A Southern gentleman and the written word
In my first year in journalism, I was somewhat of a wild thing; a year out of college, a punk-rock kid who wore skinny ties and lewd buttons on the lapel of my thrift store jacket, burnishing a brand of unchecked energy that would very soon spell trouble.
Raised in upstate New York, I was a Yankee who'd somehow landed a job in Norfolk, Va., below the Mason-Dixon line, at a paper called the Virginian-Pilot.
Better known as The Pilot, a nautical term that captured the area’s shipping and naval history, the paper was Virginia’s largest, with a daily circulation of 140,000, covering the five cities that comprised South Hampton Roads, as well as several smaller towns across southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.
Its editors, I would soon find, were decidedly southern, with a culture of spoken manners and propriety that for me needed translation, like some unlearned language.
And no one, perhaps, was more courteous, more genteel, than my editor on the night desk, a fellow named Jim Henderson.
Actually, his full name was James Rutledge Henderson III, a life member of the Society of the Lees of Virginia whose local roots dated back to the 17th century.
Born in Charlotte, N.C., Jim was a World War II veteran, a signalman in the Navy’s Armed Guard, a relatively obscure outfit that provided gun crews and communications for merchant ships convoying war provisions overseas.
He was a gifted wordsmith who started at the paper in 1957, the year of my birth, first as a reporter covering courts, politics and city hall, then as a gadfly columnist and editorial writer, before joining the desk a few years before I arrived in 1981.
He was well known for “practicing the courtesies of editing.” Word was, he'd been a drinker in his day. Now sober, he still brandished an acerbic wit and sometimes tart tongue, once describing a reporter's story as “drivel — but good drivel."
Reporters got their stories back not just edited, but bloodied, in a good-natured way. When a younger colleague on the desk asked him to review a piece he'd just edited, Jim sent it back with a note: "Sorry, it's so short but a certain amount of muck, spleen, libel, hogwash, garbage, neologism, prurience, presumption, assumption, half-assumption, bobbers, quackery and jackassery to be excised. Well, maybe not HAD to be, but was."
Jim was having fun, just warming up.
Sometimes, an offending reporter would get a one-word response: "Why?"
Columnist Guy Friddell, another Southern gentleman, called him "the best editor this side of the moon."
When Jim retired in 1990, Guy wrote a farewell column, in which Jim said he'd found his love for words at age 4, when his older sister taught him to read so he could keep up with Tarzan in the comics. A year later, he was reading the entire morning paper.
By age ten, he was reading the dictionary. For fun.
"Words fascinate me," he told Guy. "I'd get off on one word and be gone the rest of the day."
Guy finished Jim's bon-voyage piece, "This is the first column I've written that Mr. Henderson didn't have the opportunity to edit. It's a shame. It could have been much better."
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jim considered my diploma from SUNY Buffalo "the most worthless piece of paper known to mankind."
And so he set out to educate me. We were an odd couple in that way.
While I was gangly-tall and uncouth, Jim was stocky, ruddy-faced, white-bearded and academic, showing up for work each afternoon with his sailor’s cap and lunchbox containing that evening’s dinner, which was invariably consumed at his desk.
I was the green horn night cops reporter, with a desk almost within arm’s reach of his. After the day staff went home, it was often just the two of us, Jim and me, along with a few copy editors.
Jim needled us all into doing better work. “He was a consummate teacher, and he enjoyed it,” said Ellen Whitford, another young reporter at The Pilot in those days.
“He could have been impatient or exasperated with our inexperience and lack of skill, but if he was, he never really showed it. His barbed comments were never more than minor flesh wounds.”
Ellen pointed out something else about Jim: “I think he loved us. At the very least, he was very fond of us. If we'd been older and wiser and less self absorbed, we'd have seen that.”
After a mid-career gig in Moscow, former Pilot columnist and Metro editor Dave Addis returned to the Norfolk newsroom, where somebody asked about his adventures.
He answered in Russian.
Well, old Jim was there and immediately corrected his Russian grammar. Turns out, Dave said, Jim’s ship, the Charles W. Elliot, was sank during the war and he had to swim to the Russian mainland.
“As he put it,” Dave said, “he picked up a bit of the language from some lovely local ladies whose boyfriends were off defending Stalingrad.”
