We are all mourning the death of newspapers as we know them, and so it seems fitting when we must also mourn the deaths of the newspaper men and women who wrote for them, believed in them, kept them honest, and kept all of us informed. Bob Terrell was such a man.
Terrell wrote for the Asheville Citizen-Times for over fifty years as a sports writer and then as a columnist. He joined the editorial team at Smoky Mountain Living not long after it began publication and was Senior Contributing Editor for several years. The magazine featured him as the “mountain person” in the summer of 2003 with a profile of his long and fascinating life, including photographs of Terrell with Billy Graham and Mohammed Ali, with his beloved sons, and even Terrell as a soldier with a group of pin-up girls. But the photo that captures him best, was one of him leaning on his hand in front of a typewriter, the page half-full of words.
Terrell was already writing for the campus paper while in college at Western Carolina Teachers College (now Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C.) when he got an offer to come to work for the Asheville Citizen-Times as a sportswriter. From 1949 until his retirement in 1986, he covered sporting events and the racing scene in the mountains. After retiring, he continued for several years to write a column for the Sunday paper as well as writing and publishing a number of books. He was still planning new books when he died at the home of one of his three sons in Arizona on Sunday, May 31, 2009.
He was quoted by writer Geoffrey Cantrell in 2003 as saying:
“The money isn’t that important to me. I started out in this business to be a writer and that’s what I care about, really. I just want to write.”