Working downtown, I get approached by people asking me for money. They often call me “Sir,” and will say “Thank you” after I decline to give but instead wish them the best of luck.

I quit giving money after a couple of experiences of trying to help. One time a guy approached me in a parking lot with a story about not being able to get his wife and child back to Marietta on the bus. They were waiting for him at the MARTA station. Could I give him seven bucks? My gut said he was possibly telling the truth. I gave him a ride to MARTA and said if he could produce his wife and child, I would give them the seven bucks. He couldn’t. So I wished him the best of luck and drove on.

One night I was locked out of my car downtown. It was nice out, so I walked home. Along the Freedom Parkway, some guy said he needed money to stay at the shelter. I told him that if he would follow me he could sleep in my extra bedroom. He said he didn’t want to walk that far.

I don’t want to be callous and I know that as a struggling entrepreneur, I’m just a step or two away from joining these comrades on the street. But I don’t think giving them money is the answer.
The other night, I was standing outside our office building on Peachtree Street and saw a guy open up one of our Atlanta Downtown newspaper boxes and pick up about 50 of our papers.

“Hey,” I said. “Why are you taking so many of my papers?”

“They’re free, aren’t they?” he said.

“Well, yes, but each one of those costs me money.”

“Man, I homeless,” he said. “And these are my pillow.”

“But why my papers?” I asked, pointing to the other boxes of free newspapers lined up together.

“Okay,” he said. “This may get me in trouble, but I’m gonna level with you.” He had no smell of alcohol on his breath and he spoke intelligently. “I lost my job, I’m HIV-positive and my disability hasn’t kicked in yet. This is how I support myself. I walk up to cars or pedestrians, tell them that this is a free paper about downtown and hand them one. Now, this is where I become a fraud. I tell them that this paper is published by a nonprofit organization to benefit the homeless and I ask for a donation.”

I laughed out loud. “So far, I think you’re still telling the truth, about the nonprofit part. You’ve probably made more money this year than I have.”

“I distribute 50 or 60 of these a day,” he said.

“That’s great,” I said. “But I’d rather you pass out these other papers. Why do you always clean out my boxes?”

“I’ve tried using those other papers, but they don’t move as well. People pay more for yours.”
I laughed again. Here I’ve been struggling for three years trying to sell enough advertising to pay for nearly 100,000 free papers and I hear from this one-man-research-and-development-department that I could have been charging for them all along.

“Man,” he said. “You should hire me to distribute your papers. Why don’t you give me a job?”
“I think I already have,” I laughed. “You’re working now. I’ve got to go, but why don’t you call me tomorrow.”

We shook hands in the warm Atlanta evening and wished each other luck. I never heard from him again, but I’m glad I met him. Entrepreneurs get ideas from everywhere. You never know when one will make you money.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been interviewing a lot of folks for sales positions. Some managers take the interview process very seriously.

They will sit the candidates in the same chair, ask the same questions and stare them down with the same steely eye. There are legendary stories about interview nightmares, like the one about the U.S. president who took a cabinet candidate out for lunch. When the prospect salted his food before tasting it, the president nixed him for making a decision not based on facts.

Me – I’m about as far away from that as can be. Of the people I hired, one I interviewed over the phone long distance. Another walked into my office without an appointment (which is how I like to sell to my advertisers), one interviewed with another employee and never even gave me a résumé until a week after starting the job. Another I met at the bar at Atkins Park in Virginia-Highland. I asked her if she wanted a beer. She later confided to fellow employees that she wondered if it was a test. Would be better to drink a soft drink or to drink a beer as I did? On Fridays at 6 p.m., Atkins Park traditionally passes out complimentary shots of Jaegermeister. She was perplexed. What was the right thing to do?

I guess we learn from our role models. My first job interview was in New Orleans, where I drove in my junior year of college to meet Philip Carter, an editor of a French Quarter weekly and the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss. I took all my college articles, a nice résumé and the clearest head I could muster for such an auspicious occasion. When Philip showed up for my interview, he had some friends in tow.