I now consider those months with Mr Henderson my Masters Program in concise writing, a how-to on leading a more respectable newspaper life.
Back then, as now, I was most definitely a work in progress.
In the first few months alone, I could have been fired for any number of transgressions. I’ve repressed most of them, but I recall the night I returned from my dinner break brandishing a tall-boy of beer.
I sat at a computer, writing a deadline story, my booze by my side, just like I’d done in college. The newspaper’s publisher had dropped by the newsroom after a party and saw me there.
“What is that?” he drawled, pointing at my beer.
“My creative muse,” I answered, nonplused.
“Not in this newsroom, it isn’t,” he said, walking away.
Another time, covering some Sunday feature story at an Episcopal church, I showed up in basketball shorts and a torn sweatshirt. A top editor in one of the front pews was not amused, and let my bosses know.
I mean, how was I not fired? But I survived.
I was a bearded, 21-year-old package of raging testosterone, trying to set fire to the Virginia Beach nightlife. When I showed up for work each evening, I’d first check for any messages left by women I’d encountered during the previous night's escapades.
One of the paper’s local columnists, Larry Maddry, who sat next to me, wrote a piece about taking numerous phone messages for me one day, this distracted cops reporter whose business card littered local nightclubs.
Jim, for his part, referred to me as Mr. Glionna, bestowing a social courtesy I did not deserve.
In turn, I called him Mr. Henderson. It should have been Professor Henderson.
I once turned in a news brief that had something to do with nuclear power. Jim summoned me over to his desk, pointing to a paragraph containing information I had cribbed from the press release that I did not truly understand, and it read like it.
“Never turn in copy you don’t understand,” he said. “Because if you don’t understand what you’re writing, how is a reader going to understand it?”
With me hovered over his shoulder, Jim then wrote several graceful and accurate sentences that conveyed what I thought I was trying to say.
I spent a lot of time at Jim’s desk, absorbing the style of this master of the keyboard.
One night, I submitted a brief about a man who, parked outside a fast food restaurant, had inadvertently stepped on the gas rather than the brake, prompting his car to crash into the business, coming to rest at the order counter.
My lead was cumbersome. He summoned me.
Was anyone hurt? he asked.
No, I answered.
When people are hurt or killed, you write it straight, he explained.
If not, you’re allowed to have a little fun.
I stood over him as he typed my new lead: “The sign outside the McDonalds read ‘Drive-in’ and drive in Robert Smith did.”
Concise. Elegant.
Wow.
Another night, the lights at the local auditorium failed in the middle of a college basketball game, plunging the arena into darkness for several long minutes.
My lead sucked. I was summoned.
Jim started typing.
“Neither Norfolk State nor Hampton University had to shoot the lights out during their game Tuesday night at Scope Arena. They went out all by themselves.”
Over the long nights, Jim and I became friends. I respected the hell out of him. He was amused by my wayward twenty-something life.
I started dating a Chesapeake girl named Betty Jean, who was also dating a guy named Vinnie from the Gambino crime family, who would drive down from New York for unannounced assignations.
Seeing my hangdog expression, Jim could always tell when Vinnie was in town. He tried to make me feel better. He’d also seen my girlfriend on her bike, wearing really tight shorts, and always referred to her as “Bicycle Betty.”
After three years in Norfolk, I got a job offer from the Kansas City Star. One afternoon, I walked over to Jim’s house to seek his advice about the prospect of leaving town.
He pulled out a U.S. map and laid it on his dining room table, as if to give me a topographical perspective on just how far I’d be moving.
I looked at the map, with my uncultured eyes.
“Wow, so that’s where it is,” I said. “I always thought it was closer to St. Louis.”
Jim offered the sound advice to take the job, which I did.
Still, I was young. When I left Norfolk, I didn't keep in touch with Jim, or most folks from The Pilot. I had my hands full in Kansas City which, compared to the literary niceties of Norfolk, was all smash-mouth journalism.
Jim died at home a decade later, of cancer, at age 69 — still erudite, still respected. At his memorial service, his reporters all spoke lovingly about his influence, how he quietly injected a graceful common-sense into their work.
Forty years later, Jim's lessons remain substantial.
He gave me a tool kit of social graces and writing advice I rely on to this day.
Well done, Mr. Henderson.
Well done.
