My Middle Initial
I’ve worked for some small papers, but only one so small that they ran a story about hiring me.
The year was 1978. I was working as a house painter and wanted to return to the newspaper business. I heard about an opening at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach.
I called the editor and started out by saying, “Hello, my name is Ralph Ellis and …”
“No, you’re not!” shouted Jim D’Avignon, the editor.
I assured him I was. He said I wasn’t. After a few minutes we straighted it out. The state senator down there was named Ralph Ellis and the paper didn’t like the senator.
It turned out the job was actually with The Sun News’ sister paper, a weekly in nearby Conway called The Field and Herald. I drove down for the interview and cleaned up at the public showers at The Pavilion, a hulking amusement park in the middle of Myrtle Beach. It was late summer and Myrtle Beach, the hedonistic capital of the Carolinas, was emptying out. I wondered what I was getting myself into.
“It was late summer and Myrtle Beach, the hedonistic capital of the Carolinas, was emptying out.”
Conway was the county seat and a quiet little town, the opposite of Myrtle Beach. They hired me to be the sports editor and the Horry County government reporter. I reported up to ten stories a week, took pictures, and laid out pages. The routine was to write like crazy on Monday, put the paper together in the composing room on Tuesday, decompress on Wednesday, make a lot of calls on Thursday, and cover the Conway High football team on Friday night. On the weekend, I got into trouble in Myrtle Beach.
I wrote a sports column with my picture in the logo. One Saturday night I was walking down Ocean Boulevard, the main drag in Myrtle Beach, when a car stopped and a teenager leaned out the window. “Hey, are you Ralph Ellis?” he said. “I love your column.” My friends were impressed.
I met Sen. Ralph Ellis and we made lame jokes about our names being the same. My editors mandated that I put my middle initial in my byline, Ralph V. Ellis. The “V” is for Vance.
After a few weeks on the job, my editor ran the story announcing that I had been hired. At the bottom ran the line, “Although the name’s the same, Ellis is not related to Sen. Ralph H. Ellis of Little River.”
