Some of My Background

I got my first glimpse of the world through the windows of Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sometime after midday, I’m told. At the same time, I probably breathed in the sweet, musky smell of cured tobacco, which still may pervade that R.J. Reynolds empire.

I grew up in Madison, North Carolina, where my parents ran a weekly newspaper, called The Messenger. At one time it carried this message above the folio line. “The home paper of Western Rockingham and Eastern Stokes.” Those were counties. My dad was the editor, ad salesman, reporter, and pressman. He also delivered the newspaper to stores in the two-county area for counter sales. My mother was the business manager, ad saleswoman, reporter and society editor, and she also helped deliver the newspaper to strategic points. At the time, both of my uncles were running weekly newspapers in southwest Virginia, a place I had little use for as a kid because it always seemed to rain there.

I became a “printer’s devil” a day or two a week (Actually, I begged to do it.), starting about age 12. I liked the title, particularly the devil part. Remember, this was a Protestant-bound society that talked a lot about the devil and I was fascinated. As a printers’ devil, one of my main concerns was the “hell box,” a metal box that contained lead lines of body type and Ludlow-generated headline type thrown there by printers from “stones” (tables) after pages had been broken down following press runs. This was the era of hot type.

So I had devil in my title and hell in my hands. I was the envy of my friends. They couldn’t say hell in polite company, but I could let her rip in the back shop. “Hell, I’d say, does that hell box need emptying? Sometimes I’d lead or follow this question with an enthusiastic “Hell fire!” Then I’d get a long look from my mother. Remember, my friends couldn’t get away with this around adults.

Part of my job was to dump the lead from the hell box into a huge caldron, which was much like an old-fashioned outdoor stew pot that you see in antique shops. Then I’d build a wood fire under it until the lead turned to molten liquid. I particularly liked this part of the job, too. It gave understanding to pyromania. I would temper the molten mass with something called flux, then pour it into iron forms for reuse in a Linotype machine or a Ludlow. I also occasionally printed letterheads or bill blanks, using a mid-size Chandler Price job press that my father allowed me to assemble when it arrived from the factory. It looked something like this press

From the Excelsior Press Home page

This wasn’t child labor abuse. Printers were scarce. World War II was just over and many were still in Europe or the Pacific. Besides, I liked being around the slightly sweet, oily smell of lead, ink and the heavy machinery used in that era. I particularly liked the Linotype machine, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention, which revolutionized the speed of production in the last part of the 19th century. The Linotype may have been the most important advancement between Gutenberg and his interchangeable type in the 15th century and computer technology in the second half of the 20th century. It would line up matrices, in a form when the typewriter-like keybord was worked, then pour molten lead in, and in no time produce a line of type. Then it would take the matrices back to their magazine storage compartments at the top of the machine to await recall.

I’m told the linotype is one of the most intricate and exacting pieces of purely mechanical machinery ever put together. That’s not surprising. Mergenthaler has been trained as a watchmaker and locksmith before he left Germany for the United States. For more pictures on the linotype see click here.

When I wasn’t a printer’s devil, I was delivering the Greensboro Daily News (Now the Greensboro News-Record) or the Winston-Salem Journal door-to-door. This was not lucrative work but informative. I found, for example, that I would never be a businessman. I repeatedly spent my profits before I earned them.

I decided to look at literature at Guilford College, but first I took a three-year hiatus to explore the western Pacific with the U.S. Navy. At college, I majored in English and wrote for the literary magazine. Four years flew by and suddenly I had a B.A. and no more GI Bill. I had to go to work. The Greensboro Daily News hired me two hours after I graduated, and I worked as a police reporter initially and then as a copy editor.

During the next 23 years, I worked on metropolitan dailies around the country and abroad before going to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 45. The newspapers I worked for include the Greensboro Daily News (2 years as police reporter and copy editor), The Idaho Daily Statesman (8 months as a reporter) the Beaumont Enterprise (2 years as a copy editor, copy editor supervisor and assistant news editor), The New Orleans States-Item (5 years as copy editor, copy editor supervisor and assistant news editor) and Stars and Stripes in Europe (14 years as copy editor, copy editor supervisor, assistant news editor, general assignment reporter, education reporter, feature writer, and special projects reporter.)

At UNC, teaching hooked me in my first class as a teaching assistant. This led me eventually to the University of Richmond in 1983. The courses I teach or have taught at UR include news media and society, news writing,copy editing, computer-assisted reporting, feature writing, graphics and design, and literary journalism.

My hobbies fall into several categories. Some feed the mind, some the soul, some the spirit, some the body, and some a combination of these. (Others have said they feed my bent for self-destruction.) My passion for literature and poetry continues. I am a founding member and first president of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, a non-profit trust dedicated to helping developing writers.

When I am not teaching, traveling, exercising, collecting antique wood-working tools, cycling or mountain hiking, I hide out with a book and a pencil. I cannot read without a pencil, which means no one ever wants a book after I get through with it. I rarely borrow books.

I have run 14 marathons (Athens twice, Paris once). My wife and have hiked the length of the John Muir Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada, sections of the Appalachian Trail and the Alps in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.

I play at golf for several years but gave it up in frustration. I owned a 1975 BMW 90/6  motorcycle  for 10 years. Every biker knows that the prospect of a crash is always there. When I saw a  particularly bad one, I figured it was time to return to four wheels.

In the 1980s, I competed often in triathlons, and twice completed the 103-mile bike race from Spartenburg, S.C., to the top of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the eastern United States. (After a couple of these, I began to return to reasonable sanity.) Our most memorable mountain hike in recent years was reaching the top of the Triglav, Slovenia’s highest mountain, in the summer of 1994. In 2010 We returned to the Sierra Nevada join California to hike the  Sierra cabin loop.

I have had the same wife for 53 years who somehow has managed to put up with my rather undisciplined shotgun approach to life. I have two grown sons and two grown daughters, and nine grandchilddren. I have maintained a friendship with them all.. (Updated May 6, 2016.)