Source: Rhino Times Greensboro

Some Folks Who’ve Helped Us Along

by John Hammer

October 20, 2011

This week we are publishing our 1,037th paper. The first is dated Oct. 18, 1991. The mathematicians among you are saying 20 years of 52 papers, shouldn’t it be 1,040? And they are right, it should be.

But in 1991, at Christmas, the fellow who developed our film took it home with him for the holidays, so there was no way we could finish the paper. The summer of 1992, the Muse talked me into going on vacation for a week, and when I saw how much money I saved by not producing a paper we stayed two weeks. So our first year we missed three papers, but since then we haven’t missed one, which is a pretty good record.

When I sat down and looked at back issues of The Rhino Times to try and figure out how to write a history of the paper, I flipped through looking for big stories like I do every December to write a wrap-up of the year, and I took notes.

Then I realized that this is not supposed to be a history of Greensboro during the past 20 years but a history of The Rhino Times. They are certainly intertwined, but different.

History can be told in a lot of ways. One way would be to list in order major accomplishments, like adding a sales department, or the first year we did over $1 million in sales, starting the Charlotte Rhino Times in 2002, or closing it in 2008. But I decided that it would be more fun to write about the people who have made it all possible.

So there is some history in this history but mainly stories about people who have helped The Rhino make it 20 years. I’ve decided not to write about the associate publisher in Charlotte or the associate publisher in Greensboro, who we discovered were embezzling from us. In fact, since we didn’t prosecute either one it is probably best they remain unnamed, as will most of the employees who we have had over the years, not because they didn’t contribute but because I only have so much room and both sales and reporting are positions where turnover tends to be high.

One year my brother Willy and I sat down with the names of all the people who had worked for us in one year and tried to remember something about them all, and we did it, but not without some work.

Although I would like to take credit for it, The Rhino Times, at least in the beginning, was the brainchild of John Rudy, who at that time owned the Rhinoceros Club and now owns Cafe Europa. I’m not sure he’d take credit for everything that it has become, but he thought it up.

From 1982 to 1986 I had done a newsletter for the now defunct Rhinoceros Club on South Greene Street that was called The Rhinoceros Times. The most notable thing about the newsletter is that I went to the 1984 Democratic National Convention credentialed as a writer for The Rhinoceros Times and was the only correspondent at the convention for a monthly bar newsletter. In 1986 I moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and the newsletter died a natural death. I later moved to Washington, DC, for four years, went to grad school, worked for a magazine and a consulting group, learned how to do layout on a Macintosh, finally got the Muse to marry me and moved back to Greensboro in July 1991.

I couldn’t find a job, so Rudy suggested that I revive The Rhinoceros Times and this time sell advertising, so I did. It may seem odd, but for months I was confused about the ownership of the paper. I thought Rudy and I were partners, and then one day I was trying to get Rudy’s help making a decision and said something about the fact that Rudy should show more interest in a business he owned. Rudy informed me that he had just been helping me out and that he had never had any interest in owning, much less operating, a newspaper. He had his hands full with a bar.

Which is how I found myself the sole proprietor of a fledgling newspaper.

The paper started out being mostly entertainment with some editorial thrown in, but in the first few months I realized that you can only write about the new menu at Southern Lights so many times, and I started covering the Greensboro City Council.

In the beginning I did everything: I wrote the articles, took the photos, sold the ads, created the ads, laid out the paper, took it to the printer, picked it up from the printer and then delivered it around town. Rudy helped me deliver the paper for the first six months, which is one reason I thought he must own the paper. Why else would he do all that work? I can remember saying to Rudy on more than one occasion, “We’re up to eight pages this week. There is no way I can do any more.” The next week it would be, “We are up to 12 pages this week. That’s my limit.” But the paper kept growing and it turned out I could do more.

Early on I outsourced the ad creation to Rick Sanderford, who was a big help, and he also reviewed bands for a while.

One of the smartest things I did in the fall of 1992 was to call on Carter Allen at Laredo’s Neon Cactus in the Irving Park Plaza Shopping Center where Moe’s Southwest Grill is today. It was actually in half that space. Carter asked me how much for a full-page ad, and since I had never sold a full page I had to come up with a price. A couple of weeks later he would ask me how much to add a second page for Christmas and I gave him a great price, which stood for years.

