Former Observer columnist, book editor Polly Paddock dies at 71
Polly Paddock, a longtime Charlotte Observer columnist and editor who was remembered for her approachable writing style and ability to connect with readers over a four-decade career at the paper, died Friday. She was 71.
She died at her home near Chapel Hill after a suspected brain aneurysm rupture, said son Ben Maschal.
Former Observer food editor Kathleen Purvis recalled Paddock as bold yet approachable in her writing.
“We both came into newspapers at a time when women were not that welcome,” Purvis said. “You had to have sort of a brassy belief in yourself in those years.”
After graduating from what was then Queens College, Paddock was hired at the Observer in 1970 by an editor who thought “her name would make a wonderful byline,” according to Jack Claiborne’s “The Charlotte Observer: Its Time and Place, 1869-1986.”
Paddock began as a clerk before moving to reporting, where she covered Charlotte’s volatile school-busing program to racially integrate the district. She spent a summer in the Washington bureau during the Watergate hearings, held roles on the editorial board and as a columnist, book editor and copy editor.
“She had a good wit, appreciation for story and some real grit,” said her ex-husband Richard Maschal, a former visual arts writer for the Observer. In addition to their son the pair had a daughter, Laura Maschal, who died in 2017, and nine grandchildren.
Paddock also was willing to be vulnerable with readers, former colleagues said. Several recalled a column Paddock wrote when she was dispatched to Charleston to cover Hurricane Hugo in September 1989.
“People talk of feeling numb, disoriented, edgy. . .strangers in a strange — and frightfully vulnerable — land,” Paddock wrote. “Rebuilding our cities will take a long time. Rebuilding our emotional stability may take far longer.”
A Florida native, Paddock thought she knew hurricanes but described Hugo as unlike anything she’d experienced. She sang “a bizarre mix of hymns and old rock ‘n’ roll songs” and cried as the storm roared, she wrote.
“Suddenly, the ferocity turned to stillness. The eye,” she wrote. “People poured out into the motel parking lot. We hugged one another, strangers whose humanity — and terror — suddenly bound us. Someone gave me a tiny candle. I wept in gratitude.”
Paddock’s ability to connect with readers was unmatched, said Allen Norwood, who alternated daily columns with Paddock in the late 1980s.
“She was fearless and her heart was big as all outdoors. Folks were drawn to that,” he said.
After she featured a family going through hardship or another worthy cause, envelopes with crumpled dollar bills and checks would soon arrive from readers looking to help, Norwood said.
Paddock was drawn to the “small stories,” he said, of people who normally would never appear in the pages of a newspaper.
“Those were her people,” Norwood said.
That could be a ride-along with a garbage man for a column or making friends with the Observer’s cafeteria staff, her son said.
“She had such a deep well of kindness,” Ben Maschal said. “She was just so essentially kind.”
“She never wasted words”
Mary “Polly” Paddock was born Oct. 15, 1948, to Dorothy and Frederick Paddock, an Episcopal priest.
Her writing career began in Florida with a high school news column in the Leesburg Daily Commercial, where her mother also wrote for a time.
“It was called ‘Polly’s Prattles,’ a name I did not pick, and I was paid 5 cents an inch,” she wrote in 2003.
Paddock enjoyed reviewing first novels by female authors, said Dannye Romine Powell, also a former Observer book editor. The pair continued to swap book recommendations and emailed what they were reading up until last month.
And her personal reading taste?
“There is no way you could characterize what she was into other than just by sheer volume,” her son said, noting his mother often read three or four books simultaneously.
Paddock wrote frankly in a 2007 Observer column about having a stroke that hampered her speech and motor skills. She worried she would never work again, though she would work for the paper until 2011 and later found freelancing copy editing work.
In a 2014 Charlotte magazine column, then-executive editor Michael Graff wrote that despite her stroke and a cancer diagnosis, Paddock was a diligent copy editor whose “unsung” work made stories better.
“Good copy editors are like good referees; you don’t notice them when they’ve done their job,” wrote Graff, who is now editor-in-chief for Charlotte Agenda.
Because the stroke made speaking difficult for Paddock, Graff said their entire working relationship happened over email. Correspondence was short but frequent.
In addition to having a keen editing eye and impressive institutional knowledge of Charlotte, Paddock was caring: Her emails reminded magazine staff to take a break or asked about their families, he said.
“She never wasted words,” Graff said. “She said what she thought. She didn’t sugarcoat things. If she really liked something she would say it in a sentence that meant more than some people who go on and on.”
Due to restrictions on mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, her family plans to hold a memorial service later this year.
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