William Taylor Uzzle, Jr.

William Taylor Uzzle, Jr., 90, of Raleigh, North Carolina, passed away on January 27, 2022. A native of Raleigh, Bill was born in the old Rex Hospital on W. South St. He was the son of William Taylor Uzzle, Sr., a Raleigh fireman and a stereotype pressman for the Raleigh Times and subsequently the News and Observer, and Clara Childress Uzzle, who worked for decades at the Southern Bell office in Raleigh. Bill’s boyhood homes were on W. South St. in Boylan Heights, followed by W. Peace St., and beginning in May 1940, 1112 Watauga St., where he remained for much of the rest of his life. The Uzzle family were members of North Street Baptist Church and afterward, Edenton Street United Methodist Church during Bill’s boyhood and youth. Bill attended Murphey School at 433 N. Person St. through the 7th grade and then Hugh Morson High School, which was located in the center of the block bounded by Hargett St., Person St., New Bern Ave. and Bloodworth St. in Raleigh, for grades 8 through 12. He was in the graduating class of 1949, the “Forty-Niners.” At Morson, Bill played shortstop in his sophomore, junior and senior years and managed the baseball team. His senior yearbook contains many inscriptions praising his baseball skills. Bill was so good at shortstop—fielding grounders like a vacuum cleaner and making the throw to first base with lightning speed—that he also played for the Raleigh American Junior League team during his high school years. “The last few games, Uzzle has turned in errorless ball,” a 1947 News and Observer article, featuring a full photo of Bill in his uniform, noted. An avid fan of the game as well as a player, Bill followed professional baseball very closely, and every chance he got, while in high school and thereafter, would take trips to New York to take in Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers ball games, staying at the YMCA’s William Sloane House on 34th St. Bill was able to see the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, and many other greats play. Interested in writing by this time, Bill was also in the Journalism Club at Morson and on the staff of the school paper, Purple and Gold, for which, as a senior, he wrote a humorous column. His inscription under his senior photo read: “A great sport, a great mind, and a great fellow, too.” After high school graduation, Bill went to North Carolina State College, majoring in Industrial and Rural Recreation. At N.C. State, Bill played shortstop on the baseball team his first two years under Coach Vic Sorrell. After that, Bill got interested in the arts and was on the Union Theater Committee, which he chaired, and the Union Film Committee, for both his junior and senior years. Bill worked at a number of summer jobs during his four years at N.C. State in order to help pay for his expenses, including the York Building Company at Cameron Village, the Coble Construction Company in Greensboro, the Raleigh Recreation Department, the Beebe Orchard Company in Chelan, Washington, the T.A. Loving Co., a commercial construction company in Goldsboro, and the Wrenn-Wilson Construction Company in Durham. For most of his college years, Bill worked part-time at the D.H. Hill Library, retrieving and shelving books and working at the circulation desk, a job that Bill heartily enjoyed. With the Korean War on, upon graduating with his B.S from State, Bill decided to enlist in the Navy. He entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 10, 1953, and completed his sixteen weeks of training on September 9th of that year, commissioned as an ensign. Bill was then enrolled in the Mine Warfare School in Yorktown. On December 8, 1953, he was assigned to an Auk-class minesweeper, the U.S.S. Seer, based in Charleston and was given a top-secret classification for cryptology purposes. On November 18, 1954, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade. After the Seer was decommissioned, Bill was transferred the Agile-class minesweeper U.S.S. Avenge on March 28, 1955, and given various duties as an officer: minesweeping, gunnery, supply, and commissary. He was deployed twice during his time in the Navy. The first, from January to May, 1954, took him to Lisbon, Portugal, Spain, Las Spezia, Italy, and Piraeus, Greece. The second deployment, from September 1955 to January 1956, included ports of call in Gibraltar, Barcelona, Nice, Cannes, Toulon, Monaco, and Naples. Bill was always grateful for the opportunity to see these places. He completed his service in the Navy on September 1, 1956. After the Navy, Bill enrolled in a master’s program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) in the fall of 1956, earning his M.A. degree in English in 1958. His thesis was “The Political Views of Walt Whitman.” In his thesis conclusion, Bill stated that Whitman “had a great vision of what America might someday become, but the means for making this vision a reality were beyond his