BOOK REVIEW: N.C.’s Literary Godfather has close ties to Wilmington, David Brinkley

Samuel Talmadge Ragan (1915-1968) was managing editor and executive editor of the Raleigh News & Observer through the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when it was probably the most important daily in North Carolina and the paper of record for coverage of North Carolina state government.

From 1948 almost until his death, he wrote "Southern Accent," a weekly column on Tar Heel literature. Semi-retiring in 1969, he bought The Pilot, a weekly paper in Southern Pines. Appointing himself its editor and publisher, he turned The Pilot into a prizewinner that punched above its weight, while filling columns with favorite poems.

He was North Carolina's first cultural resources secretary, first chairman of the N.C. Arts Council and an early trustee of the N.C. School of the Arts.

Ragan did much to develop the novelist James Boyd's Southern Pines home at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, and he was a guiding force behind the founding of the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame.

Along the way, Ragan published a large body of free verse and served from 1982 until his death as North Carolina's poet laureate.

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For most humans, that would be monument enough, but Ragan was also one of North Carolina's most colorful characters.

"He had a kind of gentlemanly swashbuckling presence," UNCW professor Clyde Edgerton recalls in his foreword to "Sam Ragan" by Lewis Bowling, "with an ever-present bow tie and a twinkle in his eye and an almost-smile constantly upon his face -- there was a calmness and a steadiness and an almost skinny-tall-man Buddha-like quality about him."

The late newsman David Brinkley -- who worked with Ragan at the Wilmington StarNews in the late 1930s -- called him "a splendid man in all respects" in his memoir. "In his person and his manner, he calls up every Southern dream of romance and beauty among the live oaks and pines." Elsewhere, Brinkley wrote, "Sam taught me the good half of what I know, the useful half."

Clearly a biography of Ragan is overdue, and Lewis Bowling -- author of a biography of legendary Duke football coach Wallace Wade -- provides a useful start. Learning the untold side of Ragan's life makes the character all the more fascinating.

The bow tie, dapper suits and jingling change in his pocket might have been compensation for early want. Ragan was born in 1915 on a tobacco farm outside the crossroads community of Berea, N.C., one of eight children of an illiterate tenant farmer and his wife. Times were often hard, particularly during the Depression, but Ragan was lucky, finding a cluster of inspiring teachers and a neighbor-lady who encouraged him to read and to try his hand at writing. Valedictorian of his high school class, he went on to Atlantic Christian College (now Barton) in Wilson, where he edited the school paper and the yearbook.

After graduation, Ragan began his apprenticeship in journalism, laboring at small papers in Lumberton, Goldsboro and elsewhere. He met his future wife when both were covering a bank robbery. (Margaret Usher was a pioneering journalist herself, editing the Wallace Enterprise and the Jacksonville Record at a time when few women were even reporters.

Ragan arrived in Wilmington in 1939, working as the Star's sports editor and sole general-assignment reporter, covering courts, the police blotter and anything else. He didn't hire the Brinkley kid from New Hanover High School -- that was probably managing editor Al G. Dickson -- but the two spent hours talking in a late-night diner downtown after the last edition went out. (Bowling doesn't say, but I'm guessing it was The Ambassador. From 1935-1970, the StarNews offices were at the Murchison Building at Front and Chestnut streets.)

It was a spirited time and place. Ragan recalls a hard-drinking colleague who headed to Wrightsville Beach to cover a convention, detoured to a party, got distracted and woke up a few days later on a yacht anchored in Jacksonville, Fla. (The paper wired him money for a bus ticket home.) For his multiple roles, Ragan made $25 a week -- but with his wife's paycheck, that was enough for the young couple to afford a furnished apartment in town and a small cottage at the beach.

Ragan didn't stay long; he detoured to Texas when the San Antonio paper offered more money. Then he headed to Raleigh in 1941 and stayed there, except for Army service in World War II.

Bowling, who knew Ragan personally, focuses on his role as a poet and quotes a number of Ragan's poems in full. They show a close attention to nature and echo much of the Nashville Agrarians, John Crowe Ransom’s cadre at Vanderbilt University. Inevitably, young Sam wrote a poem about Wilmington, and might have coined the phrase “city of a million azaleas.”

Bowling clearly loves his subject and is reluctant to leave anything out, and his text is sometimes a little redundant. Fans of Tar Heel writing, however, will find this enthralling.

Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.

SAM RAGAN

North Carolina's Literary Godfather

By Lewis Bowling

Durham: Carolina Academic Press, $29.95.

BOOK REVIEW