THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503310262
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY MARGARET TALEV, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 321 lines
WHEN THE U.S. war in the Persian Gulf began five years ago, Mason Peters flipped on his computer and wrote a letter to North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms. ``Dear Senator,'' it read, ``Never thought I would impose upon you, but circumstances have overtaken my manners.
``Would you help me try to get back into the Navy, or at least into some war effort more useful than my present Virginian-Pilot work?'' he asked Helms. ``I have the technical and command qualifications. Eyesight good.'' And he boasted that he could do as many push-ups as his age.
Mason Summers Peters III was 75.
A journalist since he was 18, Peters had been a political writer for the paper's North Carolina editions for 10 years, and on this particular day he had decided it might be time to hang it up. It wasn't the first time he's tried to quit the calling that had become an addiction of sorts.
But not surprisingly, the Navy didn't call. So he shrugged, picked up his notebook and went back to work.
The work, he says, is what's kept him living longer than he thought he would. And as he heads into his 80th year April 14, Peters needs the job as it needs him, he said during an interview as he drove to Whistling Pines, a restaurant on the outskirts of Elizabeth City, where he's one of the regulars.
At the restaurant, Peters parked, and examined his outfit: khaki pants, yellow oxford shirt, gray blazer.
``Oh, hell, my handkerchief doesn't match,'' he groaned, plucking the blue scarf from the breast pocket of his blazer. ``Grab me that blue bag, would you?''
The open bag reveals two dozen handkerchiefs, some with patterns and some plain - brilliant greens, oranges, tans, reds, and blues, the occasional pink and finally the plain yellow one he's been searching for. He folds it into the pocket, and he is, for a reporter on a Sunday morning, immaculate. The bag of scarves is always in the car, he says, flashing a charming smile.
At a first glance, Mason Peters could be any grandfather, with a peach-fuzzy layer of white hair. He smells like baby powder and speaks slowly, with a resonant voice that is melodious and deep. When his eyes twinkle, though, he's a spry old raconteur, a gentleman dandy, ready with a compliment to charm a pretty lady, a racy joke to break the ice or enough statistics to make any public official squirm.
The meticulous dress, the etiquette, the disarming charm and the preparation are some of the methods Peters has used to build sources and get stories for the last 62 years.
He is on a first-name basis with North Carolina's most powerful politicians - and with watermen and waitresses and construction workers.
Journalism wasn't a profession he had planned on. Peters had shown an aptitude for science, was a mostly self-taught electrical engineer and loved to perform experiments.
But in 1932, when Peters was 17, jobs were hard to find. His father, once a newspaper owner and a writer, had taken a job as assistant secretary of commerce for President Herbert Hoover during the Depression.
Peters' father worried about what the boy was doing to occupy himself up in his suite at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. ``Hell, I didn't have anything to do,'' Peters said. ``I was sitting around experimenting. I remember using a hot plate to run chemical experiments. I was trying, for some reason, to extract crystalline nicotine from the Camel cigarettes that I smoked.''
Peters remembers, ``My dad said, `Do you want to go to work for a newspaper?' and I said `Yeah, I guess I'd better. I'm tired of sitting up here.' Dad knew the managing editor of The Washington Herald, a Hearst paper. That's the way it all started.''
His first big story assignment was on-the-street response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration. What followed, he said, was a new era in journalism and in the United States as a whole.
``All of the best reporters in the world came to Washington in 1933 because of the extraordinary political and social events that seemed to be developing and sure to occur. It was much more exciting than now. Hell, the Republicans aren't half as exciting as the Democrats in 1933. The Democrats came in with a view of life that was entirely different than anything we'd ever had in this country.
``At the time, I sort of moved into this extraordinarily exciting period in American history. The opening years of the New Deal. This immensely disruptive change in our society. And it was extremely lucky for a kid newspaperman, because I was exposed to the best writers in the world, who all came to Washington to watch this.''
