Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Read online

  My father was right, of course. I didn’t get rich as a reporter and was always counting the days until that next paycheck arrived. I covered plenty of routine occurrences and some downright boring and seemingly pointless meetings. I also broke a lot of news and wrote about amazing, yet everyday people.

  “I’m so lucky to have had a job that I loved, and that was different every day,” my father told me recently when we were having lunch at The Raleigh Times bar and restaurant in downtown Raleigh. “The news changed every day and the readers loved me and hated me. It was never boring.”

  At the time, he was ninety-five years old and still writing a column after starting his newspaper career seventy years earlier. I was a reporter for a mere thirty years but am just as grateful for my time on the job.

  5. Don’t Move to Podunk

  In my first newspaper reporting job, I thought of those swim instructors who throw babies into a pool. The babies have to figure out how to swim to the side, all on their own.

  I soon became jealous of those babies.

  You see, they always had parents on sidelines who would jump in and save them if needed. And when the babies made it to the side of the pool, either on their own or with help, they were immediately wrapped in a warm, soft towel and their cushy life resumed. When I started working at the Greenville News, nobody was on the side of the pool making sure I didn’t drown. And there was no going back to the easy life I had before.

  The Band-Aid was ripped off three days after I graduated UNC and went from living in a house full of friends and taking a class or two between parties and strolls down Franklin Street to living alone in a duplex next to Sandy’s Hair Shack in Greer, S.C., which was pronounced “Grrrrr” by Sandy and other locals.

  While most of my friends were in corporate training programs in Charlotte, Atlanta, and New York or spending a gap year in London, I was covering three town councils, the school board, the water board, a power cooperative, and smalltime crime while living alone and working alone out of my little home on John Street. I took the entry-level job knowing I had to cover the three small towns of Duncan, Lyman, and Wellford between Greenville and Spartanburg. I was told it would be just a few months until I got a desk in the newsroom thirty miles away in Greenville; however, I wasn’t told that the other Greer reporter who also worked out of her house and actually got to cover Greer had been there eighteen months already and was still waiting for a spot in the newsroom. I’d move up to her job when she moved up to the newsroom. I also wasn’t told my old clunky computer would have a screen the size of an index card and my editor in Greenville didn’t want me to bother him unless I heard the words “rate increase” or couldn’t get all my requisite seventeen weekly stories in on time.

  My salary was $16,500. More than half of my paycheck went to Southern Bell because I regularly racked up $77 calls to London hearing my former college friends prattle on about crazy times on the Tube while chasing a party or falling asleep in the dressing room at Harrods, where they occasionally worked.

  I’d like to say the fact that I was hot in Wellford buoyed me, but it didn’t. Decades before Valerie Bertinelli and Betty White realized they were average in New York but Hot in Cleveland, I went from being an okay-looking coed in Chapel Hill to quite the head-turner in rural South Carolina. Honking horns from speeding pickups were customary as I took morning walks on country roads strangled in kudzu. Whistles in the Stop-N-Shop parking lot from pimply high school boys buying beer underage were a given. That first phone call from Tater, however, caught me off guard.

  “Hello,” I answered late one Saturday night.

  “Hey, girlie,” a male voice said.

  “Hey. Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who is me?”

  “Geez. It’s Tater,” he revealed, frustrated I didn’t instantly recognize the voice of someone I’d never once spoken to outside of the Wellford Police Department. Tater was the junior officer on the two-man force.

  “Oh. Okay. Is something happening? Is there a murder or a drug bust?”

  “Hell if I know. I’m not working. What are you doin’?”

  “I’m not working either,” I said.

  “So what are you doin’?”

  “Uh, nothing. What are you doing?”

  “Talkin’ to you.”

  “I guess you’re right about that. Did you have a good weekend?”

  “It ain’t over yet. You goin’ boggin’ with me tomorrow?”

  “What? What’s boggin’?”

  “Boggin.’ Mud boggin’. A bunch of us are taking our trucks and some girls. You goin’ with me?”

  “Thanks for asking, but I can’t.” I’d rather be sticking shards of glass under my fingernails while I spend $89 to call my friends and hear about their brilliant weekend.

  “Why not? You scared?”

  Yes, I am. I’ll admit I’m a little scared that a cop who I’ve heard use the n-word multiple times is calling me drunk at night and asking me out, and I’m saying no though I don’t want to alienate him because I rely on him for news tips.

  “I’m not scared of a little mud. I just have a lot of errands to do tomorrow, and then there’s church, you know, of course, and I’m having lunch with my friend’s parents in Greenville and then going to the library there. But thanks for asking.”

  “Library? Geez. Okay. Bye.”

  Tater never asked me out again. He also never made eye contact again or gave me any extra details beyond the scant information scrawled on police reports of DUIs, home invasions, and dog bites.

  But Doris more than compensated. She called herself a retired housewife because her husband had died a decade earlier and her only daughter was grown and out of the house. She knew everyone and everything, and everything that everyone was doing. Doris told me about the five-year-old boy in Duncan who begged his daddy to build him a little wooden church instead of a treehouse, and the ninety-year-old woman in Wellford who grew more azaleas in her sprawling yard than anyone else in Spartanburg County. She was the authority on who hated whom on the school board and which mayors skipped church. Thanks to Doris, I landed my only front-page story in sixteen months at the Greenville News.

