Voice from the Past (and Poor Town)
© 2001 Tom O'Neal, Editor, the Carteret News Times
The internet has a lot of drawbacks. You read about them all the time. But every now and then that little box and all the wires that run around the globe produce some things that are almost miraculous.
I came to realize this over the weekend.
The last time I saw Jim Pearce was back in 1984 when I left The Raleigh Times, the capital city's now defunct afternoon daily.
I had known Jim since I joined The Times in 1976.
Jim, who in the old days worked in the newspaper's back shop, moved to the copy desk when the age of computers arrived.
He was a good copy editor, sitting there chewing on the cinnamon-coated toothpicks he had become addicted to since he stopped smoking.
Jim, who is the father of Gary Pearce, Jim Hunt's press secretary during Gov. Hunt's first term in office, used to come in each Saturday and work with me to put the paper out. It was just Jim and me and a couple of sports writers doing their best to work off a hangover.
After I left The Times, I visited the news room only once. It was a Monday, the day Jim always took off, so I never saw him again.
This weekend, a voice from the past returned in the form of an email.
It read something like this:
"I couldn't tell from the picture on the carteretnewstimes site but are you the same Tom O'Neal who used to work Saturdays with me at The Raleigh Times?"
The email was from Jim.
Down at the bottom was a link to a site called "Poor Town." Now, Jim was in his 60s when he and I worked together at The Times, so I'm guessing Jim must be in his 80s by now. I was worried he had fallen on hard times in his old age and had been consigned to some place called "Poor Town."
I was wrong.
The site is Jim's site and it is full of stories, old pictures, and correspondence relating to his relatives.
I was fascinated by it and must have spent a half-hour or more scanning the stories and looking at the old pictures.
I found many of Jim's own stories, correspondence concerning one of his relatives trying to get a government pension, and a will from before the Civil War.
I wrote back to Jim and found out that he had retired in 1989 and still lives in the same house in Raleigh. His grandmother, a Salter, is buried in Beaufort's Oceanview cemetery, and Jim makes trips down this way often. He promised to drop in this spring and pay a visit.
Jim was always pretty good with those old computers in the newsroom and apparently has become pretty proficient with the newer ones, judging from the work he put in on the Web site.
In his last email, he made me promise to read everything at the Poor Town site - "You don't have to do it all at once, but then again, don't take all summer, either," he wrote.
He also asked me to pass along the URL of the site, so I'm going to do that. It's http://pages.prodigy.net/jabeckpearce/poor_town
Now I've got some reading to do.
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