Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
—John 14:27
Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is peace; where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is love.
—Stephen R. Adams
EVEN WHILE I WAS knee-deep in my struggles with college academics and working to overcome my stuttering, my mind and heart were growing in focus on a career in broadcast journalism. And why not? My love for words was a result of my struggles with literacy. I believed some good, a new strength, would also come from my difficulties with speech. Much more than belief in my own abilities, it was a belief in God’s power. Thus, despite my shortcomings, I never doubted my chosen path. My faith teaches me that there are no obstacles, that all stumbling blocks are merely stepping stones and part of God’s plan. It was my responsibility to remain faithful and see what God had in store on the other side of my difficulties.
When I left high school, having moved from functional illiteracy to a solid transcript, I approached college with relative confidence and the assumption that I was prepared for whatever might come my way. The first year of college was like a blast of frigid air to my psyche. If there had been a basement class, at least one professor we know would have put me there. I was at the bottom looking up again.
Could read but couldn’t read fast enough or smart enough.
Could write but my thoughts were a jumbled mess.
Could speak but couldn’t speak clearly under pressure.
Knew words but didn’t have a wide enough vocabulary.
Yet I was not the same kid I had been at age thirteen. That young Byron was frightened, ashamed, and angry. The older Byron was still angry but beginning to realize that there would always be hurdles. There might always be a period of starting over. I just needed to be patient and faithful and tough enough to work my way to the other side. Admit what I didn’t know and ask for help when I needed it, but mostly roll up my sleeves and outwork those around me.
By my senior year at Ohio Wesleyan I was on pretty solid academic ground. I had decided to major in journalism and speech communications, with a minor in political science. Active in sports and school organizations, I had a column for the school newspaper, was news director for the school’s cable television news show, co-hosted a nighttime radio show, and worked as a freelance reporter for the local area radio station. It was a big deal for me when I made the regional Associated Press with a story I wrote on a local city council meeting. I stayed up half the night to see my byline cross the wire. I was named one of the top three students in the journalism department based on academic achievement and contributions to the department. We all dreamed of big careers in newspapers or television, becoming the next Bob Woodward or Walter Cronkite. My hero was Ed Bradley. I knew his level of coolness would always elude me, but just maybe his caliber of work might someday be achievable. It was another Pitts family philosophy. Never say you’ll try. Say you will. I was raised to believe that if you speak your dreams long enough and loud enough, eventually others will dream and speak with you.
My inspiration to pursue journalism had deep roots. First, there were my struggles with literacy and speech. I took those as signs from God that communication would play a major part in my life. I had convinced myself through Scriptures like Romans 12:21, “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good,” that all the bad things in life had some good purpose if only I searched long enough. So I concluded that journalism was my purpose. In addition to commanding respect, journalists have a significant and valid place in our democracy. As a child, I attended any number of rallies related to social justice and civil rights or big events at my church. I always sat in amazement when the media would show up. The police would behave one way when cameras and reporters were present, often less aggressively. Journalists held the authorities accountable, and that appealed to me. In the days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, there were riots in cities across the country, including Baltimore. On our street, looters vandalized cars that failed to have a black cloth tied to the antenna. Police took that same black cloth as a sign the car belonged to some kind of troublemaker. My father and brother stayed up most of the night, running back and forth to the car to put up or pull down the black cloth, depending on whether there were police or looters on our block. The police were not as violent but they were certainly as aggressive as the looters. One evening, as the police made their way through our neighborhood (there was a police station just a few blocks away), pushing and shoving men and women on the street, a local television crew pulled up. Suddenly, the nightsticks were not being used as aggressively. That moment left an indelible impression on me. Journalists, simply by their presence, could keep the police honest. I wasn’t so much bitten by the bug as saw that the bug had teeth.
