In November 1974, the Piedmont prop plane bringing me to Raleigh landed five times between Cincinnati and here before coming to a stop on the tarmac at Terminal A, which was RDU at the time. N&O Editor Claude Sitton's secretary drove us into town for my interview, and I will always remember that Raleigh looked just as I had pictured it - rolling hills and huge oak trees still showing the fall colors.
Downtown was another story, especially after I had lived and worked over the course of the previous four years at papers in San Antonio and Cincinnati, where huge buildings loomed over the bustling city life below. Raleigh had a much smaller, laid-back feel, but it did have something that appealed to me career wise: a kick-butt newspaper with a great reputation, a nationally renowned civil rights reporter as editor, and a state capitol right up the street.
Over the years, I saw Jesse Helms get re-elected and re-elected despite my best efforts to show him the way to retirement. Fayetteville Street had an unobstructed view from the Capitol to Memorial Auditorium before it was ripped up soon after I settled in, and before long a huge white elephant was plopped down in the middle of it in the form of a new convention center.
