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

THIS WAS TO BE my fourth promotion in my young newspaper career. I had been promoted to sports editor of the Athens Daily News, to assistant sports editor of the Atlanta Journal, and then to executive sports editor of the Journal. Now, my managing editor, Durwood McAllister, a nice man everybody called “Mac,” wanted me to leave sports and become associate city editor of the paper.

“I want you to do the same thing on the news side you did in sports,” Mac announced.

“We’ve got too much government news and not enough people news,” he said. “I like the way you emphasize people on the sports pages.”

Here was his plan: I would move to the news side and work under the present city editor, a rotund individual named Bob Johnson who was always writing me memos telling me what he thought I should do in sports.

“Call me buttinski . . .” his memos would begin, and then he would make his suggestions, all of which I ignored. It wasn’t that Bob Johnson was a bad person or anything. I just figured I knew all there was to know about producing a sports section by that time, and if I wasn’t going to listen to Bisher, I certainly wasn’t going to listen to somebody who spent his days editing stories about dull public-service commission hearings.

After six months as associate city editor, Mac explained, I would have the news side operation down, and I would then become city editor, replacing Bob Johnson. I was not clear on what was going to happen to Bob Johnson at that point, but, to be honest, that wasn’t my major concern.

My major concern was that I really wanted no part of the Journal news side, which seemed to have the imagination of a piece of Velveeta cheese.

The graphics were terrible. The front page always looked the same—as if all the type, heads, and photos were put into a shotgun and fired at the page. Very rarely was there anything on the front page that resembled any effort to give the reader something he or she could enjoy. Vietnam certainly was front-page news, but it seemed to me the Journal ran the same lead headline every day:

In fact, I distinctly remember the first edition coming up one day with the headlines transposed. It read:

There was one time, however, the news editor, who designed the front and decided what went where, did attempt to put something on the banner that didn’t have to do with Vietnam or a new sewer system for some suburban Atlanta county.

Harold Lloyd, the comedian who made ’em howl back in the early days of movies by hanging off buildings, died at age 408 or something. The Journal news editor, Carl Newton, who was nearing retirement, was a big Harold Lloyd fan. Maybe 15 percent of our readership had ever heard of Harold Lloyd. Carl put Harold Lloyd dying as the lead story in the first edition. (It went inside the paper in the second edition.)

We often laughed at the news side in the sports department. Some reporter actually did a series on the sewer system in one of the suburban counties that ran longer than a pregnancy. “Art Carney couldn’t talk that long about sewers,” Frank Hyland observed.

The sports pages and the news pages looked as though they were from two different newspapers. Our sports pages were tricked up with borders and big photo and type set in different widths. I was convinced that good layout was important. I smoked Marlboros because I liked the way the pack looked. I wanted my pages packaged well, too. In the last several years, newspaper graphics have changed dramatically. USA Today prompted practically every paper in the country to go to a large color weather map. And there are few papers left (The New York Times being one) that don’t have color on the front page as well as modern graphics.

So Mac said, “I want you to do the same thing on the news side you’ve done in sports.” But the problem was, I couldn’t. The city editor certainly could assign stories and edit copy as he saw fit. But the city editor had nothing to do with the layout of the pages or where stories were placed. That was the news editor’s job.

What I really wanted to be was executive news editor. I wanted control of it all. Give me the same control I had on sports, and in fact, I’d do the exact same thing on the news side I’d done in sports.

I didn’t want it. I knew I didn’t want it. I had the job I wanted, and I wanted to keep it for a long time. Going to the news side seemed like being transferred to Newark.

But what if I did eventually get to do what needed to be done— redesign the news section? What if it won plaudits? Would I then be able to one day move into a managing editor’s job?

Power. Big-time power. And big bucks, too. I was convinced the managing editor made at least thirty thousand dollars a year—all the money on earth.

