Chapter 2

How I lost my mind, but found true love and happiness.

“Kevin, Rachel, I really appreciate the offer, but money really isn’t an issue for me,” I began.

“You asked how I can afford to make my mortgage payments. Actually, I don’t make any mortgage payments.

“I paid cash for my house,” I told them and could see the surprise in their eyes.

“I’ve already told you some of my background, but I haven’t told you everything.

“You already know I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in journalism, but you don’t know about some of my other ... writings,” I said.

I then began my story.

I was just beginning to get ready for my first year of elementary school when I was diagnosed with glandular fever, which is also known as infectious mononucleosis. Basically, there is no treatment, other than rest, so my parents kept me out of first grade for the first three months.

Glandular fever is caused by a virus and thus does not respond to antibiotics. But glandular fever also reduces your body’s ability to fight infections and when I scratched my leg (while playing outside when I wasn’t supposed to) and developed a severe infection, doctors gave me a shot of penicillin. That was when we found out I was allergic to penicillin and nearly died.

To make a long story short, I missed my entire first year of school.

If nothing had happened, due to the way my birthday fell, I would have been one of the older students in class. Having missed a year, when I did start first grade, I was over a year and a half older, in some cases two years older, than anybody else in my class.

I’ve always loved books. Nothing makes me happier than sitting down and reading a book. I actually started reading when I was five, so for the year I missed in school, I read nearly all the time. Obviously, simple books, but books nevertheless.

Due to my love of reading, I also starting writing every chance I got. I joined the high school newspaper staff my freshman year of school so I could learn more about writing. When I was a freshman, I got my driver’s license which is something most high school students don’t receive until at least their junior year of high school.

Shortly after the start of my sophomore year, the teacher in charge of the newspaper staff asked me to write a story about an upcoming school function, then take it to the local weekly newspaper in town to see if they would put it in the paper.

When I walked into the real newspaper office, the first person I saw was a much harried guy who seemed to be trying to engage in two different phone calls at the same time. He was also trying to run around the office with a phone stuck in each ear.

I waited until he was finished and he looked at me and said, “What do YOU want?”

I introduced myself and told him I was from West High School and had a short article we were hoping he could put in the paper.

He actually grimaced and told me to give it to him.

He read the article and then looked at me. Read the article again and looked at me.

“Who wrote this?” he asked.

When I told him I had, he said, “Wow. Most of the stuff I get from high schools is garbage and looks like something an eight year old would write. This is really professional.”

That was my introduction to one of the most influential men I’d ever meet in my life. Richard “Dink” Jones was the editor and publisher of The Dispatch. (And in case you are wondering, “Dink” was the name for a half roll of news print.) In later years, I would met other men in the newspaper and printing business with the nickname Dink.

Dink invited me into his office where he explained the actual newspaper staff consisted of him, one full-time reporter, a part-time sports editor and two other part-time reporters. He also had a secretary and a part-time typesetter, but other than those they counted heavily on “stringers” for a lot of their stories. A stringer is sort of a free-lance writer.

Dink then asked if I would be interested in becoming a stringer for the paper.

I, of course, jumped at the opportunity.

One of his biggest needs, he said, was someone to cover football and basketball games at my high school, plus other sports such as soccer or baseball. There were four high schools in the county and the part-time sports editor had to try to rotate between different schools.

Dink said he’d also welcome feature stories about interesting people, or people with interesting or unusual hobbies.

When Dink asked if I had a camera, I told him photography was one of my hobbies and my father had bought me a really good camera, plus I had a complete darkroom at my house where I could develop and print black and white photos.

Back then, digital photography was still in its early days.

That particular day being Friday, my school had a home game that night.

I covered the game, took a number of photos and after I got home, wrote the story, printed three or four photos and delivered them to him the next morning.

Dink read the story, looked through the photos and said, “This is amazing. This story is better written than what my sports guy normally writes. And the photos are great.”

Dink went through the story with me, line by line, and made a number of changes, but again said he normally has to do a lot more editing with the stories from his sports guy.

I still remember Dink sitting down and taking out his check book and writing me a check for $45. My first professional paycheck!

Normally, he only paid his stringers $20 for a story and $5 for each photo, but he was paying me $25 for the story and $10 each for the two photos he was going to use because they were so good. He made me promise to not tell anyone how much he was paying me.

