Jack Claiborne papers

Jack Claiborne was born in Newell, North Carolina, near the present site of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in 1931. His father died in 1936 and it was then that the family moved to Charlotte. Jack received his education in the Charlotte public school system. At the age of fourteen, Jack entered a contest to write a sports story, sponsored by the Charlotte News. Jack won that contest, whose prize was the opportunity to go on a ten-day road trip along with a professional baseball team and write an article each of the ten days, which the Charlotte News published (One of his opponents in this contest was Charles Kuralt, who later earned fame for his trans-America journalism in human interest stories.). Claiborne continued writing sports stories through his years in high school and college, though for the Charlotte Observer. Claiborne graduated from Central High School and from there he went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a BA in English in 1957. During his college years, he also wrote for the University News Bureau—the campus news agency. In 1953, Claiborne left Chapel Hill to enter the Army, and he spent most of that time working as the editor of the Fort Jackson Journal in South Carolina. After completing his enlistment in 1955, he returned to Chapel Hill, and continued to write sports stories for the Observer. In 1957 he covered the UNC basketball team—a season in which it was undefeated and went on to win the national championship.

Following graduation he returned to the Observer full-time to write sports stories. A year later he took a leave of absence to enter graduate school at the University of Chicago. While in Chicago, Claiborne not only matriculated through journalism school, but he also worked full-time for the Chicago Daily News, where he wrote about night clubs and late-night entertainment in the Chicago area. Following his graduation, he returned to work again for the Observer, broadening his areas of expertise to include journalism in business, education, politics and government. In 1963, the Observer appointed him to become its correspondent in Washington, D.C., where he worked until 1965. When he returned to Charlotte he was promoted to fill the position of chief copy editor, Carolinas editor and city editor. In 1970 he became associate editor and began writing a series of editorials each Saturday entitled “This Time and Place.” This column was Claiborne’s venue for discussing local issues contextualized in relation to Charlotte’s history. He also wrote the Charlotte Observer, Its Time and Place, 1869-1986—a comprehensive book on the history of this newspaper. Once published, Claiborne received critical acclaim and several awards in literature and journalism for this work. Claiborne remained with the Observer until 1990, when he resigned to take a new position as Vice President and Assistant to the Chairman at Park Communications, in Ithaca, New York. Park Communications was a large media conglomerate that owned (at the time) nine television stations, almost two dozen radio stations, and 107 newspapers in twenty-two states, including North Carolina. Claiborne remained with Park until it was sold in 1994. Even before his return to Charlotte in the fall of 1994, he applied for a position with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to be its Director of Public Relations. He was appointed to this position and was promoted to the position of Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations in 1998. In addition to managing all official communications within the university, he was UNC Charlotte’s chief spokesman for communications to off-campus sources. Also, he served as the chancellor’s speech writer. Claiborne retired from UNCC at the end of 2000, though he periodically returned to campus to do part-time work. His retirement party was in 2001.

In addition to his work as a newspaper journalist and editor, Claiborne wrote a number of books. These were Jack Claiborne's Charlotte; The Charlotte Observer: Its Time and Place, 1869-1986; Unto the Least of These: A Centennial History of Alexander Children's Center; Discovering North Carolina: A Tar Heel Reader; and The Crown of the Queen City: A History of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. He also won several prestigious awards, including North Carolina Press Association’s award for sports-writing, education reporting, news-writing, feature writing and editorial writing http://www.jomc.unc.edu/n-c-halls-of-fame/n-c-journalism-hall-of-fame#claiborne). His former roles in leadership include chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council, chair of the North Carolina Editorial Writers Conference and director of the Charlotte chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Over the years, Claiborne developed a popular reputation and was frequently asked to be the guest speaker at many different functions and special occasions in and around Charlotte. One of the more voluminous series within this collection is one that contains drafts of his speeches. [Sources: Jack Claiborne Collection, 1941-2006, Mss 377, UNC-Charlotte Library; North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame website, (accessed on June 8, 2010).]