I took the job. I think the reason I did was because of a flaw in my personality that makes me never want to disappoint anybody. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint my mother, which was the primary reason I never stole a hubcap or hung out at the pool hall and always studied hard. I hadn’t wanted to leave writing and go to the slot for Minter, either, but I didn’t want to disappoint him. And Mac was a nice man. He was impressed by my work. I didn’t want to disappoint him, either.

The new associate city editor of the Atlanta Journal started work Monday morning at six-thirty. By eight, I knew I had made a horrible mistake.

I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody I’d be moving up to city editor in six months, but I think Bob Johnson knew something was up. He didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms.

I sat on the city-desk rim. Johnson was at the head of it. Three other assistant city editors were seated around the rim. I made four. Bob Johnson handed me a story from the education reporter. It had something to do with an important Board of Education meeting coming up. I read it. It was boring. I repaired a little grammar and punctuation, but that was about it. The story went into the city-desk box, then a copy person picked it up and sent it down to the composing room.

Bob Johnson handed me another story. It was about some ordinance the city council had passed. Does anybody really read this stuff?

Carl Newton, the news editor, sat at a desk behind me. Charles Salter, the photo editor, who also wrote about fishing on the outdoor page, sat next to him. What will follow soon is the dialogue they had my first day, deciding on a photograph for the front page of the Atlanta Journal.

* Which photo could simply stand on its own? Say you got something off the wire that was unusual, a jockey falling off a horse, a football player turned completely upside down by a hard tackle, a collision in an auto race. The story that accompanied it may not be that important, but the photo was so unusual, it would tell a story of its own.

* What photo would reproduce well? We tried to stay away from anything that would come out fuzzy or in any way difficult to distinguish. Newspaper photographic reproduction has become much better in the past ten years, so this is less important now. But we are talking nearly two decades ago here.

* Was the photo a cliché? Basketball armpits, baseball player slides into second, football piles of laundry, golfer out of the sand trap. Clichés all.

NEWTON: Cholly, get me a two-by-six for the front.

SALTER: Here’s an interesting photograph, Carl. Look and see what you think.

NEWTON: Dammit, Cholly. I don’t have the time to look.

SALTER: Well, Carl, how about this one? I think it’ll reproduce quite well, and look how the rays of the sun are pouring down on the water.

NEWTON: Dammit, Cholly. I don’t care what the damn thing looks like. Just give me a two-by-six and go fishing.

What would have happened if during World War II Newton had asked Salter for a two-by-six and refused to look? Salter might have throw out the Iwo Jima flag-raising for a picture of a guy holding a fish.

Newspapers don’t call photo captions by that name. They are called “cutlines.” I was a strong believer in good cutlines. I liked Newsweek’s style. Let’s say Newsweek was carrying a story about Leonid Brezhnev. They might include a photo of the late Soviet premier making a speech to the Politburo. But Newsweek would never write a cutline that read, “Soviet premier Brezhnev makes a speech.” It should be quite obvious to the person looking at the photograph that Brezhnev, with his mouth open behind a podium was, in fact, doing just that. What Newsweek would do was identify the person in the photo, follow that with a colon, and then have a line that makes reference to the main thrust of the accompanying article. Maybe:

“BREZHNEV: Are the Soviets softening?”

Over in sports, we all awaited the spring cliché photo—the picture of a college coed sitting under a tree on campus enjoying the recent warm weather on the news side.

The cutline would always say: “Agnes Scott student sits under tree on campus and enjoys the recent warm weather. “

I can see that. You don’t have to tell me in a cutline. Give me this: “SPRING FOR A DAY: Agnes Scott student greets that lucky old sun.“

Frank Hyland and I were the overseers of outlines in sports. We would cringe if a bad one got past the desk. Take something like Jack Nicklaus hitting out of a trap on the second hole at Augusta National during the Masters.

BAD CUTLINE: “Jack Nicklaus hits out of sand trap on second hole at Augusta during third round of Masters.“

IMPROVED OUTLINE FOR THE NEXT EDITION: “M R . SANDMAN: Jack Nicklaus finds his way off the beach and into Masters third-round lead.”