But despite the news it was generating, The Herald was losing money. Hearst agreed to sell it about two years after Peters joined the staff, and when ownership changed Peters found himself among the favorites on staff.
The new owner, editor and publisher was the wealthy Cissy Patterson, sister of New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson. She bought the morning and afternoon papers, the Times and the Herald, turned them into a 24-hour paper with 10 editions and in rapid succession began dropping veteran Hearst staffers and moving up young reporters.
``Here I was, a kid reporter being shunted all over Washington covering the White House, the House, the Senate, covering all these new agencies that were springing up like field flowers,'' Peters said. ``As far as I was concerned I had to learn to do everything, so I never had time to get bored. I was learning all the time, because if I didn't I'd get fired.
``She fired me pretty regularly anyway, because I used to drink like a fish,'' he said. ``Everybody did back then.
``Cissy entertained a hell of a lot. I was frequently invited to her home on 15 Dupont Circle. To be invited to these parties, where the news would be given to you over the dinner table! All kinds of people would come to Cissy's parties - senators, congressmen, ambassadors, Supreme Court judges. And a guy would be carrying on a conversation across a dinner table, and you could just see the 96-point headline.
``I'd whisper to Mrs. Patterson, `Thank you very much, I've got to write this,' and she'd say, `You'd better, I'm waiting to read it. Call me as soon as you've finished,' and I'd scoot on back to the paper. I was still just barely into my twenties.''
The Times-Herald had become the largest newspaper in Washington, and between 1932 and 1939, Peters was promoted and shifted around to a variety of positions including rewrite man, drama critic, picture editor, Sunday editor, assistant city editor and city editor, overseeing writers that included the late Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
But he didn't like editing as much as writing and he tried to keep reporting as much as possible.
Peters loved women, and in July 1936, he attempted to elope with Mary Elizabeth Overton, the daughter of a Louisiana senator. One morning at 2 o'clock they woke up the county clerk in Upper Marlboro, Md., got a marriage license and, according to reports, were on their way to find a preacher when the bride-to-be's older sister caught up to them and stopped them.
The failed elopement was covered by The Times-Herald, and the two were never married. Soon after, he did get married. His wife, Helen, already had a son, Stevie. Peters and Helen had two more children, Jane and Mason IV.
But he wasn't with them long. Sailing was the only force that compelled Peters more than newspapers, and the sea was beginning to tug at him. His son Greg, now 38, said that as a teenager Mason Peters had run away from his Chicago home, jumped aboard a steamer and traveled along the eastern coast of the United States and into South America, learning how to navigate and tie knots.
He worked his way around the world a couple of times on freighters, and later twice sailed his favorite boat, a 46-foot Alden ketch named Windwardstar across the Atlantic.
Although he was eventually reunited with his family, Mason Peters' love for boating would occasionally resurface and pull him away.
In the years immediately preceding World War II, Peters stayed with The Times-Herald, but he also began working for Navy Intelligence. ``It sounds mysterious, like John LeCarre, but it wasn't,'' he said. ``If I heard something from the German ambassador, I'd feed it into our intelligence networks.''
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Peters took a leave of absence from The Times-Herald and signed onto the Naval Reserve, where he was a 5-inch anti-aircraft gun control officer, and then gunnery officer of a destroyer. During the war, he became a radar expert. Wounded in the battle at Okinawa, he left the Navy a decorated lieutenant late in 1945, and returned to Washington in 1946.
Upon his return, he received a phone call from Cissy Patterson who hired him as night managing editor.
Patterson died two years later, and left the paper to the top seven executives, including Peters. Each of the Seven Dwarfs, as they came to be known, inherited more than $600,000. The Washington Post bought the Times-Herald.
Peters took his money, converted it to stock, and found himself a millionaire in a business notorious for its poor pay.
He had divorced Helen, and, with enough money to retire, thought maybe it was time to get out of the business. So he bought a boat, married his second wife, Janice, and cruised the high seas. Janice wanted to live on land, so Peters bought a house for her and their son. Shortly after, they were divorced.
``After the second marriage went to pieces and I was getting interested in what was then an evolving quantum mechanics picture, I decided it was time to get back and make myself useful,'' he said. ``I also decided to quit drinking. I was having a lot of emotional problems.''
He returned to Washington, considered writing for a science magazine and chose, instead, to work with a friend to develop ideas for radar antennae. The abundance of wiring in the Washington area garbled his experiments, so he moved to Western Maryland, where there was less development, to continue his research.
The move didn't last long. ``The hell with this crap,'' he said. ``I'm too far from the ocean.'' He bought a Porsche and drove south until he reached Elizabeth City, a town on the water. He fell in love again, married his third wife, Phyllis, and moved to Aydlett, a Currituck County hamlet about 35 miles from Elizabeth City.
He and Phyllis had four children. One daughter, 37-year old attorney Mary Donne Peters, said he was a living library.
``I remember as a little kid talking about things like Chaucer at the dinner table, and books and literature being a very important part of the family. I think we had a larger library at that time than the public library - under every couch and chair and bed and bedside table. He always made reading and debate open. There weren't any taboo subjects.
``If ever there was a Renaissance Man, it's Mason Peters - not just in terms of literature, but also science,'' she said. Her father began Associated Electroneers Inc., an electronics research and development company. He purchased, researched, invented and constructed equipment, and tried to put it to a good use in the community.
``One of his little projects was building a voice box for a man who'd lost his voice,'' said Mary Donne. ``He was trying to build transmitters to enlarge, amplify and enhance specific sounds. He was just messing around in his study and trying to help someone.''
She said that in the early 1960s, Peters received awards for keeping the communications system on North Carolina's Outer Banks operational during a catastrophic coastal storm. The Outer Banks flooded and the only areas not submerged in water were tall monuments and elevated sand ridges. ``My dad stuck two-way radios in most of the law enforcement cars to try to keep the communications systems open. I think he was largely responsible for saving a lot of lives.''
But Peters still loved newspapers. He went to work for Elizabeth City's newspaper, the Daily Advance. By 1967 he was the editorial page writer and editor, and in 1968 he became executive editor. Yet again, Peters tried to retire.
``He was wealthy at a very young age,'' Mary Donne said. ``He didn't have to work at that point, and I think he thought he would write the Great American Novel. I just don't think that without the deadline of the presses the Great American Novel would ever be written. At least not by my dad. He thrives on the great adrenaline rush. Between 1957 and the late 1970s he formed a series of small companies. But I don't think he could ever completely leave reporting.''
In the late 1970s, Mary Donne Peters had just graduated from college and was working as a news director at a radio station and free-lancing at the Raleigh News and Observer, when she went home to see her father. ``He was puttering around on his boat, talking about when he died. And it startled me. But I realized he just didn't have anything to look forward to.
``I had told the News and Observer about him and they were very interested in having someone in northeastern North Carolina. The pitch I made was that I was only making about $400 a month,'' she said. ``I told him that unless he wanted to support me forever, he had to do this because they would never take me without him. He started with a story or two. And that's what made him get back into it.''
Mason Peters was in his sixties when he started stringing for the Raleigh newspaper, and then he took to free-lancing for The Virginian-Pilot, which had begun covering news in North Carolina.
Former Virginian-Pilot editor Sandy Rowe hired Peters 15 years ago. Now editor of the Oregonian, Rowe explained why she made an unusual decision - to bring in a senior citizen as a daily reporter: ``He was writing circles around everyone else. With Mason, age is irrelevant. He may be one of the few people about whom I would say that.
``He had been free-lancing for us, and the question was whether he would go on a full-time slot,'' she said. ``His work and his passion were so obvious that you almost couldn't not hire him. You had to put him on full time just to be morally correct.
``One of the things that I always look for at any age is what things are they passionate about and how passionate are they about our craft,'' Rowe said. ``Over the years, his passion for what we do well has never diminished. And he had it to a degree that a lot of other people in the profession could learn from.
