In 1987, a month or two after graduating from college, I got a job at the Raleigh News & Observer. It wasn't a full-time job, and it wasn’t in the main newsroom in Raleigh, but it was a real reporting job, and I was thrilled.
I was hired to cover the police beat in Orange County, and my home base would be the Chapel Hill bureau, which was housed in a tiny office condo complex just a few steps from the road flowing into Chapel Hill from Durham. The bureau had mini versions of news, circulation and advertising departments crowded into three rooms filled with cubicles, and everyone got along famously. We laughed a lot and argued over ACC sports and gave each other a hard time whenever there was an opening.
My boss was a young, laid-back yet also slightly frenetic guy with longish brown hair named George Lawrence.
George was smart and funny and quirky, and I remember how good he was at managing to be our friend and yet always remaining the boss – to the slightly younger reporters like me (he was just six years older, though I’m sure I thought there were more years between us back then) as well as reporters that were a decade or more older than he was.
I remember my time in the Chapel Hill bureau with a heavy dose of fondness and nostalgia, especially those early days as a police reporter, making a usually fruitless circle from the Hillsborough PD (most frequent entry on police reports: “loitering at Hardee’s”) to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (where I was usually called “Honey”) to the Chapel Hill PD and finally showing back up at the bureau without much to report at all.
When I did get to write a story, George would call me over while he was editing and fire questions at me as his fingers flew over the keyboard.
Eventually, the N&O opened up a new front in the newspaper wars, and expanded coverage to Durham, which made my police beat quite a bit busier. Soon enough, there was a real news story on my beat – Durham’s search for a new police chief. I’m sure George could have given the story to one of the full-time reporters, but he didn’t. I got to cover the search process, and it gave me confidence knowing that he had confidence in me.
I couldn’t have ordered up a better first “real world” job or a better first boss and editor. When I eventually left the paper to move to Washington, George’s influence went with me, but not just on the job.
As his closer friends could tell you in much more detail, George loved music, and I was in awe of how much he knew. It’s all a little fuzzy now, but I’m guessing that he was making cassettes for other people in the newsroom, and I probably asked him if he would make some for me. I can still imagine him saying, “Well, whaddya like?” (can’t really do justice on paper to George’s way of talking). And I’m sure that I stammered as I admitted my soft-core, mainstream, non-cutting-edge music taste. There was no teasing or judgment. He just looked thoughtful – no doubt mulling over how to introduce me to some new and different music without going too far afield.
This led to two cassettes bearing two albums apiece that I played nearly to death for many years; one in particular, Used Guitars by Marti Jones, became for me one of those milestone albums that conjures up an entire chapter of your life.
On the flip side of Used Guitars was (appropriately) Don Dixon’s Most of the Girls Like to Dance But Only Some Of The Boys Like To. (I’m sure I thought the album was called something else all these years because how on earth would George have scrawled that title on one of those narrow cassette labels?)
The other cassette had the BoDeans’ Outside Looking In on one side and the Smithereens’ Green Thoughts on the other. I loved them both.
When I heard the news yesterday that George had died way too young, I figured out how to create the much less satisfying modern version of those custom-made cassette tapes — a Spotify playlist. I poured a beer and played that music that George had picked for me, the musically timid, all those years ago. I listened while I made dinner (and yes, danced a little), and it took me back to that camaraderie and all of those friends I will never forget.
George and I got back in touch a few years ago, and we tried to make plans to get together and catch up several times, but life always intervened – work or parenting and even a car accident. But we eventually caught up by phone and the occasional email or text message, and I’m glad I got to hear his voice again after all those years.
The world is a far less colorful place without him, but I’m grateful to have my Soundtrack by George; grateful that music and other things we love and share live on even when we can’t.
You can read his family's tribute to George Hart Lawrence III here.