A very long time ago I sat in James Street's Chapel Hill parlor with his A house guest, H. Alien Smith, and Harry Golden. There was a lot of talk. The only words I remember distinctly are Street's pronouncement that anybody interested in writing would be a damfool to stay on newspapers more than 12 years.

He and Smith had missed his deadline by a fair number of years before turning to fiction and humor, which was his basis for setting it. Golden didn't really count; he was filling his Carolina Israelite at Charlotte with wit and wisdom rather than news and saving it for Only in America. I flunked the test miserably without caring; my time as a reporter, desk man, and editor would stretch to 45 years.

Louis Rubin should have been with us. One year short of Street's magic dozen, 1946—57, he abandoned journalism to earn distinction at Hollins College and then the University of North Carolina as a teacher, critic, author, publisher, and foremost authority on Southern literature. He had qualified for academia between press stints by earning a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and engaging in literary assignments at the University of Pennsylvania.

But he had meant to develop a solid newspaper foundation for whatever extension of writing he undertook. He was persuaded that "for a young man who was reasonably bright, curious of what went on around him, and who felt the urge to express himself in writing, employment as a newspaper reporter was alluring because it offered, or appeared to offer, an opportunity to write."

He had nurtured the idea from his time as a schoolboy in Charleston, S.C., through his years as an undergraduate at the College of Charleston and the University of Richmond, and when a World War II soldier. He was inspired by the rise of two uncles, both self-educated, to news executives of papers in Charleston and Birmingham and the success of the younger as a novelist and the other as a Broadway playwright and Hollywood script writer.

Nevertheless, An Honorable Estate is less a treatise on Rubin's rewards from journalism than on his reason for bailing out—why, specifically, he resigned as associate editor of The Richmond News Leader while its editor, James Jackson Kilpatrick, was making "an impact on Virginia" as an artificer and exhorter of Massive Resistance. That phrase was becoming as much Virginia's motto as Sic Semper Tyrannis. It described Senator Harry Byrd and his Establishment lieutenants' response to the Supreme Court's 1954 order for public school desegration.

But that is for the last chapter. The fun part is up front.

Rubin was strictly a reporter only at The Bergen Evening Record in Hackensack, N.J. He was 23 years old, just out of college, and making $33 a week. Among his triumphs was to resolve in print a hassle between the fire and police chiefs in nearby Teaneck. The former complained to the city manager that a police sergeant had delayed his trucks' arrival at a blaze by checking out a caller's report of "trouble" at a neighbor's house before alerting the fire station. Rubin preeempted a hearing on the issue by interviewing the caller and learning that he had recognized trouble but was unaware of flames.

"My role in the episode did not harm whatsoever my relations with the Teaneck police department," Rubin writes. "...As for the fire chief and his cohorts, quite the reverse is true."

Rubin moves on to other straight-reporting incidents and sums up by marveling how times have changed. "Back in 1947 it would not have occurred to the city editor of The Bergen Record, and certainly to myself, that the paper might undertake an investigative role of its own"—the sort, he might have added, that has replaced news on a lot of today's front pages.

I find it possible that Rubin broke a clod of new ground himself in placing a police force in a better light than firelighters. On a long-ago night at the late and unlamented Durham (N.C.) Morning Herald it fell my lot to be reading copy on a recently hired much-traveled hack's story of a downtown fire. He credited the fire department with heroics and quickly got down to blasting policemen for poorly handling traffic.

I suggested to the newcomer that he had misplaced emphasis. "Well," he replied, "I assumed that you all followed the standard newspaper rule— praise the firemen and give the cops hell."

Rubin had gone to New Jersey to be near a girlfriend. When she gave him the boot, he found employment back in Virginia at The Staunton News-Leader. Staunton had a population of 14,000 and reason, it seems to me, to expect better coverage than it got from the morning paper.

It was Rubin's only spell of being boss-man during his brief but wide-ranging stays at five newspapers and a wire service. His News-Leader title of city editor was inadequate.

For it was his responsibility to get out the paper with just one reporter (unlikely to stay long), a part-time society editor (God rest that vanished sisterhood, whose members knew more bloodlines than the Book of Genesis authors), and a part-time sportswriter (whose first loyalty was to the News-Leader's evening sister). Rubin had to handle the wire copy and chicken-dinner stuff sent in by rural correspondents as well as the local stories. Further, he designed the pages and oversaw their type construction in the composing room.

