Community Profile

A Byline Synonymous with Salisbury


There are a lot of people you can talk to about Rowan County, its economy, its thriving businesses, its recreational opportunities and the like. But if you want to know about the heart of Rowan County, you need to talk to Rose Post.

Post has been a reporter at the Salisbury Post for more than 51 years. She’s a recipient of the national Ernie Pyle Award, named for the legendary writer. She’s won more awards than anyone in the history of the North Carolina Press Association. In August she was honored by the Community Care Clinic for her humanitarianism and leadership.

But through it all, she’s never aspired to do more than write about the ordinary folks of Rowan, and to get it right. “I want to do the best I can by this person I’m interviewing,” says Post, 75, “because they are trusting me to write what they say.”

Editor Elizabeth Cook has said of Post: “If Rose Post has a fault, it’s that she cares too deeply. But that’s also her greatest strength, the thing that sets her work apart. She doesn’t just interview people. She gets to know them. She revels in them. She feels their joy and pain — and she has taken on an awful lot of pain through the years.”

Despite her workaholic hours — nights, weekends, holidays — Post has always insisted that her family comes first. “I stayed with the Post instead of going into business with my family because I could control my hours,” Post says.

She became the paper’s featured columnist in 1983, her focus on writing human interest stories. “The thing I’ve liked best about this job is that I’ve met so many people, I can’t even remember all their names,” she says.

Being the mother of five children — and now 11 grandchildren — Post knows how important it is for people to see their names in the paper. It gives her great joy to go into people’s homes and see clippings on the refrigerator or framed stories that she’s written.

Even today, Post says she’s “shocked” that she received the Ernie Pyle award in 1989. “I was alive when Ernie Pyle was writing and revered, and I couldn’t imagine receiving an award in his name,” she says. “I thought it was an absolute aberration, but I accepted it gratefully.”

Post believes fervently that the free press is at the heart of democracy. “As a newspaper, we are surrogate citizens,” she says.

She became the paper’s first education reporter when the school superintendent told her that everything that happened in the city school board’s meetings wasn’t going to be in his report to the paper. Specifically, a principal had slapped a child, but as superintendent he would not release that information. Still, he reasoned, it was news. Post and her editor agreed. “There was nothing better than for a woman with five children to cover the schools,” she says.

Post began covering the city school board meetings, then later the county school board meetings. She added library board meetings, Catawba College trustee meetings and Rowan Technical College trustee meetings, rounding out the education beat.

She has also tackled in-depth series, writing on school consolidation, race relations, drugs in schools, teen pregnancy, teen suicide, the local Vietnamese culture and AIDS. She still counts those stories among the ones of which she’s most proud.

Reporters have kidded her that she’s been married to two Posts over the years — her husband, Eddie, and the newspaper. Post laughs, too. “There are two things that amaze me in my life,” she says. “That Eddie asked me to marry him, and that I got this job.”

Getting a job in the 1950s was difficult for a young, Jewish woman. Post couldn’t even get an interview in New York. “But the Post took me in,” she says, “and it has been very good to me.”   — Susan Shinn

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