“They say every man’s home is his castle. Looks like this one needs a moat.”
— From “Senator Sam”
That’s the opening line in former Salisbury Post Editor Steve Bouser’s new one-man play, fittingly titled, “Senator Sam — a One-Man Play.”
Senator Sam? Senator Sam Ervin?
Do we hear again the voice of that country lawyer who brought a president down in our land?
Well, yes, if we make it to Morganton next Saturday or Sunday.
That’s when Bouser’s play opens at CoMMA, an acronym for Community of Morganton Municipal Auditorium, a place that’s made a distinct name for itself in Ervin’s hometown, just as he himself did.
We’ll hear him and see him and remember him — or, if we’re too young, wish we could remember him — when Joe Inscoe becomes Senator Sam and steps out on his back porch on a warm August evening with a bourbon and ginge’ale in his hand and looks at the audience.
This is the night Richard Nixon resigns as president of the United States. So the old television set on the back porch is on. But the news media is encamped out front, waiting for reaction from the man who chaired the Watergate committee that brought Nixon’s downfall. And Senator Sam doesn’t want to talk to the media.
So the audience becomes the theater’s stand-in for a historic incident when Ervin spirited in a young reporter from the Morganton News Herald, gave him the interview and secretly let him out again, foiling the big media pack waiting out front.
But whether or not they know that story, the audience will understand the show’s first line and why a man sometimes needs a moat around his castle — and laugh.
And they’ll laugh while they listen to his “stowries” of his life — childhood, college, that long ago courtship of Miss Margaret, his wife for well over half a century, “stowries” of family and early days as attorney and judge and going to Washington in 1954 to fill his brother’s unexpired term as senator, and the special irony of that day.
Who swore him in as senator?
Vice President Richard Nixon, of course.
If you come, says Bill Wilson, executive director of CoMMA, who read the play last spring, decided it had to be produced and went at it with a will, “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry” and you’ll treasure all those “stowries” that revolve around Senator Sam Ervin’s philosophy of getting to and making sure the truth is known — and then let the chips fall where they may.
We could wind this up pretty soon if everyone would tell us what he knows. But if we keep playing hide-and-seek, it’s going to take a while. We’re not going to continue the investigation until the last lingering echo of Gabriel’s horn trembles into ultimate silence, but we are going to go on till we get at the truth.”
Steve Bouser never planned to write a play about Sam Ervin. He was too busy.
He was — and still is — rescuing a house from oblivion with paint, wall coverings, bathroom renovations, insulation, doors, windows, storm windows, chimneys, fences and always something else.
“It has felt like building a house a room at a time while we lived in it,” he says, but his wife, Brenda, fell in love with it, and he’s been building ever since.
At the same time he’s supervised a makeover of The Pilot, North Carolina’s highly respected paper at Southern Pines, where he’s been editor since 1997.
“We moved out, doubled the space and renovated it, put in a new press with new color, re-designed and went from two to three days a week.”
And in his spare time, he was writing a play about Russia, where he spent several years with the U.S. Information Agency after leaving The Salisbury Post in 1993. But he’d put it on the shelf because Senator Sam was — well, not exactly tugging at his elbows, he says, but there. Waiting, somewhere in the back of his mind.
Three years ago, it hit him.
“A one-man play about Sam Ervin would have straightforward appeal because of the man’s character and the obvious appeal of funny mountain stories and the drama of an everyday guy being caught up in history. It has universal appeal.”
And his ability to say anything in a way no one else would have said it.
I have the world’s worst affliction: a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian conscience. ... It’s a genetic trait that doesn’t keep you from committing sins, but it does keep you from enjoying them. ...
Senator Sam had been one of three trustees who theoretically ran the paper when Steve Bouser moved from Miami to Morganton in June 1973 when the Watergate hearings were at their peak.
“He was the best known man in the country, second only to Nixon — and one of the people for whom I worked. After I had been there for a couple of weeks, I decided to make an appointment — not go through secretaries — just looked up ‘Ervin, Sam J.’ in the telephone book and dialed his number. He said, ‘Hello,’ and I was taken with that.”