In one way it was way too cheap, but it was enough to pay my print bill every week, so it made my life much easier.

Once again, lots of people gave me credit for coming up with the whole Laredo’s idea of putting in lots of photos, but it was Carter’s idea. He said he wanted to increase his late night business and he thought photos of lots of young people having a good time after midnight might do the trick. So for years my Saturday night was spent at Laredo’s taking photos after midnight.

My brother Willy eventually took over the duty of taking photos at Laredo’s. I think it might have had to do with the fact that at the time he was young and single.

Which brings me to an even smarter thing I did in starting the paper, and that was talking my brother Willy into becoming my partner. Willy is far more organized than I am and had started a company after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering from Duke that imported decorative ceramic tile from all over the world. So he suggested that in order to figure out if this would work he take a vacation from his company and come work at The Rhino for a couple of weeks. His two-week vacation stretched into six weeks and then he had to go back and tie up loose ends at his soon to be old company.

The reason I wanted a partner was because I was working myself to death and the business side of the paper had grown beyond my limited abilities. So when Willy, who is well organized and a great salesman, came to work for six weeks he got a rudimentary accounting system going, sold a bunch of ads and really increased the number of pages in the paper. I had been struggling to put out a 16- or 20-page paper every week. There was no way I could put out a 32- or 36-page paper. Or so I thought. I managed to survive the six months it took Willy to get back, but just barely. I thought I was working hard before he came for a visit, but it turned out I didn’t know what hard work was until he left.

A note about newspapers for the 99 percent who are not in the business. The number of pages in a newspaper is determined, not by the amount of news on a given day but by the amount of advertising that has been sold. Most newspapers have a ratio of news to ads that is high on the ad side. We try to keep The Rhino Times around 50 percent news and 50 percent ads, which is an unusually high ratio for news. But, hey, the editor owns half the newspaper so shouldn’t he get half the space?

Willy came back in the fall of 1993 and turned The Rhino Times into a real business. He ran the show for 18 years, and running this show makes herding cats look like a breeze. Last March Willy took an extended leave of absence and this fall decided to officially resign as publisher.

Since March I have discovered what a thankless job it is to be publisher. At least in this economy you almost never get to announce big bonuses for everyone, but instead have to find new and innovative places to cut expenses.

In 1993 I had started covering the Guilford County Board of Commissioners along with the Greensboro City Council. I started covering the commissioners because Della Gray of Gray Television, who I knew from Rhino Club days, insisted that I watch some meetings. In the beginning I couldn’t attend the meetings but would get the videotape from Gray Television, watch it and then take it to the cablevision station in time for it to be broadcast on TV. I think if then Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Wally Harrelson had known that I was delivering the tapes for Gray Television that they would not have had that contract another minute.

Della was right, there was way too much going on to ignore the Board of Commissioners. This was right after the board was increased to 11 by the Democrats and Skip Alston, Steve Arnold, Robert Moores, Joe Wood and Joe Bostic, to name a few, were all commissioners. At some point I started attending the meetings and for years I attended the meetings of the Greensboro City Council and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners. On any number of city-county issues I was the unofficial liaison between the two, and sometimes managed to get some things done.

Back to 1992. Not long after I started the paper, when it was still being published out of the spare bedroom of our apartment, my friend Greg Brooks told me that his brother was a cartoonist and asked me to talk to him. One thing you learn early on in this business is everyone has a relative who is a great but undiscovered writer, photographer or graphic artist. It’s easy to write it all off as wishful thinking, but the reason you have to be careful is that sometimes they really do.

In this case, I met Geof, looked at some of his cartoons, liked them and we have been printing Geof’s cartoons in some form or another ever since. It is a rare paper in the last 20 years that doesn’t have at least one cartoon from Geof. In the beginning we were so excited about having our own cartoonist we printed a bunch of political cartoons on the front page. Yahoo Revue and Riff Raff were early one-panel cartoons. We have also published some of his strips. Nick Bravo PI, about a detective, and Roadkill Ranger, about a squirrel that rescues animals from death by automobile. Tradin’ Paint was a cartoon Geof did about stock car racing that was nationally syndicated. Geof gave it up after realizing how much time it took and how little money he made. You have to be in a whale of a lot of newspapers to make any money with a cartoon strip.

An early subject of Geof’s political cartoons was Guilford County Manager Hector Rivera. Editorially we went after Hector nearly every week because we thought he was a terrible county manager, and the cartoons reflected that. So most people were surprised to walk in the manager’s office and see framed originals of Geof’s cartoons on the walls. Hector, for all his faults, did have a sense of humor and an ego. He loved being the subject of a cartoon so much he didn’t mind that it wasn’t complimentary.

Geof has also covered the schools as a reporter, sold ads and is now overseeing circulation. Even when he lived in Detroit, Geof got his cartoons in every week.

Our very first columnist who started in 1992 was Annemarie Bogar. At that time she worked for the Internal Revenue Service, something that she did not want anyone to know for pretty obvious reasons.

She passed the “I want to be a columnist test with flying colors.” The test is to turn in four columns. Lots of people have a column in them and they can come up with two or three in a pinch, but that fourth one is a real bear. Annemarie had no trouble with that and wrote columns for us for years until she got promoted and her paying job became too demanding. Writing a column is tough. It takes far more time than it should, and to do it right takes even more. Annemarie had some wonderful, funny columns and I hope she has found a outlet for all that talent.

It’s funny, but in the early 1990s when we ran Tony Kornheiser’s syndicated column he wasn’t so well known around here that people knew it was syndicated and we’d get calls for Tony.

We also ran News of the Weird starting in 1992, when we went to regular newsprint and I suddenly had more pages I had to fill. People thought we compiled that also.

Which brings up a point that I find fascinating. Some people thought that all of these people were up at The Rhino Times working every day, while other people would ask me what I did for a living, convinced that The Rhino Times was a hobby.

Right now we have 15 full time employees and probably 15 part time employees. So it is a small business, but those 15 get paychecks and have insurance and 401Ks just like it was a real job.

Ed Cone was a columnist for The Rhino Times in 1994 before he was a columnist for the News & Record. The best part of having Ed write a column was not the column itself, although Ed writes well and can be extremely funny, but it was discussing politics with Ed when he dropped his column off. This was the mid 1990s and Ed was cutting edge, so I believe he brought his column in on a floppy disk. It’s good to have to defend what you believe and Ed kept me on my toes. I’m not sure either one of us moved an inch in our discussions, but they were long and sometimes loud.

We finally had a falling out over the politics in his column which I had to remind him was supposed to – but was not going to – run in my paper. Ed, of course, turned that into a paying gig with the News & Record, which lasted up until this year.

The late Vic Nussbaum gave us our first exclusive and a ton of credibility when he was mayor of Greensboro in 1993 and announced that he would not run for reelection. Nussbaum had just forced the News & Record to print the most apologetic retraction and apology that anyone in the newspaper business had ever seen. The retraction made national news. The News & Record had accused him of behaving inappropriately on a land deal and The Rhino Times had actually done the research and found that everything was handled above board, in a fair and open manner, which we reported while the News & Record stuck to its story that was based on fantasy not fact. We got it right and in appreciation Nussbaum gave us the story and let the News & Record find out from The Rhino that he wasn’t running.

That gave us a lot of credibility right out of the gate.

Danny Kelly, who runs the snack shop in the Old Guilford County Court House, used to provide a good many tips about what was really going on. But the service that he provided that made a huge difference was when he complained about not being able to read the paper.

Danny is legally blind. So having someone who is blind complain about not being able to read the paper might not make sense. But Danny has some vision and has special glasses that allow him to read, and he is a big reader. He said there was something wrong with our type and I thought that he might be losing more of his vision. But I passed the complaint along to Willy and Jim Garrison, who was in charge of commercial print at the High Point Enterprise where we were printing, and we all looked at the type. Danny was right. It was a printer problem that we should have caught but hadn’t. It took months to track down the actual source of the problem and get it fixed, but we did and it made a huge difference in the paper. Looking back over those papers today, I wonder how we could have missed it and why it took a blind man to get us to fix our printing problem.

Gena Morris, who joined us in 1994, and Sybil Stokes, who came on board in 1995, were two salespeople who stuck it out and made a difference. Although Scott Yost writes often about hiring Panthers cheerleaders and the like, both Gina and Sybil were grandmothers before they left our employment.

Sybil likes to say that in her 16th year she got married, lost her virginity and had a baby, and did it in the proper order.

