lingering doubts myself.
Hirtsboro was a long way away, Wallace Sampson had been killed years ago and the only thing we had to go on was a rich guy’s suspicion and a vague promise of help from a local preacher. I had prepared a pretty good argument that, at worst, we could get a feature on an unsolved killing and a rich Yankee’s unlikely quest. In the very best case, I would argue, the Charlotte Times could solve a murder. And a newspaper which published either one could hardly be portrayed as racist. But for now, the Wallace Sampson story pitch would have to wait.
When news breaks out, the newsroom is my favorite place in the world. It is a place where the job changes in an instant, where a plane crash or a press conference or a document hidden in city hall determines what you do that day—and you seldom know in advance what that’s going to be. It’s a place where you get information before anyone else and then get paid to tell everyone. But more than anything, it’s a place of fascinating people—writers, a few of them tortured; photographers, many of them off-the-wall; graphic designers, including the artistically temperamental; and copy editors, stern custodians of the purity of the Mother Tongue, some of them zealots.
As the managing editor, Walker is the ringmaster of our little circus. He has several assistants, but at the end of the day it is Walker who decides what stories will be covered and who will cover them. It is Walker who, as the final editor, ultimately determines how the stories will read when they finally go to press. His desk sits smack in the middle of the newsroom, police scanners on one side, radios to communicate with reporters and photographers in the field on the other, a bank of phone lines in the middle, and, of course, Colonel Sanders. But Walker spends much of his time moving from reporter’s desk to reporter’s desk in the newsroom assigning, cajoling, joking and editing.
“Let’s hear it,” I said to him.
“Last night, a commercial jet on a flight from New York to Charlotte comes in so low at the airport that it hits a telephone pole short of the runway. The pilot pulls up in a hurry, makes a safe landing and doesn’t tell anyone. Just moseys along to the hotel and hopes no one notices.”
“Holy shit!”
“Exactly.”
“How’d we find out?”
“Maintenance guy is getting the plane ready this morning and notices there’s a hole in one of the wings. He happens to bunk with a local flight attendant who came in on the plane. She tells him there was a huge bang on board, that there’s no way the pilot couldn’t have known what happened. The maintenance guy doesn’t fully trust the airline or the FAA. So he calls us. I got Jeffries chasing the airline. Keating in the Washington bureau is thrashing through the bureaucracy at the FAA. Bullock’s working the phones trying to find passengers—one hundred twenty-one of them, plus crew. I need you to find the pole. Take a photographer and get a picture of it. How tall is it? What’s it look like? We got an artist working on a re-creation. I want to know exactly how high that plane was and how far away it was from the end of the runway.”
“Got it.” I hesitated. Bringing up the Sampson case now, even indirectly, had its risks. Approached at the wrong time, when his mind was elsewhere, Walker was likely to shoot down, at least in the short-term, any idea, no matter how good. But I decided to plunge ahead. “Walker, after deadline, I need to talk to you about something.”
“I know. You want a raise.”
“Yeah, but that’s not it. It’s about a story.”
“Fine. Now grab Drake and get going. I need you back by seven o’ clock.”
Within minutes, photographer Fred Drake and I were headed for the airport. Coming from New York, I figured the plane had landed from the north to the south on Runway 36. We parked at a chain link fence a quarter mile off the end of the runway and started walking in a straight line away from the airport through the low brush, counting steps and avoiding broken beer bottles as we went. We found the telephone pole fifteen minutes later, next to an aircraft radio beacon installation. It was shorter than normal, leaning to the side and shattered at the top. Splinters littered the ground and on some of them I could see gray paint. I had taken five hundred twenty-five steps. I figured my stride averaged thirty inches. That meant we were a quarter of a mile from where we’d parked and that the pole was just a half-mile from the end of the runway.
Drake scrambled around the site like a monkey, shooting close-ups of the splinters on the ground; then telephoto shots of the top of the pole; then wide-angle shots of the whole scene, which showed the relationship of the pole to its surroundings. He extracted a tape measure that he used for precise focusing of studio shots, shimmied up the pole to the top and dangled the fully extended tape.
I was imagining a 737 roaring over, its unknowing passengers only a few feet above my ahead with another half mile to go before touchdown, when a voice commanded, “Hold it right there! Hands in the air!”
My first thought was that we were being robbed. There were some tough neighborhoods not far from the Charlotte airport. But I looked up to see a county policeman walking through the brush toward us.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.
“We’re from the Times,” I said. “I’m Matt Harper. This is Fred Drake. We’re on a story.”
“You need to get outta here now or I’m going to arrest both your asses.” The officer grabbed me by the elbow. Drake shimmied down the pole, raised his camera and snapped a picture.
Infuriated, the cop charged Drake and grabbed for the camera.
“Hands off the equipment, officer!” Drake yelled, whirling away. The camera flew from his hand, smashed into the concrete slab that supported the airport beacon and popped open, exposing the film in the back.
The cop smirked. “It looks like I don’t need that camera after all.”
I thought of telling him how airports belong to the citizens and not to the government. That as long as we weren’t a danger to aviation, no one should be hassling us because no harm can come from the people simply knowing the facts. But I kept quiet. An argument with a cop over the public’s right to know wasn’t an argument I was likely to win. Accompanied by the officer, Drake and I made our way back to the car. We were back in the newsroom, as instructed, by 7:00 p.m.
Walker Burns sat at a computer keyboard flanked by reporters Ronnie Bullock, Rich Keating and Julie Jeffries, the Times’s newest staffer and the first recruited from a television station. I joined the huddle over Walker’s shoulder. The reporters had typed their notes into the system and Walker was crafting them into a story. The first-edition deadline was looming.
“Was it one hundred twenty-one passengers including crew or one hundred twenty-one passengers plus crew?” he demanded of Jeffries.
She flipped her perfect brown hair from her face, consulted her notes and answered crisply, “One hundred twenty-one total. Five crew and one hundred sixteen other passengers.” With her pouty mouth, bedroom eyes, and gym-honed body, Jeffries was TV-gorgeous. Rumors that she’d been hired on orders from the publisher were certainly plausible. But I had to admit she knew what she was doing.
Walker banged out a few more paragraphs. “What’s the FAA say?”
Keating read him the agency’s boilerplate response and Walker typed it.
“The FAA. What horseshit. Bullock, give me your best quote from a passenger.”
“I got a lady from Rock Hill who says it was as if an occult hand reached down and . . .”
“Cut the shit,” Walker barked. It was a time-honored Charlotte Times tradition that Walker would give you the day off if you could manage to get the phrase “it was as if an occult hand had . . .” into the newspaper. Walker had to pay off so infrequently that reporters had taken to asking questions this way (as in the case of a tornado): “Would you say it was as if an occult hand had reached down and tore through the trailer park?” Sometimes the puzzled interviewee would say, “Yeah, I guess so,” and the quote would be written up