The Editor and Mr. Hawkes

Berea College Photo Archives 46 The Editor and Mr. Hawkes by Kenneth Arbogast Sometimes even the inevitable is a surprise , like the Second World War, or the death of Benjamin Franklin Hines. Hines, my boss, was 84 when he passed out at his mahogany rolltop desk in the editor's office of the Buckhannon Bugle where he reigned supreme for 57 years. His word was gospel at the paper, and the Bugle was Hines' word, except for an occasional letter from a certain Mr. Hawkes of Valley Head, but that's getting ahead of myself. Hines practically wrote the entire paper himself, or at least rewrote most of it, so that many reporters complained bitterly how they were only his research assistants. I felt like a legman myself when I handled the state office in Charleston for a few years after Huxton was caught out for bigamy and left town quick with a little blonde from the river area. It was an unfortunate choice because his first wife was a sweet woman, at least as I got to know her during her visits to the office and later to the little two-room I kept over Winston's Pharmacy. Huxton was found dead 6 months later in a Miami tenant house, the body in a condition the police there described to me as "unpleasant." One widow took it hard. The other apparently took his Oldsmobile and the remainder of a once-hefty bankroll and disappeared. That was '52, I believe, right after that terrible business at Chosin. Only the major details had their own wire services then, so I called my stories back to Buckhannon each night, not to the night desk, but to Hines at home. He translated my version to his own as he punched, one-handed, at an old Remington. He lost his left hand in the Argonne, and I suspect that was the reason he hired me on as a stringer. I was working my way through West Virginia Wesleyan on the GI bill after I came back from Normandy less a leg that I enlisted with. But after he hired me on, he never gave me slack or expected less. He took me to task in the middle of the newsroom when,just back from a manhunt in Pocahontas County, I had to explain how I missed the capture because one of the dogs knocked me into a gully, and it took some time to crawl out. Later he told me privately the story was good, had a lot of action (he wrote hefty parts himself), and that using the sheriff's account of the apprehension 47 Berea College Photo Archives 48 was a nice compromise to not being there myself. He said all that quietly, his only hand on my shoulder while I was trying to jiggle a Coca-Cola out of the rack without giving up the nickel. I realized he wasn't upset, but if he admitted to everyone he d accept less from me, then they might expect to get by on less. Hines wouldn't tolerate that. Which gets back to how much he worked on the paper. After Margaret Alice died in '49, he spent every night in the office, composing editorials or going over the galley sheets of the next morning's run, looking for every misspelling or, heaven forbid, a split infinitive . On the only two occasions he was too ill to come to the office, Billy, a runner in the type room, rode the galleys out to Hines' house in his bicycle basket and waited there the three hours or so while the august editor did his corrections . I only met Mrs. Hines to talk to once, at a Daughters of the American Revolution spring cotillion of sorts that I covered years ago because Mary Macpherson , the paper's social columnist and busybody, was then having trouble with her bunions. I liked Mrs. Hines right off, a small woman with witty eyes, who put me at ease by asking about the war but with an insider's knowledge. Her father was a brigadier general under Eisenhower , as she casually mentioned. I suspected those elegant women in...