There the foreman operated one of the four Linotypes and was deaf. The makeup man could not read. One Linotype might be idle because its operator was drunk or had left town without notice.

Rubin was not the only editorial manager ever to rely on skills of the impaired. Any composing room was likely to have a printer who had learned the trade at a school for the deaf. And I even knew a wandering typesetter named Dennis O'Brion who had worked on a Yiddish paper in Cincinnati. Like the News-Leader makeup man, he could recoginize characters well enough to get by.

I can think of only H. L. Mencken's Newspaper Days as matching Rubin's knowledge and appreciation of printers and their occupation. An Honorable Estate amounts to a casual history of hot-type composition that began with the first Linotypes of 1886 and lasted nearly a century. It may be that only one such as Rubin, who left the field early and moved on to better things, could write of poor-times stretchouts and stunted wages with such charm. Most of us who hung on and clawed upward are inclined to yield to a tad of bitterness when looking far back. As in Rubin's case, some wonderful writers, such as Elizabeth Spencer in her new book Southern Woman, profit most from rediscovering ways and folks they left forever.

Rubin's Stanton record brought him to the attention of the Associated Press in Richmond. When offered a rewrite job there, he was so pleased to be in familiar territory that he signed on at a substantial pay cut. The bureau chief said he could offer him only so much money in light of his relative inexperience, under the AP's contract with the American Newspaper Guild. Soon he learned from associstes that the union had set a pay minimum but not a ceiling.

And anyway, he didn't like polishing up other people's writing without doing any himself. He looked around. That led to an instructership in freshman composition at Johns Hopkins. He figured on returning to newspaper work in a year or so.

At the AP, Rubin writes, his being duped into bottom pay "was the first (and only) time that I was dealt with other than honorably by anyone in a position of authority in the field of journalism."

Any old news hand, as I have demonstrated, who reads An Honorable Estate is bound to be reminded of his own experiences as a novice. I must say that if Rubin was reamed just once, he was lucky. In my first job, at the Sanford, N.C. weekly Herald, I drew $10 a week with the promise of a decent raise if I made good. Half my pay, meanwhile, was in script that the county had issued upon running out of money. My raise, long delayed, turned out to be $2. At the old Raleigh Times I was encouraged to accept part of my weekly $20 in chits for dry-cleaning and hair cuts. When the New Deal's Fair Labor Standards Act required a 40-hour work week and a 40-cent minimum wage, The Durham Herald rigged the news staff's per-hour rates so that we would have to keep on working six days a week to collect what we had been making.

To earn extra money while studying and instructing at Johns Hopkins, Rubin hired out, first at The Wilmington (Del.) Morning News and then The Baltimore Sun, as a copy desk rim man. His task was to receive from the slot man—the catbird in the bucket—stories from reporters and off the wires to edit and write headlines for them. At the News the rim staff was three, at the Sun twice that.

Rubin's time on copy desks did nothing for his writing style. But it sharpened his insight into the journalistic comedy. It's a safe bet that no other survivor of the desk curse will write a better chapter about its agonies than in this little book. Here are some Rubin observations:

Copy editors tended to be middle-aged or elderly, possessed of education and occassionally even erudition, of sedentary habits and, if not always placid, then quiescent disposition.... A copy editor's role was something like that of professional baseball umpires: necessary to the game, but performed best when attracting no notice whatsoever.... There was a permanent assistant professor of philosophy, the sort who, having completed his doctorate and received academic tenure some years back, thereafter taught introductory classes while holding down a second job in order to earn money to bet on horses.... And of course there was the born copy editor, the individual who temperamentally, vocationally, and by aptitude actively perferred the kind of labor that the copy desk required to all other forms of journalistic employment. I don't know that I ever encountered such a person, but I assume that they existed.... There were other regulars on the copy desk, and I remember them as being generally competent at their trade, but none of them sticks in my mind. What does very much remain vivid in my mind is the personality of the chief of the [Sun] desk, a man named Bob Murray. Russ Baker, having observed the copy desk from across the newsroom for several years, used to talk approvingly of Murray. "He has a set of dogs and bums and drunks working for him, and he whips them through their paces every night," he would say in admiration. I felt much less kindly disposed to the man.

Rubin has it right; I knew Murray a little and used to be a desk stiff myself.

