Gruff reporter, tough teacher, nurturing mentor

For someone whose livelihood and very soul thrived on communication, the way Alzheimer's disease crept up and stole Dwayne Walls' words was the ultimate irony.

Walls was a newspaperman cut from the ink-stained cloth of the old guard. He was gruff. He didn't shy away from a drink. Nor did he muffle the curse words when the right quote or tidbit of information eluded him.

In the 1960s at The Charlotte Observer, Walls tracked the Ku Klux Klan, investigated voting fraud and drew attention to cigarette smuggling. He wrote two books, taught journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University and mentored those putting out the student newspaper at State. Then he realized he could make more money teaching communication privately, so he launched his own company, alternately motoring or flying himself around, mostly in North Carolina, and instructing newspaper reporters and corporations in the art of putting one word after another, lyrically.

For Walls, work and life were all about who, what, when, where, how and why.

When Alzheimer's struck in 2001, the answers to those questions were the first to go.

Dwayne Walls died Sept. 18 in a Veterans Administration nursing home in South Carolina. He was 76.

After his Alzheimer's diagnosis, Walls grew incredibly depressed. He drank too much in an attempt to conceal his agony. He couldn't follow a television story, so he stopped watching television. He tried to write a story about his father, but he couldn't make sense of his thoughts. Even a tape recorder didn't help; his thought process was too jumbled, his syntax nonsensical. Judy Hand, his partner since 1996, tried to help, but she, too, was unable to cobble a tale from his incoherence.

For a writer, it was a particularly excruciating cross to bear.

"His whole life was language, and that seemed to be the first thing that went," Hand said.

Dwayne Estes Walls was born in Hickory in 1932. He left home at 15, eventually winding up as a denizen of a funeral home, where he dug graves and rode in the funeral home's ambulance in exchange for room and board. He got a football scholarship to Lenoir-Rhyne University, but before graduating, he joined the Air Force and served in Korea. When he returned, he entered UNC-Chapel Hill, though he never earned a degree. That necessitated special arrangements before Walls was allowed to teach journalism at the university level.

Gov. Terry Sanford intervened on his behalf, Hand said, appointing him to a teaching position despite his lack of formal education.

In Charlotte, Walls won more than a dozen awards and was nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. He collaborated with colleague Jim Batten, who later became CEO of Knight Ridder, in examining race, poverty and backroom politics in the Carolinas. Then he left to write "The Chickenbone Special," a book published in 1970 about a pattern he noticed of young, aspiring Southern blacks moving north for better opportunities. The name derived from a moniker for a northbound train that saw more than its share of passengers climb aboard, suitcase in one hand and fried chicken for lunch in the other.

Another book followed. To make ends meet, Walls accepted freelance work and began teaching at UNC-CH and NCSU.

At UNC, Walls taught news writing and news editing. He built a reputation, along with friend and fellow curmudgeon Jim Shumaker, as an instructor who worked closely with students to craft beginnings that sang, endings that did, too, and middles packed with details both accurate and engaging.

"He did not fit the stereotype of a professor, a stuffy old guy," said Jack Adams, a former dean of UNC's journalism school. "He was hands-on."