The first time I saw Guy Munger it was 1973, and he was standing in the middle of the old News & Observer newsroom, where typewriters still created a din of sound, cigarette smoke still filled the air, and people screamed "Copy!" Which was where I, a part-time copy boy, came in, grabbing stories out of people's hands and moving them from reporter to editor.
Guy, who died last week at 87, was the city editor, supervising the reporting staff, making assignments, keeping track of reams and reams of paper.
He was the first city editor I ever saw, but he looked the part, and then some. Tall and burly, shirttail out, doubleknit pants, a full beard and the thickest hair on a man I'd ever seen or have ever seen since.
Sometimes he raised his voice, but mainly to get someone's attention. Otherwise, he was quietly well-mannered in his dealings with reporters.
I'd grown up around newspapers (my father was in the business for a while) and the editors I knew were tough guy types, yellers, desk pounders, all that. Not Guy. When he trained the new ones, he took them aside to review mistakes and slowly go over what they needed to do to get better. In the course of his career, a lot of them did. One tall, long-haired fellow out of UNC-Chapel Hill did particularly well out of that generation. David Zucchino became a famous foreign correspondent and a Pulitzer Prizer winner.
And another fellow you may have heard of was one of Guy's boys, too. Dennis Rogers, columnist emeritus, remembers that Guy was the first person he met when he came to the paper in 1976.
"I was a little awestruck when I walked into the shabby old N&O newsroom that day," he recalled. "But then I met Guy. He was the kindest, most gentle teddy bear of a boss I ever had. He loved Raleigh and her people, but most of all he loved the reporters who worked for him."
Dennis, though he'd spent nine years in the Army and had kids by the time he got to Raleigh, admits he was raw and scared. (He became the paper's columnist just six months after he got here, however.) Guy, he said, "had soft hands and a sweet disposition."
And, he remembered, when Guy wrote some of the long, in-depth pieces for what was then called the Sunday "Perspective" section, "he showed the rest of us how it could and should be done." Guy also was regarded as the finest master of the "Tar Heel of the Week" feature.
Guy was a man with a multitude of interests, a playwright and songsmith who wrote an absolutely great musical called "Stop the Presses!" and several others. His kids (there were six in all) also were inclined toward theater and the arts.
Truth is, he was just a fun guy. He and his late wife, Joan, threw some legendary News Year's Eve parties at their home on Park Drive in old Cameron Park, where people would sing and argue and tell colorful stories that never made it into the paper and the next day's tales of the parties would be legend ... until the next year.
They also had quite a collection of stuffed critters, all shapes and sizes of the animal kingdom. (I mean these were real animals, by the way.)
A story that I've never heard denied had a burglar getting in the house once, tripping around on the stuffed creatures, becoming so scared that he jumped from a second-story window and shouted, when the police arrived to arrest him, "Thank God you've come!"
Even as he got older, Guy kept living and reading and enjoying other folks, friends old and new, inquiring about their lives. He aged, but in a way never got older, retaining his sense of mischief and that sweet disposition Dennis Rogers remembers so well. Guy was still teaching, still mentoring until the end, about living a long life, and not wasting a minute.
