Sharp-penned editors hang it up

A note from the Museum of the Albemarle up in Elizabeth City about a new exhibit on the late newspaper editor W.O. Saunders reminds me of the strong tradition of strong-voiced newspaper editors in this state -- and the recent retirement from the field, if that's the right phrase, of two strong and well-informed voices.
Those who surf the net when they can't pick up the Wilmington Morning Star or the Winston-Salem Journal have looked for the bylines of Wilmington's editorial page editor Chuck Riesz and Winston-Salem's editorial columnist Paul O'Connor for years.
They wrote in the tradition of Saunders, whose paper, The Independent, published from 1908 to 1937. Saunders delighted in writing about such characters as the anti-semitic evangelist Mordecai Ham, who he said was a "shrewd, vicious, and uncompromising demagogue, a careless mouth-artist, an irresponsible bunk-shooter and a stirrer up of strife, hatred and bigotry."
Riesz was the master of the verbal deadly dart, a sharp-tongued, wickedly funny wordsmith who reveled in puncturing the hot-air gasbags who sometimes thrive in Raleigh and pounding on those who threw away their public trust and abused power in recent years. In the economic reshuffling that has affected newspapers across the country, Riesz took a company buyout earlier this spring to step down and throttle back. I miss his zingers so well aimed at wayward pols.
My friend Paul O'Connor's columns about this old state have helped readers across North Carolina learn about goings-on in Raleigh for years, first with the Capitol Press Association's daily newspapers and more recently as a Raleigh-based editorial writer and columnist with the Journal. He didn't waste words with florid prose or gushy valentines, either. He was more likely to knock the scab off some dunce's foolishness and call it what it was. I imagine politicians looked at phone calls from Paul the same way they once looked at calls from CBS's Mike Wallace: Uh-oh. He has also taught journalism at UNC Chapel HIll, preparing the unwashed and unlettered for jobs in news writing and opining. O'Connor is giving up column-writing for the Journal but will still write unsigned editorials for the paper on a contract basis while continuing to illuminate the minds of the young in Chapel Hill. I'll miss his columns, but I'm betting the attentive reader will recognize his style in editorials about state issues.