Why would someone with a history of stuttering choose a career in television? Why not become a print journalist? There were a number of factors. I was a television junkie, having spent hours and hours watching television as a child, especially when the tension in my house was at its highest. Television also kept me company when I was home by myself. Much of what I knew about the world, I learned from television. When it came to gathering news, I was much more comfortable speaking to someone in person as part of a television crew rather than on the telephone, where my stuttering problems might be more apparent. Face-to-face, I could smile or even use my hands for emphasis. I was also a great listener. One of the things I learned in broadcast journalism was to allow the interview subject to fill the silence. That part was easy for me. But I knew I would need practice to overcome my lingering communication issues. I still spoke slowly and deliberately, using the sing-song style I had learned from Dr. Robinson. So I practiced being a television reporter in my dormitory bathroom with a glass and my toothbrush. The top of a glass is about the size of a television camera lens. A toothbrush doesn’t resemble a microphone at all, but it’s what I had. With a Magic Marker, I traced the edge of the glass on the bathroom mirror, and every morning before class and every night before bed I put on my own mini-newscast. Silly, I know, but since my early struggles with literacy and speech, repetition and routine are things I rely on. The bathroom routine was about practicing the mechanics of television news.
My decision to pursue a career in journalism was solidified after hearing the stories of the guest lecturers who appeared on campus during my time at OWU, such as investigative reporter Jack Anderson and network television correspondent Emery King. In the 1980s, King was one of a handful of African-American television network news correspondents. He served NBC News as its White House correspondent covering the Reagan administration, and later spent nineteen years as an anchor in Detroit. During my senior year King spoke at OWU as part of a university lecture series. He spoke of the highs and lows of broadcast journalism as well as his travels around the globe. I had the honor of picking him up at the airport with a few of my classmates. As was my pattern back then, I was still very shy about speaking in unfamiliar settings, without the opportunity to rehearse and with people who might sense my limitations and dismiss me. So I said very little in his presence. Too nervous, anxious about my stutter, and, frankly, convinced I had nothing worth saying, I certainly made no impression on the man.
But a notable thing happened after his lecture as we were walking him back to the car. One of my female classmates stopped him on the stairwell and said, “Mr. King, thank you for talking to us. We will always remember what you said.”
Now here’s the line that made Emery King stop in his tracks. “But I want you to remember one name,” she said. “Byron Pitts. He will be at the network someday.”
King seemed surprised by my classmate’s bold prediction. I was stunned. Perhaps I had spoken my ambitious plan aloud so often people around me were beginning to believe it. My friend’s words were powerful because it was the first time I had heard anyone, not even my mother to this point, affirm out loud what my career goals were. It was like a needle full of adrenaline in the heart. For years I had quietly claimed my future career as a network journalist, and now others were claiming it with me. Emery King politely smiled and got in his car. Years later I met him on assignment. He didn’t recall the moment, nor did he have any real reason to. But I will always remember it. I have never stopped affirming (or claiming) what I want, and I have always found support from those who join me. It is amazing how you can transform a dream into a reality by saying it until you believe it and others believe it with you. It can become a call to arms. You say it. You believe it. You then devote your dreams and your sweat to it.
That May the dream of my mother, my grandmother, Dr. Lewes, and countless supporters back in East Baltimore came to pass. I put on a cap and gown and joined the 1982 graduating class of Ohio Wesleyan. I was grateful to be graduating on time. I remember the pride stitched across the faces of my family. My mother, brother, sister, and grandmother were in attendance. Remember we are not a big smiling family, but I did see a few teeth that day. It was a bittersweet day for me. I was not focused so much on what I had accomplished or where I was headed as on the people I was about to leave behind. I had grown close to people like Dr. Lewes, my friend Pete, and others. Those kinds of emotional separations had always been tough for me since the breakup of my parents’ marriage.
As I left the stage with my degree in hand, I paused so my brother could take a picture. Since no one in my family could snap a good photograph before there was automatic focus, we had albums full of blurry memories. In the age of digital cameras, none of us have managed to frame very well. Today we have crisp family photos with little head room or odd angles.
After my brother snapped his picture, I handed my degree to my mother. “You worked as hard as I did,” I whispered to her. “You deserve this more than me.”
