One of the Neighbors' Children

This autobiography by a former newspaper reporter and editor in the South gets off to a slow start with a genealogy of the Mason family and an introduction to the town of Mebane, N.C., population 693 in the 1920s. The book never gets much better. Mason, unfortunately, thinks that routine stories about drunken bachelor parties, quaint local eccentrics and idiosyncratic editors make interesting reading. He does have a few entertaining, if provincial, tales to tell, howeverone about the way the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot took credit for ""covering'' the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, when the paper had actually bollixed the story completely. But, all in all, this is an inconsequential, albeit amiable, volume. (March 31)