They were both experienced and aggressive saleswomen. Gina had worked for the Thrifty Nickel, and every Christmas would say, I don’t see why we don’t just put out the same paper two weeks in a row, that’s what we used to do at the Thrifty Nickel and nobody every complained. It was senseless to argue that people would certainly complain if we printed the same paper twice, although with the dearth of news between Christmas and New Year’s it was tempting.

Dividing up sales accounts is always a problem, whether you do actual territories, lists, types of business or alphabetical order, there are always arguments. When it was just Gina and Sybil the city was divided in half. One had everything north of West Market and the other had everything south. Still, I remember one famous high volume argument about account stealing. There were a lot of tears but Willy didn’t shed any of them. I remember sitting in my office next door thankful that I was not the publisher.

Jim “Squirrel” Garrison, salesman extraordinaire, had a long association with The Rhino Times. We were printing the paper in Roxboro until I got a call one day from some guy with a name I didn’t recognize who started talking to me like he was a good friend. I had no idea who he was until he realized my confusion and said, “Hammer, this is Squirrel.” I said, why didn’t you say so in the first place and he said he was doing commercial print at the High Point Enterprise and they would love to print The Rhino Times. I said give me a week or two and we’ll start printing with you. We printed there for seven years, which meant Willy and I spent every Wednesday evening with Uncle Jimmy in High Point. We long ago forgot why we started calling him Uncle Jimmy, but some of the employees at the Enterprise still think we’re his nephews.

When Uncle Jimmy left the High Point Enterprise he tried some other jobs before coming to work at The Rhino, but when he came to work with us in January 2003 it was clear he was home. Jim Garrison died in December 2010 after a long battle with cancer. Sometimes he was too sick to work, but if he was on his feet he was at work saying things like, “Up your ads.”

Jim’s work ethic was so strong that his bosses had to keep telling him to slow down and take it easy, and sometimes try without much success to send him home to rest.

Karen Sands, who joined us in 2008, may not be trying to fill Jim’s shoes, but is certainly working hard to pick up the slack.

In 20 years we have hired and lost more sales people than we can count. Most don’t last very long and some don’t make it through the first day.

Sales people have to be persistent to be any good. Sherry Stevenson, who joined us in July of 1999, has been our top salesperson for years, and no one would ever accuse Sherry of not being persistent.

Sherry says when she was little her mother asked her if she knew what “no” meant, and Sherry responded, “It means maybe.” In the intervening years her attitude hasn’t changed. Sherry is the only person I know who actually talked the people at the North Carolina Drivers’ License Bureau into retaking the picture for her driver’s license because the first one wasn’t a good one. It’s hard to imagine a bad picture of Sherry, but she claims most of them are, and as we quickly learned up here you don’t run a picture of her unless you get her approval. Usually when we do run a picture of Sherry in the paper we get calls to The Sound of the Beep thanking us for the photo of Sherry “Va-va-voom” Stevenson.

For a while Sherry was a part of a sales team with Johnny Smith. It seemed unlikely to me but Willy said it would work and it did. They were extremely successful, but what a Mutt and Jeff team. Sherry is extremely fashion conscious and always well dressed. If Johnny came to work and was cold he would walk around the corner to the Bargain Box and buy a sweater or a sport coat.

Sherry also finds herself as the ad hoc publisher of Rhino Real Estate, the real estate insert that runs in The Rhino every week. Willy had the idea for Rhino Real Estate but Johnny and Sherry were the ones that got it going, and Sherry is the one who has kept it going.

This office has plenty of loud mouths and prima donnas, so it is good to have someone who just comes in and does her job. That would be Melissa Smith, who has been selling classified ads for us since 2005. Some days I am surprised to find that Melissa is here because she has been sitting quietly at her desk working, which may be normal some places but it is not normal Rhino behavior.

We’ve been blessed with a number of really good office managers, and at least one really bad one. But the gold standard for office managers at The Rhino is Judi Hunter, who retired in July 2010. Judi came to work for The Rhino in September 2000, and after being here for a year or so said that she planned to retire from The Rhino, which seemed like a distant idea, but Judi almost always did what she said she was going to do and she retired July 2010. One of the reasons that Jim was able to work through his illness was that Judi filled in the gaps when he was having chemo or in the hospital.