ken. In the final judgment it can be said that he understood politics much better than the average man, but that this understanding was restricted by an emotional approach to issues and an ignorance of basic political mechanisms.” After receiving his master’s, Bill went to Georgia Institute of Technology, where he taught in the English Department from 1958–59. In the summer of 1959, he returned to UNC, where he pursued additional graduate studies through the spring of 1960. Subsequently, he taught at Pan American University in Edinburg, Texas (1960–61); East Carolina College (1963–65); the University of South Carolina at Florence (1966–67); and Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama (1970–72). Throughout his teaching years, Bill taught many subjects, including English composition, Greek literature, modern fiction, drama, American literature, medieval literature, and English literature. Bill was a tough, demanding teacher. He gave few A’s, and wasn’t shy about failing students if their work was poor. He had high, exacting standards when it came to writing and consequently expected a lot from those who took his courses. In those years, Bill relaxed by playing tennis—he was a proficient player—and “playing the dogs” at the Orange Park Kennel Club in Jacksonville, Florida, which featured greyhound races. Bill never made a lot of money with his betting, but he enjoyed it immensely. A fine writer, Bill sold a few short stories for publication in the 1960s, such as “Old Timer’s Game” (to Camerarts Publishing Co. in Chicago) and “The Contribution of ‘B’ Westerns.” He wrote many more stories that he was unable to sell, which was a source of some disappointment to him. Two letters-to-the-editor written by him were published, in Newsweek in 1963 and Life in 1968. On August 19, 1970, Bill married Susan Lee Morrisette at Enfield United Methodist Church in Enfield, NC. Susan was a former student of Bill at East Carolina who had taken his 1964 freshman English class. An East Carolina graduate of 1968, Susan was recalled by Bill as “the best freshman writer that I ever had.” The couple was divorced on February 28, 1979. There were no children from the marriage. In 1972, Bill next turned to newspaper work, which had long fascinated him, and together with his wife Susan, who had taught Jr. High English in Jacksonville, Alabama, he took over a newspaper in Weaver, Alabama, the weekly Weaver Citizen. Bill was the publisher and Susan the editor of this short-lived paper, which lasted into 1973. In 1973–74, Bill was the wire desk editor of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, where edited copy, wrote cutlines and did layout work. Returning to Raleigh afterward, he landed a job as news bureau manager for Pinehurst, Incorporated, a resort in Pinehurst, NC. Bill wrote press releases and supplied the news media, including the Associated Press and United Press International, with information about the resort. While at Pinehurst, Inc., Bill oversaw preparations for the opening of the World Golf Hall of Fame, for which President Gerald Ford gave the keynote address. Thereafter, beginning in 1975, Bill was mostly self-employed through freelance writing and the establishment of a series of free newspapers, soliciting advertisements to cover costs. After moving to Greenville, NC, Bill started his first such paper, the Greenville Observer, which ran weekly from March 18–June 17, 1975. Returning to Raleigh, Bill then started the weekly Raleigh Advertiser, which was published from November 12, 1975 to January 14, 1976. Bill’s longest-running paper was the biweekly Raleigh Reporter, which ran at various intervals from January 14–March 25, 1977; March 2–July 6, 1985; January 9, 1993–February 11, 1995; August 23–December 13, 1997; and Nov. 8, 2003–March 26, 2005. The paper was a fascinating mixture of Raleigh history, local interviews, articles of regional interest and remembrances of American film, music, and sports, among many other things, filling a much-neglected newspaper niche in the greater-Raleigh area. Many old Raleigh photos from the State Archives graced the front pages of the Raleigh Reporter, giving the reader an ongoing visual history lesson. All in all, this eclectic mix made for most interesting reading in each and every issue. One regular feature in the later issues of the Raleigh Reporter was “Glimpses,” short, interesting historical windows gleaned from the writings of famous people. Over the years, Bill collected over 500 of these—many more than ever appeared in the paper. One of Bill’s disappointments was his inability to get these published in book form. This was indeed unfortunate—these would have made engaging reading. Bill put his heart and soul into getting the paper out every two weeks, and it was his raison d’être in those days. He spent many hours making the rounds in the Raleigh area, seeking advertising and permission to leave a stack of the papers at