There are dozens of people in my life who helped change and enrich it immensely – a suggestion made, a helping hand, an introduction – but none influenced mine as much as did K.W. Lee.

The Charleston Gazette was an amazing place to work in the early 1960s when I was there as a fulltime entertainment editor – my main duty was compiling the daily television logs – during my final two years as an undergraduate student at nearby Morris Harvey College. The Gazette was to the political left of what passed for being liberal in those helter-skelter years of rebellion, though it was not totally socialist in its editorial policies. And it generally lived what it preached on those editorial pages. Among our editors and reporters were women, African-Americans, immigrants, atheists, socialists and not a few raging alcoholics.

What kept me from fully enjoying this environment was, as a newly married man, I was desperate to get into graduate school with full financial aid as I could not pay my own way. Moreover, I wanted to avoid the military draft and thus Vietnam, and my local draft board assured me that graduate school on the way to teaching youth would give me a deferment and keep me away from military training in the swamps of South Carolina, at least temprarily.

The University of Virginia was my brightest prospect if I wanted to major in political science, but there was no funding available. I was scrambling around looking for alternatives, but had nothing remotely promising.

Enter K.W.

K.W. – I forget what the initials stood for – was born in South Korea and, newsroom legend had it, was in line for his own mandatory training by the occupying Japanese, in military school en route to being a kamikaze pilot, before the war ended. K.W. never denied it. He had a certain swagger and self-assurance that I liked – after the Japanese, what is there to fear? – which served him well as the beat reporter for the small-city governments that ringed Charleston. He would get off the phone howling with laughter at first-time callers who assumed that the byline “K.W. Lee” must be owned by a Virginia-bred gentleman only to find that the man who wrote such beautiful English was berating them in pidgin English with non-stop questions.

For some reason, K.W. liked me. More than once as I entered the newsroom I would hear this loud voice, “Ahhh, here come Roger Morris, goddamn BMOC!” And when K.W. heard my plight, he started telling me I needed to go to the University of Illinois’ Communications School, his own alma mater. At first, I thought he was just joking, but he persisted. Not gently, but constantly. Ever reason why I didn’t think it would work – I had never traveled farther from West Virginia than to Virginia and Ohio and was far from sophisticated – K.W. would knock it down.I gave in, at first reluctantly and then with gratitude as K.W. walked me through the application process for a teaching assistantship and backed it up with phone calls to the head of the school. I soon found myself saying goodbye to West Virginia and the Gazette and hello to Champaign-Urbana.

The year at the UI taking grad seminars in communications and political science was one of the mostly intellectually alive periods of my life. I also graded papers and taught labs. And two professors I worked for connected me to a teaching job as an instructor at Arizona State University the following year by way of a former colleague of theirs who headed that program. Three years later, in 1970, when my wife Ella and I were ready to head East, another Illinois professor gave me shelter for a couple of weeks in Washington, D.C., and steered me to a job at George Washington University. And so I was off.

I did go back to the Gazette a couple of times while I was in Arizona. There were friendly smiles and slapped backs, but newsrooms are not heavy on nostalgia when deadlines are approaching. I thanked K.W., I remember, but I can’t remember what else we discussed. He was pleased that I had done well at Illinois, but he wasn’t overly sentimental, either. It would probably dull his well-honed edge.

I never saw K.W. after that. And, when the military draft ended in 1973 when I was 30, I had never seen Vietnam either.