AS most readers now know, the founder, MD, CEO, head honcho, guru, and any other stellar title you can confer, has retired.
To say this is a milestone in the regional press is like saying Napoleon was a pretty good general.
For Reg Anthony, or Mrs A as her staff call her, is a living legend. She blazed trails even she didn’t know needed blazing.
She has plenty of colourful anecdotes of her incredible career, which hopefully she will share in her memoirs one day.
So instead of me repeating them, I will tell briefly of my association with her that spans 40 years, for better or for worse. I definitely got the better bit.
Back in the day when I joined the Mercury, you did six month’s ambulance-chasing, six months’ court reporting, and six months’ at the Zululand Observer.
This was because the Mercury had a stake in the ZO and so ‘loaned’ junior reporters.
I soon discovered that red meat, hard-drinking news editors were mere wusses compared to Mrs A.
If something happened on the ZO patch, no matter how humble, you covered it.
Technically we could say, hey we’re Mercury reporters, but Mrs A didn’t do technicality.
If you worked hard, you had the most loyal mentor imaginable. She forgave me some unforgivable things, such as pitching up at one civic function seriously worse for wear and driving over a rare cycas in front of the council offices.
Most Mercury reporters fled back to Durban after their stint with the ZO. I did three tours of duty and loved every one of them.
You get big rewards when you work for hard taskmasters, and as far as I was concerned, the Mercury may have paid my unsubstantial salary, but Mrs A was the boss.
Hissy fit
I always kept contact with her, and one day one of her senior staff members flounced out in a hissy fit. I think she opened the door for him.
She then phoned me with instructions to get my butt over to Zululand pronto. I was freelancing at the time and actually on the bones of my butt.
The ZO has always been synonymous with good luck to me. This was no exception.
I arrived to help out and instead ended up covering the biggest, albeit most awful, story of the year – the Hammer Man.
Old timers will remember it well; a psycho who bludgeoned Zululanders to death in their sleep, then gently led children to another room.
Mrs A had a tip-off that the Hammer Man had been spotted in an Empangeni beer hall and I was there like a shot.
I was told the man had ‘eyes like fire’ and that headline appeared in Rian Malan’s book, ‘My Traitor’s Heart’.
So I landed with a series of scoops while the hissy-fit staffer was correcting weather reports somewhere in Durban.
That’s what happens when you cross Mrs A.
Finally, in 1993 I came back to the ZO as Editor, although there is a school of thought (probably true) that says I had to marry her daughter to do so.
I arrived with city boy plans – more hard news, more council exposés, more gore and less soft community stuff.
I soon discovered that in a close-knit community, the school pages are among the most avidly read.
Junior sport results have every mom and dad snapping up the paper. And the council ‘exposés’ – well, it didn’t take long to find out that most Zululand councils at the time had some of the most civic-minded people I’d met.
Mrs A just shook her head at my arrogance. She knew her readers. They were her people. That’s why the Zululand Observer is the best regional paper in the country.
We clashed often. As anyone who knows Mrs A will attest, she has robust opinions. But as I am now older and marginally wiser, I know that she was almost always right.
Today as I sit in England and ponder over those years as Editor under her, I smile. That was the highlight of my newspaper career.
So when she finally vacates her office, I will be holding a minute’s silence. I hope you join me.