places of business, where they could be read by patrons. It was a struggle to keep the paper going, and at times he discontinued publication, only to start it up again thereafter. From August–December 1978, Bill was the editor of the Dominion Post in Morgantown, West Virginia. He wrote dozens of editorials for the paper on many subjects, such as the Vietnam War, recycling, Amtrak, nuclear waste, and England’s national healthcare system. A voracious reader, he wrote scores of paid book reviews in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s for the Sunday edition of the News and Observer, Reason, World View, the Kansas City Star and various other newspapers and magazines. He reviewed books on a remarkably wide array of topics, including presidential biographies, mysteries, World War II history, education, the Spanish Armada, the Holocaust, film, music, Civil War history, military intelligence, poets, conservation, Watergate, and a host of other subjects, always analyzing each book carefully and providing cogent insights, drawing on his immense breadth of knowledge. Bill had an encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music and classic films of the 1930s–1950s. Beginning in boyhood, he made it a point to go as often as possible to the movie theaters then in Raleigh—especially the Ambassador and the Wake, both on Fayetteville Street, the State on Salisbury Street, and the Capitol on Martin Street. If you named a film from the Thirties through the Fifties, the chances were good that he could name the year it was made, the director, and the main cast—even if he hadn’t seen the movie! Bill always seemed to remember as well the theater in which he had seen a film. From memory, he could name the composers of hundreds of songs in the American songbook of the 1930s–1940s, and he compiled a list of 200 of his favorites, a compilation that included many of the beloved songs of that era, such as “I Got Rhythm,” “Star Dust,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Blue Moon,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Night and Day,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “‘S Wonderful,” “You’re the Top,” and many more. Bill had great musical taste! He also loved classical music, and often kept his radio tuned to Raleigh’s classical station, WCPE. To be sure, Bill had his own ideas about things. He never owned a television set and would not watch a DVD movie on a TV set, insisting that the only correct way to see a movie was in a theater or at a film festival on a full screen. He wouldn’t shake hands—“that’s how germs are transmitted,” he would say. He was always clear about his likes and dislikes—and there was no changing his mind! Over many years, Bill kept up voluminous correspondence with many people. He particularly prized his friendships through the mail with various literary luminaries such as historian Jacques Barzun, the essayist Noel Perrin, author Jane Langton, biographer Gay Wilson Allen, and Richard Mitchell, the “Underground Grammarian.” Bill was a familiar figure in the East Mordecai Neighborhood in Raleigh, having resided there for decades. Some of his favorite places to visit in Raleigh in his later years included the K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village, before it closed in 2020, the Person Street Pharmacy, which graciously provided a table for Bill to sell used books and records, the High Park Bar and Grill, and Reader’s Corner. Bill was a habitué of the Cameron Village Library, where he would peruse the new books, request books on interlibrary loan, and do research on the internet. He especially liked biographies, books on history, and crime mysteries, of which those written by Rex Stout were particularly favored. He read literally thousands of books in his lifetime. He loved cats and feeding the birds. In his earlier days, he was a mighty fine bridge player. Bill Uzzle was a blessing to many and will not be soon forgotten. As Abraham Lincoln said to his friend Joshua Speed, it could also be said of Bill: “Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best . . . that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” Relatives and friends would like to thank the staffs at Hillcrest Raleigh and Duke Raleigh Hospital for their care for Bill in his final months. Visitation will be at Bryan-Lee Funeral Home, 831 Wake Forest Rd, Raleigh, NC 27604 on Monday, February 7, 2022 at 11:00 am. There will be a service of remembrance at 12:00 noon on Monday, February 7, 2022 at Bryan-Lee Funeral Home, 831 Wake Forest Rd, Raleigh, NC 27604. Interment will be at Oakwood Cemetery following the service. If some would prefer making a gift to sending flowers, gifts in Bill’s honor can be sent to his designated charity, Good Days, 2611 Internet Blvd., Suite 105, Frisco, TX 75034, a 501(c)(3) organization that provides charitable financial assistance to those suffering with chronic and life-altering diseases.