She hugged me to the point of discomfort, kissed my cheek, and handed my degree back to me. “God worked harder than either of us. This is His, but you hold on to it in the meantime,” she said, with the corners of her mouth nearly touching her ears. We laughed. I walked back to my seat with my wrinkled robe blowing in the breeze. I was actually a bit sad when the day was done. I have always enjoyed the journey more than the destination.
That was a Saturday. The following Monday I started work at The Carolinian newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina, where my mom had relocated a few years earlier. It was a weekly newspaper published by a local African-American businessman and aimed at an African-American audience. As a reporter, photographer, sportswriter, copy editor, and go-get-the-boss-cigarettes-when-he-called-for-them, I was paid handsomely: one hundred dollars every Friday, five twenty-dollar bills in a small brown envelope. I assumed the envelope was small so the rolled-up twenties would seem like a larger sum of money. It was modest pay for joyous work. Despite the minimal sum, I was now a working journalist. My mother was simply thrilled I had a job she could describe to her siblings in one sentence. “Byron is a reporter in Raleigh,” she’d say. To hear her brag to her friends and family, it was as if I was a staff writer for The New York Times.
There were countless lessons to learn at The Carolinian. It was all hands on deck for every issue. I reported on everything from city government to sporting events to obituaries. And I covered a lot of crime. But included in those lessons was humility. It was tough showing up at those first few news conferences with a Polaroid camera, lined paper instead of a reporter’s notebook, and a pen donated by a local funeral parlor. We weren’t issued business cards, so my mother printed some for me on a copy machine at her job. Thus, my career in journalism started like most new phases of my life: modestly. There was only one way to look and that was up. I was not setting the world on fire, but I showed up on time, stayed late, and did whatever the boss asked of me, usually with a smile on my face. On its worst day, being at The Carolinian beat cutting grass on Interstate 95 in the summer.
Even though I lived at home with my mother, it was hard to stretch a hundred dollars a week very far. After four months at the newspaper, I reluctantly took a job at Shaw University in Raleigh as sports information director. It was a better-paying position but offered more shots of humility without a chaser. I was no closer to my dream of being a broadcast journalist and was concerned that I was, in fact, moving away from that career. I wanted to be a hard newsman, not some glad-handing public relations flak. My mother, who knew I was disappointed with my career moves thus far, and who had always found solutions in the past, had the idea that I should meet more people in the broadcast profession. When she once found out there was going to be a nationally televised college basketball tournament in town, with one of the legendary voices of sports radio attending, she encouraged me: “You should meet him. I bet he’d help you.”
We got tickets to the tournament just to meet this famed sportscaster. I can’t imagine the tickets were very expensive, but I am certain it was money for which we could have found some other use. Standing high in the stands (the cheap seats), my mother spotted the sportscaster down on the floor. “There he is, baby! Let’s go meet him,” she said with schoolgirl excitement. This was not a request. She had already pulled me out of my seat and we were heading downstairs. “Momma, can we at least wait until halftime? He looks busy right now,” I said, with the embarrassment of a twenty-two-year-old being dragged by his mother, pained by every step.
“Well then, let’s get close to him. He’s a busy man, I’m sure.” Clarice is nothing if not persistent. Keep in mind this is the woman who rarely smiles. On this occasion, you could count her teeth from the other side of the arena as she stood patiently for halftime and her moment to introduce her son to the sportscaster she was convinced would change her child’s life.
The halftime buzzer rang, and Clarice made a beeline for the press desk. “Hello, sir. My name is Clarice Pitts. I’m a big fan of yours. This is my son, Byron. He just graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a degree in journalism. He wants a career in journalism. Could you offer him any advice?” she asked, with a degree of desperation I rarely ever heard in my mother’s voice.
The sportscaster never took her outstretched hand. He barely looked away from his notes. He did size me up for a moment, cleared his throat, and said, “You should probably do something else. Broadcasting is a tough business.” End of sentence. We were wasting his time. He stood up and brushed my mother’s shoulder as he walked away. I wanted to kick his ass right there. Just jump on him and beat him until he learned common courtesy.
Finally, my mother lowered her hand, her smile painfully melted away. “Let that be a lesson to you, son. When you make it, never act that way. I guess God didn’t want us talking to him after all,” she said as she pulled at my arm again, this time headed back up to the bleachers.