Philip’s wife, Lynn, suggested we all go to their house in the quarter and start the interview there. Upon arrival, as is the tradition in New Orleans, a party started. Somewhere between rounds, Philip suggested he take a look at my articles. We talked a little about journalism, his paper, the job, etc. Then as we shook hands on Bourbon Street, he said I could start my reporter’s job upon graduation the next May.

I was the envy of my college class. Most of the seniors spent the year agonizing over whether they could get a job interview, and here I was with a full-time job in my chosen profession lined up already. On graduation weekend, I decided to join some friends backpacking in Europe that summer, so I called Philip, as I had every few months, to see if I could delay my job start until August.

“August,” he said. “But it will be over then.”

“Over,” I said. “What will be over?”

“Your summer internship.”

I nearly dropped the phone. My whole life flashed before me. No job. No money. No trip to Europe. Here all my friends had spent all year fighting for jobs and I had not given it a thought. Now I would have to start all over again.

“Philip,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You hired me for a full-time job.”

“I don’t have a full-time job open. How did we get this messed up? We’ve been talking all year since the interview.”

“Well, Philip,” I said. “You remember the interview. Your friends came over and … ”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, laughing. “Let me see what I can do.” He talked to his managing editor. Fortunately, a reporter had just announced she was pregnant and had given notice.

So my career as a newspaperman was safe. My skills as an interviewer, however, may have been permanently impaired.

When I was just a cub reporter on the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., I was assigned the police and courts beat. My favorite stop on my way to work every morning was the county jail, a popular place for legal hangers-on like me. Lawyers, probation officers, bail bondsmen, deputies and reporters would all stop off at the jail and say their howdy-dos to Sheriff Harvey Tackett.

Now, the sheriff, Harvey Tackett, was a fine man and all and we were always happy to see him, but if the truth be told, he wasn’t the main attraction. It was the kitchen, which was run by prisoners that had become trusties and happened to be great cooks.

Every morning, we’d stop in and pull a hot biscuit off the stove, stuff it full of ham or bacon or sausage, grab a hot cup of coffee and wander back to the sheriff’s office for a little talk. When the talk went a little dry, we’d wander back down the hall to the kitchen and grab some grits or maybe some cornbread. Sometimes, when the talk went on for a couple of hours, we’d check on how lunch was proceeding.

After a few months, everyone started talking about the sheriff’s Annual Chitlin Dinner, comparable in importance in Greenville to a state dinner at the White House.

“You coming to the Big Dinner?” a county commissioner asked me over biscuits one day.

“Sure, wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

“Ever eat a chitlin’, son?” he asked, looking at me skeptically.

“Why sure,” I said. “I am from the South, you know.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Georgia,” I say proudly.

“Georgia? Where in Georgia?”

“Atlanta.”

The commissioner put his coffee down and looked me in the eye. “Son, I thought you said you were from the South.”

Actually, I wasn’t quite positive I had ever eaten a chitlin. In fact, I was a little afraid to admit I didn’t even know what one was.

One day, I walked in the jail and things were all askew. First of all, it stunk to hog heaven. Secondly, there was a lot of noise coming from the second floor, where the inmates were kept in cells. I walked in the kitchen to get my biscuit and I saw Sheriff Tackett standing over several big pots boiling on the stove. He was stirring one pot and he didn’t look happy. Upstairs, I could hear cups being rattled against the prison bars. The prisoners were yelling. The cook, a trusty – or a prisoner who had earned the sheriff’s trust – was standing by the door behind the sheriff. Behind him was a woman who served as the sheriff’s records manager. She had red hair, was young and sassy.

“It’s bad,” Sheriff said. “It’s a bad batch of chitlins.”

“How do you know a bad batch from a good batch?” the woman kidded the sheriff. “All chitlins smell bad to me!”

“It’s a bad batch, I’m telling you,” the sheriff said. “We’ll have to put off the dinner until next week.” So the word went out throughout the county, the sheriff’s dinner was postponed.

A week later, the day of the big dinner arrived. I arrived late, on purpose. The room was full and loud. I loaded up my plate with french fries, cole slaw and chitlins, both boiled and fried. I sat down with the fire chief, a lawyer and two county commissioners. We all chatted as I finished off my fries and cole slaw. Then it got real quiet as they stopped talking to watch me take my first bite of chitlins.

Unfortunately, I tried a boiled one first. It was so tough I could barely chew it, and as I bit into it a strong pork flavor exploded in my mouth, emitting an odor reminiscent in its intensity and repulsiveness of foul odors from my past – my fraternity house the night after a big party or the showers at summer camp. Now I had eaten all parts of various animals, but that chitlin tasted like nothing I’d ever put in my mouth before or since. As I quickly downed a gallon of iced tea, the whole table laughed uproariously.

Others wandered over to goad me into eating more. Just as I was pouring ketchup all over the fried chitlins, which I hoped would prove to be more edible, a new reporter from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal walked in the door. Spotting a new victim, everybody at my table got up and wandered over to watch him try the chitlins for the first time.

I escaped out the back door. My pride was intact. My Southern heritage was defended. My stomach – well, let’s just say it was a week or two before I returned to get a biscuit from the sheriff’s kitchen, which smelled like chitlins for a long time after the big dinner.

Ten years ago, when I arrived as the new promotion manager at The Charlotte Observer, one of my first assignments was to prepare a proper celebration of the newspaper’s 100th anniversary. I cultivated an idea for a series of speakers and performers who would discuss how their upbringing in the Carolinas had influenced them in life.

The newspaper served both North and South Carolina and had a strong reputation as a thoughtful, reflective paper. So I jumped on the telephone and invited an ambitious list of natives, including newsman Charles Kuralt, musician Doc Watson, then-cabinet member Elizabeth Dole, Rev. Billy Graham and – the invitee who proved most elusive – Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The series proved highly successful, but as the year proceeded, I had received no confirmation from Jesse Jackson. He had agreed to speak, but his office would not settle on a specific date. This became a daily challenge for me. I wrote letters. I sent copies of our promotion ads. I called his office and got on a first-name basis with one of his secretaries. But after months of calling and I still had nothing set.

Then I remembered an old episode of the great newspaper TV show, Lou Grant, about Lou Grant, the city editor of a Minneapolis newspaper. In this episode, Billie, one of Lou’s reporters, couldn’t find the address of someone they were writing about. Lou picked up the phone and called the circulation department of his paper and charmed a manager into looking up the subscriber’s address. So I pikced up the phone and called Jesse Jackson’s hometown Greenville, S.C., newspaper and asked an old co-worker for the unlisted home phone number of one of their subscribers, Jesse’s mother.

I then called Mrs. Jackson and told her of the series and how excited we were to have her son Jesse as a part of it and, since he would be speaking of his childhood, how we would love to have her as our guest for dinner and the speech. She was excited and said she would come.

“What night is it?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve got this problem …”

Two days later, Jesse’s secretary called and confirmed a date: September 16, 1986. I met Jesse at the airport that night. He was taller than I’d expected. He stopped for a moment in the concourse and took a deep breath.

“This assignment you have given has caused me to do a lot of soul-searching. It has caused me a lot of painful moments as I reflected upon things I had buried long ago.”

I thanked him for his effort, but I was totally unprepared for what was to come. At dinner at our editor Rich Oppel’s house, he referred to it again and I noticed tears in his eyes. He was visibly shaken by the task.

Five minutes into his speech, I had a horrible realization: I was witnessing the greatest speech I would ever hear and I had made no arrangements to record it. Jesse spoke for nearly two hours. The memories were unbelievably passionate and moving. I was transfixed. I had always been an admirer of his oratory, but he had tapped into a totally different energy source that night.

Soon, I realized his plane was scheduled to leave the airport in 15 minutes and he was nowhere near a conclusion. We called the airport and they held the plane. His assistant dragged him off the stage as the crowd stood and chanted wildly for more.

The next day I sent a postcard to everyone who had ordered tickets by direct mail asking if they had recorded the event. I received five tapes in the mail. With great effort, we transcribed it and sent copies to those who attended. Two years later, I watched with wonder as he gave what most people said was his greatest speech ever at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Few there realized that most of the most passionate elements of that speech were forged from that hot September night in Charlotte – from a speech those of us who were there shall never forget.

Photos: Above, a scene from Lou Grant, with the editor, counseling his reporter, Billie. Below, Jesse Jackson giving his speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. It made the list of American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches.