MALCOLM'S MEMORIES: I Fell in Love With the South, Despite That One Scary Afternoon

I fell in love with The South a long time ago. Despite that one scary afternoon. 

It was only my second trip there as a native of northern Ohio, the son of two Canadian immigrants. Memphis was my first job as an actual, real-life newspaper reporter. It would surely determine my entire professional future.

The Scripps-Howard chain hired college kids as summer fill-ins to learn the business and replace their vacationing pros. It was grand exposure to a variety of assignments and, to be honest, cheap help for the paper. I got $75 a week at the Memphis Press-Scimitar.

All I knew about that city was Elvis. He lived there, was 29, and, it turned out, had only 13 years of life left.

The Press-Scimitar was an afternoon newspaper in the waning years of that media breed. We reported for work at 7 a.m. The first deadline was 7:15. Not much time for in-depth reporting. But I was terribly excited.

The chain also owned the morning newspaper, the staid Commercial Appeal, which was on the first floor. As it happened, the city editors of both papers were brothers. Each reporter became a reluctant instrument in that fierce sibling rivalry.

I had completed my second year of university. The previous summer I wrote radio news in the Detroit bureau of United Press International. That was an intense lesson on mentally digesting a news story, converting it to be listened to, instead of read, and doing that quickly fresh every hour. 

In my boarding room after work, I would tune in to different stations and hear my exact words read on the air. Nobody knew they were mine, but it felt good.

The newspaper editors were firm and demanding. Also kind and patient. When I eagerly wrote one really good and comprehensive police story about a rash of neighborhood gas thefts, the editor explained why he was cutting a large chunk of it. 

“Andy, thieves already know how to siphon gas from parked cars. We don’t want to teach other people.”

On the other hand, I received my first career Page One byline when I interviewed a man whose dog had found and returned his lost wallet. Hey, it was summer. That required a phone call home that night, collect.

In between assignments, we could hang around with the veteran reporters, who did not mind sharing riveting tales of their adventures, most of which were probably true. I heard about a retired reporter confined to a veteran’s hospital. During my visits, he taught me more about reporting and shared combat tales of his war service in Korea, where I would be assigned 11 years later.

The paper had a couple of rewrite men. They were older, wiser veterans who had pretty much done it all for decades. They never left the newsroom anymore but took phone calls from reporters in the field, usually on deadline, and deftly, swiftly turned the conversation into a newspaper story.

One day, I was sent out to interview the family of a missing boy. Get his description, circumstances, and what the police and family had to say. No GPS or cell phones in those days.

It was close to deadline when I called Rewrite. I had never organized and “written” a story completely in my head before. I was probably flustered. “That’s O.K., kid,” he said. “Just give me what you got.”

I read him my notes. “Good stuff,” he said, and hung up.

When I saw the later edition, there was a beautifully written feature story about the missing boy. It carried my byline. Back in the office, I needlessly reminded the rewrite guy that I didn’t really write that.  

“Well,” he said, “it was your reporting. And I figured you would have if you had the time.”

The summer reporters took turns on what was dubbed the Eat Beat, covering remarks at weekly lunches of the Rotary Club and such. They rarely produced real news, but no one else wanted such assignments and editors knew they also provided a free lunch. 

That summer was an instructive time coming up with story possibilities. The editors would ask pointed questions about your idea that revealed the details they expected you to have and, sometimes, the worthlessness of that particular idea. Those lessons prevented a lot of embarrassment in later years.

It was a heady time though, being on my own, learning new stuff every day, deciding when, where, and what to eat, what to do at night or on a day off. The fill-in reporters went boating together, to church sometimes, toured the countryside, and made $2 bets at the dog races.

The Mississippi River had long intrigued me, as big things always have. So much so that one summer years later I drove and boated along every mile from the source in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico and wrote a book about it with a professional photographer, Roger Straus. It flowed silently right by downtown, just as massive and strong as I imagined when reading and re-reading the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

I liked the South and Southerners very much. They were much less hurried and harried than Northerners, more immediately open, even prematurely friendly. They suspected the best of strangers, until proven wrong. Not the other way around. 

I also absolutely fell in love with fried catfish. And the ubiquitous air-conditioning, which wasn’t as widespread yet back home.

After the editors developed confidence in us, they handed out more important stories. One day in late summer, I actually got an out-of-town assignment, a federal court hearing in Oxford, Miss. My biggest story yet. The issue was so important that I remember nothing of it.

Now, that was the civil rights summer of 1964, a troubled time as some southern Americans, under pressure, attempted to discard old relationships and work out new ones, not always quickly or peacefully. As we all know now, such necessary changes were not confined to the South.

Three civil rights workers, all college students like me, had disappeared in Mississippi. They would be found buried in an earthen dam. Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr. would be shot and killed in Memphis.

As a naïve northerner, of course, I knew about racial segregation. I did not know of it. My rural schools in Ohio had a few black kids and no one thought about it.

My only experience with race had come years before as a youngster walking into an Alabama public restroom. And being gently and promptly escorted out by a very kind black man. He said, “You don’t belong here,” and pointed to a sign over the door:  “Colored.”

Now, truth be told, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a white man, a very white man. I am so white I once got sunburned by the heat lamp in a hotel bathroom.

However, the disappearance of three male college students who’d been trained in civil rights work in my home state gave me pause. I was to drive a red car with Ohio license plates from Memphis to a city deep inside Mississippi. And back, hopefully.

The editors thought this was chuckle-worthy. Me, not so much.

A local friend sympathized with the young Yankee. He loaned me his Tennessee plates for the day. And I set out for the 90-mile drive.

Mississippi is a beautiful state. And Oxford was exactly what you’d expect of a small, sleepy southern community midweek in steamy August. 

It was the kind of time when James Faulkner, no doubt, would sit in the slight breeze of an open window there to write his distinctive stream-of-consciousness. Who’s got time for punctuation with that heat and humidity cloaking everything? 

Ancient shady trees lined the old Oxford streets, some of them brick, as I recall. I drove around a little to get a feel for the place, circled the broad downtown square, and parked there in the shade across from the courthouse. I noticed three old-timers sitting on a bench nearby, their heads turned toward me. 

In fact, I was the only thing moving in the square. Everyone else in Oxford that afternoon had the good sense to be inside or sitting on that bench in the shade.

I put a dime in the parking meter, turned, and walked toward the courthouse as if I knew precisely what I was doing. 

That’s when I heard him. 

“Hey, boy!” Except boy came out in Mississippi. It had two syllables, something like “boy-a.”

I kept walking briskly because he couldn’t possibly be addressing me. People did not yell at strangers where I came from. So, this did not feel good. 

“Boy-a,” he called out again. “Hey, red! You hear me?” 

Did he know about the license plates?

Then, I heard boot steps. Oh, crap! And I almost did. I did not want to go missing. But an important life lesson was approaching from behind.  

I remained deaf and kept on going because, you understand, I was focused on a very important assignment from the editors of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. 

Suddenly, ominously, a hand on my shoulder. I whirled around to confront my doom. 

“Boy-a!” the old-timer said, all smiling. “You don’t gotta put money in the meter, son. It’s Wednesday.” 

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This is the 26th in an ongoing series of personal Memories. Please share yours in the Comments. Links to the others are below:

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