RALEIGH – I missed my 20th anniversary. I just flat missed it. Nor would I have realized it had I not had the wild idea to travel a couple of counties over, and back in time, on Tuesday evening to relive a cherished tradition with my old friends at the Spring Hope Enterprise. My realization came when I happened to look at an old binder of Enterprises from 1986.
In the spring of 1986, I took my first class at UNC-Chapel Hill’s school of journalism. My professor was Philip Meyer, who had enjoyed a distinguished newspaper career with Knight Ridder and wrote some important and highly recommended books on journalism. Professor Meyer recommended that I interview for a summer internship through a J-School program for community newspapers. I did so, and was placed for a May-to-August gig at the weekly Enterprise, a few miles from Rocky Mount in Nash County.
Editor Ken Ripley, photographer and circulation manager Joe Burnette, and then-reporter Jay Price graciously welcomed me into the community-newspaper fraternity. I took to it immediately (and that was, believe me, the only fraternity with which I have had anything but mutual disrespect). Many a Tuesday night, we were up to all hours putting the finishing touches on the week’s issue and having a great deal of fun. I learned a lot about the daily practice of journalism – what questions to ask, how to read public documents, why getting details right is so important – and I also made some deep and lasting friendships.
After returning to school that fall, I kept in touch with the Enterprise crew, coming back during breaks and summers to pitch in with reporting, editing, and production. But even before I left that first summer of 1986, I had begun another relationship with the paper that continues to this day: as a weekly columnist on politics and public policy in North Carolina and beyond.
During the rest of my college career and early journalism work in Washington, I continued to write the column. It ran in the Enterprise, its sister paper the Rocky Mount Record, the Carolina Critic magazine I founded at Carolina, and eventually in several other community papers in Eastern North Carolina. Later, when I returned to North Carolina to help create the John Locke Foundation, I made Bernie Reeves’ Spectator magazine in Raleigh my column’s home base, initially writing under the pseudonym “Bickerstaff.” I also marketed the column to daily newspapers, weeklies, and the business press across the state. The number of papers carrying my weekly scribblings rose to a dozen, then 15, then 20. Paul O’Connor, at the time a statewide columnist for the Capitol Press Association, offered critical advice and distribution assistance. While technically separate from my writing and editorial duties at the John Locke Foundation and its periodical, Carolina Journal, the syndicated column did present me the opportunity to apply our philosophical principles to specific public-policy controversies while covering the major elections and political news of my home state.
Today, my column runs regularly in about 50 newspapers across North Carolina, from the mountains to the coast, serving more than half a million readers. I am deeply grateful to all the editors, current and former, who have allowed me the chance to populate their editorial pages once a week. But I am particularly grateful to Ken Ripley for allowing a young whippersnapper to get things started 20 years ago.
Yes – my first weekly column appeared in the July 24, 1986 edition of the Spring Hope Enterprise. I had my 20th anniversary as a newspaper columnist just a couple of weeks ago and didn’t even know it! Here’s a brief, belated commemoration.
The piece was entitled “Court erodes personal liberty.” I took the U.S. Supreme Court to task for ruling that state laws against sodomy were constitutional. “Somehow,” I wrote, “the Supreme Court does not recognize the principles of liberty and freedom as applying to sex.” (Much later, of course, the Supreme Court concluded differently in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, which struck down state sodomy statutes. I take full responsibility.)
That’s not all. I wrote that just as adults have the right to engage in consensual sex acts in the privacy of their homes, so do other adults have the right to criticize said acts and structure their lives accordingly. “The same principle of freedom that allows persons to exercise their sexual preferences must allow others to exercise their social preferences,” I said, even throwing in a reference the “philosophy of John Locke” for good (and now ironic) measure.
Individual freedom and individual responsibility still form the core of my political beliefs. And when, in 2026, I celebrate my 40th anniversary as a newspaper columnist, you can be sure these timeless principles will still be found in this space.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.