Joseph Mitchell, a North Carolinian, once wrote a story called Hit on the Head with a Cow. The story was not so much about being hit on the head with a cow—although he had as a boy been felled by a beef that slipped its hoist as he prepared to skin it—but rather it was about the disoriented, pleasantly confused sensation that a knockdown blow begets, the same sort of crackbrained feeling that certain cranks, eccentrics, free spirits, if you will, can induce in any listener who truly tries to follow. Listening to Bob Windsor, another North Carolinian, has a lot in common with being hit on the head with a cow.
Windsor is a very large man who publishes a newspaper in Chapel Hill with the assistance of a dwarf, whom Windsor calls his bodyguard. The newspaper is called the Landmark, and it is published higgledy-piggledy. Sometimes it is a weekly, and sometimes it is a biweekly, and sometimes it is just, well, tardy. It is always popular, however, and whether the press run is 4,600, as it was for the first issue last June 10, or 20,000, as it was for the most recent issue, there are precious few copies, if any, left over at the office, a casebook study in clutter, standing between a liquor store and a massage parlor.
It is a populist paper, written mostly in the first person, entirely without pretension and utterly without objectivity, by Windsor, who is something of a card. Windsor wears red Camel overalls and chain-chews Tums in between smoking Pall Malls, and the effect of his great heft is stunning: he looks like a denim- wrapped redwood that somebody potted in brogans. What is more, he has a tongue that could not be stilled if you placed it under a brick. "I always wanted me a paper," he was saying the other day, discarding a half-formed opinion that contemporary chickens have no personalities. "I looked into buying one, but they all wanted a fortune. So I started one. I was so green, I thought paste-up was something you did with wallpaper and layout was something you did with a girl."
He was 53 then and feeling solvent. He had been rich two or three times since he took a bachelor's degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1954, going on to speculate prosperously in land. He speaks wistfully of a period, long ago, when he ran through his money in the sporting houses of Havana. Laying a finger alongside a nose whose veins suggest some past abuse, he allows: "One time, I drank myself broke."
Sober again (and sober still), he made more money, but, as his wife Joyce observes, "Bob and money don't get along. One time we had a Cadillac and an airplane, but I didn't have a cup that matched a saucer."