By way of being in the newspaper business, I came to know the late Vernon Malone better than many people in the community, though certainly not as well as many thousands of others. He was, after all, a public man who spent his entire life in public service. A man of many friends and even more acquaintances.
Sen. Malone left us last Saturday. He was 77. I and many others have been contemplating one thing that always struck anyone about him, something simple and yet something that was important. He was a true, 100 percent gentleman.
He was a person who never seemed to raise his voice, who treated his political foes with the same genteel manners he exhibited to his friends. When, on occasion, he disagreed with something in the news or editorial sections of The News & Observer, he would be direct: "You all were wrong about that." But he was always smiling. And after he had said what he had to say, he was on to more lighthearted matters.
Sen. Malone also was a man of great personal discipline. This was of value in all of the various leadership roles he held, whether at the Governor Morehead School or as chair of the Wake County school board or the county commissioners, and later in the state Senate.
And of course, there was courage. The schools of Wake County are a monument to his determination to see that all children get a good education, and that they can profit by going to school with those of different backgrounds. He had seen the awful byproducts of segregation and racial discrimination first-hand, and he did all he could to eliminate them. No easy fight, it was. But he carried on.