I still wanted to kick his ass. That thought may seem like an overreaction, and perhaps it was, but that moment took me back to my childhood. How many times had I watched some person in authority treat my mother disrespectfully? From store clerks, to bosses, to a construction worker on a street corner or one of the many therapists we met when I was in grade school. How many times had I been bullied in school or on the way to school?
I believe there are assumptions that some people in positions of power or influence make about those on the other side. As a boy, I was too small, too weak, and too frightened to stand up to their slights, but I was no less offended by them. All those moments from the past pressed on my shoulders, like a tight lid on a boiling pot, and often sent me into a rage whenever someone was less than respectful of my mother or any person they viewed as vulnerable. Without question, those feelings existed deep in the dark places of my heart. But I used them like fuel. I was keeping score. It always kept me pressing forward to prove myself or defend others.
Years later, after I had joined CBS News as a correspondent, I ran into this famed sports broadcaster again. We were both covering the Super Bowl in Miami. My credentials gave wider access to the field and to players. There’s that old saying about revenge being best served cold. I have never sought revenge, never rubbed a slight in anyone’s face, but I have always made a mental note.
“Byron, you do a great job. I watch you all the time,” he said with a bright smile during our sideline encounter.
“Thank you, sir, awfully kind of you to say,” I replied with a firm handshake. “My mother is a big fan of yours,” I added, thinking the whole time I would kill him with kindness, though deep down I wanted to punch that smile off his face. To this day, his behavior toward my mother is one of the reasons I do my best to give as much time as possible to anyone who asks. Every college student and fledgling reporter gets my full attention and a few minutes of my time. I don’t want to dampen anyone else’s dream the way that sportscaster made me feel.
In many ways, working at Shaw was like a postgraduate year after college. Shaw is one of the nation’s historically black colleges. It had a compact, friendly campus like Ohio Wesleyan. In addition to working at Shaw, I returned to WTVD, Raleigh’s ABC affiliate, where I had interned during my junior year in college. I would work days at Shaw, writing press releases and logging sports scores, then I would spend my nights, unpaid, at WTVD pulling scripts for the eleven o’clock late news. During these days before computers, TV anchors read from typed scripts that entry-level staffers and interns manually loaded into the teleprompter. Although this was not hard-news reporting, it was a chance to keep a toe in the business. It also gave me the opportunity to reunite with my old friend Larry Stogner, my original mentor and a reporter’s reporter.
When I first met Larry, he scared me to death. Looking more like a banker than a reporter, he always wore a white shirt and a suit and tie, and was almost always deadly serious. He was a chain-smoker with a demeanor as hard as the briefcase he seemed to carry everywhere. He had one of those TV voices that revealed decades of smoking unfiltered cigarettes and drinking coffee. He was probably in his thirties when we worked together, but Larry carried himself like a guy who had been on earth a very long time. He was the station’s go-to guy, and as best I could tell, most of the other reporters and anchors on staff feared and respected him.
The night before my first day as an intern, I had gone to the local library and read back issues of the hometown newspaper, The Raleigh News and Observer. I wanted to at least sound like I knew something about the news. That morning my mother made me breakfast, we said a long prayer, and she dropped me off on her way to work.
“God bless you, son,” she said as she drove away. We hardly ever wished each other luck, since there wasn’t much in life we ever attributed to luck. With a full stomach, a head full of newspaper clippings and Bible verses read at home, and at least one verse typed on an index card and placed in my sports coat that morning by my mother, I walked into the Raleigh newsroom ready to conquer the world.
“You’re late” is how Larry greeted me that first day.
“Good morning, sir. I was told to report here by nine o’clock. It’s not nine yet,” I said with a tone of confidence in my voice.
“Chickenshit reporters may get in at nine, but I get here at eight, and I expect my intern here when I get here,” Larry said, with his feet on his desk, a cup of coffee in his hand, a cigarette in his mouth, and both eyes on the morning paper. “You don’t want to be some chickenshit reporter, do you?” he said, as he glanced up from his paper.
