Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 21, 1992 TAG: 9201210344
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JIMMY THACKER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PAPERS! PAPERS!
Fifty-eight years. That's more than a half-century, and putting it that way makes it seem even longer. But that's how long I was involved, one way or another, in the newspaper business.I started when I was 12, selling The Evening Leader on the streets in Staunton. We paid a penny apiece for the newspaper and sold it for 2 cents - a 100 percent profit. The best spot was under the town clock at Beverley Street (the main drag) and Central Avenue, providing you got there first and someone bigger didn't take the corner from you.
From there, I graduated to delivering a regular route, a big step indeed. The paper was printed six afternoons a week, Monday through Saturday (there also was a morning paper), and you got 10 cents a week if a subscriber took the newspaper for the full week.
I remember the first thing I had published in a newspaper, and I also remember that it got me in trouble with the mother of one of the people involved.
I was about 14, and wrote an account of a baseball game between the Sears Hill Tigers and the West Frederick Street Foos. I gave many of the players nicknames, one of them "Dutch." Well, there happened to be two pretty unsavory characters in Staunton called "Dutch" - and the mother of the player I gave that name didn't think it one bit funny.
I wrote about high-school sports for The Leader without pay - I was just glad to see my stuff in print - and jumped at the opportunity when in March 1939, nine months after graduating from Robert E. Lee High School, I was offered a job as proofreader on the morning paper. Six nights a week, for $6. I was actually getting paid for working for a newspaper.
When the one reporter on the morning paper left, I was offered a two-week tryout as his replacement. The rest, as they say, is history.
I covered everything from a visit to Staunton by President Franklin Roosevelt to Ruritan Club father-son dinners, community fairs, murders, jail breaks and sporting events. I even sat in as the society editor on occasion.
Except for a stint in the Marines during World War II, and less than two years in public relations with American Safety Razor Co., which had moved to Staunton from Brooklyn, just about every cent I have made in my lifetime has come from newspapers.
From the razor-company job, I came to Roanoke to work for the newspaper here. Now that association has, regretfully, ended. But I can't think of any other way I would have rather spent my working life. It has been hard work, and not always pleasant. But it has been fun.
When I was city editor of the Roanoke World-News, we got a call every morning from a young man asking that we read him his horoscope for that day and interpret it for him.
Then there was a frequent visitor, a woman, who said she could pick up airline radio calls through her teeth, which really were horrible looking. One day when I was fortunate enough to see her get off the elevator, I hid under a desk until she left.
Andy Petersen, who was with Channel 10 at the time and who also handled publicity for the old Roanoke-Salem Plaza, called to ask about the chances of our doing something on a performing bear that was appearing at the plaza. I told him that if he brought the bear to the newsroom we might do a story.
About an hour later, the bear (and its handler, of course) stepped off the elevator, much to the surprise - and no doubt horror - of two people who were standing there waiting to get on.
Then there was the man who came to the newsroom asking why we had not done a story on the people who were disappearing from Roanoke, sometimes by the carload. We took him sort of seriously until he informed us that the only way you could avoid being spirited off into the unknown was to put a big wad of Juicy Fruit chewing gum on the fender of your car.
Jimmy Thacker, now retired, was an assistant managing editor for the Roanoke Times & World-News.