ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 7, 1996 TAG: 9611070068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
A guy who managed to cover Roanoke Red Sox games despite a mental block on how to keep a box score probably deserves some kind of an award.
And Lexington-raised newspaper columnist and onetime Roanoke Times cub reporter Charles McDowell is getting one. A big one.
Tonight, McDowell, a longtime Washington correspondent for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, will receive the National Press Club's highest honor, the Fourth Estate Award.
McDowell has covered Washington politics for more than 30 years. His column is syndicated nationally, and he's been a regular on public television's "Washington Week in Review" since the 1970s.
The press club award is another high point in a journalism career that got its start, albeit a sort of dubious one, at The Roanoke Times.
Back when McDowell was a student at Washington & Lee University in the late 1940s, Roanoke Times Managing Editor Bill Atkinson was teaching journalism one day a week at the college. He arranged for McDowell to cover Piedmont League baseball games on weekends and during summers.
"It was marvelous in that The Roanoke Times let me have the responsibility to do some things," McDowell said. "They'd let you go cover something and really cover it, write it and they'd put it in the paper."
McDowell got to try his hand at all kinds of stories before he went off to graduate school at Columbia University in New York.
But when he finished, he headed for the Richmond paper, not back to Roanoke.
"Washington was closer to Richmond," he said, "and Washington was my objective."
He cut his teeth on politics in the state capital first, where he became something of a mentor for a veteran Roanoke Times reporter who had showed him around the police beat a few years before.
"He told me not to write 'gee, whiz' stories," Melville "Buster" Carico said - stories that said "ain't this a big deal."
McDowell moved to Washington in 1965, and has been a fixture there since. He retired from the Times-Dispatch in 1992, but continues to write a weekly column.
The press club award puts him in a league with some heavy hitters in the news business who have also won the award, including Walter Cronkite, Art Buchwald, David Brinkley and Russell Baker.
"The company you're in is very intimidating. I decided I would say that no oftener than once a week," he said with a humble laugh. "Otherwise I said I would grin and say, 'It's wonderful,' and I've done pretty good at that. I'm not going to go around apologizing for winning a major award."
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