Fred Powell, a fixture for decades on the copy desk of the Knoxville News Sentinel, worked his last day a couple of Fridays ago. As I and I’m sure others expected, our columnist Sam Venable summarized his career nicely.
At the appointed hour, a young, soon-to-be University of Tennessee journalism graduate reported for his job interview.
“You’ll have to come back,” the editor’s secretary told him. “Things are a little bit wild right now. The president’s just been shot, and the managing editor is about to have a heart attack.”
Thus unfolded the events of Nov. 22, 1963, the start of Fred Powell’s association with the Knoxville News Sentinel.
After hearing that story from Fred, I found it so good that I retold it plenty of times myself. It brings together staggering longevity, strange luck and one of the biggest news events of the century.
I also thanked Sam for providing insight into the life of a copy editor.
Copy editors man the trenches in this business. They catch errors, clarify syntax, correct spelling, size photos, write headlines, fit stories to allotted space, design and lay out pages.
They do it unflappably, behind the scenes and ahead of publication.
We had a nice little dinner gathering to send Fred off, and he told old-time News Sentinel stories, each funnier than the last. Newsrooms were a bit more rough around the edges back in the bad old days. One story, in which one angry staff member dangled another out of a newsroom window by his feet, was deemed likely to be apocryphal.
I enjoyed talking national and international news with him, and bemoaning together the shrinking space that our paper, and of course other papers, devote to that kind of news. As our wires editor, his job was to figure out what national and world news absolutely needed to get into the paper, and then make it fit that space. Not an easy task.
We all wish him the best in his retirement.
Nice entry, Christian! I wonder what Fred is doing today?
That story is true! My father remembers it.