I’m Lex Alexander, a husband, father, blogger and recovering journalist in Greensboro, N.C.
I was born and grew up in Charlotte and have an English degree from Davidson College. I’ve blogged off and on since 1997. I started Blog on the Run in April 2002 and refocused it and renamed it as Blog on the Run: Reloaded in February 2006.
I worked for almost 22 years for the News & Record in Greensboro before taking a buyout in early 2009. I’ve lived and worked here since 1987. I’ve freelanced for several national magazines. I also edited the book Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century, by Bev Harris and my good friend David Allen.
I’m a lifelong Presbyterian, come from two long lines of Scottish-Irish Presbyterians and am the nephew and grand-nephew of ministers. Growing up in Charlotte, I had Jim Bakker’s PTL television ministry almost literally in my back yard for years. Not entirely coincidentally, I covered PTL’s collapse and the subsequent legal proceedings for the N&R from 1987 to 1990. I also covered religion for the N&R from 1995 to 1998, during which time I won a national award from the Religion Communications Association and was a finalist for a national award from the Religion Newswriters Association. I’m pretty good at picking out religious charlatans and I show them no mercy. If you don’t like that — and a lot of commenters don’t — well, come to Jesus, heathens.
Both lines of my family settled in North America before the Revolution, which I mention as fact, not merit. I trace my father’s line to a guy who migrated from Ulster to Pennsylvania before settling in upstate South Carolina in the early 1770s. Along with a passel of his sons and sons-in-law — his own platoon, basically — he fought in the Revolution at Cowpens, Kings Mountain and, finally, Yorktown. (I believe I am the first first-born son in that line not to have served in the military. My father, a Bronze Star winner in Korea, talked me out of it.) Some of those guys from whom I am directly descended had some brass, too. I trace my mother’s line to a then-recently-retired gentleman of fortune (read: pirate) who settled in Charleston about 1719. The men who don’t go into the ministry have tended to be (legitimate) businessmen. So far as I know, no one else in the line has been a pirate, although my son says he’d like to be. That or a mummy. Whichever.
E-mail welcome at lex dot alexander at gmail dot com