“No, sir. Good morning, Mr. Stogner. I’m Byron Pitts,” I said. My morning confidence left by the door, I was now in a puddle of sweat.
“Well, good. We all work hard in this bureau, and we are all serious about the news. You serious about the news, son, or do you want to be some chickenshit anchor someday?” he said.
“No, sir, I want to be a newsman,” I answered, confidence creeping back up my spine.
“Then good, every good newsman knows how to make coffee. Coffee machine is in the back room. Get to it,” he said in what would be our lengthiest conversation of the day. Perhaps I wasn’t the fastest learner he had ever had in the office, but Larry seemed to take a liking to me. Within a few days I graduated from making the coffee in the morning to picking up Larry’s cigarettes. Years of going to the store to pick up my mother’s cigarettes were finally paying off.
“Wear a sports coat tomorrow. We’re going to the state house,” Larry yelled as I walked out of the office at the end of a shift.
That was Larry’s style, similar to my mother: do what I say and we’ll get along fine. And we did. It was one of the best summers of my life; the state house one day, a murder scene the next, and I had a front-row seat with one of the finest reporters in North Carolina. Actually, it was more like a back seat, crunched between camera equipment and old bags of fast food, but I felt like Edward R. Murrow or Ed Bradley in the back of that news truck. Larry usually worked with a young cameraman named Eddie Barber. While I never saw Larry without a shirt and tie, I assumed Eddie didn’t own one. A total free spirit, he was always smiling, always upbeat, and always willing to go anywhere to tell a story with his camera. He was a wonderful example of always having a good attitude. No matter how lousy the assignment or how foul Larry’s mood, Eddie was always enthusiastically at his side. He was also a great encourager. He patiently listened to my dreams about a career in television and would end every conversation with the same words of encouragement: “Go for it.”
While Larry was a father figure, Eddie was like an older brother. Larry and Eddie never seemed to care about the color of my skin. They worked hard and seemed to appreciate my desire to do the same. To the bosses and staff at the main building in Durham, they were the odd couple. They taught me some valuable lessons, including, Never judge a person by what you see on the outside. On the outside, the three of us had next to nothing in common, and they certainly had no reason to take any interest in me. But they did. When Eddie would get a call about a murder overnight, he’d give me a call and swing by my mother’s house to pick me up, just so I could get some experience. And Larry protected me from the sometimes unpleasant realities of the language and biases in the newsroom. Like the time we went to a murder scene “in the ghetto,” as someone in the newsroom described it on the car radio. “Those people are animals, so you boys better be careful.” Turned out the crime scene was less than a block from my mother’s home.
Larry could see the hurt in my eyes as he glanced back at me through the rearview mirror. “Don’t be an idiot,” he barked back into the radio. I met Larry’s smile with a smile of my own. He winked at me and said, “Son, don’t ever let idiots bother you.” His advice has served me well my entire career.
Now, two years later, I was back in the WTVD newsroom, for a free stint after college. Larry was no longer interested in having me make his coffee. “You weren’t very good at it,” he later confessed. “We got to get you a job,” he said. And he did. It was my first lesson in the age-old saying, “It’s not always what you know, it sometimes helps who you know and who you stay in contact with.”
How fortunate I was to stay in contact with Larry Stogner. Without any professional advice or support like Larry’s, when I graduated from college I had sent out more than forty videocassettes with samples of my writing and on-camera work to small television stations across the country. Places like Toledo, Savannah, Jackson, Mississippi, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. About a dozen news managers were kind enough to write back. Most were form letters. One was handwritten. They all said the same thing: Thanks but no thanks. One news director at a small station in eastern North Carolina was a friend of cameraman Eddie Barber. Eddie called to see if the news director had received my tape.
“Yep, got it,” he told Eddie. “Tell your friend he’s wasting his time. I see a lot of tapes. He doesn’t have what it takes. He’s wasting his time.” I guess it was his idea of doing me or Eddie a favor.
