Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 20, 1993 TAG: 9306200099
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Brill
DATELINE: DURHAM, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Carefully.
This will be the last column I write for the Roanoke Times & World-News. It's been a long and mostly enjoyable run, dating to 1956, when a young man who had worked in Covington for 3 1/2 years made the jump to the big time.
I want to make that clear right away. I liked working for The Roanoke Times, and after the merger with the World-News, because the people who were my bosses cared about their product.
It's not like I was a born-and-bred sportswriter. When I graduated from college in 1952, I not only didn't know what I wanted to do, but I couldn't type.
It was my father who spotted the ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Covington Virginian was looking for a sports editor. I had been home for six months, socializing with my buddies. That wasn't what my parents had in mind when they sent me to Duke as the youngest student entering in the fall of '48.
I got the job on the phone. By the time I arrived a week later, the position had been filled by Forrest "Hotdog" Dressler.
I still couldn't type. But I became the police reporter. I was making $30 a week, $25.80 take-home pay. There was a slight problem. My room and board came to $26.
After six weeks, I told my boss I loved the job but I was going broke fast. He gave me a $25 raise. I had almost doubled my salary and I was using the hunt-and-peck system. Still do, for that matter.
To me, Roanoke was a great opportunity. I jumped at the chance to join the sports staff (three people) of one of the great characters, Harold "Soup" Wimmer, for the princely salary of $95 weekly.
At the end of 1959, Soup - who never liked to travel - and I sort of changed jobs. He became the desk man, charged with putting out the paper, and I became the sports editor/columnist.
Things grow fuzzy when you try to erase the years, to recall how it was long ago. I know the newspaper business has changed as much as any and more than most.
Everybody worked on Friday nights. High school football was huge. It is true that a news reporter actually used the phrase "pickle-shaped pigskin" in his game story. I think he lived to tell about it.
Our Friday night writers included the famous from the news room - actually, we were all in one room - including Melville "Buster" Carico and Ben Beagle. Whatever happened to Beagle, anyway?
This may surprise a lot of people, but there was a time when this newspaper didn't cover college basketball. Not even home games at VPI and W & L, which had a terrific team.
One of the moments I'll never forget is when Wendy Weisend, the VPI sports publicist, made the proposal to my boss that if the paper would cover all of the Gobblers' basketball games, home and away, the school would pay for it.
That's how I became a basketball writer. And, yes, papers long since have quit accepting those kinds of perks.
I rode the bus for 20-odd hours and I roomed with Weisend. He and I ran into Bones McKinney in a Dayton hotel, and he told us that there were a couple of homers who officiated all Dayton games. The next morning, we looked at the paper and saw a picture of Bones in the stands. He had been tossed out of the game.
There were scary moments in some DC-3s, perhaps the safest airplane ever created. One time when we landed in Charlotte, N.C., when the airport was closed, because the crew lived there and said to heck with it. We were stranded for two days. Nothing, I mean nothing, was open.
Chuck Noe coached the Gobblers in those days and we had a deal: I could go in the locker room at halftime if I never wrote about what was said. Noe was one of the great basketball minds. That's how I learned basketball, and I never violated that trust.
Chris Smith and Louie Mills and Dean Blake and Jitterbug Gilbert and the rest were my friends. I wasn't that much older than they were. But I never found it difficult to write that they stunk when they stunk. Noe never had any problems with that, either.
I covered every game of Virginia's losing streak in football. They beat my alma mater, Duke, in my first game writing for Roanoke, and it was nearly three years before they won again.
But those were different times, when you got to know the coaches and drank a beer with them, and they'd call you back within 15 minutes.
We never heard of graduation rates and gender equity and shoe contracts. Not much television, either.
As an editor, I was a very lucky boss. I always had good people working for me. People who could write, and wanted to work hard, and didn't count hours.
I say this with the purest of intentions: I always thought some of those people were better than Roanoke. Meaning, I guess, that there were larger papers with big budgets who had less-capable writers.
The best thing about working in Roanoke was that the sports section had the respect of its peers. We had fewer people, less money and less space. Yet somehow we covered as many events as the big boys.
Our guys might drive home at 3 a.m. because we couldn't afford to stay over in a motel, and I loved it, because they loved it, and they did it because they wanted to make the paper better.
What you wanted as a sports editor was dedication. I had that, and I'll always believe it showed in the product.
There was a time when The Roanoke Times covered the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the U.S. Open and the NCAA basketball final (before it became the Final Four).
That mostly doesn't happen anymore because of the enormous changes in the business, mostly the computers and the wire services that now offer you the best writers in America. Why should a smaller paper send its own person, even if it could afford to?
I remember when the sports staff was all male and all white, and how that changed with no difficulty because we hired talented people.
We merged with the afternoon paper and if we didn't pull it off without a hitch, I think we did a good job.
Bob Teitlebaum and Jack Bogaczyk came over to the joint operation, and they're still here, for which Roanoke should be grateful. I gave Doug Doughty and Bill Cochran their first newspaper jobs, for which I am grateful.
I can't name all the names. I'd be sure to forget somebody.
I've been gone from Roanoke for two years, minus a day, and the paper certainly hasn't suffered. You probably don't know Bill Bern, the sports editor, but that's the nature of the business. Now sports departments are run by "inside" guys. But Bern's signature is on every edition. That's his reward.
What I always tried to do was tell you what I thought. Some of you didn't like that and I understood why. I heard the frustrations from Virginia Tech fans and I answered all the hate mail if it was signed. I'd much rather debate a critic than a friend.
But now it's over and we all have to go on to other things. I've never regretted the decision to leave when I did. I may have been the first person to give two years' notice.
For a person whose professional interests and hobby are the same - college sports - I have come to Shangri La.
I never retired. I've been busier than I was the last couple of years in Roanoke. It's been fun.
To those who liked me and those who hated me, I have the same message. Trust me, I cared.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB