By Mark Buckshon
Recently, Dave Simpson, president and CEO of the Carolinas Associated General Contractors (CAGC), invited me to listen to a podcast where he was interviewed for Business North Carolina.
I enjoyed listening to his story, describing how his news reporting career (initially as police reporter for a daily newspaper) evolved to government and association relations/lobbying. He now leads the Carolinas’ largest and most influential construction trade organization.
We share a key early career experience: police reporting. For myself, there wasn’t a formal journalism program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Instead, students interested in journalism learned from their peers on the student newspaper and those with some talent, connections or (in my case) creativity, found part-time jobs at one of the city’s two daily newspapers. My initial task: Monitoring police activities on Friday and Sunday nights for The Vancouver Province.
These were interesting days; driving to crime scenes with a police scanner in my red Datsun. Once a gun-man shot up the local youth hostel, and then as he ran from police, tried to hide in (of all places) a gun shop. This didn’t work out so well for the criminal since, well, the shop owner was well-armed himself.
While Simpson’s career evolved to the legislative buildings in Raleigh, I decided to go to Africa, traveling overland through the continent from the Sahara to South Africa, eventually concluding my journalism career as a sub-editor on the Bulawayo Chronicle as Rhodesia turned to Zimbabwe. My last day as a daily newspaper journalist happened after a rather wild evening at a remote tribal village bar in April 1980, two weeks before Zimbabwe’s independence, where I experienced a coming-of-age epiphany (and got four angry tribal villagers thrown into jail for trying to steal my camera).
Youthful adventures in journalism more than four decades ago provided the sort of “street smarts” life experiences that have allowed me to put things into perspective. I think the down-to-earth experiences have also shaped Dave Simpson’s life – and yours as well. Of course formal college and university education has its place, but getting out in the world and experiencing life I think teaches us much more enduring knowledge.
Mark Buckshon is president of Construction News and Report Publishing Inc., which publishes North Carolina Construction News. He can be reached by email at bu******@*****************ws.com.