Eddie’s response to me was “Don’t worry about him. Just keep going for it.” As fate would have it, sixteen months later this same news director at this same station in eastern North Carolina had a job opening. Eddie encouraged me to apply again.
“He hated my work before. Why would he like it now? I don’t have a new tape,” I insisted.
“Just go for it,” Eddie said. “And have Larry call the guy.”
With the same tape and a recommendation from Larry Stogner, I applied again. Oddly enough, the news director seemed thrilled to get a personal phone call from a big-name reporter in Raleigh.
“I love this kid’s tape. If you vouch for him, that’s good enough for me,” he said to Larry. He never interviewed me, but he did give me the job. By the time I started, he’d been fired. Had I missed my chance to kill him with kindness? Not exactly. We met years later. It was a familiar reunion: “Byron, nice to meet you. I’m a big fan of your work.” He clearly had no recollection of the actual role he had once played in my career.
“Good to meet you, sir,” I said with a smile and another insincere but firm handshake.
I started at WNCT-TV in Greenville, North Carolina, as a general assignment reporter and weekend sports anchor for an annual salary of $8,600. I was thrilled. My mother was angry. I had been earning about $20,000 at Shaw with a small expense account and an assistant.
“It’s okay to dream, son, but don’t be dumb about it” was my mother’s response to the news that I was moving out of her house to take my first paying job in broadcast news. Oh, by the way, I could no longer afford my own car. It just meant I would have to live within walking distance of my first job in television.
“Your tuition was more than they’re paying you. Are you sure you want to take a step back like that?” she asked.
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s how it had always been. When I left for Greenville, my mother wasn’t speaking to me. We did not talk for a few weeks. Now that I was out of college, there would be no more letters written in red ink. Mother would express her disapproval from then on with deafening silence.
My first news director was a guy named Roy Hardee. He was a forty-something news manager who had cut his teeth on Southern newspapers and Southern radio. He preferred penny loafers, button-down shirts, his weekly crewcut, and pork barbecue for lunch. He knew more cops by their first names and their favorite beverage than any other newsperson I have ever known. Roy was always suspicious of reporters more focused on polishing their résumés than on covering local news. Thus, he greeted most new (and most often from the North) reporters the same way. Using both hands to hitch up his pants, just before he sucked his teeth, he said, “So you think you can cover the news?” It always came across as less of a question and more of a threat.
Because it was a small station with a small budget, most people were hired to do more than one job. I was a weekday news reporter and weekend sports anchor. It looked good on the business card, but it was a tough way to make a living. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with at least one roommate, and for a brief time two. We learned the finer points of macaroni and cheese, tuna fish, and on rare occasions grilled chicken. Since we were paid so little at work and were constantly hungry, searching out free meals was sometimes a motivation for covering stories. One way the staff would decide which press conference we would attend on any given day depended on which organization provided the best food. The East Carolina University football coach’s weekly press conference was always a favorite: sandwiches and shrimp cocktail.
That was the best part of being a sports reporter. I was eating with the best sportscasters in the state. Unfortunately, when it came to actually being a sportscaster, I was, to put it gently, awful. I had assumed (there’s that word again), since I had played high school and college football, had been around athletes and coaches all my life, that being a sportscaster would be easy. Wrong! You actually have to know something about all sports. I never liked or even understood soccer until my children played many years later, and I thought tennis was a sport you played to pick up girls.
Needless to say, my career as a sportscaster did not last very long. But it lasted long enough for me to discover that I loved news reporting. I was allowed to change beats. I became what was known at the time as a one-man band. I was the reporter, photographer, producer, and editor wrapped in one. The station gave me a big van with the station call letters on the side. Fortunately, since there were no side windows on my van, no one ever knew the only thing inside the manual-shift vehicle was a video camera, a few tapes, extra batteries, and a spare tire. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was all the gear I was responsible for, and now my dream had a starting point: I was a television reporter.
My beat was the small town of Washington, North Carolina, affectionately known as Little Washington, with a population under ten thousand. I would spend my day between the courthouse and the jail. I pretended to be Larry Stogner: white shirt, tie, and a sports coat. Who could afford a suit on less than nine thousand a year? Only a breath ahead of the Carolinian newspaper in Raleigh, we occasionally had real notebooks. I no longer carried pens engraved with the name and address of the local mortician. I had upgraded to the local gas station pens or the ones I could swipe from the sales department. I also learned that napkins and fast-food lunch bags make for wonderful writing surfaces in a pinch. I was in heaven.
Reporting for television is not particularly an art form or a science as much as it is a craft. WNCT-TV in Greenville was my first apprenticeship, a place to learn the very basics. In athletics, there are people who have been described as naturals. The same is true in broadcast communication. I have had colleagues over the years who seemed as if they were born to be on television. For them, talking on television is as simple as inhaling. Nothing about broadcasting ever came easy to me. What I have learned to do, even the simplest things, I have learned through practice. One of the first things I worked on in Greenville was the proper way to hold a microphone. That may sound ridiculous, but consider this: John Wooden, one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, insisted on teaching his players the proper way to put on their socks. No detail is too small to practice. Because of my long thin fingers, there wasn’t a natural way for me to look manly holding a microphone. Do I hold it in my fist? What about three fingers, as if it’s a flute? Do I hold it directly under my chin or off to the side? That’s how I spent many evenings at home in Greenville, North Carolina, working on the best way to hold a microphone. Is it more effective to stand directly in front of a speaker at a news conference or off to the side? After some practice, I decided it was better to stand off to one side. The person would have to physically turn his head in order to face you. It proved easier to sneak in a quick followup question once you had the person’s attention, and it seemed easier to turn away from a questioner directly in front. As a one-man-band photographer/reporter in Greenville, I would practice setting up in different spots at news conferences. It was a game I’d play. I kept notes on where the speaker would look first to answer questions. Which side would they look to most often? Through trial and error, I discovered it was often better to start the question—if I was competing for attention—with the person’s name. Make everything as personal as possible.
Once, for example, while covering a murder trial in Little Washington, I got to know the families of a victim and of the accused killer. Every morning before trial and at the end of the day cameramen and reporters would run outside the courthouse and yell questions at the accused. He would always just look straight ahead. During one recess, I was talking to his mother. She called the man by his nickname. Relatives called him Junior. I held on to that small bit of information until the man was convicted and sentenced to die. That day at the end of court I waited by the police car. Reporters yelled their familiar questions. No response. As he approached in leg irons, with my camera on my shoulder and my microphone in hand, I had one chance, “Hey, Junior! You ready to die?” The man stopped and turned to the voice that had called his name; we made eye contact. “I don’t want to die. What I did was wrong, but I don’t want to die.” He looked scared. After days of sitting in court acting like a tough guy, this convicted killer finally showed a glimpse of fear. That night I got a “way to go” from Roy Hardee. But, more important, I got a call at the station from the victim’s family. They were glad to see the killer had finally shown some emotion. The lesson for me that day was to always look for some human connection, whether to saints or sinners.
For all that I learned in Greenville as a hungry young reporter, I probably lost about fifteen pounds. Call it the price of an education. The first time I went home to Baltimore to visit, I ran into my high school buddy, Joe Stumbroski.
“Hey, Byron, you’ve lost so much weight. I heard you were in television. Are you a model?” Joe asked innocently.
“Nah, man, I’m starting in the basement. Call it remedial reading for reporters,” I answered without a hint of regret. We both smiled.
All I had ever prayed for was a chance. God was giving me that chance. By this time I had an army of family and friends praying for me and pulling for me. Greenville was a long way from East Baltimore or Ohio Wesleyan, for that matter. But I wasn’t alone. I never had been. I was not just trying my hand in television. I was doing it. I am sure I didn’t strike the most impressive pose as a young reporter: Razor-thin, big Afro, big glasses, high-pitched voice, the three shirts I owned all worn around the collar. I looked more like a backup singer for the Commodores hooked on crack than a credible reporter. But based on where I started? Faith had carried me this far, so I just kept my head up, pushed my shoulders back, and kept stepping out on nothing. What a glorious ride. Next stop, Norfolk.