It was 40 years ago this week that I wrote my first column for North Carolina newspapers. Still in journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was interning that summer at two outlets based in Nash County: the Spring Hope Enterprise, which covered the southern part of the county; and a startup called the Rocky Mount Record.
Although I enjoyed covering municipal affairs, county government, school systems and local businesses, I’d long been enamored by the opinion pages of my hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer, and such regular columnists as William F. Buckley on the right and William Raspberry on the left. Having penned columns in my school paper, The Declaration of Independence (High), I asked the Enterprise editor, the late Ken Ripley, for the chance to try my hand at it. He said yes, although he knew my views were very different from his.
