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News people are not unfeeling. I've seen reporters weep as they interviewed relatives of loved ones caught up in tragedy. On a balmy day in May 1972, right at our noon deadline, a berserk sniper killed three people and wounded eight others at Raleigh's North Hills Mall. As we frantically monitored the office police scanner for details, other newsroom personnel tried to comfort and shush reporter Nell Styron, an "Old Raleigh" native whose loud weeping was drowning out the source of our information.

Looking for Marsha

Several former Times men wondered in advance if Marsha would be there. Marsha, a strikingly statuesque young woman, introduced the miniskirt to Raleigh. According to one reminiscing staffer, the skirt was "one foot long and she had legs about nine feet long."

When Marsha strolled around the corner to the Professional Pharmacy for lunch, the posted lookout across the street at Southern Bell Telephone would alert the males throughout the building. As she headed back to the newsroom, a sizable gathering of gawking men would applaud and whistle their approval from a distance. When Marsha failed to show at the reunion, former reporter turned lawyer Chuck Mooney sighed, "It's just as well. I'd rather remember her as she was."

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, showed at the reunion. The ever youthful looking "boy wonder" and "the kid," as we sometimes dubbed him, cut his writing teeth on the Times. At the reunion, he confessed he still has his Raleigh Times byline clips as souvenirs from his sentimental journey with us.

A newspaper editor's job is not always a rose garden. One night, I received a call at home from a raging subscriber whose mother had been quoted in that day's edition. After listening to his rantings, richly laced with profanity, I finally said, "Tell me, sir, did the reporter misquote her or not?"

"I don't know if he did or didn't," he yelled. "He had no business quoting her at all. The poor woman doesn't know whether to wind her watch or spit! Anyway, I'm coming out there and beat your [butt] before supper." When I told him he'd have to step on it because we were just sitting down to dessert, there was a long silence, then a soft chuckle.

"Well," he said, "I'm still mad. But I do have to say that I've lived all over the country and this is the only place where you could look up the newspaper editor's number in the telephone directory and call him up and give him hell about something."

As with Scheherazade, this tale-telling could go on for a thousand and one columns. As we dispersed into the night, each to go our separate ways, with some few perhaps to meet again on other days, I wondered how many felt as I did: that our time at the Times was, indeed, among the best of times. A special time on a very special newspaper.

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