About Charles Malone
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Charles Malone was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1947, and was reared in nearby Harnett County until his college years.  He lived in the small town of Coats – population about 1,000 – with his father, mother and his two brothers, Ted and John, attending the local public school from the first grade through high school, graduating in 1966.  For spending money, Charles worked a combination of town jobs—mowing grass and nightly janitorial work in the local doctor’s office, and in summers hired out at local farms to harvest tobacco and cotton, working one summer in a local cotton mill.

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Beginning at age 11, Charles and his family lived for a couple of summers on Wrightsville Beach, N. C., where his father, Elmer Taylor “Ted” Malone, owned and managed an apartment house on the oceanfront.  The Malone brothers helped to clean the apartments and bellhop for renters, but their idyllic experience was cut short when their father, a World War II veteran, died of a heart attack at age 45.  This tragedy forced the family to remain in Coats and sell the beach operation.  His mother, Mildred Winborne Malone, never remarried, and remained in their Harnett County home until a few years before her death in 2001.

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Charles graduated from Campbell College (now Campbell University) in 1972, following a tour of Vietnam as a military policeman and after training in river boat patrol duty in Mare Island, California.

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He attended graduate school at N. C. State University where he studied public administration, but left to join the U. S. Senate campaign of Robert B. Morgan.  During the campaign in 1974, he married Donna Hamilton, whom he’d met when both were students at Campbell College, until her death in 2019.  They have one son, David, born in 1984, who resides in Raleigh with his wife, Kara Repenning Malone, a native of Nebraska and a grandson, Henry, born in 2017.

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Charles went on to work in his father-in-law’s home improvement business for many years, but left it in his late thirties to work at  small-town newspaper, fulfilling his desire to write and do research.  After about five years in journalism, he was hired to work in the human resources for the State of North Carolina, where he stayed for 20 years, retiring in 2013.

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Charles ran for political office twice.  He was the Democratic nominee for the N. C. State Senate in 2010 and for the U. S. House of Representatives in 2012.  He is also a member of the James B. Green Masonic Lodge in Raleigh, N. C.

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