Curtis Wilds
Memorial by Phillip Vance Smith II
Curtis’s friend
I met Curtis when I landed a job working in a print shop in a medium custody prison. I worked in an office setting while learning graphic design. Curtis worked on the floor on an industrial folder. We slept in the same cell block, but Curtis was in his fifties. I was in my early thirties. Our peer groups didn't exactly gel. He kept to himself for the most part, so I only learned a few things about him.
First, he was a die hard NC State fan. While many guys displayed pictures of family, he displayed a picture of the Wolfpack basketball team.
I learned about his serious work ethic while working with him. As a designer, it was my job to lay out print jobs on the computer so they could be printed and bound to perfection. If I messed up, the whole job could be spoiled, and we would lose our thirty percent bonus. Well, I laid up a tri-fold brochure wrong. Curtis caught the mistake after it had been printed with the wrong measurements.
Curtis called me over to his station and pulled out his line gauge (printing ruler) and showed me the mistake. The fold was a sixteenth of an inch off the mark. A sixteenth may not sound like much, but it can offset the front and back images of a brochure severely.
I panicked.
Luckily, Curtis said he could fix it. He cued up his folder and taught me how he could adjust the fold slightly to make the inside panel longer by… a sixteenth of an inch. No one ever knew the difference.
"Measure twice, cut once young blood."
It was a lesson I will always remember.
In 2020, Curtis died of the coronavirus. Sadly, he will be missed, but his legacy lives on within me.
From Mourning Our Losses:
Curtis Eugene Wilds, of Lexington, North Carolina, passed away from COVID-19 on February 17, 2021. Born on August 31, 1959, he was 61 years old when he died while incarcerated at Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina. Curtis spent almost 25 years behind bars, working in the facility’s print shop and offering advice to some of the younger men. He was the fourth person at Nash Correctional to die from the virus. We mourn his loss.
This part of the memorial was written by MOL team member Andrew Kornfeld based on Curtis’s obituary published on Echovita and correspondence with Phillip Vance Smith II.