A young man thinks of what he wants to do with his life. Doctor, lawyer. Fireman, farmer. His whole life is ahead of him and he can feel immortal. Old age and death are not in his mind. Time will wait for him, he thinks.

If he's lucky, one day he can look back and say, I picked the right career field, wouldn't have done if differently.

For a teenager off the farm with ambitions for the Nobel Prize for Literature, newspapers were a natural choice. I was lucky enough to get a job as copy boy at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. In 1950, the Pilot was a stepping stone up for reporters such as Tom Wicker and a stop on the way down for an AP wire editor like Duke Manning who had been with the NY Daily News.

Bob Mason, an icon in the business, was Sunday editor, Cap'n Jack Spencer was managing editor and "Uncle Charlie" Borjes was chief photographer, with his limp from frost bite suffered chasing Pancho Villa into Mexico with Gen. "Black Jack" Pershing. My best friend Neal Clark was a young photographer and my college classmate. Every afternoon little Harry Moore came in with a "Merry Christmas" greeting for everyone. He claimed to have been the reporter who broke the story of the Wright Brothers Flight. Harry was old enough.

To fit in, I had to learn how to avoid choking on a cigarette and to drink beer without heaving. He learned too how a focal plane worked on a Speed Graphic, how to rewrite a brief story from the sister afternoon paper, The Ledger-Dispatch. More importantly, he learned about life. A newspaper reporter is privy to the inside workings of the community, the police department, city hall. He was there with the three remaining Confederates held their last reunion, old men sitting patiently in the hot sun having their pictures made.

Minimum wage was 75 cents an hour, $30 a week. Plenty for room and board and even recreation. A candy bar was a nickel,

It was a majestic process of putting a big daily newspaper together. The copy boy or girl carried articles from the newsroom to the shop where skilled men used melting lead to create type that wind up from words, pages and ultimately wind to the whirling presses below and out into the early hours of the city.

Printers spent years learning their well paid trade--apprentice, journeymen. It was called hot type--raised characters which accepted the ink and transferred it to paper. None of us knew it then that a process called offset printing in a few short hours would replace the need for trained professionals. A glorified typewriter and anyone who could type would replace the years of training a linotype put in. Professionals would trade their talent for a pair of scissors to cut out the paper from the "typewriter" and paste it up for a camera. In the Sixties, the revolution came and everyone was looking at the superior print quality and economical method of the NY Newsday caught their fancy. A little weekly in Christiansburg, Virginia, became a mecca for curious publishers.

Young enough to adjust, I moved from the Pilot to a weekly where I felt at home. A reporter on a daily is usually specialized. On a weekly, the reporter may cover a rape trial and then a meeting of the flower society. I wore many hats Circulation manager, Fairchild scanagraver operator (where pictures were copied onto plastic), photographer and reporter.

I must have had some Gypsy blood in me, always itching for the next newspaper job, learning something at each one. Bob Mason had moved from Norfolk to be editor of the Sanford, NC, Daily Herald. He needed a sports editor and I became that, along with doing a building page, high school correspondent editor, shared photography chores and even sat in as editor on Saturdays to give Bob the whole weekend off. For $65 a week, I began my day at 7 AM and finished whenever everything was done. Bill Horner, who had come to Sanford with his family and possessions in an old car, published the Herald with a news crew of four people. His son Billy was on the high school football team. He was publisher last I heard.

A Pied Piper named Chester Martin in Hamlet, NC, had a string of weeklies and talked me into going down to South Carolina to publish the Camden Citizen. It wasn't planned that way, but it became a one-man operation. Me. I sold the ads, took the pictures, wrote the stories, carried everything to the printer and then brought them back to deliver the latest weekly edition. At the same time, my wife was giving birth to our daughter.

Over the years my newspaper work read like a travelguide of Virginia and the Carolinas. From Rocky Mount, Virginia, to Lynchburg. From Greensboro, NC, to Winston-Salem to Lumberton to Fayetteville, many of which I started. With ten cents in my pocket, I started one newspaper. It lasted six months. Civil rights was a hard fought battle in the Sixties and I helped Dr. John Stevenson start the Carolina Peacemaker in Greensboro.

Occasionally I ventured into other fields, real estate, taxicabs, always drifting back to the delight of putting words together in hopes of informing and maybe enlightening someone.

Another career could have been more profitable in worldly rewards. But nothing could have given me more satisfaction.

Then one day the young man isn't young any more and he knows there are more dreams behind than ahead. But he has his memories--and what beautiful memories.