How this got a name....

  I got my start in Newspapers when I was about 12-years-old, working Saturday nights putting the comics in the Sunday edition of the Anderson Independent  -- by hand. It wasn't hard work, just rapid. The press didn't slow down for anybody, and there were 22 of us, on a line of tables, working just as hard as we could. You don't have to think as an inserter. You have to pray. You pray for a web-out, where the paper going through the press would suddenly hang up, or rip. You pray for an electric motor to burn out. You pray time passes fast.
the way it worked, the back half of the tables were stacked high with comics. We worked the front half, We'd run to the press, and grab off a stack of 50 papers. Then we't slap them next to a pile of comics, open up the first section, and stuff in the funny papers.
That's something we didn't do. The whole world referred to the comics as the funny paper, but to us, there wasn't a darn thing funny about them. We grew to hate funy papers.
I stood that for as long as I could, and right after my 14th birthday I got a call from Mr. Wilton Hall. He owned the newspaper, as well as Palmetto Pubishing Co, a print shop, and the conversation that day went something like this.
"Fant (back then my whole family and everyone close called me Fant. This was mostly because every male Fant around as also named Reese, so it was hard to get in touch with the one in trouble. Taht was me, and they started calling me Fant as soon as I could walk.) "Fant," Mr. Hall said, "Why didn't you come to work today?"
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I had turned 14 on a Sunday, and got my driver's license on July 2nd. It would have been the first, but I didn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, so I had to go back the next day to become a legal driver. I'd been driving for years. I drove back and forth to the newspaper on Saturday nights. We worked from  midnight to about five so there was no way my daddy was going to take me to work and then come after me. I drove, and every week my life was threatened if I did anything besides go straight there and return straight back home.
Now, on Wednesday, Mr. Hall was wanting to know why I didn't come to work. It turned out I was supposed to report to the print shop bright and early to do all of the delivery work, to clean presses, to cut paper to the right size, and to run out for sandwiches. I was the official print shop gopher.
I did that for yeares, until I got far enough through school to drive a school bus. Then I quit the print shop. I had dropped out of the inserting job a long time ago.
After getting all of the public education I could stand, including two years in the 12th grade, I enrolled at Anderson College. The Vietnam  War was getting bigger and bigger, and the draft for the military was running full speed. I couldn't think of anyone I wanted to kill, or any reason to crawl throgh a rice paddy, so I was determined to stay in school and get a good education. And a deferment.
I'd been at AC for a while, taking anything and everything I could, when my daddy walked in the house one day and told me he had run into Mr. Hall. Mr. Hall wanted to know how 'Little Fant' was doing, and daddy told him I still living at home, taking classes at AC. Mr. Hall said if I wanted a job to help out, for me to come see him.
I went right then. I was instructied to introduce myself too the Sports Editor, and go to work on the sports staff. Johnny Martain was the Sports Editor, He was single, smoked the most vile cigars in the history of the world, and could not drive. If you know him you automatically knew he was single. He and his cigars smelled like wet rope, and he got transportation to games with free tickets.
I held that job for over a year. Until the day of the Clemson spring game.  I was scheduled to work at the paper that afternoon, but Johnny called at noon and asked if I wanted to see the spring game. I did, of course, and he said to pick him up in 30 minutes.
So we drove to Clemson and Johnny told me there wasnt room in the press box. So I sat outside in a mostly empty stadium, while Johnny and a half-dozed sportswriters were in the pressbox that owuld hold dozeens of people but wasnt big enough for me to sit in a corner. At halftime, Johnny came out, eating an apple, to see how I was doing. I told him I was fine, that I would put up with anything as long as I was getting paid. Johnny laughed and told me he had called someone else to work in my place, and I was not getting paid.
I waited until he went back in the pressbox, then I went down, got in my car, and went home. I told my daddy what I had done, and he told me to go right then and tell Mr. Hall, to get my side of the story out front. So I headed to the newspaper. Mrs.. Barbara Gaines was Mr. Hall's secretary, and she told me Mr. Hall was way too busy to see me, but what did I want. I told her I had left Johnny in Clemson, and why.  She laughed outloud (lol) and told me to wait a minute. She went in to Mr. Hall, and I could hear him laughing, too. Then she told me to come in and tell what I had done. So I did/. Mr. Hall really did laugh out loud (lol) and told me to go on into the sports department. I told him there was already someone working, and he said he wanted me to stay there until Martin came back from Clemson so I could tell him to report to his (Mr. Hall's ) office.
Sure enough, a couple of hours later, a nasty cigar came huffing into the office, saw me, and told me I was fired. Only he wasn't that nice. Then, and only then, did I tell him Mr. Hall was in his office waiting to see him. And I went home.
Johnny called the next day to give me my schedule for the week, and until I finally quit, on my own, he was the nicest man in the building.
And, a couple of years later when the Greenvlle News offered me a job, Martin gave me a glowing recommendation. It wasn't necessary, because one of the guys in the Greenville Piedmont sports department had been working in Anderson when Johnny and I had our run-in, and cautioned them that some way, some how, I always had a hammer ready if I needed it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The name of this Blog, which I have been writing for just today, is called Reese At Random, and I'm calling it that for a specific purpose.
And I need to dedicate everything I write, ever, to Mr. Lawrence Webb, the journalism professor at Anderson College.
Here's what happened. I was at AC, trying hard to keep my grades high enough to stay out of Selective Service' gunsights, and I was always in need of help with my  Grade Point Ratio. Mins was bad from day one. It may have been because I never did homework, or read the textbooks, or really cared. But I prefer to think the professors had it in for me.
Anyway, I saw where they offered a journalism class, and since I knew all about how to run a newspaper, from the newsroom through composing, pouring the place, running the press, and seeing the papers go out the windows of the mailing room, I figured it would be an easy course and help my GPR.
Little did I know it was going to change my life and that Mr. Webb was going to do it. As soon as I reported to the first class he informed everyone that since we had enrolled in journalism, we had also enrolled in the school newspaper, The Yodler. I figured I'd get demoted right back into some mailing room.
Then Mr. Webb said he wanted each of us to write a theme that would not be graded but would help him determine what job we would hold on the paper staff. I don't remember what I wrote, something stupid that went on and on, probably , but the next time the class met Mr. Webb announced newspaper positions. He named the editor, the women's page editor, the lifestyles editor, the business editor, the sports editor, and on and on, while I just sat there waiting to get put in the mailing room.I knew what I was good at.
But Mr. Webb finished assigning positions, and my name was not mentioned. I had realized, just before the end, that every other student had a position, except me. I could see a mailing machine in my future, and wasn't really ass tore up about it. But several other students were. One guy, who always wore a bow tie and was a revolving butthole, wondered aloud how I had been missed.
Mr. Webb told everyone that every newspaper had to have someone to write a column. And that was to be my job.
I was to have a pretty good spot set aside for me in every edition, that it would be called, Reese and Random, and I could write about anything I wanted. There were no rules, regulations, or restrictions on what I wrote.
My firest column was about a dice game. It as well received by the students. By the teachers,not so much. But they had mostly all had problems out of me at one time or another, anyway.
By writing one five-page theme, Mr. Webb saw that I could make some stories interesting. One five-page theme.
I was in the Greenville Piedmont Sporets Department almost 8 years before a new Executive Editor wanted me to write a column about politics and have it on his desk in a week. What he didn't know wass my own father had served in the House of Representatives, and I was about eleven years old before I found out not every home had a kitchen full of lawyers every night. I knew politics.
I had the story on his desk, in an hour. What I wrote was the overall condition of politics in South Carolina at the time. 'Pug' Ravenel  had been running for Governor, and had spent $4,000,000 on his campaign before he found out he was a legal resident of Washington and couldn't run for SC governor. And we had Strom Thurmond running, again, for Senate.
My conclusion was we had a man running for Governor who didn't know where he lived, and a man runnig for reelection to the senate who was in his s70's, and he had four children under 10-years-old he thought were his.
After reading that story, the big boss came straight to the sports departmen where he said, "We will never be able to print that story, but it was terrific. You have just won yourself a promotion. You will write three columns a week. They will be called The Yarnspinner, and they will be funny."
I asked when I could start, and was told as soon as I could get my desk moved across the room to the general news section and get my phone changed. I grabbed up my typewriter, set it in my chair, pulled open the top drawer to my desk, and said, "I have my end, you get yours."
And the Executive editor helped me physically give myself a promotion. When I got my desk moved, he asked what I was going to do about a phone, and I showed him how close I was to the 'telephone room'. The ran a cord under the door, and I had my phone is less than an hour.
I am calling my blog Reese at Random in honor of Mr. Webb, who knew in two days that I could write, something it took a real newspaper almost a decade to determine.
Thanks, Mr. Webb. Without you, I would have someday had to go out and find work, something I have trried to avoid all my life.
I did have a real job for abut 18 months, though, before I went to the Piedmont. And I managed to leave that job by betting on a football game.