Can an ex-con become a professional writer?

It was freezing cold in Durham, North Carolina, when I got off the Trailways bus at the downtown terminal that Monday night and called a cab to take me to my aunt’s house on Cleveland Street, in a neighborhood in the north end of town. I had barely made it out of Washington DC after a life changing experience with my wife who was living in New York at the time. After being released from prison on December 9 and going to Tarboro, where my mother-in-law lived with two of her three stepdaughters, I had gone looking for work. I talked to my wife a couple of times on the phone and she said she was glad I was out of it, even though the reason I went back to prison in 1966 was because I tried to hit her in the head with the barrel of a shotgun.
Yes, those were my bad years.

I had about $500 when I walked out the prison gates in Creswell, North Carolina, a small prison camp, where the superintendent had told me, “I’m not going to change the sheets on your bunk. You’ll be back.” For over 10 years until he died, I sent this superintendent a card every December that said simply, “Not yet! Hope the sheets hold!” The money had been saved through my parole job with the bridge maintenance crew where I had worked for about a year. So I decided to meet my wife in New York. In Washington, I called from the bus terminal to say that I’d be late because a snowstorm had stopped the buses. Their conversation on the other end of the line wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I’ll spare you the gory details. They’re not important to this story. But that conversation was the reason why that on December 23, 1968, he was in Durham, NC instead of New York City.

My Aunt Hattie, an elderly invalid, and her son, Leon, a heavy alcoholic, seemed happy to see me, and had made available a room on the ground floor of the big old two-story house. I was glad to have a place to live. My mother was in Virginia, but she had told me before I was discharged that she simply didn’t have room for me in the nursing home she operated or the trailer she lived in.

First item on the agenda: get a job! I grew up in Durham and committed all my crimes there. Most of the city police knew me immediately and immediately suspected that I was still a criminal. A job wouldn’t change his belief, but, in addition to other perks, it would give me an ironclad alibi of eight or nine hours a day. Tuesday was also very cold, but it did not matter. I had to find a job, today. Around 2 pm, I did! The man who hired the concierges for a famous downtown hotel, The Washington Duke, hired me after hearing my story of crime and change. He said, “I don’t know why Milton, but I believe you. I’ll give you a chance. But if you fail me, I’ll be in prison, because I’ll kill you myself.” “So there I was, out of prison just 15 days and employed. But keep in mind that I wasn’t a hotel concierge. In my mind, I was a professional writer, temporarily working as a hotel concierge. The distinction was powerful and critical for my future.
As far as I could tell, I never wore the hotel concierge uniform off the premises. My co-workers made sure to stand in the back as I turned the corner onto Chapel Hill Street to enter the hotel’s employee entrance. They laughed out loud and called me the janitor in disguise. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, but I wore my clothes to and from work, never the uniform. Oh, the pay? Imagine $1.25 an hour for a nine-hour day that started at 7 am and ended at 4 pm, with an hour from noon to 1 pm for lunch. I worked six days a week and my take-home pay averaged about $53 a week.

Winter weather fluctuates in North Carolina. It can be icy one day and soft the next. So, on a payday Friday in January, it was much hotter when I walked into Sam’s Pawnshop on Main Street downtown and spent $25 on a battered Royal typewriter. I knew from my prison research that newspapers and magazines did not accept handwritten copies. In addition, he had taught me to type while working as an assistant professor in the GED program at Odom Farm. During January and February 1969 I tried to get into the school, but the directors of the two business schools to which I applied refused to give me a chance. Without being discouraged, I began to draw up a personal educational program

So, on a warm spring day in 1969, I strode into the office of the editor of the Durham Morning Herld, across the street from the hotel, and applied for a job. As I had learned after a terrible experience in Tarboro, lying about my criminal record would not work. So I risked the whole story. Alex Crockett’s decision not to hire me was neither surprising nor disconcerting. I had a trump card. “Okay, I understand,” I said confidently. “Well, how about you let me hang out in the newsroom when I get off work at the hotel and I’ll see if I can get some tips from the reporters? I’m going to become a professional writer, and this is such a great place.” like any other”. start.” Crocket agreed. So there he would go every day after work, he’d walk across the street and up two flights to the newsroom.

The lesson was painful, but enlightening. I saw myself as an excited “wannabe professional writer,” but the professionals in the newsroom apparently saw me as an “assistant.” Every time I came to ask a question, someone would ask me to go across the street to Palm’s Restaurant, or down the block to Amos & Andy’s hot dog stand, or down to the break room where the coffee pot was. They gave me the money. I ran errands and when I came back, they were always busy. I had to change the script.

I explained my dilemma to my aunt and cousin and asked them to let me stay there for free for about six months so I could take the $20 I gave them every week and invest it in my future. They agree. So when I walked into the newsroom, I had chicken sandwiches, hotdogs, coffee, etc. Here is the big difference. I owned the food. The price of my food? Answers to my questions! It worked because the pros “saw” a really dumb go-fer who would not only go get the food, but also spend his own money. How could someone so foolish benefit from what they said? Some of them lie, some more often than others. That was good. As I asked questions, I began to learn more and more about reporting skills, which includes interviewing and double-checking what people are saying.
I asked the building custodian if I could take care of the trash cans in the newsroom for him. He agreed, of course. He wanted them to throw out all the crumpled papers from the reporters so he could compare what they started with what they finally published. So, with my battered typewriter, I would get up at around 5 am every day and rewrite certain stories in the newspaper. When I had about two dozen, I took them in one day to Roger Jolly, the city editor, and asked his opinion. He said, “Would you like to come in on Sundays and rewrite the electronic copy?”

Later that spring, I thought I had learned enough, so I walked across town to the local black weekly and applied for a job. Louis Alston, founder, editor, and publisher of The Carolina Times hired me, and I wrote for him for a couple of months before moving to Greensboro to write for another black weekly, and by the spring of 1970, I was back living in Durham. , and writing for a black weekly in Raleigh. At every opportunity, I met and learned from professional journalists. One of them was News&Observer reporting editor Guy Munger, and another was Ted Harris, then the capitol bureau chief of UPI (United Press International). These friendships soon proved to be very fruitful.

The publisher of the weekly paid me $60 a week and expected me to report and write news as well as the company at least three articles a week. Well, in 1970, the Afro hairstyle was all the rage among African Americans, and one day at the barbershop, I heard the barbers share stories about the dangers of the Afro. It sounded like a nice feature. I reported it, wrote it and sent it. The publisher hit the ceiling, saying he gave barbershops and hairdressers too much free publicity. He rejected the story. On a whim, I asked Munger to check it out.

“Do you want to do this on your own?” Munger asked when she finished reading the article. Pride wouldn’t let me admit that I didn’t know what “freelance” meant. So I said “Sure, why not”. He said, “I only have a small budget for stand-alone parts, will $75 be enough?” Mathematics amused me! He was writing at least five articles each week for the weekly for $60 (no tax deduction). That’s about $12 per item, and Munger wondered if $75 per item was enough. “Sure, why not?” I said, trying to sound calm and professional.

Munger published my lead article, complete with byline, at the top of the Sunday article cover two weeks later, and on Monday, the weekly editor fired me for writing for the competition. I went to Ted’s office to see if he knew of any writing jobs I could apply for. While I was there, the phone was located and all I heard was Ted say, “Well, damn, he’s sitting in my office right now.”

The phone call came from the secretary of the executive editor of the Wilmington Star-News, a newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina. It seems that Jim Wilson had been instructed by the editor, Rye Page, to hire that paper’s first black reporter and Wilson read and liked the article and called Ted to see if he knew me. I spoke with Wilson, who asked if he could be in Wilmington on Tuesday for an interview. I ran down to Munger’s office to see if he could collect the $75. Payment, he told me it was two weeks away. Back at Ted’s office, I asked him to lend me enough for bus fare, a hotel room, and some food. Ted gave me $125.
In Wilmington, Wilson and I had a great time, but he was worried because I didn’t have a car and didn’t have the money to buy one. He said, “Mr. Wilson, hire me as a reporter and have your editors give me whatever assignment they want, and the day I miss a deadline because I don’t have a car, fire me.” Wilson replied, “Okay, I’ll start at $90 a week and increase it each time I prove more valuable to this paper. When can you be here? We set a date.

So it was that in mid-June 1970, less than two years after being released from prison, a high school dropout with a GED became a writer for the Wilmington Star-News, a professional writer, no longer working. as a janitor.