Larry Carson: Reporting on the Reporter

"Well I had dropped out of college . . . a friend of mine suggested I might like being a reporter so I just started calling and applying to the newspapers in Baltimore and I initially got a job as a copy boy at the News American for about six months."

That's how Baltimore Sun reporter Larry Carson got his start in journalism. Carson lives in a town house overlooking lake Elkhorn in Owen Brown. Carson started working for the Baltimore Sun's evening paper in 1969 and moved to Columbia in 1978.

Prior to 1978, Carson lived in northwest Baltimore. He started out as a copy boy for the paper, running takes from the writers to the copy editors. He would also go out on Saturday nights with the police reporters. When an opening became available for a reporter, he took it. Later he became a police reporter or a "leg man," who gathered information in the city and passed it on to a rewrite man.

In January of 1969, his first assignment for the evening sun was to cover howard county. Carson shared an office above the Wilde Lake village center with a morning reporter. He recalls reporting on the hilltop housing which replaced the substandard housing in Ellicott City and the shoddy workman ship of Ryland housing in Oakland Mills as well as the view of the Lark Brown road residents on the General Electric move into Columbia.

As a reporter, Carson has a detached view of Columbia because he tends to keep a distance from things he may end up writing about. He did however share his opinions on what hasn't worked in Columbia, specifically the lack of cohesion in downtown, affordable housing and transportation.

"It's not something that most people prefer to use because it takes a lot of time to get anywhere, the busses are noisy they're not that comfortable. You know, they stop a lot of places before you get to where you're going. It can take you a long time, so I think transportation's another big problem," says Carson.

Carson says the issues facing current and future Columbia are the downtown redevelopment and the revitalization of the village centers as well as the proposal for the 23 story tower. He says a lot of people are concerned about the school congestion and the congestion of major thoroughfares like Route 29.