When the Braves actually shocked the world by winning the 1969 Western Division pennant in the National League, Minter and I worked all night putting out the first edition for the next day. He had me write the outlines for the many photos.

Our main photo on page 1 was a picture of Brave outfielder Rico Carty, who called himself “the Beeg Boy,” pouring champagne over the head of Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen, who had been the main force behind getting the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta.

“BUBBLING OVER: The Beeg Boy and the mayor celebrate the miracle on Capitol Avenue.”

When the paper came up, Minter looked it over and said to me, “You’re a great cutline writer.”

After the first edition was finished on the Journal city desk, the next order of business was to decide what we wanted the only female member to go and fetch us for breakfast. Today, of course, they would look at us and say, “Go get your own goddamned doughnuts.” But we’re still in the early seventies here, so each morning she dutifully went for doughnuts, sausage biscuits, and even an occasional box of Krystal cheeseburgers, which we came to know affectionately as “gutbombers.” After we ate, the first edition would come up, a few changes would be made for the final, I would edit a few more stories about a county commission meeting here and a mayoral press conference there, and I would be on the tennis court by one-thirty.

I was reading a small wire story in the first edition. It was about a Georgia man who had been found shot dead in front of his estranged girlfriend’s house in Atlanta. The man turned out to be a high school classmate of mine. I hadn’t seen him since we graduated in 1964.

I called a friend back home to ask if he knew anything about the circumstances. He informed me there was a lot of talk around town about our former classmate going around saying about how he had been involved with the CIA and had been heavily decorated during the Vietnam War. “Nobody is real sure,” he said, “if anything of that is true, or if he is lying or suffering from delusions of grandeur.”

I assigned a reporter to do the funeral. It turned out to be one amazing story. There was a friend at the funeral who broke up during the service and finally spilled the beans about what had happened.

My classmate hadn’t been decorated in Vietnam, and certainly had no connections with the CIA. He had made his stories up apparently to impress the folks back home, and his girlfriend, who had eventually jilted him.

He had decided to try to win her back by having her find him with a bullet wound in her front yard. He would tell her he had been shot by the CIA because, as the old movies used to say, he “knew too much.”

The friend would drive. My classmate, upon nearing the girl’s house, would take a small-caliber pistol and put a large paperback novel next to his abdomen. He would then fire a bullet through the novel. He figured the novel would slow the bullet sufficiently so that it would not be a serious enough wound to kill him or inflict real damage. But he would be shot, and his girlfriend would feel sorry for her brave lover and take him back.

He fired the shot. The friend drove to the front of the girl’s house, took the paperback away so nothing looked amiss, and my classmate rolled out onto her lawn. That’s where he bled to death.

I said to Mac, “We need stories like this. It’s what we looked for in sports. If we just throw it inside with no graphics, it will be lost.”

I knew that would be what would happen to the story—my first on the city side—if I didn’t go directly to Mac. Carl Newton would set it in one column, put a 36-point head on it, and bury it on 8-A.

I managed to get a photo of the dead man from his family. Then I managed to get Mac to allow me to lay it out on the top of page 1. Newton could fill in the bottom.

I blew the picture up to two columns. I set the story in two-column, indented type so I could set it off with a border.

You have to read a story under that sort of headline, don’t you? You put in “death” and you put in “lover,” and you put in “CIA,” and it’s a cinch.

Minter called down from the Constitution. “You have anything to do with page one today?”

I thought, Maybe Mac will see now. Maybe he’ll go ahead and make me city editor and let me lay out page 1, and this will be fun after all.

One day, President Carter decided to grant amnesty to the draft dodgers who had fled to Canada during Vietnam. And who happened to be in Montreal with the Braves? Hyland.

I didn’t ask anybody, I just called Frank at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, woke him up at eight o’clock, and said, “Frank, how about one for old times’ sake?”

“What the hell do you want?” he replied. “I didn’t get to bed until four.”

“Listen to me, Frank, I really need this. Carter has granted amnesty to the draft dodgers in Canada. Go find some and get their reactions. Find out how long they’ve been away, what they’ve been doing, and how they feel about having a chance to go home.”

