there, would stop me on the back steps of The N&O and ask me about a story I was working, or had worked. A few times, not many, he sent for me to come to his office.

He never gave me instructions, do this, don’t do that, I guess he just wanted in on the news.  And, after all, it was his newspaper.

Frank Daniels Jr.
Frank Daniels Jr.

On one  occasion, I don’t remember what the story was about but I clearly remember that it involved a rich guy, Frank’s secretary called me on the phone and said he wanted to see me.

I was not raised around money —brother, sister, that’s an understatement — and although I’ve met a few rich people I like, Frank Jr. foremost among them, I’m not comfortable around those kind of people. I prefer the company of “mortgage payers,” the term one multimillionaire I interviewed used to describe me and my kind.

The fact is, I guess, I’m biased against rich people.

Anyway, I went down to the second floor, to Frank’s office. We talked about a story I was working and I told him,  “This guy is as rich as Midas and I never saw a rich guy you could trust as far as you could throw him.”

Those words were not out of my mouth before I realize that was not the smartest thing to say to a man whose family owned newspapers worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Frank didn’t even blink.

Coming Friday: You May Find This Odd

The Fatal Surprise

In the old days our newsroom bulletin board was sometimes — OK, a lot of times– a better read than our newspaper.  Some reporters and columnists had a wicked sense of humor that was not allowed, for good reason, to show up in the paper.

Take this accident story, for example.

Park Central Hotel
Park Central Hotel

The News &  Observer was located at 215 S. McDowell St. in Raleigh when I went to work there in 1971.  Next door there was a dilapidated old hotel called Park Central, built in 1893.  The N&O bought it in 1975 and tore it down the next year.  Obviously, Raleigh needed another parking lot more than it needed a historic old hotel with a turret.

Some of the debris was thrown down chutes into trucks parked below. Some was hauled out in wheelbarrows, taken down to the first floor in an antique elevator. It was the kind of elevator I haven’t seen for decades, the kind with narrow, head-wide windows in the elevator doors.  One window had been smashed.

When a worker was accidentally killed on the job N&O reporter Bob Lynch wrote a story about his death for the newspaper.   N&O columnist Jack Aulis also wrote three graphs and thumb tacked his story to the bulletin board in the newsroom.

I’m pretty sure no one remembers Bob’s story but anyone who saw it remembers Jack’s. Here’s what he wrote, more or less:

“A worker hauling debris out of the Park Central Hotel Tuesday stuck his head though a broken window in the elevator door to see if the elevator was coming.”

“It was.”

“He was 55.”

NOTE:  That accident ranks right up there with a veteran sky-diver –he had more than 800 jumps –who was killed near Raleigh when he forgot to put on a parachute.  He had been filming another jumper and he continued to film on the way down, 10,500 feet.    His video equipment and battery were in a satchel strapped to his back, an FAA spokesman said, and he may have mistaken the weight and feel of the satchel for a parachute.  A police officer, who saw the video the dead man made as he fell, said his last words sounded like: “Oh, no!”

Coming Friday: The Sweat Shop