In 2004 we moved from the Southeastern building, at 107 East Market St., a block and half west to the Irvin Arcade at 216 West Market St. When we had moved into the Southeastern building we had a couple of boxes of stuff and two computers. In the Southeastern building office at one time we had a pool table and a Ping Pong table and the coolest vault in town. We had lots of space and we filled it up with stuff.

There is no way we could have made that move without Judi. She must have walked a couple of marathons back and forth between the two buildings.

Her title was “keeper of order,” and she did. As long as Judi was in the building you knew that things were going to get done.

Judi was the summit of office managers but we have had quite a few who have done a great job of trying to organize the unorganizable. Sandra Ritter, Traci Marsh and Paula Heath were all office managers who handled the job well. Paula has the notable distinction of giving Mina to me and the Muse.

When you have an employee come back and work for you a second time you know either they are really hard up for a job or you did something right. Our current office manager, Erika Sloan, worked for us as a sales assistant and then left for a great job at Pace Communications. This summer she left Pace to come back to work for us as office manager and she has brought order back to utter bedlam. We generally assume people are doing their jobs, but when our last office manager left and we looked at what had been done and what had not, we had to run pay the Duke Energy bill before they cut our electricity off. So that sort of bedlam is what Erika walked into and within weeks she had it mostly straightened out, and she makes things better everyday.

Scott Yost tells the story of how he came to work at The Rhino in his column. What he doesn’t mention, because he wasn’t there, were the conversations that we had about Scott before he came to work for us. He was working for a really boring business publication but we had read some of the clever, funny pieces he had written. So occasionally Willy or I would say, “Why do you think Scott Yost won’t come to work for us? He can’t be happy writing that drivel. We haven’t ever written anything bad about him, have we?”

But we had to wait for him to get fired before he would join us.

Scott is a worrier and told me one time that he had come back to the office in the middle of the night to make sure I had turned the coffee pot off because he was concerned the building would burn down. I left the coffee pot on all the time but the building never burned down. However, we did buy a coffee pot that you cannot leave on so Scott wouldn’t have to trudge back up here at night to protect us from ourselves.

At one point Scott was spending a lot of time during the day on the basketball court. I kept getting calls from people asking me if Scott was all right and if he still worked for us. He was and he did. It was just that he was doing his work on the basketball court instead of behind a desk. Half a reporter’s time is spent on the phone and it doesn’t matter where you are, and more importantly Scott was getting the job done.

Scott has been covering the Guilford County commissioners for us since 2002. Sometimes he is referred to as the 12th commissioner. He even went on a junket to Hawaii to cover the national convention. Sometimes he seems to know what they are going to do before they know. It is true that I called Scott once to tell him something he didn’t know about what the commissioners were doing and he was so dumbfounded about that he wrecked his car at a residential intersection where it is just hard to imagine an accident.

We’ve had some memorable failures as reporters. I remember the interview of one whose name I can’t remember. I looked at the resume, talked to the guy and thought there is no way in the world this guy can do the job, his clips were awful. The next thing I knew I was talking to him about what time to come to work on Monday. It was like I blacked out while I was sitting there. I waited until Friday and told him I didn’t think things were working out.

We had another who got up at one of his first City Council meetings as a speaker from the floor. He clearly didn’t understand the role of the reporter.

One reporter wrote for us for a while and I actually fired him three times before it stuck. I would fire him and the next day he would be back at work. The first time I wondered if I had dreamed it, so the next time I made sure I had witnesses, and then there he was again. The third time was the charm.

Scott “from the Rhino” is a well-known man about town, compared to our other staff writer who has been with us since January 2008, Paul Clark. We hired Paul in the normal hiring process for reporters – the Muse met him at CompUSA when the store was going out of business. Paul had been hired as part of the crew to sell everything in the building. Elaine says that not only did she find a good reporter but she got a good pair of computer speakers out of the deal.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people for jobs and I’ve never walked away with a good set of computer speakers. I must be doing something wrong. Paul is a refugee from the consolidation of publications. He had worked in Washington, DC, for years and decided to move back home to North Carolina, but getting a job in recession is tough. In this market getting a job as a writer is tough anywhere.

It seems that every black cloud does have a silver lining, because if the economy were not in such lousy shape and the daily newspaper business were not collapsing we could never afford a writer of Paul’s experience and ability.

