As a budding reporter with the former Sandhill Citizen in Aberdeen back in 1949, Tom Wicker did not realize the magnitude of one of his first big stories.

A local doctor had told him that the fallout of dust from the Taylor Chemical Co. plant on the outskirts of town was dangerous to workers and the families living nearby. Dr. Robert Mobbs suspected that the dust was responsible for the 1948 death of his 3-year-old niece, Mary Hugh Keith.

Wicker, who went on to become a widely acclaimed journalist and died last Sunday at his home in Vermont, was fresh out of journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he took the Aberdeen job.

At the time, he wrote in his 1975 book “On Press,” he had “no real sense of the volatility or importance of the safety issues” when he reported on Mobbs’ charges and was “too inexperienced to know how to follow up, or even that I should.” The chemical company adamantly denied the allegations.

Shortly after reporting on that story, Wicker left Aberdeen for “greener pastures,” taking a job as sports editor of The Robesonian, about 50 miles away in Lumberton, and later hit what he thought then was “the big time” in 1951, when he became a copy editor and telegraph editor for The Winston-Salem Journal, where he worked for most of the 1950s.

Wicker went on to become a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times. His career soared after his dramatic coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He had won a spot as a political correspondent in The Times’ Washington bureau in 1960 and was the only Times reporter to be traveling with Kennedy when the president was shot in Dallas.

In 1966, Wicker began his “In the Nation” column, becoming, along with colleague Anthony Lewis, a longtime liberal voice on the op-ed page. Two years later, he was named associate editor of The Times, a post he held until 1985.

Wicker’s book “A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt” and his eyewitness reporting formed the basis of a 1980 television movie recreating the tragic events that followed the inmate uprising in September 1971. The prisoners took 38 guards hostage, demanding better living conditions.

After four days of negotiations, the siege ended with state troopers firing on the prisoners, killing several guards in the process. Wicker, who was one of the civilian negotiators, was played in the movie by George Grizzard.

Wrote 20 Books

Wicker retired to Vermont in 1991 but continued to write. He published 20 books, ranging from novels about gritty, hard-scrabble life in the South to reflections on the presidents he had known.

In his final column, published Dec. 29, 1991, Wicker commented on the fall of the Soviet Union and urged President George H.W. Bush to “exercise in a new world a more visionary leadership” on nonmilitary issues like the environment.

“As the U.S. did not hesitate to spend its resources to prevail in the Cold War, it needs now to go forward as boldly to lead a longer, more desperate struggle to save the planet and rescue the human race from itself,” he wrote.

Wicker, the son of a railroad man, grew up in poverty in Hamlet, N.C., and wanted to be a novelist. But he pursued journalism when his early books didn’t catch fire.

His first job at the now-defunct weekly Sandhill Citizen paid him $37.50 a week to report on such local news stories as the discovery of “the first beaver dam in anyone’s memory on a local creek.” He also covered court news and even sold an occasional ad, according to his book “On Press.”

But the most importantstory he wrote, time would later tell, was the one prompted by Mobbs’ concern. He was among the first to suspect that DDT and other insecticides might be harmful to human beings.

‘Life Mission’

While Wicker had moved on from Aberdeen, Mobbs had to deal with the fallout from his allegations, which put him at odds with the chemical company and sometimes his own neighbors in Aberdeen, the very people for whom he provided medical care.

After his niece died of unexplained convulsions, Mobbs began to suspect that the exhaust from Taylor Chemical caused her death. He discovered that the plant was mixing DDT, sulphur and lindane into a crop-dusting compound. To protect workers who were bagging the mixture, the dust was blown out of the plant by a large exhaust fan.

The Keith family lived next to the plant, which was on N.C. 5 just above Aberdeen Lake. The girl played in the backyard and breathed in the dust, says David Keith, who was born in 1953, five years after his sister died. His mother, Iris — who was well-known around Aberdeen and for years was the town librarian — told him all about what happened and about Mobbs’ charges. Iris Keith died in November 2010.

“That exhaust fan blew the dust right onto our property,” David Keith says. “She got sick. Dr. Mobbs was with her when she died.”

Keith says that when his brother become a ill a few years later, their father immediately moved the family to Pinebluff. He notes that Mobbs was challenging a powerful interest.

“It was a company town then,” Keith says. “I admire him for what he did. This became his life mission. He never gave up on it.”

Taylor Chemicals, which operated the plant from the 1930s until the mid-1960s, was one of the largest formulators of pesticides in the Southeast.

Mobbs earned a reputation as a “zealot, a man who rocked the boat and who had given the town and one of its industries a bad name,” Wicker wrote in his book. He also wrote that Mobbs’ story illustrated the “necessity for whistle-blowers to hide their identities — to become ‘anonymous sources’ protected by a reporter from the vengeance of their superiors or neighbors or competitors or peers.”

In 1954, feeling “ostracized” — as Wicker wrote in his book — Mobbs moved back to his native Massachusetts, where he practiced medicine and continued his crusade on the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals.

For some 30 years, he served as an influential legislative consultant to congressional members, a member of the Massachusetts Pesticide Control Board, and a medical examiner for Massachusetts. As a U.S. Army Reserve officer with the rank of colonel, Mobbs commanded the 331st General Hospital in Lawrence, Mass.

‘Proud of Fight’

When Mobbs got the news in 1972 that the U.S. government had banned DDT because it was suspected to cause cancer, it was validation of more than 20 years of his life’s work, according to his daughter, Melannie McDonald, who lives in Moore County.

“He knew that he was right,” McDonald says. “This was something that was very important to him.”

Mobbs’ career was cut short by a massive stroke in 1987. No longer able to work, he turned his attention to family and moved back to Pinehurst in the early 1990s. He was in Boston when he died in 2003. The back page of the bulletin for his memorial service, held Nov. 13, 2003, at Bethesda Presbyterian Church in Aberdeen, included excerpts from page 25 of Wicker’s book about his allegations in 1949.

“He loved to get out that book (‘On Press’) and talk about it,” McDonald says. “That was very important to him. He was proud of the fight and what he was able to help bring about.”

McDonald says her father was always very proud of the fact that Wicker wrote about him in his book and referred to him as the first “whistler-blower” he ever encountered.

McDonald recalls hearing her father say he was “annoyed” by the anger directed at him from some in Aberdeen before he moved away.

“I think he actually took pride in it,” she says. “He kind of liked to ruffle feathers. I am not so sure Mom liked it.”

McDonald says her sister ran into Wicker several years ago in New York.

“He remembered my dad,” she says. “That turned out to be such a huge story.”

Contact David Sinclair at dsinclair@thepilot.com.