Hal Sieber, in a still from the documentary “February One”
I’ve been thinking today about my former editor at the Carolina Peacemaker, the late Hal Sieber. Hal could have been the model for Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World”: he hung out with the Beats, served as a speechwriter for Senator John F. Kennedy, helped spring Ezra Pound from a mental hospital and once dated an ex-wife of Isaac Hayes, not to mention his role in the civil rights battles in Greensboro in the 1960s and ’70s. He was truly one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.
For me, Hal played a role in one of the most productive periods of my life: my tenure at the Peacemaker. Between 2000 and 2003 I won three NCPA journalism awards, an impressive beginning to what seemed like a promising career. After he left the Peacemaker in 2004, though, there were no more awards; whatever had inspired me to push myself was gone. The editors that followed him were good, but that connection was severed. My interests drifted on to other things, and I left the Peacemaker in 2006. Outside of a few freelance articles, I haven’t worked in journalism since.
Working with Hal wasn’t always easy. He never learned to use a computer, and he wrote out his stories longhand, giving them to our long-suffering office manager to type. His loud arguments with reporter Ben Holder, with whom I shared an investigative journalism award, would probably have gotten the two of them tossed out of more stiff-necked workplaces for creating a toxic work environment. But what he had – and Holder as well – was passion and restless energy. As a self-taught journalist, I found their attitudes refreshing, especially compared to my only previous professional experience at a corporate-owned newspaper.
Last summer, I told myself that I was going to make major changes in my life by my 46th birthday. So far the effort has been rather hit-or-miss, though I feel I’m making progress. I can’t really move forward, though, if I don’t know what motivates me to do my best. Whether it was the Peacemaker, or the bands, or even my personal relationships, I’ve never been happy with environments which lack a certain insanity, a certain seat-of-your-pants approach to creativity, a certain doomed-to-failure sense of romance. Maybe that’s why so many of my projects never get past a certain point; I’m always afraid that success would be predictable and boring, one high-set bar after another. It’s easier to always be the scrappy underdog, tossing together music and sound systems on the fly, photographing bands with a camera in one hand and a PBR in the other. How people develop the traits necessary to turn their creativity into a paying career is one of life’s eternal mysteries to me.
Hal Sieber did a lot of great things, but maybe getting a solid four years of achievement out of me was one of the greatest, even if he didn’t know it. I’ll always appreciate that.