Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504180001
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Most people who supported the nomination of Melville Soyars "Buster" Carico to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame wrote about his considerable talent in covering Virginia politics and government.
This is as it should be. Carico was the man in the red baseball cap who moved among the tumultuous conventions and campaigns of both political parties - and among their less interesting activities - with ease and skill.
He covered some of the state's most dramatic times in this century - including the fight against racial integration in public schools that almost destroyed the public school system and raised, at least figuratively, the old ghost of civil war.
He was there when some of the state's schools closed because a law passed by the General Assembly said they had to be locked the moment a black child tried to enter.
He watched as the Democratic organization of U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. cracked at midcentury and then became a memory.
He covered governors and knew them intimately - including Linwood Holton of Roanoke, who was elected the first Republican governor of modern Virginia in 1969.
He knew Mills E. Godwin Jr. of Chuckatuck, an old Byrd man who was first a Democratic governor and later a Republican governor. Nobody had seen anything like that before. Even Carico.
And Carico knew their enemies and their friends and he walked an objective line between them.
He called everybody "good buddy." He said most people were "gret Uhmerricans."
He knew precinct chairmen from Northern Virginia to Scott County by their first names, and was once propositioned by a lady of the night while using a pay phone on the street to phone in a story from Norton, of all places.
He covered the General Assembly for 23 years and when it came time to retire in February 1981, they gave him a joint resolution and a rare breakfast accolade at the old John Marshall Hotel in Richmond.
Few old reporters can hang a resolution from the General Assembly on the den wall; never mind the memory of a breakfast like that.
(Incidentally, there was a time when Carico wore a gray fedora hat, which he tipped to women with old-world class. Carico said he started wearing the red baseball cap because the fedora got in the way of getting in and out of cars. You would have to say a gray fedora wouldn't stand out much at a convention.)
Before politics and government - back in the Great Depression and afterward - Carico practiced a kind of eclectic journalism that you don't see much of anymore.
Start in the 1930s, with the skinny kid who had graduated from Jefferson High School and knew he wanted to be a newspaperman. Working the morning Roanoke Times' switchboard wasn't exactly like writing stories that would blow the lid off the town. But that is what the skinny kid did until they took him on in The Roanoke Times newsroom for $18 a week.
His reporting career became enormously unspecialized, as most careers were then.
He covered dance recitals. Once, a particular dancer took his fancy and and he gave her a rave review. Angry mothers of less-favored dancers made a lot of calls the next day to the managing editor, who was not happy.
He did the uninspiring in journalism - going by City Hall to write down the realty transfers or the divorces.
And he covered the dramatic, along with the mundane. He wrote court stories - including petty matters and capital murder. He covered the power company and the railroad and old Hotel Roanoke.
He wrote weather stories. Once, in a piece about a snowstorm, he wrote, desperately: "Some of the stores were closed, while others were open."
He took obituaries on the phone - holding close the old ethic associated with that: Get everything right because this may be the only time this person's name will be in the newspaper.
He chased shootings, fires, robberies, stabbings, ax murders, rapes and appalling car wrecks while most other people were in bed. Once, when the emergency room at the old Lewis-Gale Hospital in downtown Roanoke was overflowing, he helped take histories from patients.
He later covered Virginia politics and government - which may or not have been more genteel in practice than ax murders - as they probably never have been covered before.
Yet, in those early years, in the superb Salem Avenue Academy of Music that once brought culture and excellent acoustics to Roanoke, he reviewed Ethel Barrymore in "The Corn Is Green."
The piece is lyrical, certainly non-political, and Ethel Barrymore must have loved it.
He knew every cop on the beat and the detectives, and before the General Assembly and before politics, he was a legend in Roanoke.
Ask the reporter who went to interview the director of Blue Cross health insurance about a rate increase that was coming up. "I thought they were going to send Carico," the nervous executive, worried about getting the facts straight, told the new reporter.
And when a dispirited colleague complained of being a "has- been," Carico said: "It's better to be a `has-been' than a `never-was,' good buddy."
Carico, now 78, was never a "never-was" or a "has-been." But he has watched so many politicians, so much sorrow and kindness, grace and violence, and idiocy that he knows what life is like.
by CNB