``I would suspect he was born with a good dose of it. And I suspect he's done some hard work that he may not even know or acknowledge to keep it alive in himself,'' Rowe said. ``It was sort of a constant reminder that I shouldn't forget to care deeply about passion in journalism. I don't know anybody at any age that has the same passion for what we do than Mason Peters at age 79.''
Peters' third wife, Phyllis, died a few years ago, after succumbing to chronic illness that had kept her in a nursing home for years. After she'd begun to require professional care, Peters moved onto a boat, and visited her until her death. Then he left town to cover the state legislature, and when he returned, the boat had fallen into disrepair.
He now lives on a farm in Perquimans County, but still plans someday to move back on the water. But he probably won't leave the dock for more than a two-week vacation.
He couldn't quit reporting now if he wanted to, he claims. ``For one thing, I have to live comfortably,'' he said. Once a rich man, Peters drank, sailed and spent his way through a good part of his fortune. ``I gave all my money away,'' he said. ``I never thought I'd live this long and that's the God's honest truth.''
His zest for life amazes his co-workers, who say a regular paycheck is not the main reason he keeps with the reporting. A long-time Virginian-Pilot editor, Ronald L. Speer, became editor and general manager of the North Carolina operation in spring '94.
One of the reasons Speer took the job was the opportunity to work with Peters.
``I knew he was a great story teller,'' Speer said. ``But I didn't realize how many other things he could do.
``I was amazed when I first took over the Carolina operation to see Mason climbing up steps clinging precariously to a ladder to drill a hole in the second floor wall so he could run a line and fix me a police scanner with an outside antenna,'' he said. ``I'm 20 years younger and I sure as hell wouldn't have done it.''
At the keyboard, Peters is equally productive, although his style echoes an antique kind of journalism, long and colloquial. ``Some of our young readers and editors scoff at Mason's writing as being too flowery, too filled with adjectives, too old shoe,'' Speer said. ``It probably is for journalists. People, however, love it.''
Peters usually works six or seven days a week. On this particular Sunday, Peters has been at the office since 10 a.m. On most weekends he comes in to check the answering machine, read the wire and call the police ``so the kids won't have to come in.''
He also serves as resident computer expert in the paper's North Carolina bureaus.
Back at the Whistling Pines, Peters takes a good look around. The lunch buffet has drawn an elderly crowd, and Peters frowns at the blue-haired women and men in brightly colored polyester jackets. ``I don't look like those old farts, do I?'' he asks.
He doesn't.
``Mason Peters still has good legs, and that's what makes newspaper people great,'' Speer said. ``He works well with youngsters, but he does not consider himself of the past.
``Mason shouted at me last week when I suggested that maybe he and I pull back and let the younger people carry the big stories,'' Speer recalled. ``He said, `Don't tell me to let the kids take over. You pull back if you want to but I'm not going to. I'm going to die on this job.' He probably will, and I can't think of a better way for Mason Peters to go.'' MEMO: Margaret Talev, who worked with Mason Peters when she was an intern with
The Virginian-Pilot in the summer of '94, wrote this profile for her
senior thesis at the University of Maryland.
ILLUSTRATION: From the Mason Peters Collection
Mason Peters in his 30s, as picture editor of The Times-Herald in
Washington, D.C., where he also served as reporter, rewrite man,
drama critic, Sunday editor, assistant city editor and city editor.
Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
At 79, Mason Peters hasn't lost his passion for eloquence, his
thirst for knowledge or his sense of fashion. Nor has his lost his
enthusiasm for reporting.
Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Mason Peters, right, in his element at the Elizabeth City Bureau
with reporters Anne Saita and Perry Parks.
From the Mason Peters Collection
His love affair with water started early - perhaps while fishing as
a boy on Lake James in Illinois.
Peters served in the Navy in WWII
Was wounded in battle at Okinawa.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB