Nancy Stancill

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“Whether you’re a six-footer or you top off at five feet, ["Tall"] is a reminder that how you measure yourself is more of a determiner of your success and well-being than any measure on a yardstick.”

– Judy Goldman

. . . . .

“Nancy Stancill takes readers on a grand adventure, from her early life as a painfully shy, 6-foot teenager, to a kickass reporter who learned that height can be power.”

– Cindy Montgomery

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The Last Day

By

March 19, 2021

I wrote this poem about my mother-in-law Jaye, who died two weeks ago.

The Last Day

Hungry.
Stop for
a chicken sandwich.
Arrive at
the nursing home
by 1:15 p.m.

In Jaye’s room,
an attendant
tells us gently:
She passed away
at 1 p.m.

Overwhelmed
by guilt.
If only
we hadn’t stopped,
we could have been present
for the last minutes
of my dear mother-in-law’s life.

Trying to ease
our minds,
the staffer says:
She’s been in
a coma-like
state
for a couple of days.

It’s easy to see
that Jaye
is gone.
Her face
is turning
sallow.
Her body
is so, so still.

We sit
beside her
in silent
mourning.
My sister-in-law
arrives.
We hug
and sob.

A seven-year bout
with dementia
erased
the joy in Jaye’s life –
and some of the joy in mine.

Before,
she had loved me
as if I were
her child.
She praised
my stories,
my mothering,
even my cooking.

Her love for me
was unequivocal.
I loved her
the same way.

If only we
hadn’t stopped,
we could have
held her hands,
stroked her hair,
helped to ease her
into eternity.

Filed Under: Nancy

Building a legacy

By

Jan. 28, 2021

I walked into the Charlotte Observer building for the first time in the spring of 1993. An editor had asked me to apply for an investigative reporting job and the paper had set up a two-day interview. I wasn’t sure I was interested because I had a satisfying job at the Houston Chronicle.

Still, the Observer was a premier Southern newspaper in a state I loved. I was a proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and wanted to locate closer to my family in Virginia. My father had just been diagnosed with cancer and I wanted to spend more time with him.

During my Observer interview, I met with close to a dozen editors, talked about journalism for hours and toured parts of the city I’d never seen.

There was plenty to see, including the lovely uptown with its growing number of skyscrapers, tree-lined streets and flower-filled planters. But what intrigued me the most about the commercial area was the iconic Observer building.

Photo: Observer archives.

I’ve always been interested in architecture and could tell that the white, rectangular building was built in the Brutalism style. Located at one end of uptown, it was constructed in 1971, when that type of heavy, faux-modern style was popular. The five-story edifice seemed to squat on its plot of land, its high slitted windows giving it a hooded look.

Inside, a central atrium flooded the middle of the building with light. On each side of the atrium were the escalators, where staffers going up and down waved to each other and talked – or nearly shouted – in truncated conversations. I’d never worked in a newspaper building with escalators and the effect was collegial and charming.

Or so I thought. Two months later, I was working at the Observer and discovered that the escalators were the bane of the staffers’ existence. The moving stairs broke down chronically and often required days to repair. Two small elevators took up most of the slack – and too much time.

The newsroom was on the fourth floor and its signature narrow vertical windows cast a mostly gloomy light on the L-shaped newsroom.

The news staff grumbled about the building’s general inefficiency, but everyone knew important things went on there. The stories ranged from Pulitzer prize winners to three-inch weather updates. In between were civic-minded reports on the school board, city council and county commission.

In my 15 years in the newsroom, I saw and generally experienced varieties of every emotion – exhilaration, boredom, happiness, sadness, pity and disgust. As an editor, I comforted people as they cried, hugged excited staffers and helped to pacify angry reporters.

When I left the paper in 2009 and moved to London, it was with a sense of foreboding. The Observer and its relatively new owner, the McClatchy Corp., were being pummeled by a terrible economy, crippling debt and plummeting circulation. Bankruptcy came a few years later. It was just a matter of time before something bad would happen to the building on Tryon Street.

Sure enough, the building and its ten acres were sold for a multi-use development in 2016 and the wrecking ball appeared not long after. Before the old building was demolished, a big party was held to celebrate its storied history. I didn’t have the heart to go, but my name was inscribed on the lobby’s wall, along with the names of a few thousand other people who’d worked there over the years.

The remnants of the depleted Observer staff moved to the NASCAR building a few blocks away, but that didn’t last either. A few months ago, the editor announced that the paper’s newsroom would be shut down and the few dozen staffers left would work at home, partly because of Covid 19 but mostly because the modern quarters had gotten too expensive. A hedge fund now owns the paper and decided it really doesn’t need a newsroom.

The reviled but beloved Observer building is gone, replaced by a sleek, tall bank. But the new building can’t take away the memories.

Filed Under: Nancy

The world’s best job

By

Oct. 7, 2017

I never chose my job. Journalism found me.

My father was successively the editor and publisher of two small Virginia newspapers owned by a chain. The first was located in Radford in southwest Virginia and his second one was in Suffolk, near the coast.

My life was inextricably bound to those newspapers. My first real job was proofreading the Radford paper the summers I was 13 and 14. I’d sit in a dingy office in the basement near the printing presses and workers would bring me freshly inked galleys – long columns of print – to read. I’d mark them up with the proofreading symbols I learned. I was proud that I was a good speller and spotted errors easily. The job had long hours but I loved it because I was working with my father. He’d discuss his day during our rides home for lunch and dinner, almost as one adult to another.

The summer I was 19 and a prospective sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill, I started working as a reporter at his Suffolk paper, soaking in the art and craft of newspapering. I covered mostly city council and police news. I’d observe the honorable and friendly way my father dealt with employees, customers, advertising prospects and anyone else who came in the door. He even delivered newspapers after hours to customers who’d call us at home to say they hadn’t gotten one. He worked incredible hours to keep the business going, wrote pithy editorials and sometimes shot pictures and wrote high school football stories.

During my sophomore year, I walked into the Daily Tar Heel offices and offered my services to the editor. On my own for the first time, I was put to work immediately. I loved the fraternity of the student newsroom and the daily sense of accomplishment. I was hooked.

My first job after graduation was as a women’s editor for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the 38 years I worked for newspapers in Virginia, California, Texas and North Carolina as a reporter and as an assigning editor, I mostly loved it. It was hard, with long days that often stretched into late nights, but I believed that my job was important to society.

In the early 1980s, my father was rewarded for decades of hard work by being laid off by his mercenary chain. He was a few years short of retirement age, but a new generation owned the chain and the ungrateful son wanted to get rid of the old guys. My father negotiated a settlement and eventually wrote columns for the new editor. I treasure those columns. He died in 1995 and I lost the best role model I ever had.

When I think of our president referring to the media as “an enemy of the people,” I’m offended. I wonder if citizens understand how hard journalists work to bring the truth to light. I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t take the work seriously, who didn’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying about misspelling a name or who didn’t put in extra hours to ensure a story was airtight.

I’ve been threatened, cursed at and verbally abused many times, but I still feel that the work of a journalist is a sacred calling.

Filed Under: Nancy

Secession was just a plot line, until…

By

Aug. 13, 2016

This article was published Aug. 12 as an op-ed in the News & Observer under the headline “Texit? In US today, a surprising amount of secessionist sentiment.” It was also published Aug. 25 in the Houston Chronicle (paywall).

My obsession with secession began in 2009, when then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggested that if the federal government messed with his state, Texas could go its own way.

Typical Texas talk, I thought. Then the light bulb flashed on.

BlogSig100I wanted to write a Texas novel about a reporter’s adventures in Houston, a bigger-than-life city where I’d worked for 15 years. But I needed a hook, something to knit it all together. Secession was the perfect theme.

Seven years and two Texas suspense novels later, I’m amazed at the amount of secessionist activity threading itself across our country. Pro-secession groups are popping up and flourishing far beyond Texas, in states including California, Vermont, Colorado and Alaska.

This month, the South Carolina Secessionist Party was the latest to grab the headlines. Sparked by the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds last year, the nascent party is raising funds to erect the flags on private lands across the state. The leader of the group, which has an active Facebook page, is Tyler Bessenger, a man in his 20s who lives in Charleston. I tried to reach him, but his listed phone had been disconnected.

Dr. Scott H. Huffmon
Dr. Scott H. Huffmon

I did reach Scott Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop (S.C.) College. He described the group as “very small but very loud” and organized primarily in response to the flag controversy. But he pointed out that secessionist activity in South Carolina is hardly new. The state was the first among 11 to secede from the union during the Civil War. And before the Civil War, the 13 original colonies unleashed the biggest secessionist movement of our history – the American Revolution. Historians have tracked at least a hundred secessionist groups over the years.

Still, the results of a national Reuters poll in 2014 were startling. The poll found that 23.9 percent – nearly 1 in 4 – Americans support their state breaking away from the United States. It found support for secession strongest among young people, rural people, people who identified themselves as conservatives and those living in the Southwest or Western states.

Huffmon said he hadn’t seen that data, but speculated that the polarization of our politics, especially during this election year, might fuel interest in secession. He said people who are disenchanted with politics or the general direction of the country tend to feel that things are better in their state, or in their region, than they are across the nation.

There are no estimates of how many secessionist groups are active. But several of the more active groups are in regions where residents believe their state governments are out of touch with their needs.

Seven counties in northern California have passed resolutions since 2013 to create the state of Jefferson, named for Thomas Jefferson, a champion of the West. Leaders of those counties also would like to include a few similar counties over the border into Oregon, though no Oregon counties have joined the quest. The mostly rural California counties, which are suffering high unemployment in agricultural and logging industries, contend that California state officials have done little to help their region.

Colorado has a similar situation with an active group that wants to create North Colorado from five counties along the state’s northeast border. Leaders in those oil and gas-producing counties have said they don’t agree with some environmental proposals from the Colorado legislature and don’t believe they get a fair share of services in their region, considering the revenues they produce.

Other large secessionist groups have longer-standing grievances, such as the Alaskan Independence Party. One of its governing beliefs is that the 1958 vote for statehood was illegal because voters should have gotten a range of options – including remaining a territory, becoming an independent country or becoming a U.S. commonwealth. Todd Palin, husband of former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, formerly was a registered member of the party. The group tried unsuccessfully to get a statewide vote on secession in 2006.

The Texas Nationalist Movement, born in 2004, is the largest secessionist group in the country, claiming 200,000 members and becoming more visible in state affairs. It narrowly failed, at a recent Texas Republican Party convention, to get the Republican Party to vote on whether to call for Texas secession.

After Brexit in June, the movement started using the term Texit as shorthand for its ultimate goal of making Texas an independent republic. Texas secessionists also have history on their side, because after the state won its independence from Mexico (Remember the Alamo!), it was a republic for 10 years before it was admitted to the union. (Then it left for the duration of the Civil War.)

Some of these groups, Huffmon said, espouse unsavory philosophies, “a crossover between white supremacists and the militia movement.” But, ultimately, he said, it’s about how the groups spend their time. Talking about their beliefs over beers with their buddies is harmless enough, he said.

“But are they willing to commit violence?” he asked. “A lot of these homegrown terrorists, like the ones in Oklahoma City, would like to bring down the government.”

Nancy Stancill is a former Charlotte Observer reporter who lives in Charlotte.

Filed Under: Nancy, Winning

Old KGB agent knows what’s best for Texas?

By

June 1, 2016

I had no idea that Vladimir Putin had an opinion on Texas secession until I saw this editorial comment in Sunday’s London Times. Could I somehow get a copy of Winning Texas to him?

BlogSig100From the Times:

“As we debate Brexit, isit time for Texit? Pravda, once the official organ of the Soviet communist party, has suggested that the US would be better off without Texas.

“Texas has been a particular cancer on the people of the United States,” says the paper, which blames the state for, among other things, unleashing George W. Bush on the White House. Texans should now follow the British example and plunge into weeks and weeks of angry debate followed by a referendum. Nothing quite so bracing, is there?”

Thanks to my London friend Sylvia Wallach Squires for sharing this bit of British commentary.

Filed Under: Nancy

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