So Close and Yet So Far

One of my favorites, itself crafted like an O. Henry short story, is called “A Killer Makes His Escape.” In it, the intrepid reporter receives a phone call from a woman who will not give her name but offers to tell him the whereabouts of a wanted man. He has shot his wife and her lover, apparently discovered in flagrante delicto, and then disappeared.

Jones says “yes,” and soon locates the killer, who in fact is not hiding out at all, but is staying in a hotel under his own name in a nearby town, waiting for the authorities to find him. Jones conducts his interview, and returns to his office to write the story.

Somehow, the police bungle their subsequent attempt to arrest the killer, and he disappears — this time for good. Jones receives another phone call from the same anonymous woman, demanding to know why the reporter let the murderer get away. He tells her he is not a policeman, and arresting people isn’t his line of work, and then asks her to explain her interest in the case.

“He killed my husband,” she says. “The only man I ever loved.”

The thin volume, containing 51 tales of journalistic hijinks, was published in 1961. A handwritten note inside the cover reads, “To Dr. and Mrs. Charles J. Sisk, with love from Your Uncle Ora.”

I have a copy of the self-published memoir because Charles J. Sisk was my maternal grandfather. It was given to me early in my own journalism career by my mother, Sandra Sisk, who in 1952 married a young newspaper reporter named Karl Fleming, and who three years later gave birth to me — thereby blessing or cursing me with journalistic DNA from both sides of the family.

Writing near the end of his life, Uncle Ora brought to his stories a reporter’s keen eye for detail and a mountain man’s dry sense of humor. Nowhere were these more on display than in his retelling of the historic flight at Kitty Hawk — a story that, like many of those collected into his autobiography, has its own O. Henry twist at the end.

Having been run off Kill Devil hill, the resourceful reporter befriended several locals who agreed to keep him updated on the aviators’ progress. Of that, there is little. As the days pass, more unsuccessful attempts at flight were made. Jones borrowed a “spy glass,” as he calls it, and used this to observe the Wright Brothers at their ministrations.

But conditions worsened.

“The cold wind whistled through my clothes so penetratingly it felt as if I had no clothing at all,” he wrote. “There was too much of cold, too many mosquitoes, too much sow belly, too many mice, ticks and too many blistering sand storms.”

Jones retreated to the relative warmth of the fisherman’s cabin, where by the fire he collected his thoughts, made notes and prepared for his return journey across the sand dunes by horse cart to Elizabeth City and thence home.

From Elizabeth City he filed his column, reporting on what he’d seen in his usual humorous way, and concluding with this summation:

“If the good Lord had intended men to fly, He would have created them with wings. If the Wright brothers want to serve humanity they should return to Dayton and re-open their bicycle shop.”

He learned the following afternoon, when he picked up a newspaper in the town of Goldsboro, that the Wrights had in fact become the first men in history to acquire wings, and had completed four successful flights at about the time he was filing his column, 40 miles across the Carolina sand dunes.

Jones does not report on the professional ramifications of missing the most important story of his career. But he does add, with charming self-deprecation — and his signature allergy to the comma — this coda:

“As flying became more commonplace more and more attention was given to events of December 17, 1903, when the first flights were made. All those who were present and witnessed the great history-making events were later given extensive individual publicity. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first flights a national magazine gave much space to publicise (sic) every person who was there. Because I was sitting by the fire a mile away at the time my name was not mentioned. Thus I became the man who missed fame by a mile.

“But there are compensations. I have been informed that every person who witnessed those first four flights is now dead. I am still hanging around watching the jets zoom by.”

Autobiography may be in my DNA as well. My father, in his wrenching memoir “Son of the Rough South,” chronicled his remarkable journey from ignorant, bigoted orphanage boy in North Carolina to brave, crusading civil rights reporter in Mississippi and Alabama.

Friend and trusted source to Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and others, and the only white man invited to walk with King’s caisson after his assassination, my father, like my great-great-uncle, did his job while being harassed, beaten, shot at and left for dead on the streets of Watts after the 1966 uprising.

As I approach the end of my own reporting career, with only 40 years on the clock, I have no intention of compiling an autobiographical collection of the war stories I told J-school students when I taught reporting at University of Southern California or the more ribald ones I have shared with other reporters around the barroom.

Uncle Ora ended his days as a printer living in Florida, running a newspaper printing factory in Key West and later a printing shop in Pompano Beach. But the mountains did not leave him. In 1966 he published a book called “How the Baptists Got Their Doctrines,” a compendium of his observations after 60 years as a church usher, librarian, Sunday School and mission study teacher, deacon, treasurer and trustee. A year later, he published “Peculiarities of the Appalachian Mountaineers as of Fifty Years Ago.” In it, he offers “A description of good and bad luck signs, omens and customs once accepted in the Carolina mountains."

I do not know when he died, and have no living relatives who remember him. It is a great sadness to me that we never met.