One of the simpler pleasures of life, never coming back, was reading the great daily newspaper columnists. Royko in Chicago, Caen in San Francisco. Breslin in New York.
North Carolina had many talented journalists in the decades before the industry’s economics collapsed, and truth-telling daily columnists became an unacceptable expense for newspaper publishers. At the top of that list was Jerry Bledsoe, who died on New Year’s Eve at age 84.
Jerry lived in Randolph County and spent much of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s writing for the News and Record of Greensboro. It was never the “best” newspaper in North Carolina because of its more limited ambitions and staffing than peers in Charlotte and Raleigh…