You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Hurricane Florence.
This Category 2 beast came across the outer banks at 100 miles an hour.
Wind and water pummeled the Tar Heel state like a sand blaster ripping paint off an old Buick.
People were evacuated. Rescue personnel responded. Media members stood in the gale, for seemingly no reason.
As I watched the coverage, I couldn’t help but think back to my time in Eastern North, Carolina.
On Saturday, New Bern seemed to be the epi-center of destruction with tidal surge precipitating hundreds of water rescues.
New Bern is where I first landed to talk to my 2nd ever news director Bill Knowles. We had an adversarial relationship almost from the start. He wanted to tell me what to do, and I don’t do well with people telling me what to do.
I looked at the cities being decimated by rain and wind and it brought back so many memories.
Jacksonville, Atlantic Beach, Emerald Isle, Kitty Hawk, the Pamlico Sound.
The weather map of destruction reminded me of my early days as a journalist.
So many stories started to flood into my brain.
Eastern North Carolina is really where so much of my life was forged, especially in News.
While watching the coverage, Friday night, I texted my 1st camera man. He now works with the Office of Emergency Management and still lives in Greenville with his wife, a reporter turned professor. While the Governor is now counting on him to help evacuate residents, I can only think of the gap toothed mad man who drove our news car into crazy day after day at the speed of news.
The hurricane made me reminisce for those days when I was young and didn’t know what I didn’t know.
As my gap toothed camera man texted me about life on this saturating night, my memory churns. I suddenly remember the morning after a hard night of drinking. My camera man is hung over like a tuna fish sandwich left in the sun. He is driving our news car into the middle of a Greenville intersection, when suddenly he pumps the brakes, and forcefully showers stomach bile and half regurgitated bar tacos into the dashboard and news scanner.
It’s a tidal surge of unimaginable horror.
I jump out of the car, horns honking, people staring.
“Clean up this damn car, and don’t come back till you do.”
And with that, I grabbed my bag and walked to the news bureau a block away.
Ha.
Betcha Edward R. Murrow doesn’t have that story to tell. Or maybe….
Since I started my career as a one-man-band, this gap toothed southern boy was my 1st cameraman. He was a pain in the ass and my best buddy at the same time. He was a salesman, a schemer a pro-active hustler. Since I had many of the same traits, we were like fire and gasoline, often laughing and fighting like an old married couple driving around Eastern North Carolina taking in the view from the front seat of our news vehicle.
When we were on, we were on. We broke stories that had never been broken. We kicked ass that had never been kicked.
And when we were off? We, or should I say, he was losing the Fourth of July fireworks tape, and running the highlites from the year before on live TV.
Ugh….
Not a good memory.
Though it’s been 25 years, people still remember some of the stories we churned out working together. It amazes me to get a phone call or email once in a blue moon from a viewer or old police contact from Greenville North Carolina, asking how I’m doing.
During our text barrage, we didn’t talk about the flooding as much as we reminisced about our time together at WCTI and WITN from 1990 – 1994.
He was my ally, then when I quit, and went to the rival NBC station, he was my most formidable competitor whose ass I often had to stomp.
LOL.
We talked about the unsolved Be-Lo murder where 6 people were stacked inside a supermarket and executed. That killer has never been found. It was a crime that terrorized a tiny town. It brings me chills that nobody has ever been arrested for this heinous act.
We chatted about F*** the Police where I aired a story that prominently featured a suspect in a shirt that boldly said: F*** THE POLICE! Why did I air it? Because the police chief challenged me to air it as part of the fabric of the story. Why didn’t I tell anyone I was airing it? Because I knew they would stop me from airing it. Why didn’t I cover up the words on her shirt? Ha? Because, then, what’s the point.
The hurricane reminded me of my screenplay Deadline: The story, that I have tried to sell countless times is based loosely on my real life experience in Oak City. It’s here that the Sheriff was shot and killed during a bank robbery hostage ordeal. I was the 1st reporter on the scene and laid in the dirt with troopers and deputies as bullet ripped through the town square. Eventually the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation SWAT team would kill the hostage by accident. It is still the craziest story I have ever been a part of in my 30 years.
The hurricane made me think of hurricanes I have covered along the outer banks on Highway 12.
I remember working as a one man band, driving a Taurus Station wagon with no cell phone, no internet. I had a 2 way radio that was as useful as a toaster oven in a category 1 storm. Nobody knew where I was. I was a news pirate on my own voyage of destruction. I remember parking on the road, and staring into the beast and having no plan in case it all went to hell in a handbasket.
I simply did what I have always done, which is rush head first into the jaws of the lion and then, with no good options, fought my way out of the mess I had just created for myself.
I still have a lot of friends from that time period. It’s where I cut my teeth on news. I made a ton of mistakes, but I also learned my craft here.
My oldest son was born here. I got married here. I went to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield while working here.
Armonte Cordan Williams was born here. His Pitt County mother wrote me and told me that she named her son after me because she admired my reporting style. Can you believe that? A child with the middle name, Cordan? I believe Armonte has done a little time in the slammer, but then again, who named Cordan, hasn’t?
I remember fighting the owner of the Sub Station one night. The popular ECU college beer joint only had one men’s room. Frat boys frequently went behind the building and pissed. I remember being back there waiting for the bathroom. It’s nighttime and the lighting is dim. I look up and see a fat white man leap onto a picnic table, jump into the night sky and launch himself at me. I instinctively sidestepped his flying attack, grabbed him by the neck and body slammed him onto the concrete. He groggily accused me of peeing on his building and banished me from the restaurant.
A bar full of college drunks, I’m on TV, and I’m the guy fighting a bar owner who is banished?
I remember being called to New Bern more than once to answer to my boss for not only journalistic indiscretions like F the police, but for actually fighting in public.
My gap toothed camera man called it 1-800-call-Bill.
Bill was my newsdirector who hated me and loved me. He wanted to resign me and fire me at the same time.
“I have video of you fighting at an ECU football tailgate,” I remember him saying.
My response: “Yeah, so what? It’s my time off.”
In a world before iphones and the internet and social media, I actually thought I could fight on my own time.
What an idiot, I was, have always been.
And so it was in North Carolina.
Crime Tape was there to hold the other reporters out, not me.
Speed Limits were to keep the other motorists under control, not me.
The Police, the SCLC, the violence and racism and murders and crazy.
Eastern North Carolina was like journalism 101. It was my training field, my stomping ground, where I went to cut my teeth and learn to be the journalist I would become.
As I watch the devastation on the TV before me, I can only hope my friends are ok. I pray the pristine cities on the map recover quickly.
As I watch hurricane Florence batter the coastline, I remember so many good memories that will always be a part of me.
Recover soon Eastern North Carolina.
Life’s Crazy™