Over the course of the next year, at first I had one or two stories in each weekly issue, then three or four, then five or six articles. As I began writing more and more, it would not be unusual for me to have 10 or 12 stories in a single issue.

Most were either sports related, or features about different people.

What I didn’t know was that every year, the North Carolina Press Association would have a competition among its membership for Newspaper of the Year, Story of the Year in different categories, and Photo of the Year (sports, news or human interest), just to name a few categories.

The competition was divided into different classifications, depending on the type of paper (daily or weekly), and circulation. Thus a medium size weekly like ours would not be competing against large daily newspapers with their vastly greater resources.

Dink, without my knowledge, entered a number of my stories and photos into the competition.

My first year as a “real” writer and I (and the paper) won Sports Story of the Year, Sports Photo of the Year, Feature Story of the Year and Human Interest Photo of the Year.

I was floored when Dink told me about all the awards.

Dink also presented me with my official North Carolina Press Association Press Pass. It was better than a get out of jail free card in Monopoly! For one thing, it was real and while the get out of jail free card would get you out of jail in Monopoly, the Press Pass would get you into just about anything.

I could now go to any museum in the state FREE. I could attend any high school, college or even professional sports game FREE. I could go to Carowinds, an amusement park similar to Six Flags, FREE.

And not to mention now that I was semi-famous as an “award-winning” reporter for the local paper, my social life really picked up! Girls who normally wouldn’t be interested in someone like me, suddenly became interested. And some of those girls were, in fact, married women!

It was just about the best time of my life!

Shortly after I started my junior year of high school, Dink called me in a panic.

He had to cover the county commission meeting that night and his full-time reporter was supposed to cover a city council meeting, also taking place that night. Only his full-time reporter was in the hospital recovering from having his appendix removed.

Dink asked if I could cover the meeting. This would be my first “hard news” assignment. I had no idea the meeting would change my life.

I always read every story in every issue of the paper, so I already knew that a couple of the city councilmen had a rather acrimonious relationship.

Of course no one suspected their heretofore war of words with each other would get physical at that night’s council meeting.

Halfway through the meeting, one told the other “that’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say – which coming from you is really, really stupid!”

The next thing anyone knew they were exchanging punches and wresting throughout city hall.

Of course I had my camera with me, so I got a number of photos of the physical confrontation, complete with blood dripping down faces.

Both men were arrested and hauled off to jail, so I used my press pass to gain entry to the jail where I saw the assistant police chief. His daughter attended my high school, so I knew them both rather well and he allowed me to interview both men while they were locked up.

The next day was the day the paper was printed, so I immediately went to the newspaper’s office where I typed up the story about the meeting, a separate story about the fight and the rather contentious relationship between the men and a third and fourth story based on the interviews with both men.

As I was finishing, Dink came in. His meeting had been very boring, but had lasted several hours so my story was the first he had heard about the fight.

The next day the entire front page of the paper, plus several inside pages was filled with my stories and pictures.

That same day the state’s largest daily newspaper, The Charlotte Journal, called Dink. They had heard about the fight and wanted a story. Dink faxed them all my stories, as well as emailing copies of the story and most of the photos.

Rather than rewrite the stories, the editor of the Journal asked Dink if they could simply use his stories and they would of course give our paper full credit. Dink agreed, but only if they included my byline.

The next day, almost the entire front page and several inside pages of the state’s largest daily paper was filled with my stories and photos. And my byline was included on every one.

The editor of The Charlotte Journal was really impressed with the quality of the writing and photographs and asked if I would be willing to drive to Charlotte (about an hour away) and meet with him.

That turned out to be one of the funniest meetings I’ve ever had.

The editor, with the rather pedestrian name of Tom Smith, was in his mid-50s and, at least sartorially speaking, almost the opposite of Dink.

Dink rarely wore a tie, almost NEVER wore a jacket and I think you could almost tell what he had for lunch by examining the food stains on his shirt.

Tom Smith was dressed in a suit with vest and wore a bow tie. “Impeccable” is probably the correct word to use to describe his attire.

I remember the first thing he said after meeting me was, “Damn, now I know I am old. Every year you journalism majors seem to get younger and younger. Why, you look like you should be in high school!”

“Well, Sir,” I answered with a smile, “that is because I am a high school student. I’m a junior in high school.”

I actually had to get out my high school identification card and driver’s license before he would believe me. The rest of the day he took me all over the newspaper building and introduced me as “a damn high school kid who just wrote the story of the year!”

