In North Carolina: Beware of Falling Cows

By Gregory Jaynes

Joseph Mitchell, a North Carolinian, once wrote a story called Hit on the Head with a Cow. The story was not so much about being hit on the head with a cow--although he had as a boy been felled by a beef that slipped its hoist as he prepared to skin it--but rather it was about the disoriented, pleasantly confused sensation that a knockdown blow begets, the same sort of crackbrained feeling that certain cranks, eccentrics, free spirits, if you will, can induce in any listener who truly tries to follow. Listening to Bob Windsor, another North Carolinian, has a lot in common with being hit on the head with a cow.

Windsor is a very large man who publishes a newspaper in Chapel Hill with the assistance of a dwarf, whom Windsor calls his bodyguard. The newspaper is called the Landmark, and it is published higgledy-piggledy. Sometimes it is a weekly, and sometimes it is a biweekly, and sometimes it is just, well, tardy. It is always popular, however, and whether the press run is 4,600, as it was for the first issue last June 10, or 20,000, as it was for the most recent issue, there are precious few copies, if any, left over at the office, a casebook study in clutter, standing between a liquor store and a massage parlor.

It is a populist paper, written mostly in the first person, entirely without pretension and utterly without objectivity, by Windsor, who is something of a card. Windsor wears red Camel overalls and chain-chews Tums in between smoking Pall Malls, and the effect of his great heft is stunning: he looks like a denim- wrapped redwood that somebody potted in brogans. What is more, he has a tongue that could not be stilled if you placed it under a brick. "I always wanted me a paper," he was saying the other day, discarding a half-formed opinion that contemporary chickens have no personalities. "I looked into buying one, but they all wanted a fortune. So I started one. I was so green, I thought paste-up was something you did with wallpaper and layout was something you did with a girl."

He was 53 then and feeling solvent. He had been rich two or three times since he took a bachelor's degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1954, going on to speculate prosperously in land. He speaks wistfully of a period, long ago, when he ran through his money in the sporting houses of Havana. Laying a finger alongside a nose whose veins suggest some past abuse, he allows: "One time, I drank myself broke."

Sober again (and sober still), he made more money, but, as his wife Joyce observes, "Bob and money don't get along. One time we had a Cadillac and an airplane, but I didn't have a cup that matched a saucer."

So it goes with the Landmark, a publication whose revenues are as idiosyncratic as the interests of its editor, who does not give out figures except to say he has $100,000 invested in the thing. But what it loses in making money, he offers, it gains in making waves. Last year, for example, Windsor's big campaign was to win accreditation to cover University of North Carolina football games. The university claimed the press box was full. Windsor charged discrimination against small newspapers and covered the games from outside the stadium, until he got an invitation from Chancellor Christopher Fordham to cover the Thanksgiving game from the president's box. In the middle of his account (look up, reader, for a Holstein is about to drop), Windsor wrote: "I was probably the only person at the game that day who had been kissed by a cow. Early that morning I walked to the barn . . . and as I put a bucket of sweet feed over the fence, Chocolate, my big, black and beautiful cow that I used to carry everywhere in my arms, gave me a big lick on the cheek. Jesus don't love souls anymore than I love that cow."

When the Chatham County commission refused to let him place his tape recorder on its meeting table, Windsor raced home and fetched in his own little French provincial table and parked the tape recorder there. After that, the machine was allowed to rest on the commission's table.

This year Windsor has gone after the Raleigh News & Observer for what he considers to be the paper's efforts to damage Lieutenant Governor James Green politically. When the capital paper pointed out that the state was paying for a private bathroom in the Lieutenant Governor's office, the country paper took a picture of the bathroom and published it. "I was ready to see a 30-ft.-sq. bath with sunken marble tub and gold fixtures, similar to the Roman baths," Windsor wrote. "What I found was a tiny room about 5 ft. by 7 ft. with a plain white lavatory and plain white tub, a toilet paper holder that does not work, and that is all. There is not a filling station in Orange or Chatham County that does not have a better bathroom. It is plainer than an old shoe." Beyond that, the Landmark went on to insinuate that the management of the News & Observer has been known to "push biddies in the creek." Windsor admits he made up this heinous crime, drowning chicks, but says he was sore.

In the region, these salvos appear to be met by bemusement more than anything else. There are journalism professors here who say the Landmark is a personal journal more than a newspaper and should be savored as one man's meat. Brent Hackney, the Governor's press secretary, calls Windsor "Hunter Thompson in bib overalls." And the cable television channel in Chapel Hill has given Windsor a 30-minute talk show on Friday nights, such is his newfound popularity.

But about those overalls: Windsor, 275 Ibs., claims he once owned a business suit but split it while praying in church some years ago. He had to get a special dispensation from the state legislature to wear his overalls in the house and the senate, and here he can be seen this time of year, prowling the corridors with a compass dangling from his neck. "There's no sun in the legislature," he explains. "You can't tell where you're going." In this state, as in so many others, the old majestic capitol building has been abandoned by the legislature for a new seat of government that does not suggest democracy so much as cubism. Thus the compass may sound loony but is, in fact, practical.

Other important tools of his trade can be found in a sagging pocket. There repose a barlow knife and a buck knife for whittling when somebody makes him wait and a hard Arkansas whetstone for sharpening when somebody makes him wait longer. When the subject of an interview at last gives him an audience, Windsor puts away his knives, and when the subject says something that impresses this porcine correspondent, Windsor has been known to gush, "God bless your old heart!"

He whittles chains, swords, canes and slingshots, and claims in the doing that it puts his mind to rest. In his office recently he was asked what one does with a 10-ft.-long wooden chain, and Windsor said, "Hang it on the wall, of course." About that time Windsor's assistant and chief ad salesman, Billy Arthur Jr., who is 3 ft. tall, walked in. The editor introduced him as a reprobate and a womanizer but said he was a genius. "This boy can make a bomb out of anything," Windsor said. Billy Arthur Jr. was then asked what was the point of his bombs, and he said, "To make a big noise, of course." Anyone within earshot who possessed common sense then gazed heavenward, anticipating a collapsing Taurus.

The Landmark itself can make a reader feel beaned, but on a good day, amid its political ravings, and there are plenty of those, all conservative, it can lift the spirits, make you pause to hear the birds. Take, for example, "My Dog Squirt Is Home," the tale of a beagle hound that had been missing five months, only to turn up again.

"Don't tell me stories do not have happy endings," Windsor wrote. "I do not know who has cared for my dog during the time he has been gone, but I am eternally indebted to them and thank them. If I can find out who it was I will be glad to pay them, but I suspect they are just some fine people who would care for an animal or a person who was in need. Whoever you are, I love you."

Windsor shows his heart when he writes this way. As for his head, he says, "The Lord must have vaccinated me with a Victrola needle. You won't never get me to stop talking.''

--By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.