I had to promise to buy him a case of Heineken. Four hours later, the Western Union telex fires up in the wire room. It’s Frank with a great piece. He found a bar—naturally—where American draft dodgers were celebrating the news. He sent back a remarkable human interest story. I got that piece on page 1, too, and I thought, Am I a great scrambler or what? The news breaks, and I notice the Braves are in Montreal, and I get our guy there to do a firsthand, exclusive piece.

“You should never have gotten Hyland to do that story. It sent a message to the news staff that you’re still hung up on sports and want to use sportswriters to do stories from the real world. It wasn’t good for morale.”

I sort of gave up after that. Maybe if I hung around ten or fifteen more years, I might wind up with some control over the news side, but I didn’t want ten or fifteen more years of somebody telling me I’d made a mistake by improvising and getting a firsthand, human account of a major story. First, I had figured there was no way I’m ever going to get permission to send a news staffer to Montreal. Resources were a little slim in those days. Second, I know Frank’s got all day because the Braves are playing a night game and all he would do is sleep until noon anyway. Third, I knew Frank, regardless of how much he would complain about having to get out of bed, went after any story full bore, and fourth, I knew Minter would read the story and ask his desk, “Why in the hell didn’t we call Minshew [Wayne, the Constitution’s baseball writer] and get him to do it first?”

I lasted six months. There was no way I could ask to go back to sports. The new executive sports editor, Don Boykin, was quite capable.

Kay and I were living in a suburban apartment complex by then, and she had taken a job working in the resident manager’s office. What she got paid was we didn’t have to pay any rent.

We didn’t have many expenses. There was a car payment. (I had bought a new 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix, blue with white seat covers. The ’68 Cutlass, as happened often with my cars, sort of fell apart. The glove box wouldn’t shut anymore, I couldn’t pick up FM on my radio, and the ashtray was full, so I traded it in.)

I also now had a part-time correspondent job with Sports Illustrated. They paid me around eight thousand dollars a year.

So I decided I would become a free-lance writer. I didn’t know much about how to become a free-lance writer, but it is one of those occupations you can go into just by saying you are one.

The first time anybody asked me what I did, I answered, “I’m a free-lance writer.” That made me a free-lance writer. I didn’t mention I hadn’t sold anything yet or didn’t have an assignment yet, but what difference did that make?

There are a lot of occupations like that. Screenwriters fall into the same category. So do artists, poets, midnight gynecologists (otherwise known as “pickup artists”), environmentalists, adventurers, and political analysts.

I met a guy at a party one night, and he had a lot to say about a lot of things, and I was curious as to what he did. “Are you in the media?” I asked him.

Later, I found out he was unemployed and just went to parties and had a lot to say.

It’s sort of like Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson is the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but I don’t think he has a church. Nor does he go around with a tent, healing people. Jesse Jackson is basically a free-lance “black leader,” as in “black leader Jesse Jackson arrived in town today to address,” etc., etc.

Who pays Jesse Jackson? Somebody must. On Fridays, where does he go to get his check? Who signs it? Who buys his expensive suits? Who pays for the chartered Lear?

Mac tried to talk me into staying at the paper. I really didn’t get into the fact I saw no future ahead of me. I just said I’d always wanted to be a free-lance writer, and I walked out of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building six years after I had walked in as a new employee.

For about the first three months, being a free-lance writer was a lot of fun. I would get up around ten in the morning, drink coffee, eat breakfast, and read the paper. Around noon, I would ease over to the DeKalb County Tennis Center and play tennis until it got dark.

I found out something interesting during that period. If you don’t have a real job, you can save a lot of money. First, I didn’t need to buy any more shirts, slacks, ties, or suits. All I ever wore were tennis shoes and tennis shirts. I ate lunch at the tennis center. Hot dog and Coke. Dollar and a quarter. No expensive downtown lunches. I didn’t have to drive downtown anymore, so I saved a lot on gasoline money.

