If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

NEWSPAPER HOURS are strange. If you work for an afternoon newspaper, you report at the very crack of dawn and you get off when everybody else is having lunch. If you work for a morning newspaper, you report in the afternoon and get off when everybody else is asleep. There are some good points to these hours.

Monday morning I walked out of my apartment exactly at six. Of course I remember what time it was. One doesn’t meet his destiny without recording each detail.

It was June and it was hot and it was my first day as a paid em-by-God-ployee of the Atlanta Journal sports department. Almost four years to the day since I had stood alone in that small office, hallowed be its name, and had vowed to return. Well, not only was I back, I was wearing a new sports jacket.

I had decided I needed one. My old jacket, which I bought to go through fraternity rush at Georgia, hardly seemed right for such a historic moment in my life. It was a tweed sort of thing. And the truth was, it didn’t really wow them that much when I went through fraternity rush.

I probably visited fifteen houses and only got invited back to two (I still think they probably got me mixed up with another guy). I wasn’t the biggest lizard who went through rush at the University of Georgia in 1964, but I did wear funny glasses, and I had a lot of freckles.

I went to Judson Smith’s cut-rate, factory-reject warehouse in my hometown of Moreland to buy my new sports jacket to wear my first day at the Journal. Judson dressed almost everybody in Moreland, including the town’s two preachers and the grammar-school principal. Judson had a motto: “If you want it, we got it. Let’s just hope we can find it.”

You had to drive down a dirt road to get to Judson’s place. People came from as far away as Hogansville, Grantville, and Primrose to shop there because of his bargain prices. Judson would sell you pillows and sheets, bundles of white socks, six pair for a dollar, shoes, sweaters, shirts, slacks, and if you needed a plumbing tool or a mousetrap, he’d probably have that too.

I selected a forty-long gray sports jacket from Mr. Judson’s spring collection. The only thing I could find to identify it as a factory reject was what appeared to be a faulty stitching just under the left side pocket. It was barely noticeable. For twenty-eight bucks, it was practically invisible.

I wore a pair of navy-blue slacks with my gray coat. I also wore a white shirt, a red striped tie, and a pair of brown wing-tip shoes I had shined the night before. I had slicked down my hair with Vitalis, dabbed on some English Leather cologne. And I was gorgeous. Okay, I was clean.

It had never occurred to me where I would park. Jim Minter hadn’t mentioned anything about an employee parking lot.

I drove downtown and turned up Forsyth Street, where the Journal-Constitution was located, next to Atlanta’s Union Station, still suffering from the disappearing railroad blues, as Steve Goodman put it in his brilliant “City of New Orleans,” which a lot of people recorded, but Willie Nelson did best.

I circled the block a couple of times—I still had twenty minutes before it was time to report—but I didn’t see any parking meters or parking lots. What I did see, however, was a great deal of room in the Union Station lot. Run one dilapidated passenger train a day, and there usually will be a lot of room in your parking lot. I didn’t see any sort of guard, so I figured what the hell and parked just above the entrance to the station, where I jumped into the exciting field of sales four years earlier.

Just after dawn, I walked past the station. It hadn’t opened yet. But even on the outside, it still smelled of urine, and there were newspapers and wine bottles near the entrance. The place looked like an aging contessa who had let herself go and danced in the darkness of her room alone.

Just past the entrance was some sort of little cubbyhole that looked as if it might have been a place to check baggage back when the contessa was still a fine-looking lady and the trains were spit-polished and were anxious to arrive “on the advertised”—at the precise hour and minute it had promised its passengers.

As I walked past that area, I heard a voice. It startled me. I sort of had the idea I was the only other person up in the world.

The voice said something like, “Hey, buddy.” I looked around. I was the only buddy on the premises. I looked inside the dark little hole. I could make out a human figure. It came out and said to me, “I just got off a freight train, and I haven’t eaten in two days. Can you help me?”

The man was as filthy and decrepit as the station. His hands shook. His eyes were hollow. He smelled. Urine and body odor were not my idea of a perfect start to the day. The man seemed more pitiable than menacing.

I pulled out my wallet and gave him two dollars. That left me five. The man seemed genuinely appreciative.

“Where did you come in from?” I asked him. Night trains were especially fascinating to me. I’d heard their distant horns so many nights in Moreland. I’d just lie there and wait for the train to get nearer and the horn to get louder, and then would come the clanking and rumbling as the train passed through town, highballing either south to Montgomery or north to Atlanta on the Atlanta and West Point roadway. Then the horn would grow distant again, and silence would be restored. There was always something peaceful and restful about hearing a train at night. I would lie there under my cover, and sleep was easier. One day I knew I would ride a night train out somewhere covering the Atlanta Crackers on the Southern Association circuit, maybe into New Orleans or Mobile or Little Rock. But as I stood there that morning, the Crackers had been gone from Atlanta for years, and what passenger trains were left were ghosts.

The man said he’d hopped a freight in Nashville. He seemed anxious to get on his way, which made sense. After all, he had said he hadn’t eaten in two days.

“Do you know,” he asked me then, “what time the liquor stores open?” Oh. I walked into the Journal-Constitution a much wiser individual, having learned that in desperation, hunger always comes in second to thirst.

As I rode up in the elevator, alone, to the fourth floor, I wondered, Would I ever leave this place again?

Not likely. I was there to practice the art of sports journalism, to be the best at it I could be.

I walked in. Tom McCollister, the slot man, pointed to a seat around the rim, and said for me to occupy it. He handed me a wire story that needed a headline. I wrote it. I was official. I had gathered with the eagles, like Bisher and Minter.

Bisher, as sports editor, had run the department for years until the creation of an executive-sports-editor position. Bisher had been a tyrant. There was still a large hole in the bulletin board behind the slot. Former slot man Greg Favre, currently executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, was said to have gone to Bisher’s office once for the morning ritual of being told what was wrong with his first edition. After this particular session, he had stormed out and put his fist through the board.

Nobody ever set foot in Bisher’s tiny office without fear. And nobody ever emerged from Bisher’s office with a victory. It was often said, “In that office, Bisher is unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon.”

Bisher was a North Carolina man, a robust fellow with black curly hair. His family was in the hosiery business. Bisher grew up in Denton, and as he often mentioned in his column, grew up listening to the dulcet tones of Bill Stern and the early sportcasters on an Atwater-Kent radio. We had that much in common. I had grown up listening to the dulcet tones of Harry Caray and Buddy Blattner on KMOX in St. Louis and Waite Hoyt calling the Cincinnati Reds games on WCKY, which also featured The Wayne Rainey Show, where they played a lot of gospel music and sold baby chicks “guaranteed live on arrival.” My radio came from Sears.

Bisher originally was sports editor of the Constitution. Ed Danforth, who was always referred to as “Colonel,” retired as sports editor of the Journal in the fifties, and Bisher took his place on the afternoon paper.

Bisher’s tyrannical nature (he once walked into the office and said to a staff member he particularly disliked, “Watson, I’ve got a new assignment for you—find another job.”) and his frequent absences as he covered everything that moved in sports, finally led management to the decision to allow Bisher to keep his title and continue to write his brilliant column, but to name somebody else executive sports editor to see to the staff and the daily working of the paper.

He had been born into the red clay of then-rural Fayette County to the south of Atlanta, a farm boy who learned the work ethic in his father’s fields. He graduated from the University of Georgia and went into the service post-Korea. If he had remained in the service, I am convinced we would have won in Vietnam. No man was ever so born-to-lead.

His father’s death took Minter out of the army. He had to return to Fayette County—to the land and to his mother. Both needed caring for.

His family affairs in order, he then followed his own notion to get into journalism. Ed Danforth gave him a job on the Journal sports staff, and he wound up running the show.

He was tough. And ornery. A hard man to know. But if you fell in battle, he would come back for you. In madness, he would remain calm.

I hate to jump ahead, but the following example of Minter’s toughness fits best here. He eventually left Journal sports to become managing editor of the Constitution. Reg Murphy, at the time, was editorial page editor.

Murphy, a few years later, was kidnapped by some guy with a mental problem. He stuffed Murphy into the trunk of his car, and then called the newspaper and demanded $800,000 in cash for his return.

He wanted somebody from the paper to meet him with the money. He wanted that person to come in an uncovered vehicle, and he demanded that person come alone.

Minter volunteered to take the money to the kidnapper. It was deep into winter. The Federal Reserve bank, located next door to the paper, came up with the $800,000 in cash.

Minter bundled himself up against the cold and drove to meet the kidnapper in an open jeep, not knowing what might eventually happen to Murphy or himself.

As it turned out, Minter was not harmed and the kidnapper, later captured, let Murphy go.

At a press conference later, a TV reporter asked Minter what he felt like, leaving the newspaper with $800,000 of Cox money.

Minter demanded good writing. He demanded good layout. There was a way he thought the Journal staff should write, and there was a way he thought the Journal sports section should look, and he would not allow anything that didn’t fit the mold.

He wanted news. He demanded news. The Constitution, despite the fact it was under the same roof and management umbrella as the Journal, was Minter’s, and thus Bisher’s, mortal enemy. Better to have died a small boy than to walk in one morning, pick up the Constitution, and find your adversary had broken a story on you.

We covered the Southeastern Conference with bright and shining light. Nothing escaped us. If the papers in Birmingham, where the conference offices were located, broke an SEC story first, Minter would take it as a personal offense.

The Journal and Constitution were combined on Sundays, but the Journal was responsible for producing the paper. During football season, we covered, with writers and photographers, everything in the South that put on a helmet.

Photographers would fly into, say, New Orleans for a Georgia Tech–Tulane game early. They would shoot the first quarter, then jump on a plane and get the photographs back by early evening. The next day, there would appear a small airplane in the corner of the photographs selected, informing the reader this wasn’t any nickel-and-dime operation.

Georgia Tech’s legendary head coach Bobby Dodd probably knew how to handle sportswriters and sports pages better than anybody else of his day. If a reporter covering Tech couldn’t think of an angle, Dodd would give him one. If Tech was on the road and the photo deadline was tight, Dodd had a unique way of making the photographer’s job easier. He would find out what side of the field the Journal-Constitution’s photographer was stationed, and run all the plays on Tech’s first offensive series toward that side.

The Braves had moved into Atlanta from Milwaukee in 1966. Atlanta was also granted an expansion National Football League franchise the same year, and the St. Louis Hawks of the National Basketball Association came to Atlanta in ’68. The city even got a franchise in the North American Soccer League. Atlanta was finally a major-league town.

Compared to today, however, we were woefully short on people and space. Today, most big-league sport departments have wide-open pages, a staff that works inside to produce the paper, and then a covey of writers to cover their various beats. Inside people don’t write. Outside people don’t edit, and appear only occasionally in the office.

At the Journal in 1968, you worked both inside and outside, and there was no such thing as overtime (Hold that thought. It becomes important later).

Wilt Browning covered the Braves, Hyland had the Hawks. Darrell Simmons covered the Falcons. Teague Jackson was the golf writer, Bill Robinson had auto racing and outdoors. Bill Clark and I covered the colleges, Bill Whitley had the high schools. Joe Litsch helped him.

Tom McCollister was assistant sports editor. He rein the slot four mornings a week, then worked Saturday nights producing the Sunday morning edition. He had the worst job on the staff. Basically, what he did was get up at four in the morning four days a week and then work from two in the afternoon until the next morning on Saturday, and if there was anything wrong in the sports section, it was his fault. He is still alive, incidentally.

Bisher wrote his column and still raised hell if there was anything he didn’t like in the section. He had accepted the fact he no longer oversaw the day-to-day operation, but did not accept the fact he wasn’t supposed to make everybody’s life miserable when he spotted what he considered an error in spelling, fact, style, layout, or judgment.

Minter battled Bisher’s tantrums and did the hiring and firing. He also gave out the assignments, made up the work schedule, signed expense accounts, reworked the design of the first edition if he didn’t like it, covered college football Saturdays, and broke news. He was the first to write that Norm Van Brocklin was coming to the Falcons as head coach.

He got that story when the wife of a Constitution reporter bragged to Minter’s wife, Anne, that her husband had confirmed Van Brocklin was coming to Atlanta, and was going to write the story in the Wednesday morning paper. Minter came out with it Tuesday afternoon.

Minter was not above any sort of treachery that would net him a scoop. When Georgia was trying to hire a new athletic director, he hid in a room next to where university officials were meeting and planned to listen to what was taking place through a heating and air conditioning duct. Unfortunately, he was noticed by a latecomer to the meeting and his cover was blown. He was first with the story later anyway.

Minter had lost some horses in the late sixties. John Logue had covered baseball and college football and was a brilliant writer, a well-read man whose literary allusions on the sports pages were wonderful. But he had decided to leave and join the staff of Southern Living in Birmingham. He has since become a highly regarded editor and writer of mystery novels.

Lee Walburn was gone, too. Walburn had also covered the Crackers. When the Braves moved into town, Bisher called him into his office with instructions on how to cover a major-league spring training camp. Walburn announced his intention to take his young family with him to West Palm, where the Braves trained.

Bisher was incredulous. How could a man do a job on spring training when his wife and children were around? Walburn recalls Bisher saying, “Lee, you’ve just got to make a choice—it’s either your family or baseball.”

Luckily for Lee, before he had to give his final answer, the Braves hired him to run their public-relations department. Walburn later opened his own successful public-relations firm, sold out to J. Walter Thompson, and is currently editor of Atlanta Magazine. He is still married, as well.

So here we were that June morning of 1968. My history of falling in with an odd crowd was continuing:

—Frank Hyland, the basketball writer, was in his late twenties. He was originally from Minnesota. He smoked nonfiltered Camels. He had a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. Frank enjoyed arguing abut any subject, and there were few subjects about which he didn’t have a strong opinion.

I think Frank was always happiest when he was leaning against a bar with a beer in his hand debating who was the better player, Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain. Frank and Bill Clark spent hours on the issue. Frank was a Bill Russell man. Clark defended Chamberlain. Once, I got into the argument and mentioned the fact I was a Bob Pettit man. Frank said, “You have the mind of an earthworm.”

—Wilt Browning, the baseball writer, looked a lot like a teacher I had in high school. He had false teeth. He logged a million miles or so traveling around the country with the Atlanta Braves. How he kept his sanity, I’m not certain. He was the consummate professional. He could compose a three-page Braves story at a manual typewriter and never make a typing error. He wrote one of the greatest headlines I’ve ever seen.

At six-thirty on a Monday morning, Wilt was in the office doing his story on the previous Sunday’s Braves game, which they had lost, even then a redundancy.

Wilt’s angle to the game was that Mike McCormick, who had pitched for the winning San Francisco Giants, might have an outside chance of winning the Cy Young Award as the National League’s outstanding pitcher of the year. McCormick, getting up there in baseball years, had told Wilt, however, that he believed he was too old to hold up during the hot months of August and September.

I was in the slot. I couldn’t get a headline I really liked. Finally, Wilt, who didn’t have to sit at the desk during baseball season since he was working twelve-hour days anyway, sat down at the rim and said, “Let me try.”

—Bill Robinson, the outdoor editor and auto-racing writer, had nine children. He never came into the office on time. Seven o’clock, no Robinson. But he always had a great excuse.

Once, he rolled a flat tire into the elevator and then into the sports department to show proof of his latest reason for being late. Legend had it he always kept a flat in his trunk for just such an emergency.

The story went that Greg Favre finally had enough of Robinson being late and told him, “Robinson, if you’re late one more time, you’re fired. I don’t care what your excuse is.”

The next morning: Seven, no Robinson. Seven-thirty, no Robinson. Finally, he strolled in at eight, wearing a pair of jeans, a pajama top, and a Pure Oil racing cap.

“You’re fired, Robinson,” he said, “but just for the record, what’s your excuse this time?”

“You know I’ve been married nine years and I’ve got eight children,” he explained. “This morning was the first time in our marriage my wife had a period, and I had to fix breakfast for the kids because she was too sick to get out of bed.”

Robinson was a handsome man, then in his late thirties, whose eyes always seemed to be half-closed. He was originally from Alabama, and held unbending allegiance to the university. Robinson lobbied during the autumn to be assigned to Alabama football games. He covered the Crimson Tide in a Sugar Bowl once and was so thrilled at an Alabama upset, he began writing about the “Crimson Cobras” and the “Alabama Red Snappers,” and he forgot to include a final score in his game story.

With the exception of Bisher, Robinson was probably the best pure writer on the staff. I still remember one of his leads from a Daytona 500:

“Nose-to-nose, hubcap-to-hubcap, Cale Yarborough and Richard Petty went into the final lap at Daytona International Speedway as the seconds ticked away, like so many staccato drumbeats.”

The problem, however, was nobody was ever quite certain if Robinson had actually attended the event he was writing about. There was the time Minter got mad at Robinson for some sort of misdeed and assigned him to cover a high school football play-off game in the north Georgia mountains on a rainy, cold Friday night, a horrid fate for a veteran sportswriter.

I was in the slot the following Saturday morning. Naturally, Robinson was late. When he finally arrived at the office, I said, “How was the game?”

I watched him as he sat down at his desk and opened the morning Constitution. I had the feeling then that Robinson hadn’t been to the game and was going to rewrite the Constitution account of the game.

Unfortunately for him, something had happened to the Constitution’s coverage, and all it carried about Robinson’s game was a one-paragraph story.

I had laid out a page with a sizable hole for Robinson’s article. I also needed a score-by-quarters, who made the touchdowns, and final game statistics. The Constitution didn’t have that, either.

He wrote a remarkable story. There were phrases such as “... North Georgia’s hills were alive with the sound of sweet touchdown music” and “... the swivel-hipped halfback left tacklers grabbing nothing but the sopping-wet night air . . .”

He also typed out a line score and statistics. Later, he admitted to me he had not been to the game and had made up the statistics. We never received a complaint.

But that wasn’t always the case. Robinson wrote a twice-a-week outdoor column. One Sunday, he waxed poetic about a fishing trip with an old pal in South Georgia. According to Robinson’s column, the big bass were literally jumping into the boat, and Robinson quoted his buddy through the story.

The following week, I picked up the phone and a man asked for Robinson. He wasn’t there.

“Well,” said the man, “would you just mention to him he was fishing with a ghost. Ol’ [whatever Robinson’s pal was named] died two months ago.”

—Teague Jackson, the golf writer. He was from the Midwest. His father had worked for the Chicago Tribune. Teague always referred to it as “the Trib,” as in, “That’s not the way they do it at the Trib,” which became a catchphrase in the department.

“Hey, Frank, rewrite the National League roundup and put the Dodgers in the lead,” McCollister would say to Hyland.

He was a large man, also in his late twenties, who seemed to be in a constant state of dishevelment. You could dress him in a Bill Blass tuxedo, and in three minutes his tie would be crooked and his shirt would be out in back.

Atlanta’s newspapers had a history of great golf writers. O. B. Keeler had been the Boswell of Bobby Jones. Ed Miles, who retired shortly before I joined the Journal staff, had been there for golf’s explosion with Arnold Palmer and television.

Teague was familiar with the tradition, and fancied himself as another link in the chain. But his naiveté kept getting in the way.

Jack Nicklaus’s father had died. Teague spent the morning trying to get Nicklaus on the phone. Finally, he did.

We were at very close quarters. Everybody could hear the conversation that ensued:

After Nicklaus apparently had nailed down the identity of the party with whom he was speaking, Teague said, “I’d like to offer you my condolences on your father. I know just how you feel.”

The best thing about being a golf writer is they play a lot of golf tournaments at nice resorts. Teague was on the phone one morning with a PR type with the women’s tour that was to stop at a course on Georgia’s coast.

“Yes,” he was saying, “I think I should come and cover your tournament. Let me ask the boss if I can. I’m sure it will be okay.”

Teague put down the phone and walked over to Minter’s desk. Minter was busy. You didn’t bother Minter when he was busy.

“Jim,” he began, “would it be okay if I went to Sea Island next week to cover . . .?”

“But,” Teague argued, “I think the Journal ought to be represented. . . .”

Teague went back to the phone. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the bosses here at the Journal seem to think your tournament is not important enough for me to . . .”

As he rambled on, Minter got out of his chair, walked over to Teague’s desk, took the phone out of his hand, spoke into it, and said, “Teague can’t go.”

Frank didn’t like Teague. It all began when he was out of change and asked Teague for a dime so he could get a cup of coffee out of the machine in the hall. Teague gave him the dime, but as soon as Frank came into the office the next morning, Teague said to him, “Frank, do you have the dime I loaned you yesterday?”

So Frank reached into his pocket and forked up the dime. Teague reached into his pocket and pulled out one of those little coin purses and put the dime safely back into it.

Teague went to Augusta to cover the Masters. A couple of days before the tournament began, there had been a testimonial dinner for Ben Hogan. Teague wrote a story about it. His lead boggled the mind:

AUGUSTA—Somewhere in a murky, never-never land, a Hawk circles slowly, licking his wounds, pain gnawing at his vitals as he hurts where only a real man can hurt.

They called Ben Hogan the Hawk, see, and he had been in a car wreck, and he was a bit of a recluse, and . . . And nobody on the desk had any idea what Teague was trying to say. We didn’t run the article.

While we waited for the first edition to arrive back up in the office, Frank took Teague’s piece, sat down at his typewriter, and converted Teague’s story into a one-act play. He called it “The Hawk: An Original Feature Story by Teague Jackson, Adapted for the Stage by Frank Hyland.”

I played the Hawk and pretended to circle slowly in a murky never-never land. Darrell Simmons made noises he thought sounded like something gnawing on a vital, Robinson played the “veteran pro” Teague had quoted in his story. Frank was the narrator.

We put on the play for Minter, who thought it was a riot. Minter was still reeling, as a matter of fact, from a memo Teague had sent to him a few weeks earlier.

Teague had asked for a day off to go to the dentist and then asked for a “sick day,” as he put it.

“How in the hell,” Minter had asked, “does Teague know two weeks before that he’s going to be sick on a certain day?”

—Bill Whitley, the high school writer. We called him “Doctor Whitley” because whenever he called a restaurant to make a reservation, that’s the way he referred to himself.

“Yes,” he would begin, “I’d like a table for two at nine. Fine. Put it in the name of Whitley, Doctor Whitley.”

“You always get better service if they think you are a doctor,” the doctor would say. He was short and round and balding and your basic southern gentlemen. When he laughed, he turned red in the face and lighted up a room.

He was a native Atlantan and a graduate of Georgia. He was remembered on campus for getting into his MG after an afternoon of drinking beer in the legendary Old South tavern downtown and losing control of his car. It finally came to rest, with him in it, in the Athens bus station. It had gone through the doors to the waiting room, as a matter of fact, and when the dust and glass had settled, Doctor Whitley looked up, smiled and said, “One way to Savannah, please.”

The doctor was a Civil War expert. He had seen Gone With the Wind about four hundred times and could do practically all the dialogue from the movie.

He and his wife, Miss Margaret, of whom he said, “I brought her down from the hills of North Georgia and put silk underdrawers on her,” had a daughter. Her name? Miss Scarlett, of course.

—Joe Litsch, who helped Whitley with the high schools. He was feisty, opinioned, and had a biting sense of humor.

He walked into the office one morning and somebody said, “Did you hear Freddie Steinmark died?”

Freddie Steinmark was a Texas football player who was stricken with cancer. Before he died, one of his legs had been amputated.

When Litsch was told of his death, he replied, “Well, hell, he had one foot in the grave anyway.”

—Darrell Simmons, the pro-football writer, looked like a young Burl Ives. He had come to the Journal from Jacksonville, Florida. He smoked Lucky Strikes, spoke so softly it was often difficult to hear what he was saying, but he did do one helluva job sounding like vitals being gnawed in his performance of Teague’s Ben Hogan article. I can’t spell the sound Darrell made, but I was impressed by his creativity.

Darrell had the toughest beat on the staff because he had to deal with Falcons head coach Norman Van Brocklin, who hated sportswriters. Van Brocklin thought all sportswriters were communists, and his phobia was legendary.

When a soccer-style foreign kicker beat the Falcons with a last-second field goal, Darrell asked Van Brocklin what he thought when he saw the kick was good. He answered, “I was thinking they ought to tighten the goddamn immigration laws in this country.”

—Bill Clark. He was a tall, handsome man in his thirties. I forget what brand of cigarettes he smoked. I think perhaps menthol, though. Didn’t we all smoke in 1968?

He had all the college contacts. He was smart and slick and sly. And he helped me. The first time I was ever on Bisher’s Football Review television program, he said to me, “Relax and don’t argue with Bisher.”

But Bill Clark would turn the place upside down for a time. I mentioned there was no such thing as overtime at the Journal. Once a week, you filled out a time sheet. Under each of the five days you worked, you simply wrote an 8, and the total was always 40.

Bill decided that was wrong. He began to ask other staff members privately if they thought they were being taken advantage of.

Bill Clark figured there was the time he spent in the office, the time he spent driving to various events, the time he spent covering them, the time he spent eating and drinking with various sources, the time he spent on the phone at night tracking down news, and even, I suppose, the time he spent arguing with Frank about Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain.

Clark began to push for overtime pay. He wrote memos. He argued with Minter. He pushed too hard. Minter fired him.

Each member of the staff was called in to testify at the ensuing trial. It was understood that nobody would take Clark’s side. Nobody did. We were loyal to the death, not to mention cross-examination.

“Did you help cover the Atlanta Golf Classic on June so-and-so?” he asked me.

“So you left your home at nine in the morning, and you were on duty until nine that night. That’s twelve hours. How many hours did you put down on your time sheet that you worked that day?”

He finally got me to admit I always put down eight hours, no matter how many I worked.

“If I had wanted to punch a time clock,” I managed to get in before the attorney could stop me, “I’d have tried to find a job on the assembly line at the Ford plant.”

I got to see ball games and golf tournaments for free and got my byline in the Atlanta Journal sports section, by God. Wasn’t that and $160 big ones a week enough?

I naturally expected to succeed him as the head college-editor guy. But I had made another mistake, which would send my career in a decidedly different direction. It also changed my life drastically.

I had learned all about graphics and layout and how to get a sports section in on time in Athens. Guys who wanted to cover ball games and write about them were easy to find. Not so, fools who would take on the task of putting the sports section together and then head to the composing room to make certain it got in on time and was relatively mistake-free.

McCollister, the assistant sports editor and slot man, got one day a week off because he worked Saturday night putting out the Sunday edition.

That meant he had to have a replacement that one weekday he had off. Several other members of the staff filled in for him on that day. Minter thought everybody should have at least some idea of how the paper got put together every day.

I had been at the paper about a month when he said to me, “You’ve had some layout experience, haven’t you?”

A week later, I sat in the slot for the first time. I had copied the Journal’s layout style in Athens. I liked pages where photos and type were displayed horizontally, I didn’t think type that ran up-and-down, willy-nilly was very attractive.

When the first edition of my first Journal section arrived at Minter’s desk, he took a long look at it and then said to me, “You know how we want to look.”

Soon after Clark left, McCollister took a job as public-relations director for the Hawks. Minter took me across the street to the Eagle Cafe one morning for coffee. I thought he was going to promote me to Clark’s job.