And he was taken with him again the first time he saw him.
“We had an item in the paper that he was going to speak at the annual Burke County barbecue, and I drove out there that evening, and about the time I got there, he came driving in in this great big old blue Chrysler he always drove and kind of got in a ditch, and then came walking in, stood in line, sat down at a table at random with strangers and after dinner, he talked.
“They had set up a lectern of bales of hay that looked like a set out of ‘Hee Haw’ or something, and about halfway through his talk, a mangy hound dog came in and sat down in front to the lectern while he talked about the Constitution of the United States. That was my first exposure, and I was quite taken. I remember thinking what a scene it would be to write about.
“He was not at all active in the running of the paper,” he says, but about once a year, key people at the paper would go to a dinner that would evolve into a storytelling session by Senator Sam. Bouser sat close to the back and listened to mountain stories he heard over and over again.
“He was maybe the only great man I ever knew in person,” he says. They weren’t close, but Bouser knew him and his family, and when he applied for the journalism fellowship at Stanford University in California, his recommendation was from Senator Sam.
Our grandson, Bobby, who was 13, came to see us here in Washington. We were walking to a restaurant, with reporters and photographers chasing after us. One of them asked Bobby, ‘How does it feel to be going to dinner with the chairman of the Watergate Committee?” and he said, “It’s like going to the circus with the organ grinder.”
But Bouser’s life moved on, through three years at the Shelby Star, to the Salisbury Post and then to Russia and back again to Southern Pines — and Senator Sam.
By then, he had been hit by the playwrighting bug.
“People told me I had an ear for dialogue,” he says, and he wanted something with wider appeal than the Russian play and an engaging person for the main character, “and Sam Ervin is just kind of a slam dunk. So I read all the books.”
And summer before last, the family went to the Outer Banks.
He sat on the beach and wrote, setting the play on the senator’s deck-like back porch on that August night in 1974, in an island of soft light, looking out into the night, talking to the audience like he’d once talked to that young reporter, drinking his bourbon and ginge’ale, walking around the table, remembering ...
“The climax comes when Nixon comes on TV and resigns.”
I come from a state where they believe that the laws of God are embodied in the King James Version of the Bible. And I think that those who participated in this effort to nullify the laws of man overlooked one of the laws of God, which is set forth in the seventh verse of the sixth chapter of Galatians: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
Bouser’s wife, Brenda, was a theater major in college and acted and directed a lot of plays and has been, he says, his best critic.
And he had other “good fairies” busy with his life and the life of his play. Sandra Epperson, who runs the theater company in Southern Pines, arranged a staged reading and invited theater people from all over the state and beyond.
“That was big deal for me,” he says, because he’s hoping for an audience here and beyond, “but I wanted it to premier in Morganton” with its beautiful municipal auditorium that brings in “first rate stuff” regularly. So he called Bill Wilson.
“And he’s the real fairy godmother of this thing,” Bouser says. “He got excited about it” — and heavily involved. He picked the actor, Joe Inscoe, a professional actor who was in “Nell” with Jody Foster and “Lassie” and a lot of “Matlock” — and grew up in Morganton.
He’s 49 and looks nothing like Senator Sam but remembers when the families went to the same church and the Senator would reach behind his ear and pull out a silver coin.
C. Robert Jones, a mentor of Brenda’s who taught drama for years at Mars Hill College, accepted the directing job as a labor of love.
“Steve gave us the script,” Bill Wilson says, “and we’re putting the skin on it — the set, everything that makes a production, and we’re going to give birth in a week, right at term. It’s been a 9-month pregnancy with no morning sickness.”
And they all expect it to produce great theater in Morganton, bring in money for the Rotary Club’s scholarship fund and grow beyond its raising.
“My dream,” says Bouser, “is for it to go to Ford’s Theater in Washington.”
“Senator Sam — A One-Man Play” will be presented at CoMMA, Morganton’s municipal auditorium, Thursday at an invitation-only dress rehearsal; Saturday at 8:15 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. All seats are reserved. Tickets for both shows are $12.50, $15 and $20 depending on location. For reservations, call 800-939-SHOW.
Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com
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