Newsroom With A View

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That became evident to me recently as I examined, out of curiosity, some of the earliest news reports in the Caldwell County Public Library’s collection that you can find from the Lenoir, N.C., area, from the weekly Caldwell Messenger, which began publication in September 1875.

For instance, an item in the Dec. 2, 1875, edition reported on “a slight runaway” of a horse team on Main Street in downtown Lenoir:

“Cause – too many fire crackers in the rear. No damage. Moral – don’t leave your team standing without someone to look after the horses when the school boys have holiday. They will celebrate.”

We all can recall our father’s warning, if your father was like mine, about firecrackers in the rear, and while you won’t find any teams of horses downtown anymore, visit and you might find a fair share of horse’s rears, or you might at least run into me.

An item in the Nov. 18, 1875, edition commented, “It is well that our hog law has been repealed, or our town dogs would be immensely idle, nowadays. As it is, it keeps them pretty busy between meals playing with friend Johnson’s pigs on the public square.”

This was followed a week later by Mr. Johnson’s objection to that commentary:

“Friend Johnson says it isn’t his hogs that afford so much amusement for the town dogs. The hogs, he says, belong to various other parties, principal among whom are the Town Commissioners.”

I have not researched it, but the hog law must have been reinstated at some point, for hogs seldom are seen around the public square anymore. Perhaps Mr. Johnson shamed the commissioners into keeping their hogs penned and re-enacting the ban.

And then, as now, one of the chief functions of the local newspaper has been to shine a spotlight on local residents, particularly those who are active in civil affairs, such as this resident noted in the Nov. 25, 1875, edition:

“The most vigilant and persevering inhabitant of Lenoir is a certain cow we know of. She seems to regard herself as the miller of the town, from the way she takes toll of every wagon that is stopped on the square – or anywhere in smelling distance. She would have made a capital collector of tithes during the war. She has a determined energy unequaled by Grant himself.”

One thing that has changed is in the advertising. Newspapers have always been vehicles for local merchants to get their messages out to the public through advertisements, but many of the ones in those old papers would baffle young people now, selling such things as “tinware,” turbine water wheels and “dry goods.” (I have not yet seen an old ad for “wet goods,” but one presumes such things must have existed.)

But one that local pharmacist W.W. Gaither ran repeatedly in late 1875 and early 1876 is as relevant now as the day he penned it:

Drugs! Drugs!

I cannot afford to sell any more of them without pay. All who owe me are invited to settle without further notice. No more credit.

All kinds of country produce received.

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We were both 22.

As a young reporter covering courts in Caldwell County in 1987, I noticed what a high percentage of people facing charges were roughly my age. Sometimes what landed them in trouble was a situation similar to one I had been in, but a different choice here or a different starting point there made all the difference in the outcome.

There was not a lot about Sammy William Sturgill or his background that felt familiar to me, but we were both 22 – he was born in October 1965, I was born a couple months earlier. We were both slim. He appeared to be in better shape. He looked like a nice enough guy, and from the thumbs-up he flashed at the News-Topic’s photographer while being led out of the courtroom during his murder trial, he sure seemed to have a sense of humor.

Sturgill testified in his own defense in that November 1987 trial, a not at all common thing for murder suspects to do. I recall that he was calm and seemed relaxed as he described the events of Feb. 3, 1987, that ended with Walter Blevins, 68, bleeding and unconscious, suffering from many injuries but dying of a blow to the side of the head.

Both of them, Sturgill said, were drunk; Sturgill described himself as having a chronic drinking problem. But in Sturgill’s telling, Blevins was the aggressor, angry that Sturgill had sold him for $6 a whiskey bottle half full not of whiskey but a mix of whiskey and soda, and Sturgill, drunkenly defiant, refused to give the money back. Blevins pulled a pocket knife. Sturgill, stumbling back into the woods, saw a discarded wine bottle, picked it up and smashed Blevins in the side of the head, causing Blevins to drop the knife, which Sturgill said he picked up and used to stab Blevins.

The story sounded reasonable to me.

