CityView Magazine

54 December 2021 the night before; the mother and children who lost their home in a fire. He could write with empathy about a woman struggling with a diagnosis of breast cancer. He could put you alongside a father and mother grieving the loss of a child and help you find a lost pet, too; or returning to an Italian restaurant aer a tragedy like nothing Fayetteville ever could have imagined. He told us, too, about everything from his colonoscopies to parting ways with an automobile he adored to the day he had the mole removed from his nose. And about Charlie, the cat he loved for sure. He was a storyteller. He was a journalist of the written word. ere was only one Larry Cheek. A Return to The Dair y Farm "Well, Billy, think I'm going to retire," he told me in 2000, and that's just what Cheek did aer 27 years with e Fayetteville Times, e Fayetteville Observer-Times and e Fayetteville Observer. Retirement, wife Suzan Cheek remembers, was an emotional moment. "He never wrote aerward," she says. Cheek returned to Orange County and the 200-acre dairy farm, where he grew up with two brothers and a sister and the purebred Ayrshires and not far from his beloved University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He loved sharing life with Suzan, chipping golf balls to the flagstick in the backyard and spending time on his riding mower by the weeping willow. He kept up with friends to include Dr. Richard Shereff, Susan Shereff, Joanne Copeland, Beegee Caviness, Beverly Stewart, Bob Ray, Lynn and Karl Legatski and Carol and Joe Quigg, that hero of the 1957 NCAA National Championship basketball team from UNC that Larry Cheek wrote about in Kansas City, when sports editor of the Daily Tar Heel campus newspaper. William Lawrence "Larry" Cheek died Sept. 30, 2021. He was 85. A portrait of Cheek looked over us as old newspaper colleagues Johnny Horne, Cindy Burnham, Seth Effron, Tom Lassiter, Susan Ladd and Tom English Jr. gathered on Oct. T here was a curiosity within him about people and their lives. "Everybody has a story," he oen would say in a long and distinguished newspaper career. His was a receptive ear when it came to the stories they had to tell, and he had a way of his own in putting them at ease. You might find him leaning back in his chair giving a listen to what they had to say and scribbling a note here and there. Or standing along a downtown street, where an interview for a column in the next morning's paper was more like a conversation. He was Larry Cheek. If your name made his column, you were somebody in this town. "Larry Cheek was a columnist, and very talented," Tom English Jr., former managing editor of e Fayetteville Times, reminded us on a recent autumn aernoon, when newspaper colleagues of days gone by gathered to reminisce about the life and newspaper times of this columnist extraordinaire. "He was a blessing and admired by thousands of readers." Larry Cheek arrived in this historic town weeks before Fayetteville Publishing Co., launched a morning newspaper on July 2, 1973, amid an energy crisis and the early revelations of a Watergate scandal that eventually would send a U.S. president from the White House in disgrace. His journalism credentials included newspaper stints with e Roanoke Times, the Chapel Hill News, an investigative reporter with the Greensboro Record and as a Washington correspondent with Landmark Newspapers before finding his columnist desk in a makeshi newsroom along Hay Street, where the old oak tree still stands. He was 37 and surrounded by younger editors and even younger reporters such as Luke West, Harry Abernathy, John Pittman, Bill Scarborough, Jack Timme, Dennis Patterson, Dennis Rogers, Perry Jenifer, Brian Stokes, Eve Oakley, Nancy Szokan, Anne Ebeling, Kitty Leach, Dot Sparrow, BILL KIRBY JR. A newspaper columnist of legend William Lawrence Cheek, 1936–2021 Add Penfield Jr., Tommy Horton and Penny Muse – all dedicated to building careers of their own. And not to forget Ken Cooke, a veteran photojournalist to complement Larry Cheek 's written words along with young photojournalists Johnny Horne and Steve Aldridge. "Larry was a great asset for making e Fayetteville Times successful." says Ramon Yarborough, retired publisher of the morning and aernoon newspapers. "He had a large following that enjoyed his insight and humor." 'Hey, Honey, You Gotta Read Larr y Cheek' ey wrote their stories. ey made their deadlines. But there was only one Larry Cheek, and Cheek would become the face and the voice of a newspaper, and he was there every morning at your breakfast table over coffee and toast. "Larry was so happy to be part of a brand- new, damn-good newspaper in Fayetteville," wife Suzan Cheek says. "Opportunities arose for him to leave. It didn't take long for him to realize that he didn't want to leave the people and place he had come to love." It was a mutual bond between writer, reader and a community. "Hey, Honey, you gotta read Larry Cheek," became a familiar refrain around a breakfast table in almost every household in this community and the Cape Fear region. You found Cheek 's photograph and his name in diners, barber shops, beauty salons and the courthouse; his words and his stories 18.6 picas wide and right there along the right leg of the newspaper almost every day of the week. He could amble down Hay Street and find a column on a down-and-out homeless person. He found a fascination with the Hay Street night life on a military payday. Or a kid selling lemonade for a charitable cause. He could tell you about the Market House history; the locks and dams at the Cape Fear River; the storm that ravaged a town

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