Mitch Sneed: Bill finally drove his truck into the Alabama night

When you get into the newspaper business you don’t have a clue. The things they teach you in journalism school are great as far as ethics and nuts and bolts, but they can’t teach you to write, to understand people and to listen.

Bill Robinson and Jim Minter taught me those things.

Minter was the longtime publisher of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and he had bought my hometown paper and became my mentor. He introduced me to Bill.

Bill was a legendary NASCAR reporter who told stories like no one I’d ever met. He had seen it all and done it all and lived life to its fullest.

When I heard Monday that he had died last Saturday, I just cried uncontrollably. He was larger than life to me.

He made me a writer instead of a robotic reporter, and he was a friend.

He taught with one-line words of wisdom that stuck with me like a beggar-lice after a walk through a field.

He said:

* Don’t waste words. Don’t write a lazy sentence. Why use a $5 word when a 10-cent one will do.

* Write just like you talk only with better grammar.

* Write what you see because if you just put words down in black and white that’s what the people reading it will get.

* “I just tell a story like I just got home from school and I’m telling my mama what happened.”

* You don’t have to work so hard if you let the people you talk to just tell the story.

It’s been written countless times that Bill gave Richard Petty the nickname “The King.” Here’s how that happened. Petty had started running Dodges that were using a new 426-cubic-inch hemi-headed engine and he was blowing away the competition so badly that NASCAR decided to outlaw the power plants. Petty was not happy.

“The first time I cranked it. I thought it was gonna suck the hood into the engine,” Petty told Bill. Bill wrote it and called Petty “King Richard the hemi-Hearted.” The name stuck. He just wrote the way we wished we all could.

Talking about the death of former Tennessee quarterback Jimmy Streeter, Bill found the perfect way to define fast: “Jimmy Streeter was fast. Not fast for a human. He ran like a deer on opening day of gun season.”

After covering a high-school game in Valley, here’s the way Bill described a goal-line stand: “The defense was all over him like ants on a jelly sandwich at a church picnic.”

As good as he was as a writer, he was a better person. He never met a stranger, and if he met you, he remembered you.

He met my kids when they were just out of diapers, and he knew them from that moment on. He knew where they played softball, where they were going to college and would call me when he read that one of them had hit a home run or had their name in the paper for anything.

If I ever did anything right as an editor, it was calling Bill Robinson on the first day I took my seat at the Opelika-Auburn News. He lived in Buffalo and I had to see if he would write a column every now and then. He jumped at the chance and our paper was better for it.

His columns on the Old South were incredible, but the one he wrote after a post-Katrina visit to New Orleans brought tears to my eyes. It was the first cool day after a horrid summer in the Big Easy. Here’s what Bill wrote: “And poor old Louisiana. How can one state survive so much? But the day following that first churlish night in east Alabama, well, it dawned with crimson light mixed in with a buttermilk sky. It was still cool, but the wind was bracing and fresh and it was welcomed. Perhaps summer is over.”

He worked to help others wherever he met them. He tried to lead an effort to get a statue built to honor Joe Louis and even helped my daughter when she was in need.

He tinkered with old washers and dryers in his latter years and when my daughter’s went on the blink, Bill loaded up that old black truck and delivered one. His eyes had gotten so bad that he couldn’t see to drive at night and the sun set on him while he was installing it. He never said a word. He just said goodbye after supper and I thought he headed off. I found him asleep in his truck when I went outside early the next morning.

“Bill what are you doing here,” I asked as I woke him.

“It’s hell getting old,” Bill said. “I can’t see a thing at night and I just ain’t ready to admit it to anyone other than family just yet.”

He came in and ate breakfast and then road off into the morning sun.

I hate to think of Bill being dead, I hope he’s just looking at that morning sun and describing it to someone he has just met. If that’s what’s happening, they are in for a treat.

Mitch Sneed is publisher of the Culpeper Star-Exponent in Virginia and is former managing editor of the Opelika-Auburn News.