The accidental journalist.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Ashley Futrell, editor and publisher of the Washington Daily News - Company profile

For Ashley Futrell, winning a Pulitzer pales in comparison with making his business a success.

In April, Ashley Futrell, editor and publisher emeritus of the 11,000-circulation Washington Daily News, received one of the highest compliments a journalist in the state can get - being named to the North Carolina journalism Hall of Fame.

But to hear Futrell tell it, there's something he's even prouder of - taking a paper with a worn-out press, a small, beleaguered staff and a circulation of 2,700 and building it into a property now worth millions.

Not bad for an accidental journalist who left a good job as a tobacco buyer for a dubious future running a small-town newspaper. But Futrell says he jumped at the opportunity to be his own boss and to do what his dad had trouble doing becoming a truly successful businessman.

"Things were tough as a boy," says Futrell, who was born in 1911 in Rich Square, a town northeast of Rocky Mount where his father was a jeweler.

When the business failed, the family picked up and moved to Wilson to start all over again. There, Ashley Futrell's father combined optometry with being a jeweler and made a go of it. But he was determined to pay off all his debts in Rich Square. "It was pretty rough going," Futrell says. "It was close."

Futrell followed his older brother to Duke University. He majored in business administration but says he spent as much time making ends meet as studying.

After graduating in 1933, he went back to Wilson with one aim in life: "I wanted to be a tobacco buyer. That was my ambition. In Wilson, which was the world's largest tobacco market, if you could get to be a buyer with Imperial [Tobacco Co. Ltd.], in a sense, you had it made."

Futrell started out part time in one of the British company's processing plants, moved up to a clerk's position, then got on as a buyer in 1935. He had a good job, but his life was difficult. His mother was a semi-invalid, and his father had had a heart attack. "It fell on me," Futrell says. "I was on a salary, and I said then, 'One day, I want to be my own boss."'

That wasn't to be until after the war. In the Army Futrell got his first taste of journalism. A colonel, who was a die-hard baseball fan, made him editor of the post newspaper - not because Futrell knew anything about journalism but because he had played shortstop in the old Carolina League.

"I said, Colonel, we may have just won the war, but you just lost the peace.'

And, you know, he came to believe...