
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995                   TAG: 9505040008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARGIE FISHER EDITORIAL WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COLORFUL CAST

MELVILLE Carico has been called ``a living legend'' so often that it probably should be printed on his driver's license. Indeed, there are few Virginia politicians or Virginia journalists - at least few over age 40 - who don't know ``Buster'' Carico, who can't do a passing imitation of his Southwest Virginia twang, who don't associate hundreds of political events with Carico's trademark red baseball cap.

Numerous newspaper columns have been written about Carico, both before and since his retirement in 1981 as a political reporter for the Roanoke Times & World-News. The latest, by his longtime friend and colleague Ben Beagle, ran in this newspaper just two weeks ago as Carico was being inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame.

Like Beagle and others who've known him for many years, I, too, could tell reams of Carico stories. But attending the Hall of Fame dinner in Richmond where he was honored, it seemed to me that worth celebrating - as much as Carico's career, which began at this newspaper two years before I was born - was the entire large cast of colorful characters like him who have peopled this industry in the time I've been a part of it.

Beagle, Ozzie Osborne, Mike Ives, Bill Brill, Charlie Cox, Mary Bland Armistead, the late Cecil Edmonds - names indelibly linked in my mind to the Roanoke newspaper, no matter how long ago some moved on. Guy Friddell of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Shelley Rolfe of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the late Hugh Robertson of the old Richmond News Leader, the late Agnes Cooke of Northern Neck weeklies.

Others - the late Paxton Davis, for instance - were colorful in terms of the powerful effect of their writing. Readers either loved them or hated them, but rarely viewed them with indifference. Here, though, I'm talking one-of-a-kind personalities - wonderfully eccentric, individualistic, unconventional, slightly nutso mavericks of the Fourth Estate.

They don't make 'em like that anymore - and a pity it is because some of the happiest times of my life have been spent in the company of the above-mentioned iconoclasts of my venerable profession. When I came to work here 36 years ago, they made it so much fun that Times-World, had it only known, could have gotten by without paying me the $1 an hour I then earned.

Perhaps young reporters still have fun. If so, it's not noticeable when I leave the editorial department these days to visit the third-floor newsroom. It's awfully serious up there. Awfully sober.

Not, mind you, that drinking on the job was encouraged by the company in the wild and crazy days of yore. But post-deadline beer-guzzling in the old Pipe Room of what was then the Ponce de Leon Hotel across the street was a ritual. And more than a few news stories were written and edited in the blur of hangovers, not to mention cigarette smoke so thick you could hardly see the keys on the old manual typewriters.

Today, the atmosphere in the newsroom is purer: smoke-free and politically correct. I never hear of fights breaking out among reporters, or of the city calling to say some editor's false teeth were found in a sewer, or of bawdy songfests led by the city editor. I don't think city editors still exist. All decisions concerning news coverage and play of stories are made by teams of individuals, many of whom have academic degrees in fields so specialized that they could moonlight as brain surgeons.

They do good work up there, and I'm proud of them. Doubtless, some of the young ones will become newspaper publishers, win Pulitzer Prizes and also be inducted into the Communications Hall of Fame. But the newspaper's climate - sanitized, computerized, homogenized - isn't, I fear, conducive to oddballs.

Well, says Frosty Landon, our executive editor with his own bona fide oddball credentials, the industry's standards and expectations have changed with the times. ``We've all become solid citizens.''

Jimmy Thacker - one of my first editors, now retired - says the colorful characters who used to populate newsrooms took very seriously their jobs: gathering news, and reporting it objectively and professionally. ``But they weren't out to save the world. They didn't take themselves so seriously.'' And, for the most part, there was less scrambling to climb the corporate ladder, less eagerness to go on to larger media markets, to become Woodwards and Bernsteins.

Fun? Who do you know in any business who's having lots of fun these days? asks my friend, June Nicholson, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Mass Communications. The culture of work is different.

Anyway, there won't be many more Buster Caricos, who could hire on as a newspaper switchboard operator and retire 47 years later as the dean of Virginia political reporters, honored by governors, congressmen, legislators, Supreme Court justices and even the president (Reagan). And that's readers' loss, politics' loss and journalism's loss.

by CNB