Randolph Hub writer fights to the end

By Ray Criscoe

Publisher, Randolph Hub

ASHEBORO — The Randolph Hub family lost one of its own on Aug. 9 with the passing of reporter Greta Lint.

Greta lost a long battle with breast cancer just days after her 65th birthday on Saturday, Aug. 6.

Greta was one of the key contributors to help get Randolph Hub off the ground. One of the main requests from potential readers was for business stories that showcased the uniqueness of what local businesses made and produced and stories about the people running them.

Those types of stories were right up Greta’s alley. Her natural curiosity and her ear for anything unusual or unexpected helped make our early business pages some of the best reads in the paper.

Greta also insisted on working for free early on, knowing that would help an enterprise starting from scratch. So despite my offering to pay her numerous times, she always said the first year was on her. Truth be known, like a lot of people who truly love this business, the work was more important than the money anyway.

I first met Greta in a Leadership Randolph class in 1995. She was among the two dozen or so of us meeting monthly to learn more about the county we all served in some form or other. 

Greta was a public relations person then, but she squeezed so much out of life over the decades that in 2019 she was honored with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, a rare distinction in North Carolina reserved for persons giving exemplary service to their state and communities. Created in 1964, the roster of recipients in those 58 years since numbers fewer than 22,000.

If you’d like to read more about Greta’s accomplishments and life, you can find her obituary on page 5B.

Greta had hoped to return to writing. Every time her life took even a brief uptick, she’d throw story ideas my way and talk about which ones she wanted to do. In the face of what she was facing, that’s as good an example of hope and optimism as you’ll ever come across. 

Thank you, Greta, for everything you brought to the table. You will be missed.

Rest in peace.