  “Katherine, honey, you need to get over to the Lyman post office pronto,” she said when she called one day, waking me from my afternoon nap in my home office. “Somebody is mailing a live bird to California.”

  I wrote the epic story on my three-by-five-inch screen, inserting a couple of obligatory puns, courtesy of my father. It was “poultry in motion” that didn’t “ruffle any postal feathers” because mailing birds with proper ventilation was permitted.

  It was also Doris who told me about a divorced mom who was telling people she had to have sex with a local police officer to get out of a DUI.

  “My son has a lot of medical issues, and I can’t afford to lose my license or my job. It’s just me,” Lisa told me, off the record, at her apartment between rapid drags on her Marlboro Lights.

  It was a new police officer from the other side of the state who just started on the force. Lisa had had about three beers after work because her son was spending the night with a friend. She probably did swerve a little, so she begged the officer as soon as he approached her window with the long, silver flashlight not to give her a ticket, or could he at least make it a speeding ticket, because her son had special needs and she couldn’t lose her license.

  “He asked me if my back seat folded down. He said if I cooperated, I didn’t have to get any ticket at all,” Lisa told me without a tear as she reached for her fourth cigarette. She knew what he meant and begged him to just drop the ticket, but he said there was only one way out. So Lisa climbed in the back of her car and let it happen.

  Afterward, she told a few people and learned this officer was trying the same justice system with other women. She was mad, and that’s why she agreed to talk to me. I was mad, too, and convinced her that a story in the newspaper could get him fired and help her case i
f she pressed charges. Lisa agreed to tell me everything again on the record while I recorded her on tape.

  The next day, I asked the police chief for records of any complaints about his newest officer. He knew of none. I called my editor in Greenville, reminded him who I was, and actually got invited to come to the newspaper’s tall home office in downtown Greenville and play the tape for him and the managing editor. They were intrigued greatly, but said I needed to find another woman to go on the record saying the same thing happened to her before I could write anything. Late that afternoon Doris called to say the police officer had been fired.

  “No, no, no, he wasn’t fired,” the mayor told me with a chuckle. “He’s moving away. To Alabama or maybe Florida. He has a brother or a cousin down that way.”

  I requested copies of every traffic ticket the officer had written, hoping to find someone who opted for a ticket and fine over sex. I called about thirty women, most of whom didn’t want to talk to a reporter. A couple said the officer was kind of creepy, but they weren’t propositioned. Several hung up before I could even finish my awkward question.

  Lisa called me regularly for a while asking if there was going to be a story, but all I could do was ask how her son was doing and tell her I was sorry. I moved to Charlotte a few months later to take a job with the Charlotte Business Journal. I carefully packed the cassette tape with Lisa’s story in the top drawer of the wooden jewelry box my Aunt Zetta gave me for high school graduation.

  There was nothing I could do with it, but I couldn’t get rid of it.

  6. Don’t Talk to Strangers

  Somewhere along the way, between invites for mud bogging and corrupt police officers, I covered my first night of election returns. Even neophytes like me were assigned to the county courthouse where the vote tallies came in and were projected up on a big screen. It was very high tech, like in high school when teachers put math equations or anatomical drawings on an overhead projector.

  Reporters from local TV, the Greenville News, and our competition, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, gathered there until midnight to watch and report the returns. One of the few reporters I knew at the Greenville News introduced me to several reporters from the Spartanburg paper.

  “Where is your office?” one asked me.

  “In my living room,” I said. “I work out of my house.”

  “So, what’s happening on All My Children?” another reporter named Adam Smith asked.

  “Adam Chandler’s long-lost twin, Stuart, has been living in the attic for forty years, apparently,” I said and went on to share the perks of working from home in my pajamas since this was long before telecommuting was even a term, much less the norm.

  Later that night, Adam stood next to me as I deciphered the numbers on the big screen and scribbled them in my notebook. I’m lucky he was looking over my shoulder.

  “I think you are confusing the number of votes with the number of precincts because I’m pretty sure your candidate has more than twenty-eight votes this late in the night,” he told me.

  “I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. Thank you so much,” I blurted out. “Can you just write the whole story for me, and I’ll pay you my daily wage of $10?”

  We talked more when all the reporters went out to a bar after our stories were filed, and I learned Adam had been in Spartanburg about a year after working at a paper in Salisbury, a small town outside of Charlotte.

  He asked me out the next weekend, and it was then that I realized he had worked in Salisbury, Connecticut, not Salisbury, North Carolina. Adam was actually from New York City. I was on a date with real live Yankee!

  I learned his dad was from Mobile, Alabama, and his mom was from Chicago, so I reasoned I could make it through dessert. We made it longer, actually, and were married twenty-four years before an amicable divorce.

  But back when we started dating in South Carolina, three months in he invited me to go to New York to meet his parents. Well, that wasn’t the intent of the trip, but it was a side effect that had me all nervous. We were actually going there because his parents were friends with Hal Gurnee, who was the director of Late Night with David Letterman at the time. They had four tickets to see the show. Adam, having just come off a three-year relationship, told me he wasn’t ready to get serious and this was not the “meet the parents” weekend.

  I guessed his parents were wondering how their son had latched on so quickly to a girl in Greer, S.C., and I worried they preferred him with someone more worldly, who’d gone to a New England liberal arts school and could quote Proust instead of Margaret Mitchell. I was intimidated but determined to show I was smart and worldly, and my Southern charm was just the icing on the pound cake.

  “Now they do know I’m from Raleigh and not Greer, right?” I asked Adam the night before we left. “And did you tell them I lived in London one summer and that this isn’t my first time to New York and that I went to Washington, D.C., in fifth grade on a field trip for all the Safety Patrols?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. They are fully aware of how cosmopolitan you are,” he assured me. “But it really doesn’t matter. We’re only going to have dinner with them after the show. That’s it.”

  Adam flew direct from Spartanburg to LaGuardia. But I used a free ticket I’d earned on Northwest Airlines the year earlier after being bumped off a spring break flight home from Jamaica. So, I took the airline’s only path north: Spartanburg to Memphis to Detroit to Newark.

  Three-fourths of the way into my connect-the-dots odyssey, the flight from Detroit to Newark was delayed. I called Adam’s parents’ house and spoke to his mom for the first time ever to ask her to relay the info to Adam if he called since I was meeting him at a hotel in the city.

  “Okay. Well, thank you for letting us know and I’ll let him know,” she said. Was she annoyed? Did she like me? Did she hate me? I couldn’t tell.

  “So why are you going to Newark?” a cute guy sitting two seats away in the Detroit airport asked.

  “I’m going to New York to meet my boyfriend for the weekend,” I said, sounding so cosmopolitan it killed me.

  “Well, I’m going to New York to meet my girlfriend. So there,” he said, teasing me for no apparent reason. “I’m Marc Jaffe.”

  “I’m Katherine Snow. Are you from Detroit?”

  “God no. New York. But I’m in law school at the University of Chicago.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Raleigh, North Carolina.”

  “I know one person in the whole world from North Carolina. I worked with a girl named Charla Price last summer at an ad agency in New York.”

  “No way. She’s my cousin.”

  “You’re kidding. What is she doing now?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t really know her.”

  I went on to tell him about my father’s fourteen siblings and how there were a lot of relatives I didn’t know. Charla’s mom, Charlene, was actually my first cousin, and I adored her but had never met her daughter who was just a year my senior. She lived seven hours away, and we never visited Dobson, the town of our roots, at the same time.

  “So, everybody in North Carolina is related,” he said. “It really is just like The Andy Griffith Show.”

  “Wrong. And wrong. Not everyone in North Carolina is related; furthermore, nobody on The Andy Griffith Show was related except, of course, for Andy, Opie, and Aunt Bee. Well, actually, Goober and Gomer were cousins. But it wasn’t the whole town.”

  “What’s a Goober and a Gomer?”

  “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand. Just forget it.”

  “Gladly,” he snapped, and then went on to tell me that along with seeing his girlfriend in New York he had an interview for a summer job at a law firm. I shared my plans, and he was actually impressed I was seeing Letterman.

  “I still can’t believe you don’t know your own cousin. You must have a lot of cousins you don’t know. You could potentially meet a guy in a bar, sleep with him, and inbreed without even
knowing he was related to you?”

  “You know what? You don’t need to worry about whom I meet in bars or with whom I sleep because it doesn’t concern you in the slightest.”

  “Ouch. Get back, Loretta,” he laughed.

  We were friends now. Throwing barbs and telling our life stories. He’d been dating his girlfriend for several years and planned to marry her but hadn’t proposed. I confessed I was the somewhat nervous transitional girl meeting my boyfriend’s parents for the first time, hoping I’d soon be out of transitional territory.

  It was 1991, the midst of the first Gulf War, and loudspeakers at all three airports I’d frequented that day repeatedly warned travelers to watch their bags at all times. But now a new alert was blaring. Our flight to Newark was cancelled because of a looming snowstorm.

  Marc and I rushed to a Northwest desk and learned there was a flight to Islip, N.Y., leaving in thirty minutes. It was the last chance to get out of Detroit for the weekend.

  “Can I take a cab from Islip to Manhattan?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, if you want to spend $500,” he quipped. “But my parents live near Islip. I’ll get their car and drive to the city tonight. You can ride with me, North Carolina, if you don’t say anything else that stupid.”

  I had just enough time to call Adam’s mom to update her and calmly said I was getting a ride from Islip to New York City with a guy I met at the Detroit airport.

  “Katherine, do you feel safe with him?” she asked. “Do you think this is a good idea?”

  I quickly explained that he had worked with my cousin, though I did not tell her I had never met my cousin. I added that Marc went to Harvard undergrad and was now in law school at the University of Chicago.

  Her tone changed from skeptical to impressed.

  “The University of Chicago is a very good law school. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  By the time my well-pedigreed stranger and I landed in Islip, it was after midnight. Marc’s father was waiting at the little airport.