I continued to do the SI work, but I was yet to break in as a paid free-lance writer. I did buy one of these writers’ guides that gives you the name of every magazine on earth and tells you how much they pay for free-lance material. There was an Atlanta Falcons football player who was a big deal in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I sent off a letter to some Baptist publication suggesting I do a piece on him. I never heard back, and later I found out some out-of-town group had wanted this player to speak to a high school FCA group, and he had asked the guy who called him if he would get him a hooker while he was in town.

I was putting a lot of spin on my second serve by now, and my backhand volley, which had been very weak, was improving.

Around the fourth month, I sort of got the feeling like you do the fourth or fifth day you’re out of school sick. It’s fun to start with. You get to sleep late, and your mother feeds you in bed and brings you ginger ale. But then you start missing your friends and what’s going on at school. It’s amazing how quickly you can get well when you reach that point.

I had stayed in touch with Minter. Finally, after five months as an unpaid free-lance writer, I sort of hinted I might be interested in coming to work for him on the Constitution.

We agreed almost completely on what a newspaper should have in it and what it should look like. So Minter hired me and gave me one of the great titles—special-assignments editor. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, and neither was he. We would make it up as we went along.

Durwood McAllister, so I heard, believed my leaving the Journal had been a ploy cooked up by Minter and me, so he could get me to the Constitution. It wasn’t. Jim just said to me, “You belong back at the paper. I’ll find a way to get you back.”

The first job Minter gave me as special assignments editor was to improve the Constitution sports section. The guys over there loved that, especially the executive sports editor, my rival for so many years, Mickey McCarthy. He saw my piddling with his section as an insult, not to mention a signal that I would eventually replace him.

All I really wanted to do was clean up their layout a little, get a little more organization going, and stop veteran Charlie Roberts, a wonderful man, from writing such things as “. . . he chortled with a mock shudder,” whatever that meant. Wonderful men can still write some strange things.

Henry Aaron had hit one out against Cincinnati, but outfielder Pete Rose jumped above the fence and caught the ball momentarily. But when he slammed against the fence, the ball came out of his glove and was falling back into the playing field. Rose somehow got back to his feet and leapt and caught the ball before it hit the ground, saving the game.

Charlie wrote, “Pete Rose will tell you the best defense for de fence is defense.” It’s not “somewhat marred,” but it’s close.

So I piddled here and there with the sports section, and then Minter sent me to the features section to work on it.

The veteran television writer was about to retire. He had one of the great tricks for getting out of the office early. Each day, he would wear a coat and a hat in, and he would hang them on a rack in the features department.

I could never find this guy, but I’d see his hat and coat were hanging in the office and I would figure he was around somewhere. I’d tell myself I’d catch up with him later, then I’d forget about whatever it was I wanted to ask him or get him to do.

What I found out was that he had an extra coat and hat he kept in his desk. When he wanted to leave early, he would wait until nobody was watching, then he would put the dummy coat and hat on the rack, put his other hat and coat on, and split. I would have done something about this, but Minter said, “He doesn’t have but three months to go. Might as well forget about it.”

There were two brilliant young writers in the Constitution features department. One was Gregory Jaynes, who wrote a marvelous series on the North Georgia mountains. He later moved on to The New York Times. Art Harris was on the staff, too. Art was in his early twenties, and he had some sort of condition that caused all his hair to fall out. Art didn’t have any hair on his head, nor did he have any eyebrows. In fact, he looked exactly like Telly Savalas, so everywhere he went, people called him “Kojak.” I had the feeling Art was going on to great things in journalism.

“Pigeons are all over big cities,” I said. “Where do they come from? Why do they seem to like cities? Why do they seem to like statutes? What do they eat? Can we eat them?”

Art did a great pigeon story. His best anecdote never got into the paper, however.

Jim Kennedy, heir to the Cox family throne (they owned the papers and Lord knows what else), was fresh out of college and was working at the papers to learn the business. Jim loved hunting, and he had been catching pigeons on the roof of the Journal-Constitution building to use in training his hunting dogs. We figured, A) that was illegal and B) even if it wasn’t, we ought not to put it in our pigeon story.