But Sturgill’s version didn’t account for the extent of Blevins’ injuries, which included a number of fractured ribs, the prosecutor pointed out. Nor did it explain how fibers from the Blevins’ wool cap became stuck to the toe of one of Sturgill’s boots. The prosecutor’s contention was that the fatal blow to the head came not from a wine bottle swung in self-defense but from a kick to the head while Blevins already lay bloody and broken on the ground.

I had largely forgotten that trial until a couple of weeks ago when I was searching through microfilm at the Caldwell County Public Library, trying to find a particular story I wrote around that time and came upon that front-page photo of Sturgill giving the thumbs-up, with perhaps a wry smile under his moustache and a light in his eyes, on the day that he testified.

Last week, after Sturgill himself died after being stabbed in another confrontation with an older man, I kept thinking about that photo — the distance from that courthouse scene to a recent county jail mug shot of Sturgill, and the distance from my seat in that courtroom to my office now.

Sturgill’s family describes a man who, when sober, was kind and generous, who planted flowers and vegetables at the Gateway Nursing Center on Harper Avenue. When he was younger, “he was a good kid,” his older sister told the News-Topic on Wednesday.

It all awakens in me that feeling I had at my first full-time job, sitting in court, watching young men my age stand not more than 10 yards from me and face judgment. Where do things begin going wrong? Where did things pass that point that ultimately one person would sit on one side of that courtroom, able to walk out the building’s front door, and another person would sit on the other, being led out the back in handcuffs?

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No one ever will mistake me for a local, but having worked here in Lenoir once before, I sometimes get the same kind of surreal feeling that I have when I drive through neighborhoods where I grew up in other cities.

One came Tuesday when Sawmills Town Administrator Seth Eckard told me that in the materials the town has from its founding 25 years ago, he noticed that I wrote the story about the town’s incorporation.

I’m not sure whether Eckard had even started elementary school by then, but that’s a different topic.

There was an awkward moment after Eckard told me about that newspaper story. I was silent, my gaze drifted up and to the side. I’m sure my eyes glazed over. Then I looked back at him and said I don’t remember the story, but I remember the community discussion about whether to incorporate.

It wasn’t just that story or topic washing over me that turned me into a momentary zombie. It was that this was another in a series of such moments since I rejoined the News-Topic in January.

I go to the courthouse to help cover a trial, and I remember when reporters and lawyers alike were allowed to go up the back stairs, which now is behind a locked door. Reporters sat with the lawyers in the chairs to the side of the judge’s bench, opposite the jury seating, not out in the public seating, and we mingled in the law library behind the courtroom. I was in the hallway behind the courtroom when a man on trial for murder was brought over the catwalk from what is now the old jail, and a TV cameraman beside me working for a Charlotte TV station walked in close to the man, who suddenly became angry and punched the TV camera lens (why he wouldn’t instead punch the man holding the camera is probably related to the kind of thinking that lands a man in jail for murder in the first place).

When I go into the county administration building downtown, I remember how in 1987 no one – not a solitary soul, it seemed – referred to it as anything other than the Belk building.

When I drive along Southwest Boulevard, I remember an entire special section full of stories I wrote about that road’s construction, particularly one about what seemed like a high number of churches that had to be moved, were torn down or lost land to the road project.

But unlike someone who grew up here or has lived here for many years, my memories are not a continuum of change. I have two distinct reference points: 1987 and now. The intervening years, however, seem so fleeting that I feel more like a time traveler than a person who lived here, moved away and moved back, as though I visited long enough to learn some essential information about the place, then decided to skip ahead 25 years or so and visit again. Everything I see now is compared to my 1987 memory.

Going down Connelly Springs Road, mentally I check off, “That was there, that was there, that’s new, that used to be something else” – and that reminds me of a column I wrote in 1987 about trying to get directions to almost anywhere in this county. Over and over, people gave me directions citing landmarks that weren’t there anymore, as in, “You turn left where the (fill in the blank) used to be.”

I couldn’t follow such directions then. I might be able to now. But only if the landmark was there in 1987.

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