The story below is from our November/December 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Our long-time writer looks back at five decades of local journalism for our magazine.
Roanoker publisher Richard Wells and I came up to Roanoke from our native Asheville a few months apart to join The Roanoke Times & World-News’ sports department in 1971. Richard had been a copy editor at The Asheville Citizen and I was a sports writer at both The Citizen and The Times rising to sports editor of the afternoon Times just out of my teens.
It was an odd joining because by my count, the Roanoke newspapers had 11 former Citizen-Times reporters on staff and we looked on the Asheville paper as a farm club. We were moving up, we thought.
Richard was a restless sort and the Roanoke papers didn’t offer much of a challenge to him, so he began branching out, founding Ski South, which gave him an editorial outlet and let him cover his favorite sport. Pretty soon that wasn’t enough, so he — and his very bright and talented wife at the time, Teresa — founded The Roanoker and the rest of the story you likely know.
From the beginning, I volunteered to do some writing for the new magazine because it offered me the opportunity to do something besides sports, which can be insufferably boring after a few years. I don’t think I even charged Richard for my time in the early years because he wasn’t drowning in dollars. But I wrote stories I liked, all under a pseudonym in the first few years.
I didn’t write a lot, but what I did was fun and so very different from my day job in sports. The pseudonym was necessary because The Times would have fired me in a heartbeat if it had known I was writing for a competitor, whether or not I was being paid.
Over the years, I was on and off with The Roanoker, writing an occasional story, especially after I was fired by The Times in 1981. I had several jobs after that, all of which allowed me to freelance elsewhere if I wanted, supplementing a salary that an old girlfriend called “your allowance.”
I wrote some stuff I was proud of: looking at rape and sexual harassment in Roanoke; the flow of journalists out of the profession; Roanoke becoming a mecca for authors; profiles on Virginia Western’s Bobby Sandel, Hollins’ Mary Hinton, builder John Garland and politician/businesswoman Trish White-Boyd; black-owned businesses; exotic medicine; post-COVID nursing; looks at Craig County, Moneta, Rocky Mount and downtown Daleville; immigrant women; and hospital violence. There have been a lot more than that, but those come to mind.
‘Course there was that cover that nobody wants to talk about, but which gives me a chuckle every time I see it. That’s the one on City Market where Santa is stuffing dirty magazines into his bag while a flasher (me) stands in the background.
Working for The Roanoker is rewarding because it expanded the topics and created another avenue for learning and meeting interesting people. I’ve been at this business for 60 years and that’s what journalism is about, in the end.
The story above is from our November/December 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