Art went on to The Washington Post. He is the man who brought down Jimmy Swaggart in Penthouse and the one who also got a lot of the goods on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. He remains a hero of mine.

I was also involved in two special series we did at the Constitution. The first, written by political editor Bill Shipp, was called “City in Crisis.” Atlanta’s politics had been almost completely taken over by blacks. But the downtown white power structure had all the money—so there was a stalemate between the two groups.

Minter assigned me to do the graphics. The series was to start in the Sunday combined edition, which was put out by the Journal staff. I had to get special dispensation from Executive Editor Bill Fields to let me put the series on the top of page 1, design it as I wanted, and then to give word to the Journal not to touch it. He did.

We also did a series entitled “The Welfare Mess.” Good series. I went down to Georgia’s southern coast to McIntosh County, which had the state’s lowest per capita income, to see how they were dealing with welfare. I sent back a story about a man I found living under an I-95 river bridge with his dog. The county welfare caseworker had told me she had tried to get the man to accept welfare, but he wouldn’t.

I parked my car and climbed down under the bridge. The man said he didn’t need any welfare because he had the bridge to keep the rain off, and he had a boat from which he could catch fish to keep him in food. I offered him five bucks. He wouldn’t take it. I offered him half a pack of Marlboros. He took it. I went back to my room at the posh Cloisters, the five-diamond resort on Georgia’s exclusive Sea Island, and wrote about the man, his dog, and what it was like to live under a bridge.

A devastating tornado hit Atlanta while I was at the Constitution. I handled the coverage and did the layouts, including a picture page.

The Vietnam War ended when I was at the Constitution. I put out that section, too.

But I was getting antsy again. Mostly, what I did was sit in Minter’s office and talk to him. He complained, “Not many of ’em around here have any idea of what I’m talking about.”

I got a little bored and frustrated. I didn’t know where all this was leading to. Then I got an assignment about an Atlanta sports artist, Wayland Moore, from Sports Illustrated. I got the writing bug again. Six months after rejoining the Constitution, in the spring of 1975, I was a free-lance writer again.

I also hooked up again with Norman Arey, who had left the newspaper to work for Lamar Hunt’s fledgling World Championship of Tennis. Norman traveled to each tournament all over the country and had a myriad of duties under his title as public-relations director.

I traveled with him to a couple of tournaments. Norman had gone bald at this point and had a five-hundred-dollar hairpiece. I was at a tournament in Philadelphia with him. Sunday night, we took the train to Richmond for the next week’s tournament. We both lingered in the lounge car too long and took ourselves a couple of naps. When I awakened, Norman’s five-hundred-dollar rug had fallen from his head. The lounge car attendant was sweeping it and the other trash away when I stopped him and saved Norman’s five-hundred-dollar hair.

Norman even got me a couple of jobs. A professional women’s tournament was coming to Atlanta’s Omni, and the promoter hired Norman to handle PR. Norman then hired me to do the public address for the tournament, five nights for three hundred dollars. The third night, I finally got the name of a new Czech women’s player down right. Nah-Vrah-Tee-Lo-Vah.

Then Norman called one day and said he had us a week’s work at a local Atlanta public-relations firm, and it would pay us each five hundred dollars. Norman had left the WCT by then because he was never at home with his family and Peg. I knew very little about public-relations work, but there were few things I wouldn’t have done then for five hundred big ones.

The PR firm, Ball, Cohn & Weyman, had two new clients. One was a new Legends of Tennis tournament, featuring aging players like Ken Roswell and Rod Laver, that was coming to Atlanta.

The other client was Atlanta’s Six Flags Over Georgia, which had just constructed a giant parachute-jump ride it wanted to promote. Norman took the Legends job because he had all the right tennis experience. I got the parachute-jump ride.

What we were supposed to do, Norman and I, was to call media outlets all over the South to seek a little publicity. So I started calling newspaper cronies. I’d give them my pitch, and they would listen, and then they would all ask the same question: “What the hell are you doing pushing some dumb carnival ride for a PR firm?”

