Beginning this week, he’s talking to reporters about pictures needed with their stories.

The rationale is clear. He’s a photography chief with years of experience with pictures and, besides, it will free up a little time for Managing Editor Frank DeLoache who’s been doing it in the past.

And it just happened to happen when it snowed.

But Wayne wonders.

Sort of funny to get that new duty and Rowan to get snow simultaneously.

And his phone started ringing. Everybody was passing on all the snowman calls to him, and that’s a lot of calls because when it snows everybody in Rowan County builds the best snowman that’s ever been built. The tallest, the fattest, the prettiest, the best dressed snowman in Rowan County, and the Post doesn’t have enough paper to print them all on if even if it had enough photographers to take all their pictures.

On the other hand, we want the calls. That means we have readers.

So Wayne takes the calls and does his best to say he’s sorry but there was a snowman that sounded just like that one you just called about down on Bringle Ferry Road and he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings but — are you out of breath yet?

Wayne is.

One woman called and said her 17-month-old baby had built a snowman. Now if a photographer had been available, he would have made sure we got a picture of that. That baby might be eligible as the youngest snowman builder known and get his name in the Guinness Book of World Records.

And he got two calls about the kids who built a 7 1/2-foot snowman on West Ridge Road.

That’s tall, and the caller sounded young.

“How old’s the oldest one in the group?” she was asked.

“Wait a minute,” she said, and immediately shouted to someone, “How old’s daddy?”

And then a man called to say he and a big crowd of friends were going to build a snowman and put the preacher’s name on it.

Wayne tried to get details. Was there anything special about the snowman? Well, the man said, only that they were going to make him fat, the fatter the better.

Well, Wayne couldn’t guarantee that he could send a photographer or that the picture would make it into the paper.

OK, the caller said, “but if you’re not going to use it, I’m not going to get all these people together in the neighborhood and spend two hours building it.”

But he wasn’t mad. He was laughing.

The little girl whose picture Joey Benton didn’t get was pretty upset though.

Joey made a picture of a snowwoman standing by a lounge chair wearing a bikini and red spray-painted lips and hair.

But before he got back to the office with his film, a woman had called to ask could he please come back and take the picture again. Her little girl had helped build it and her brother got in the picture, but she didn’t, and she was crying.

Wayne called Joey.

She wouldn’t get in the picture, he explained. She kept hiding behind her daddy. Her daddy kept telling her to get out there and get in the picture.

Besides, Joey said, without further explanation, his best picture wasn’t the snow woman. It was that food and hand coming out of a grave.

But who decides what’s best?

James Barringer took a picture of a fully clothed snowman built by people creative enough to arrange the clothing and then stuff it — with snow.

Naturally, the snowman leaned as the snow melted, but why worry? Maybe passersby just figured he was a snowman who’d had one too many.

But even he won’t be the most memorable of the season.

That will probably go to the crowd of parents and children who got together at Salisbury Four Square Church and built a family of four, including a man nine feet tall and a mother holding a baby.

“It was wonderful!” she said. “We were all going stir crazy, and we decided we’d all get together at the church, and parents had as much fun rolling in the snow as the children.”

That’s probably why everybody’s so proud of their snowmen, Wayne says. Parents and children and friends and relatives get together and have so much fun building snowmen that can’t help being great, can they?

Or prompt a laugh.

“We even had a dog helping,” the woman from the church said.

“I don’t know if I want to ask you what the dog did,” Wayne said.

But he didn’t have to.

“He helped with the coloration,” the caller said.

Even a friend of Wayne’s wife, Sammie, called her. She’d built a 10-foot snow woman and maybe Wayne would like ...

“Huh,” Wayne said as he hung up after one of those calls, “snowmen are probably why I inherited this duty. Frank’ll probably take it away from me as soon as the snow melts.”

Probably.

But his friends at the Post have no intention of forgetting his new name.

Mark Wineka has decided Scrooge Hinshaw hits the spot.