Ben Beagle

Or as longtime Roanoke Times columnist Ben Beagle once recounted, "The spring's pool in the basement was stocked with fish and surrounded by a railing - which didn't deter the drunks who sometimes fell into it and became not more youthful, but sober and wet."

"He also looked on the bright side, no matter how bad it was," said Roanoke Times columnist Ben Beagle.

Hood's long newspaper career began humbly in 1936 when he took a job as a copy boy for the Roanoke World-News.He was following a family tradition: Both his grandfathers were newspaper publishers, and his father worked for the World-News as a telegraph editor.

At that time, two newspapers competed for subscribers - The Roanoke Times, a morning paper, and World-News, an afternoon paper.
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Hood didn't fit the stereotype of the hard-drinking, raucous city editor, Beagle said.