Paul has the enviable position of writing about High Point, something that I know nothing about. They do things differently in High Point, which is something I learn about nearly every week.

Paul will go to the ends of the earth to track down that one piece of information he needs to make a story. It is amazing what he finally gets out of people.

It’s also amazing how we have hired people. Scott we hired while he was on his way home from being fired. Paul we hired because he waited on the Muse in a retail store, and Lisa Bouchey, our managing editor, we hired in 2005 because the Muse was going on vacation and somebody had to do her job. It’s interesting – there are always three or four people around here who can do my job, but the Muse needs someone who really knows what they are doing to fill in for her.

I remember when Lisa applied for a job. I told Willy that she was way too qualified for the job and too experienced and talented to be working for us. Lisa is the reason that the paper actually gets printed every week. Somebody has to be the adult, and in our office it is Lisa, because the boss is probably the cause of the problem.

We do something that I think is unique at The Rhino, and that is the editorial team writes the headlines as a group. We sit around at the end of the day with Lisa at the computer and come up with headlines. The best ones we often can’t print, but if Lisa has a few minutes she will often come up with a trial headline better than the rest of us working together can do.

On the editorial side, Lisa can do everyone else’s job including, of course, mine. Lisa is another example of the bad economy being good for us.

No history of The Rhino would be complete without the story of Anthony Council, who has now worked with us for 14 years. In 1997 we had hired a talented outgoing A&T student, David Gaines, as our graphic artist, meaning he created ads and did some layout of the paper. David did a pretty good job, but after a while he started bringing a friend with him to work named Anthony. We started noticing that Anthony was usually working at the computer and David spent his time sitting on the couch reading magazines. Willy and I talked about it because we weren’t paying Anthony a dime, but he was doing most of our graphic design work, which was good for us because he was both better and faster than David.

Then the Muse and I went on vacation to the Azores. I was talking on the phone to Willy, back when you could still find pay phones, at a little beach bar looking out at the scenery, which was notable and at the ocean. We had hired Anthony to do the Muse’s job while she was gone and Willy was telling me that Anthony was so good that the only smart thing to do was to hire Anthony and fire the Muse.

So we did and it was one of the best moves we ever made. Anthony is incredibly talented, hardworking, and also very important in the newspaper business he is fast, and very rare in the newspaper business he is so well organized that he rarely makes mistakes. He is the main reason the newspaper looks as good as it does. The reason the paper today doesn’t look better is because Anthony’s boss is an iconoclast who would actually like to print on a hot lead press only in black and white.

Without Anthony The Rhino Times wouldn’t be what it is today and wouldn’t look anything like it does.

Although we did fire the Muse, my wife Elaine, to hire Anthony, she didn’t stay fired. It did give her a break from working for a family business. Working for your husband and brother-in-law is not stress free.

Elaine is currently the copy editor and the editor of Rhino Real Estate, but she has done every job you can do at a newspaper.

Elaine was our first outside sales person when we couldn’t afford to pay anyone to sell ads. As with everything, she did the job well but she said the pressure of supporting The Rhino was too much and wanted to do something where the entire financial future of the business was not on her shoulders. She has also worked as a graphic artist and did the final layout for years. She takes photographs, writes stories, answers the phone, files, types, makes coffee, takes out the trash and occasionally does a job at The Rhino that is usually the exclusive domain of the editor-in-chief – she picks up trash in the parking lot.

But Elaine’s biggest contribution to The Rhino was in working in a job she hated but that paid enough for her husband to try and do something that is virtually impossible, which is start a newspaper with no capital.

As some point in the first couple of years, when the production team consisted of Willy, Elaine and me, we put out a paper after working seemingly non-stop for days. After we sent it off to be printed, I said, “Why am I so tired?” The Muse pointed out that the three of us had just produced the first 60-page Rhino Times, which is a lot of work for three people.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Orson Scott Card started writing two columns a week for The Rhino. He has since cut back to one, but it almost didn’t happen at all. The Muse and I are big Orson Scott Card fans. Once, before we knew Scott Card, the Muse saw a car with the license plate ENDER and figured it must be him, so she started following the car. After a few blocks she realized that Orson Scott Card might not want to be stalked and she wondered what she would say if he stopped.