I said I was in it for the money. They all said to me, “You belong back at the newspaper.”

Tuesday: I have a great idea. Why don’t I try to get a job with the New York Times Atlanta bureau, covering Deep South sports? The Times had just sent a man to the West Coast to cover sports out there. It seemed perfect.

The trouble was, I didn’t know anybody with The New York Times. I made a couple of no-luck calls on the parachute jump, and then I remembered Jack Semmes.

I had attended a seminar for sports editors at the American Press Institution at Columbia University in New York City. I met Semmes there. He was a fellow southerner and was deputy sports editor of the Associated Press, headquartered in New York.

Jack and I became close friends. He later left New York to become dean of the journalism school at Auburn University. He would know somebody on The New York Times. So I called him and asked if he could get me in the front door.

Tuesday afternoon: To hell with the parachute jump and the five hundred dollars. I wasn’t born to be a hack. Jack Semmes called me back. He told me if I really wanted the Times, he would help me. But he also said I could move to New York and get on the desk of the AP sports department. And then he said, “There are two sports editor’s jobs open, too—the Philadelphia Daily News needs a guy, and so does the Chicago Sun Times.“

“I really want to write, Jack,” I said. “I’m not moving to New York to sit on a desk, I hate Philadelphia, and I’ve never been to Chicago, but I hear the weather’s bad.”

He said he’d get back to me on the Times. I snuck out of the PR office and went and played tennis.

Wednesday morning: I am sitting at my desk at the PR office, thinking. Chicago. That might be pretty exciting. The Cubs and the White Sox, the Bears and Bulls and Black Hawks and Notre Dame and the Fighting Illini. What’s a little cold weather? And how cold could it be, anyway?

Chicago had a proud newspaper heritage, that was a plus. Ben Hecht and The Front Page. There were three newspapers there. One company owned two, the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times, but there was a battle with the Chicago Tribune. Maybe I could convince them to let me run the sports department and write on occasion. It was too late to go back to the Journal or the Constitution, and I just had a feeling the Times thing would never work out.

I picked up the phone at Ball, Cohn & Weyman, and called the Chicago Sun-Times. I asked for the managing editor’s office. It’s ten-thirty Wednesday morning.

I told the managing editor’s secretary I was calling about the vacant sports editor’s job. The managing editor, Ralph Otwell, came on the line.

I told him who I was, and I told him my background. He asked if I knew Reg Murphy, the former Constitution editor of kidnapping fame. I said I did. He said he and Murphy had been Neiman Fellows together at Harvard. Ralph Otwell took my number and said he’d be back to me in an hour or so.

I never really asked him, but I think he called Reg Murphy to ask about me. I assume Reg gave me a good recommendation because Ralph Otwell called me back from Chicago. “Can you be here Friday for lunch and an interview?” he asked. “We’ll put you up in our suite at the Executive Inn.”

I walked out of my office and told the first guy I came to—I can’t remember if it was Ball, Cohn, or Weyman—thanks, but I’d had enough of the PR game, and that they didn’t owe me any money. I figured they were going to pay for the phone call to Chicago, and that would make us even.

I talked to Kay about Chicago. She seemed excited. I think she thought if she could get me out of Atlanta, I might become a better husband.

How to get to Chicago without flying? I was heavy into another nonflying stage at this point. I wasn’t going to ride a bus to an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, however, and it seemed too far to drive. I decided to take the train.

There was only one way to do that. I would have to drive to Birmingham and catch Amtrak’s Miami-to-Chicago Floridian. It was a three-hour drive to Birmingham. I boarded the train at three in the afternoon on Thursday. I arrived in Chicago’s Union Station at eight the next morning, on a pleasant October morning, 1975.

I took a cab to the Executive Inn, took a shower, ate some breakfast, then went and bought a copy of the morning Sun-Times to look over the sports section.

It was a mess. The layout was terrible. The headlines and cutlines were awful. This was the Big Time?

