Nothing Changes in Richmond

I started reading Roger Mudd's The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News this morning, and his story starts in Richmond, at the News Leader where he got his first job, replacing a reporter who was out on maternity leave. The year was 1953 and what was amazing to me (besides there being a female reporter who was going to come back after having a baby) is he talks about the same people I encountered when I arrived there 20 years later -- Charles Hamilton, John Leard, Charlie McDowell, and Guy Fridell.

All of them still had jobs at Media General decades later. McDowell and Fridell were columnists. Hamilton had been booted upstairs to the executive floor where he was put in charge of the employee newsletter, and he wasn't happy about that one bit. Because I wouldn't flirt with him or otherwise play nice, he sidelined my professional career. It took me several years to discover that he was the reference that was tripping me up. I swore I was going to show up at his funeral to glare at him, but he lived a very, very long time, and by the time the obituary appeared, I had lost my steam. There was so much sexual harassment going on back then anyway. He wasn't the only one.

But my point is, back then the newspaper was so reluctant to change, even when the person was old, retired, and completely out of it, Media General found a job they could do so they could keep writing or keep coming to the office to sit behind a desk, even if they didn't have anything to do. One old guy had his wife drive him in from Barboursville twice a week so he could sit in his little glass cubicle and turn in his column, with the date line Barboursville. He actually died in that little cubicle one Labor Day weekend.

Mudd writes that black preachers could not be called The Reverand. Only white preachers could have the capital The. The blacks were just Rev. He also reported living in Baltimore Row in the "historic district." Where is this Baltimore Row?

After his spring and summer at the News Leader, he was hired by WRNL, the sister radio station, and had several successful years there chasing the Byrd political machine with his gigantic tape recorder. He went on to jobs in Washington radio and television and eventually CBS News, coming back to Richmond to be married at the Cathedral.