After 9/11 I received an email from Card inquiring about the possibility of writing a column or two. I sat down to write back and froze. Then I wrote my life story, which I then laboriously cut down to two sentences and I didn’t like either sentence. So two hours later my work product was two sentences I didn’t like.

The Muse wanted to know if I had written Orson Scott Card back and I said I was working on it. So I worked on another way to say, “Yes, we’d love to have you write for us.” And once again got trapped by the idea that a writer who had won both the Hugo and Nebula awards two years in a row was going to be reading this email. The fact that Card had already read thousands of words I had written didn’t matter. So I didn’t respond for days until I believe we either got a phone call or an email asking if I had gotten the first email. Here you have a world famous author offering to write for free for a local weekly newspaper and he can’t get the courtesy of a response. I finally managed to cobble some words together and hit send before I could delete them and Scott, who is a very understanding man, didn’t hold it against me.

Card’s column, as well as being entertaining and enlightening, has resulted in The Rhino Times receiving the kind of national exposure that most papers only dream about. Rush Limbaugh read an entire column by Orson Scott Card on the air in October 2008. (He had quoted one in 2006.) The Rhino Times website went down for hours as people tried to read the column. We get hits on our website from all over the world, and the reason is because Card has fans all over the world.

It has been a wonderful addition to the newspaper, and what is amazing is that even when Card suffered a mild stroke earlier this year he didn’t miss a week. Now that is dedication.

Card writes so well that even when he is reviewing something that I don’t think I’m interested in, like olive oil, I find that I am interested after all, and tidbits from the column seem to crop up in my conversations. Although it is often difficult to work olive oil into a political conversation.

Because we are being sued, both Jerry Bledsoe and I have had to testify under oath about how a New York Times best-selling author came to write a 92-part series for The Rhino Times. But it is amazing in its simplicity. Jerry called me one day and said he was thinking about writing a series based on City Manager Mitch Johnson locking Police Chief David Wray out of his office and then forcing him to resign and would I be interested in publishing it. I said, “Sure.” It seems lawyers do not like agreements like that. But to the best of our recollection that is what happened. I think I did add the caveat, being a shrewd editor, that I would like to read it first.

The opposing lawyer couldn’t believe that two otherwise responsible people would launch into a long-term project with no contract, written or oral. In truth I have been a huge fan of Jerry Bledsoe as long as I can remember, which won’t make Jerry feel any younger, but I was one of those folks who used to cut his column out and carry it around or keep it in a desk drawer and laugh every time I read it.

I don’t want to burden Jerry with having to take the blame for my journalistic career, but one of the reasons I became a writer is because Jerry made it seem like so much fun. Of course, as I would later learn, writing is drudgery. It is having written that is fun. Anyway, to have one of my childhood heroes call me up and ask if he could write something for the paper, there was no hesitation on my part. Although I think if Jerry I had known the series would stretch out over years and hundreds of thousands of words he might have hesitated for a minute or two. He still would have done it, but he would have complained a little first.

I had to go back and read part of the series recently and I was amazed all over again at how it is and at the sad story it tells.

In 1992 Dusty Dunn invited me to call in his radio show at WKEW. It wasn’t long before I was driving over to the offices on Summit Avenue for our regular weekly show, and we continued that through three radio stations and 16 years, until Dusty retired on May 29, 2008. Many of our most loyal readers were introduced to the paper through the Dusty Dunn Show.

Being interviewed by Dusty was always an experience. You just never knew where he was going to go next, which is what made him so good. One of our all time favorite interviews was in 1995 when Mayor Carolyn Allen was in a very tight race for reelection with Tom Phillips. The WKEW studios were a little cramped. As Dusty liked to say, “We had them on that little love seat cheek to jowl.”

In those early years when The Rhino Times circulation was limited, being on the Dusty Dunn Show provided us with advertising we never could have afforded.

I learned one of the big differences in radio and newspapers from Dusty at WKEW. At a newspaper you can always add more pages, in radio there is only so much time. One year they oversold the show during the election season and we sat and chatted during the entire show and I don’t think I was ever on the air.

Our dad, Dick Hammer, retired as the retirement benefits officer at Guilford Mills in 1997 when he was 75. Not long after that he moved into a spare office in The Rhino Times World Headquarters and it was a joy to have him come in every day. Dad picked up the mail, ran errands, wrote stories about his experiences as a bombardier in World War II, got hit by a truck crossing the road outside our office that he basically walked away from after a short ambulance ride, and gave good advice to anyone who was smart enough to ask.