Just when Rubin had a chance to improve his academic standing, he grabbed an offer to become associate editor of The Richmond News Leader. "I was looking forward to a triumphant—as far as I was concerned—return to what had been my lifelong ambition, and to the South where I had grown up and wished to live and work. In Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania [where he had gone from Baltimore], I felt like a wanderer in a strange land; or, less elegantly, a tropical Southern catfish swimming around in a cold-water pond."

That was in 1956, when the Supreme Court's desegration order of two years before was taking bite. The News Leader was editorially indignant. To blend into it, Rubin managed to persuade himself that the court's judgement was "well, not so much wrong as premature, too far ahead of its time. Such was the power of nostalgia and the wish to Go Home Again." Besides, under Jack Kilpatrick's domination, he would not be expected—indeed, would be barred from—writing on the topic or any other phase of politics. That was strictly the editor's turf.

Even before reporting to work, Rubin experienced a warning that his prospective boss lacked what another Virginia editor has called editorial courtesy. A piece he submitted from Philadelphia when published bore the Kilpatrick trademark. Soon Rubin would learn that he would not create a product but unfinished goods, awaiting spin and fancy.

It troubled Rubin further that The News Leader was "blowing the charge six times a week" for Massive Resistance. Not only did Kilpatrick accept the sophisticated racism that the publisher and his business managers demanded; he took command of it.

That was by writing a "brilliantly wrongheaded series of editorials in advocacy of something known as Interposition"—a discredited doctrine going back to the politically turbulent 1790's that states may "interpose" their sovereignty between the federal government and mandates they claim to be unconstitutional. Kilpatrick might as well have gone whole-hog with John C. Calhoun's Nullification foolishness.

The Byrd-controlled General Assembly took—seemed to take— Interposition seriously until the courts finished ruling. The only thing to be said for its doomed behavior toward blacks and their organizations is that it was less crude than much of the South's.

After 16 months at The News Leader Rubin left to teach English at nearby Hollins College (now University). If his journalistic stops had been brief, they pretty well had swept the estate: reporting, managing, rewriting wire stories, copy editing, writing headlines, drawing pages, and turning out editorials. He would remember more about newspaper production of his day than most newsmen learned. But he was through.

There is no pique in his account of unhappiness at the job that could have led to an important editorship. "Kilpo and I got along fine personally," he repeats. He emphasizes his admiration for Kilpatrick's mastery of the sentence. And he is not the only person close to the News Leader to separate himself from its all-out hostility to racial equality.

Virginius Dabney, the one-time conditional liberal who edited the P. M. paper's A.M. twin, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, in his memoirs pleaded that "I was not involved in writing such [editorials] as graced the columns" filled by Kilpatrick. They were supplied him. Such was his pretext for bowing to the paymasters.

And Rubin writes of "a sequence of other associate editors who were to follow me in the job, and who came one by one, wrote editorials, mostly enjoyed working with Kilpo on a personal basis, learned from him, but grew impatient with the pseudonymity and departed." Everybody likes a little credit.

The Richmond papers' editorial history is singular. Their primogeniture publisher during the Massive Resistance period was of the well-born and well-heeled who seldom dominate large cities' identity. "This was the constituency for which the two Richmond newspapers spoke. There was (and still is) a powerful awareness of class and caste.... The male business and social elite of the city lunched at the Commonwealth Club. Not to belong signified that one was not Socially Accepted."

Kilpatrick was not accepted. That he much gave a hoot—he would tell an interviewer of his hurt—suggests a clue to his enthusiasm for the Establishment's disdain for school integration. Yet he simply could not overcome being an uncertified arrival from Oklahoma, a name remindful of Indians instead of English royalty, and having been schooled in Missouri, not the University of Virginia or VMI.

"The [Commonwealth Club] episode does no credit to Richmond, Virginia," Rubin scolds. But surely he was aware that in bringing it up he was inviting amusement.

Kilpatrick departed Richmond in 1967 and became a foremost syndicated columnist now writing about the Supreme Court and the American language out of Charleston. "When moving up to Washington," Rubin muses, "his peer group was not the Richmond Establishment but the Washington Press Corps, and it wasn't long before Kilpo shifted from his far-right position to the center. In doing so, he put racial segregation completely behind him."

It appears that James Jackson Kilpatrick, like Martin Luther King, was free at last.