It turns out his words were prophetic. I not only won the first place award for news story and news photo of the year for the weekly paper I was working for, but at the same time won the same awards for the daily papers as well.

I was soon a stringer for both papers, which continued even after I enrolled in college.

My senior year of high school, I also started attending classes at the local junior college so I could get some of the required courses out of the way.

I actually began my college life as a sophomore.

Midway through my junior year, the editor of the daily Charlotte paper called me and asked me to stop by his office, saying he had a special assignment I might be interested in.

North Carolina was home to one of the most prolific and most reclusive writers in America.

Every two years, for more than 30 years, Sebastian Cabot Vandiver would release a new book. He has won every conceivable writing award, including a Nobel Prize for Literature and a Pulitzer, for both Fiction and Non-Fiction.

He had also not given an interview to anyone, television, newspapers or magazines, in over 20 years. His last interview had not gone well and he always claimed the guy was really trying to do a hatchet job on him.

The editor of the Charlotte paper had been trying to get him to give an interview for more than 15 years and Vandiver would always turn him down.

Several weeks earlier Tom Smith had sent Vandiver another request for an interview, but this time sent over 30 stories I had written, dating back to the very first sports story I had ever authored.

He also sent a short bio, including that I had written that first story while still a sophomore in high school.

For whatever reason, Vandiver finally agreed to a one-hour interview, but only with me and only if I came by myself.

I presented myself at his estate at the scheduled 9 am for the one-hour interview and left 10 hours later at 7 pm.

I had so much information, the one story turned into a week-long series that was not only printed in the Charlotte paper, but also picked up by The New York Times and virtually every other major daily newspaper in the United States.

It was even reprinted in the “other” Times – the Times of London – sort of the Holy Grail for journalists. I had also taken over 100 photos of Vandiver, many with his beloved dachshunds, and over the course of the week-long series, most of those were used as well.

And, of course, every story included my byline and every photo included in the caption who took the photo.

It was heady stuff for a college junior.

After the series was printed, I received a hand-written note from Vandiver asking me to stop by his mansion again.

Vandiver told me it was simply the best stories about him he had ever read.

Then he surprised the heck out of me:

“How are you coming on your novel?” he asked, completely out of the blue.

“How did you know I was writing a novel?” I answered.

Vandiver said he had started in the newspaper business and knew that “inside every journalist is a novelist struggling to get published.”

He explained that nearly every week, he would get two or three manuscripts from people, asking him to “just look at my book,” and yet I had spent 10 hours with him and never once brought it up.

“I wouldn’t presume to ask something like that,” I truthfully answered.

“Well if someone offers, then you aren’t ‘presuming’ anything,” he said.

I told him I was about half-way through and if I really worked at it, I could be finished in another six or eight months, which would roughly be by the beginning of my senior year.

Vandiver asked me to email him the story when I was finished and a few days after my senior year started, I did exactly that.

I wasn’t really expecting to ever hear from him again, but two months later he again asked me to stop by so we could discuss my novel.

To say he ripped it to shreds isn’t completely accurate, but close.

He told me what he liked and what he didn’t. He said to lose certain story lines and expand others. He suggested several possible plot twists that I had considered, but didn’t think would work. He didn’t make any actual changes, just numerous suggestions on what and when to tighten and when to loosen up, and left it up to me to use my best judgment.

About mid-way through my senior year, I emailed it back. This time, when we met, he only had two or three suggestions, which I completed in a few days.

After I emailed those to him, he said he would get back with me.

A month later I received a call from the publishing company Vandiver used, asking me to fly to New York. They offered me a contract and gave me an advance check, against projected book royalties, for $100,000.

Vandiver was also at the meeting and for only the second or third time in his career, wrote the foreword for a book. It was unbelievable how quickly the novel took off.

When I mentioned to Kevin and Rachel that Vandiver wrote the foreword, Rachel actually jumped and started to say, “Wait...” but then said never mind and to continue the story.

In a month the book was on the New York Times bestseller list. A month later it was in the top 10 and a month later it hit number one for 27 straight weeks.

Every month I started getting a check for six figures from book sales. And the amount of the checks kept increasing.

The horrible downside to this was the day I graduated college. I’d received a dozen advance copies of the book two days before graduation and immediately autographed copies of the book for my parents and my younger sister.

I had not mentioned anything to them about the book – not even the fact I was writing one. I wanted it to be a complete surprise.