One thing that always amused us was that because Dad had retired and had an office at The Rhino Times, people assumed that he had retired as the publisher of The Rhino Times and had turned the paper over to his sons. Sometimes people would try to get around us by going to Dad. He would listen and tell them he would see what he could do. But it wasn’t like going to the chairman of the board, which is what people thought they were doing.

Dad came to work right up until the week before he went in the hospital.

At some point in 1992, when we were still printing on fancy paper, my mother, Hannah Hammer, asked if she could have a few copies of the newspaper to give to her friends. My mother, when she was working, was a top saleswoman, so she didn’t stop with a few papers for friends. She pretty much started carrying papers with her and handing them out wherever she went.

My mother created her own delivery route near her house and is not supposed to deliver more than 500 papers a week. But if we don’t watch her, she starts inching it up.

We know a couple of things that will generate telephone calls to The Rhino, and one of them is if my mother doesn’t deliver her route. We always get three or four calls until the word gets out on the street that Hannah is visiting her daughter or she just has a little cold.

In May of 1999, the Muse and I inherited Mina, a half Australian shepherd, half golden retriever mix. The next year she started coming to work with me everyday, and sometimes several times a day. She was consulted on just about every major article or project we undertook. She was a great listener and would quietly let you work things out for yourself without interrupting. Sometimes she was thinking so hard she had to close her eyes and would almost appear to be asleep, but I knew she was mulling over the problem.

The Rhino Times has always been word heavy. We don’t have a team of photographers like daily newspapers but depend on our journalists to take some photos. However, we have had some great help in filling the photography void. NyghtFalcon, who is a professional photographer with studios in Greensboro, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Savannah, Louisville, and South Beach, is way out of our league, but he agrees to take photos for us when possible. Sandy Groover has become the face of The Rhino to lots of people because she photographs so many events for us. Andy Jay pinch hits once in a while, and Wade Alexander has been taking pictures for us, I think since before we existed. They all have done a great job in a difficult environment, since we are so focused on the written word. It’s unfair, but that’s the way it goes.

Although he is not an employee, The Rhino probably wouldn’t be here except for the efforts of our attorney, Seth Cohen of Smith, James, Rowlett & Cohen. Seth is an unlikely attorney for a conservative newspaper because he is also an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, but on First Amendment issues we generally see eye to eye and he has worked hard to keep us from getting in more trouble than we can handle.

Seth finally found a solution to a long running battle The Rhino had with the Knights of Ku Klux Klan. The KKK would take the free papers out of a rack and then wrap their despicable flyer inside some pages and throw them on people’s yards. Whenever that happened we would get a rash of phone calls from people and many of them would start, “I always knew what your real beliefs are. Now I have proof that you’re just a bunch of racists.”

We would write about the fact that we in no way authorized or condoned the use of our paper to deliver the grotesque, racist propaganda to homes, but we couldn’t stop them.

We hired a private detective to see if we could find the person who was actually delivering the paper so we would have someone to sue, but that didn’t work.

Seth came up with the plan to sue the Klan for unfair trade practices, arguing that they were trying to damage our reputation and business by linking The Rhino Times to the Klan. He said it wasn’t the strongest case in the world but it was strong enough to drag them into court.

As with most legal matters, it gets complicated. But we did drag them into court and because of the work of Seth Cohen, The Rhino Times is the first newspaper in the country to have a permanent injunction prohibiting the Klan from using The Rhino Times in the distribution of material, and they had to pay us $25,000 to boot.

Although this is a ridiculously long column, it doesn’t come close to mentioning all the people who have helped out along the way. Somehow Drew Ruble, one of our first and best reporters, got left out. He did a great job and spoiled us for years because we thought all reporters should be so talented.

Also we don’t mention all the advertisers, including those first 10 restaurants and bars that bought ads in a publication that was more of an idea than a reality, and all the other advertisers who paid our bills over the years. We’re also grateful to all our delivery people throughout the years. And we failed to mention the loyal readers that we have that makes it all possible and worthwhile. I enjoyed writing the first history and enjoyed looking back and writing this history for our 20th anniversary, but I hope that someone else is in this chair if we do a 40th anniversary special edition.

Thanks.