Lessons from an old newspaperman

Ed Hodges' death the other day caught me by surprise. He was only 90 and I thought he was off somewhere getting ready to cover a presidential trip to Copenhagen or something. He had been covering life in North Carolina -- and for a time flying with presidents -- for so long for the Durham Herald-Sun that even his retirement years ago just didn't sound right.

A native of Tarboro, Ed was an exemplar of the citizen soldier. His college career in Chapel Hill was interrupted by World War II, where he wound up flying all kinds of airplanes including those giant cargo craft "over the hump" of the Himalaya ferrying supplies and equipment to Army Air Corp bases in China and keeping Chiang Kai-Shek in the war.

After the war Ed worked for a while at the Stanly Press in Albemarle before winding up at the Durham Morning Herald, later the Herald-Sun, as an editor and columnist. I ran into him in 1968 as a greenhorn intern at the Herald, trying to get some course credit and some experience covering the news. There were great mentors at the Herald: Cornelia Olive, now the mayor of Sanford, who taught me how to work sources and advised me always to get a decent dinner when you're on the night shift; Chuck Barbour, who taught me to always stay on the in with the outs when you're covering politics; and city editor Jim Carr, who taught me you need a good sense of humor in this business because nobody goes into it for the money. And there was Ed Hodges, whose graceful writing about ordinary folks as well as the high and mighty was a big draw for readers.

Ed taught me a couple other lessons. One of them was to be careful what you say because somebody might put it in the paper. The other was never waste an anecdote. Keep it with you because one day you might need it for a column.

I learned a lot that semester of spring 1968, but on my last night not much was happening. About an hour before my shift end, I rolled a piece of copy paper into an old typewriter and amused myself by dashing off a yarn about my "retirement" from the Herald at the ripe old age of 21. Written in classic AP style, the second graf noted that Betts had "distinguished himself in a brief career with the Herald by garnering four bylines, 2,346 rewrites and a short article about a student demonstration on the state page….. While he was on the Herald staff, Betts was paid nothing and produced a corresponding quantity and quality of work."

The piece went on to note that after graduation in May, Betts was moving on to his hometown Greensboro Daily News "where he will be paid something, according to an unreliable source. In all probability they will make a copy boy out of him, or give him a small paper route, depending on how well he scores on personnel tests." And so on. I figured once everybody got a two-second chuckle out of it, the piece would hit the trash can where it belonged.

A few weeks later I showed up for my first day the Greensboro paper, where I was to start as a copy editor for $115 a week plus a $4 a week differential for working the night shift. When I walked in the door, my new boss looked up and drawled, "Nice retirement column" as he pointed toward the bulletin board. There hung my retirement column -- reprinted in Ed Hodges' "Folks Around Here" column a few days earlier in the Herald.

I expect I blushed beet red. Fortunately, there were no openings for a copy boy or a carrier that day, so I got to keep the new job on the copy desk. But Ed Hodges' lesson stuck with me. Never waste an anecdote. He used my "retirement" column for a column of his own 41 years ago, and now, so have I.