THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504020038
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARGARET TALEV, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 176 lines
When 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 has 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 has kept him living longer than he thought he would.
And as he marks his 80th birthday 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 is one of the regulars.
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?''
At first glance, Peters could be any grandfather, with a peach-fuzzy layer of white hair. He smells like baby powder. When his eyes twinkle, though, he's a spry old raconteur, a gentleman dandy, ready with a compliment to charm a 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 he was 17, jobs were hard to find. His father, once a newspaper owner and writer, had taken a job as assistant secretary of commerce for President Herbert Hoover during the Depression.
``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 assignment was on-the-street response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration, in 1933. Since then, 10 presidents have occupied the White House.
The paper changed hands and the new owner, editor and publisher was the wealthy Cissy Patterson, sister of New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson.
``Cissy entertained a hell of a lot. I was frequently invited to her home on 15 Dupont Circle. 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.
He liked women, and soon was 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. As a youngster, he had 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, Peters' love for boating would occasionally resurface and pull him away.
After the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Peters took a leave of absence from The Times-Herald and joined the Navy, where he was a gunnery officer of a destroyer and 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, who was managing editor. 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, 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.
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. 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.
``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.
``One of his little projects was building a voice box for a man who had lost his voice,'' said Mary Donne.
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.
But he started stringing for the Raleigh newspaper, and then began free-lancing for The Virginian-Pilot.
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.''
``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. ``He had it to a degree that a lot of other people in the profession could learn from.''
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 had 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.
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.'' MEMO: Margaret Talev, who worked with Mason Peters when she was an intern with
The Virginian-Pilot in summer 1994, wrote this profile for her senior
thesis at the University of Maryland.
ILLUSTRATION: Photos
DREW C. WILSON/Staff
Mason Peters, right, discusses an upcoming newspaper project with
Anne Saita in the newsroom in Elizabeth City. Staffer Perry Parks,
seated at a monitor in the background, works a daily story. Peters,
still going strong, will be 80 on April 14.
Peters began his newspaper career in 1932, at the age of 18, and has
been at it ever since. Early in his career, left, he learned to pay
attention to detail. Today, above, he says he couldn't quit
reporting if he wanted to.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB