This is quite a pleasure for me, talking about reporting with a group of young aspirant newspersons. The proportion of sexes is a little surprising. Don’t young men want to be newsmen any more?

Well, I was a newsman for 16 years, first on a newspaper and then with the Associated Press. I’ll try to interest you with some of my experiences and some of the lessons I learned.

First of all, I must to tell you, this is my half year birthday. I am 91 ½ years old today. So if I refer frequently to my notes, you will understand.

Secondly, I left reporting in 1958. That’s when your parents were little children. So today’s use by reporters of computers, cell phones, and recorders, and all the rest is all foreign to me.

I believe, though, that good reporting doesn’t change, no matter what aids you use. It involves accuracy, truth, and recognizing the difference between news and fluff. Years ago, I was told, that a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee would often end his lectures by saying: accuracy, dammit, accuracy.

I think I wanted to be a journalist even in my teens. When I was in high school I had to pull every string I could to take typing, because typing was reserved for commercial students planning to be stenographers or bookkeepers. But I got it.

I began my reporting career in November 1938. I think that was several months before Walter Cronkite began his. He went a bit farther in the news business than I did..

I went to work for the Roanoke World-News, the afternoon paper of the Times-World Corporation. The salary was $15 a week plus a bus pass. I was given a great beat for a cub reporter. It was a year in a little bureau the paper maintained in Salem, the county seat of Roanoke County. That was the reason for the bus pass. It was a small single office across the street from the Roanoke County Court House. That was convenient. I spent a lot of time in that court house.

First, though, I spent a couple of months in the Roanoke office learning the ropes. On my first assignment, the city editor sent me to cover a talk on the evils of alcohol. I had never taken a journalism class. But I had read that a good lead was comprised of the five Ws, who, what, when, where, and why. My lead to that story was something to behold. I still have the clipping. I’ll read it to you. – - – There are 62 words in that sentence. Unaccountably, the city editor ran it just as I wrote it, and he gave me a byline. I guess he wanted to encourage me. But there was another grave error in that paragraph. It has the paper saying the speaker was distinguished. That was a no-no for our managing editor. One time I used honorable before someone’s name. He almost had a fit.

Well, early in 1939 I was sent to Salem, and the reporter I was relieving spent a week breaking me in. Then I was on my own. I covered everything: three courts,, the country board of supervisors, the school board, the five county constitutional officers — the Commonwealth’s attorney, the clerk of court, the commissioner of revenue, the treasurer, the sheriff. Also the town council, the mayor, the residency and district highway department offices,, the chamber of commerce, Roanoke college, the Red Cross, Kiwanis Club speakers, anything and everything.

I had one great source. There was a controversy between the county school board and the board of supervisors. The chairman of the school board, Moss Plunkett, dominated the school board. He later ran for governor against the senior Senator Harry F. Byrd. Plunkett wanted to build a proposed highschool on an ideal location north of Salem. The town and the board of supervisors wanted to build it in town..

The Roanoke newspapers supported Plunkett editorially, so I could always get a story from him. He was a walking encyclopedia on school statistics. But, of course in the end,, the board of supervisors, which controlled the purse strings, got its way. – - – While in Salem, I think I helped my standing with the paper by writing some features for the Sunday Times. Although I worked for the afternoon paper, I was obligated to rewrite stories for the morning paper and to write something special for the Sunday Times. My mother, who had been a reporter and free-lance writer, encouraged me to make a special effort to write well-researched and interesting features. She thought it important that I demonstrate I was willing to do more than required.

I wrote a number of features and they were well played, with illustrations. My salary soon went up from $15 a week to $22 a week.

All in all, my year in Salem was a wonderful introduction to reporting, a splendid training ground for gaining a wide experience.

And then, soon after I was transferred back into the newsroom in Roanoke, I was given another break. The paper went from a salaried six-day 44-hour week to a five-day 40-hour week for reporters. Since we published six days, that meant that some reporter was off each day of the week. I was made the swing man, with a different beat each day, so that I once again covered almost everything. I think by the end of my second year, I was a very good reporter with an all-around experience. Of course you always keep learning.

Incidentally, while I was in Salem I learned a valuable but costly lesson. In re-writing for the morning paper a court story in which a woman had appealed a conviction for reckless driving, I wrote she was convicted on drunk driving. I knew better than that; I had written the original stories on the case. It was just carelessness. For the paper it was expensive carelessness. I never knew how much they paid to settle her suit for damages. I wasn’t fired, but I think it was a narrow escape. I’m sure Mr. Fitzgerald has emphasized that you should check, and double check.

I had been on the paper more than three and one-half years, when I received a commission in the Navy in the summer of 1942. After almost four years in the Navy I came back to the paper. By then I had a wife and two children, and I became very dissatisfied with the salary the paper was paying me, only four dollars a week more than when I went away..

I took a job in public relations with the Veterans Administration in Richmond. It turned out to be a great career move, but not with the VA. After I had been in the job less than a year, Congress slashed the money for VA public relations and I found myself facing the prospect of being laid off. But I wanted out of the VA, anyway.

So I went to a friend of mine from the Roanoke Times who was Governor Tuck’s press secretary to ask if he knew of any newspaper job openings. It just happened that he was resigning from the governor’s office, and the man taking his place was leaving the Associated Press Richmond Bureau. I applied for the AP position and got it.

I had only been on the job a few days when my new boss, Frank Fullerm sent me here to Harrisonburg to report on a terrible tragedy, an explosion that collapsed a building housing a beauty parlor. It was where aa bank is now, right across from Asbury Methodist church.. Eleven women were killed. That night I had a story under my byline that went to papers all over the country.

Actually, because I was new to how the AP worked, I messed up. Wire services then, as I suppose now, were very competitive and speed was important. I tried to cover the story as I would for a paper, going to the funeral home to get the names of the victims, checking out the site, checking with the police, and so forth. I should have stayed mainly at the Daily News-Record office and put together my story from the information being gathered by several local reporters. So I was late with my story. I always felt my boss should have given me better instructions. Well, you live and learn.

I soon became aware that most of the work in the Richmond Bureau of the AP was unexciting rewrites and editing of stories sent in by member newspapers and various stringers throughout the state. Our job was to tighten and improve the writing, if necessary, and send the stories on to the member newspapers and radio stations throughout Virginia.. If the stories were deemed important or newsworthy enough, we would forward them on the national or the regional wires.

The stress in the AP office was greater than that at a newspaper, because at a newspaper once the deadline is passed you can relax.We had no time to relax. You no sooner wrapped up the work for the a.m. cycle than you had to turn around and do it for the p.m. cycle. And we usually had more work than we could do.

For several years at the AP I worked all of those routine jobs, writing for the radio wire, taking news and sports stories over the telephone from stringers, working as day editor, and as night editor. Later, I was given a chance to write some features, and that was more interesting. And then in 1952 I was assigned to write profiles of the two candidates for governor, the Democrat Thomas Stanley, the choice of the Byrd Machine, and the Republican Ted Dalton, a charismatic State senator from Radford. Reporters were charmed by Dalton, and they had a dim view of Stanley.

I drove to Stanleytown, near Martinsville, and spent the day with Stanley and his gracious wife. The next day I spent with Dalton in Radford. I wrote separate stories for each, and the Virginia Press Association awarded me first prize for wire service stories. With the power of the Byrd machine behind him, Stanley won the governorship.

When the General Assembly was in session, four of us, including the bureau chief, would cover it. I was assigned the Senate, At the next session after my two profiles, I mentioned to Senator Dalton that I had won the award. After the assembly finished its work, he gave a steak dinner for members of the Capitol press corps and their wives in my honor.

The AP bureau had one real reporting job. We depended on the Richmond newspapers for local news, but our boss thought we should have a reporter on Capitol Hill. That meant covering the governor, the various state agencies, the State Supreme Court, and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s was a choice assignment, and I was given it about that time. Covering the governor’s office was the best part, along with politics, which went with the territory.

When the State Supreme Court had opinion day, I, along with the Times-Dispatch political reporter, would try to figure out what the sometimes lengthy opinions really said. There was no one to help you, no résumé. And of course you couldn’t spend all day.

When important segregation cases came to the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, the court was part of my beat. I used to see Thurgood Marshall, the prominent African-American lawyer who eventually became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. But there was another African-American lawyer involved who, I thought, was the most brilliant lawyer in town, white or black.. He was a Richmond lawyer named Spotswood Robinson III. Eventually, he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

When in 1957, the National Governor’s Conference was held in Williamsburg. I was sent to cover it, along with Harry Nash, who was the one-man Norfolk bureau, and Jack Bell whose beat was the U.S. Senate. Jack Bell was our boss.

When President Eisenhower came to address the governors at a banquet in the Williamsburg cafeteria, Marvin Arrowsmith, the AP reporter who traveled with the president, joined our group. During Eisenhower’s speech, I was given a less than glamorous job. I had to hold on to one of the two telephones in the building for Arrowsmith in case Ike departed from his written text.

Bell took a liking to me and let me write the main national story the last night while he went to have dinner at the Williamsburg Inn with a daughter of Chief Justice Warren and a couple of other people. I joined them later. On a trip to Washington, I made an appointment with Jack and he took me down on the Senate floor before the session began while he interviewed Lyndon Johnson, then the majority leader in the Senate.

By 1958 I was getting restless. I was 44 years old and I felt I had gone as far as I was going to go with the AP. The boss had refused to okay my transfer to Washington, the Mecca for newspersons. And then opportunity struck.

The General Assembly had created the Virginia Civil War Commission, charged with a state observance of the five-year Civil War Centennial, beginning in 1961. That allowed for more than two years preparation. I was assigned to cover the organization meeting of the commission. I duly reported their actions and went on my way.

That afternoon, returning to my office, I bumped into State Senator Curry Carter from Staunton, who was a member of the commission. I stopped to chat with him and I observed that the commission had decided to hire an executive director. Off the top of my head, I said: “I don’t guess I’d be qualified for that job,” and he replied: “Well I don’t see why not.” Nothing more was said. I went on vacation for two weeks in Roanoke and forgot about it.

On returning to Richmond, I was hailed by a lawyer in the State government, who said the selection committee of the commission been looking for me. It turned out I was one of 12 applicants for the position of executive director. I got the job, and thus ended my newspaper career.

During my years with the AP I was associated with other newsmen covering the hill. Three who made it big time were Paul Duke, Roger Mudd, and James Kilpatrick. You may not be familiar with those names. Paul Duke was in the AP office with me. He went on to several national reporting jobs, and finally was moderator on the public radio program, Washington Week in Review for twenty years. Jack Kilpatrick went from political reporter for the Richmond News-Leader to editor of the paper, and then became a very conservative syndicated columnist. Roger Mudd at one time was supposed to share the NBC Nightly News anchor job with Tom Brokaw, but Tom beat him out. I think Roger still has an occasional feature on public television.

This was in the fall of 1938, the year I graduated from the University of Virginia. It was a recession year, recession within the Great Depression, and jobs were very scarce. It had been a discouraging time for me. I spent some time during the summer with my Uncle Riner and his family in Buffalo hoping to find employment there. I visited my cousin Elizabeth and her husband Jack Beckert in Rochester, and was interviewed there by the personnel director for Eastman Kodak.

I returned to Roanoke to take a temporary job my Aunt Vedy had arranged for me in a plant manufacturing tomato cans. It was an assembly line job. I stood at the head of the line by a machine that rapidly picked up flat pieces of tin, one by one, and sent them along the line where they would be curved, sealed, and a bottom attached. My job was two-fold. I stacked the flat pieces of tin into an enclosure from which a great metal claw would snatch them up, two or three a second, and send them on their way. If the machine jammed, which it frequently did, I would strike a lever to stop the machine and then take huge pliers to pull out the crumpled pieces of tin. The faster I hit the lever, the fewer pieces got crumpled. The only satisfaction I got on the job was seeing how fast I could stop the machine once it jammed.

As far as I can recall, it was the only job I’ve ever had where I punched a time clock. It wasn’t very pleasant employment. Less pleasant was a job the management assigned me in order to keep me employed after they shut down that particular line. I was relegated to a damp earthen basement where I, a college graduate, was engaged in straightening out as much as possible the accumulation of crumpled pieces of tin. Then, tomato season over in Virginia, the operation moved to Florida for the winter. I was offered a job there, but I declined.

My friend Ed Sellers, a Washington and Lee journalism graduate, was working in the public relations office for the Norfolk & Western Railroad, and he knew of my interest in becoming a reporter. He advised me there were going to be a couple of openings at the Roanoke World-News because two reporters were leaving.

I promptly submitted an application to W. C. Stouffer, the nervous, irascible managing editor for the paper. He informed me he had a stack of applications a foot high, and that there were no openings that he knew of. I went back twice see him, the first time to take a short sketch entitled “Red Grange,” about a rooster. I had written it for my English composition class at the University of Virginia. He mailed it back, saying it was well-written. But the last time I went to see him he reiterated he had a stack of applications a foot high and that if I didn’t stop bothering him I would never get a job there.

Then in September I had a health problem. My lower wisdom teeth were impacted, and I had an old dentist in Salem remove one of them. I think he botched the job. My face on that side swelled up like a grapefruit, I ran a fever, and was in bed for a week. At the end of the week I took a long walk with my mother and that night the tooth hemorrhaged. I bled all night, and finally the dentist reluctantly agreed to see me about 5 a.m. after my mother told him I was bleeding to death. “A little blood at night looks like a whole lot,” he had told her. But he stopped the bleeding.

Now it was October and I had no job prospects; and I was rundown from my tooth experience. I accompanied my mother to Christiansburg, county seat of Montgomery county, on some business of hers there. More as a gesture than anything else, I went in to see the county superintendent of schools, C. C. Shelbourne. I feared there was virtually no prospect of a job opening for a teacher because it was already October. But an opening there was.

Shelbourne explained there was this remote school for which he had been unable to find a woman teacher willing to take the job. The school was two miles up a mountain road from the nearest decent place to find room and board. But he also explained to me that I was not at all qualified to teach; I hadn’t even had the hygiene course that every graduate in Virginia was supposed to have. How I graduated without it I don’t know. So, more discouragement; I got up to leave.

“Well, do you want this job or not?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it. Why yes I wanted it. So the necessary arrangements were made, including my staying with a farm family on Little River just a a mile or so upstream from the Pulaski county town of Snowville.

The Mr. Altizer, at whose home I stayed, was a part-time farmer who also did part-time carpentry work in Radford, so he had a higher standard of living than most of the people nearer the school. He and his wife were very pleasant, and they had a shy 13-year-old daughter. They lived in the kitchen during the week, and the cook stove was the only heat in the house. They did have a space heater in the living room, where there was overstuffed furniture; but I never saw it lit because that was only on weekends when I was home in Roanoke.

The cost per month for room and board was $15. For this I got breakfast, sausage and biscuits; a packed lunch of sausage and biscuits; and dinner, as I recall, also sausage and biscuits, but there must have been something else.

It was chilly October weather at that high altitude, and the sheets in my unheated bedroom were like ice. One night I had just gotten comfortably warm in bed when Altizer knocked on my door and said there was a possum in a tree across the creek that ran by the house, and would I like to shoot it. I reluctantly crawled out of my warm bed and dressed.

He handed me his daughter’s .22 caliber rifle and went with me across a footbridge to the tree. It was pitch dark. He shined his flashlight up to the top of the tree, probably some thirty feet. I could see two little beady eyes shining in the blackness, but nothing else. There was no way to line up the sights on the rifle.

I was no expert with guns, but I knew a little about them because I used to target practice with my Uncle Leslie’s heavy .22 that he had inherited from his brother Louin. I swung the rifle around to the sky which was light enough for me to see the sights. I lined them up, then slowly brought the rifle back to where I estimated the eyes were, and fired. The possum came tumbling down. I had hit it dead between the eyes.

My first duty, after I got settled, tested my courage because threatening dogs send a shiver down the back of my neck. I had to walk up the dirt mountain road to the school, stopping at each house along the way to tell the family that school was about to begin. Virtually every house had one or more big hounds that let me know they were suspicious of strangers. But I screwed up my courage and went in. Some of the men appeared indifferent or hostile; they didn’t care for schooling. But the women wanted their children in school.

I would go to the school early in order to build a fire in the little pot-bellied stove to take some of the chill off the room. It was a beautiful time of year, with the woods still in autumn color; and I enjoyed the two-mile walk. The road went by pastures, lots of woods, and a few mountain houses. On the first day of school most of the children came on their own. But I remember one little six-year-old boy who was brought by his daddy. He was very shy and frightened. His father tried gently to reassure him. He cried when his father left. When I left the school three weeks later he cried again.

I recall very little of my teaching, and I have no idea whether it was effective. I do know that I rarely sat down at my desk all day. I was too busy taking care of the several grades. Of the 18 pupils enrolled, only 15 came to school. Of those, six were only five years old, under age, but their families had entered them anyway.

The problem of these five-year-olds I solved by buying six little snubbed-nosed scissors and gathering up a stack of old magazines on my first weekend trip home. I had these under-age kids cut out paper dolls all day. To teach even the six-year-old pupils to read was a problem because they had seen so little of the world outside of their mountain homes. First grade reading books had pictures of taxis, elephants, street cars, and other subjects that these children had never seen and knew nothing about.

The children taught me a recess game called, I believe, anti-over. We divided into two sides, one on each side of the school building. One side threw a rubber ball over the school and whoever caught it rushed around and tried to hit someone with it on the side that had thrown the ball. If successful, then his side got to receive the ball again. We played this game at least three times during the day.

One day the supervisor, a little middle-aged lady named Miss Penny, drove up unexpectedly. I was glad we were not out playing anti-over. She said for me to dismiss the children, she wanted to take me to observe one of her teachers. We drove to a two-room school and I sat in the back of one room where a teacher was handling three or four grades. I was flabbergasted; I realized that this woman knew what she was doing and that I did not.

Children in one grade were busy doing posters or some kind of drawing. Others were busy with math problems or reading or what I don’t know. But they were all busy and interested. This teacher must have sat up half the night preparing for her day. I had a lot to learn — and to think about if I was considering education as a career.

But my health was improving. The daily walks to and from the school in the sunny, often crisp, autumn days , and the long nights of sleep were making me strong and vigorous again.

It was a hectic time, but I doubt if there is any other three-week period in my life from which I took so many memories. One-room schools were fast disappearing. I was privileged to have had a brief experience in one of them.

Then it ended as abruptly as it began. I received a two-line letter from Stouffer saying there was an opening in the news department of the World-News, and if I were interested to come see him. I went and he gave me the job. Mr. Shelbourne let me out of my contract, and in addition said if it didn’t work out for me he would rehire me. I departed, happily and sadly, to begin my twenty-year career as a journalist.

On several occasions I met him at his warehouse Friday night and drove up to Prospect with him for a weekend. We would drive back to Pittsburgh early Monday morning. On this particular weekend the ground was covered with several inches of snow. On Sunday afternoon I decided to take a hike through the fields and woods of that hilly countryside. Their big collie dog accompanied me.

I am sure I must have enjoyed walking through those unfamiliar woods. But it was an overcast day, it was late afternoon, and I was suddenly aware the light was fading. Also I had unaccountably lost my companion. I stepped up my pace through that particular patch of woods. It was getting dark in the woods, but I expected to come out at the top of a hill and look down on Herb and Katherine’s place and the warm and welcoming sight of lighted windows. Instead, as I emerged from the woods I beheld a broad scene utterly strange to me. I recognized nothing. There was the eerie, unreal light of dusk when the ground is covered with snow and the sky is shrouded in a thick overcast. Two or three houses in the distance had lighted windows; the only relief from the encompassing grayness. Night was falling fast. I felt utterly lost. I wondered if I would have to make my way to one of those houses and ask the way. But would they know the Waddells, recent newcomers to the area?

I chose to walk to a hill on my right. When I reached the top, I could look down and see Herb and Katherine’s cozy little house with its warm and welcoming light from the windows. Why I had that panicky feeling I don’t know. I was never really lost, of course. Even if I had to ask at a stranger’s house, I would certainly be back with my uncle and aunt that evening. But the feeling was so intense and tenacious that to this day it comes back to me when I am in the country amid woods and fields, there is snow on the ground, and the overcast sky gives the dusk a darkness and pervading grayness. It takes me back to that lonely moment on a winter twilight at the top of a strange hill.