Step Out on Nothing

by Byron Pitts

  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. Ever
y 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. H
ad 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.