But I also thought, This will be a piece of cake. Give me a layout pad and half a day, and I can make this thing look 100 percent better.

I went to see Ralph Otwell at the Sun-Times, across the street and the Chicago River on Wacker Drive. He was an older, soft-spoken man who smoked a pipe. He seemed quite harmless. “I want you to also meet and talk with our editor, Jim Hoge,” he said.

What editor? At the Journal-Constitution, the managing editor did the hiring and firing. All the editor was in charge of was the editorial pages.

The three of us, Jim Hoge, Ralph Otwell, and I, went to lunch. Hoge scared the hell out of me. A strikingly handsome man, he was just off a cover of GQ. He had severely punishing eyes that were hard to meet. He was no-nonsense.

“The stories should square off vertically. There’s too much clamor on the pages. It doesn’t look like there’s been any thought into what to play where. You don’t play your photographs large enough, and the headlines and cutlines show little or no imagination.”

“Poor. I didn’t understand a word of what Bill Gleason [columnist] had to say. And where did you get this guy Lacey J. Banks, who covers the Bulls? His story personified ‘Offense’ and ‘Defense’ and then he made up a dialogue between them. What in the hell happened in the game?”

Hoge never flinched. He offered no defense for the section, nor did he say he agreed with anything I had said. Ralph Otwell lighted his pipe. I was covered in sweat.

We went back to Hoge’s office at the Sun-Times. I had brought along some examples of my layouts. Some he liked. I had brought along the special section I had done of Henry Aaron. He didn’t like that.

I tried to explain that I’d done the best with the space I had been given. He did not seem impressed.

I got back on the train at nine that evening and arrived in Birmingham at three Saturday afternoon. I went to Harrison’s and met Hudspeth. I got home at one. Kay was worried. “Why didn’t you call?” she asked me. I didn’t know the answer to that one.

I made up my mind that if Jim Hoge offered me the job, I would take it. I would move to Chicago, Illinois, and out of the state of Georgia for the first time in twenty-two years. I was twenty-eight at the time. I had been born in Georgia, spent a few years out of the state with my father, being transferred to various army bases. Then I spent eleven years growing up in Moreland, Georgia, four years at the University of Georgia, and then seven working in Atlanta.

I loved Georgia. I took up for Georgia. I had a Georgia public school education, I had a Georgia accent, and it burned me when someone from the North would run down the South, and Georgia in particular. I hated it when New Yorkers would ask, upon hearing me speak, “Where are you from? Texas?”

That wasn’t funny. In the first place, nobody had said “Shut yo’ mouth” in the South in a hundred years, and Yankees were always screwing up “you-all.”

“You-all” was never used in the singular sense. If I were addressing one person, I would never ask “Would ‘you-all’ like something to drink?” I would just use “you.” And if I were addressing two or more persons, I wouldn’t say, “Would you-all like something to drink?” I would use the contraction, “y’all.”

There was a lot of other stuff. Yankees called Cokes “pop.” Why? Because it was supposed to go “pop” when the top came off? It doesn’t go “pop.” It goes “whoosh.” What you say, to be proper, is, “I’ll have a Co-Coler.”

Coca-Cola’s home is in Atlanta, and if we wanted to say “Co-Coler,” we could. I wasn’t going to tell a New Yorker he had to say “hot dawg” instead of “hot doo-ug.”

I was raised on southern food. My dress was traditional (they call it “preppie” now). Yankees tend to dress funny. They wear black socks and sandals with their shorts, for one thing. You can pick out a Yankee tourist in Panama City, Florida, in a heartbeat.

I always felt Georgians and southerners were looked down upon. Hey, I wanted to say, we’ve got paved roads now, too, and indoor plumbing.

And there were the racist things. If you were from the South, you were automatically expected to say “nigger” about every other word.

I really had no racial agenda at that point in my life. To be honest, I had been so involved in the newspaper business, Vietnam had sailed by me, too, with the exception of losing one fraternity brother and a high school classmate, neither of whom I was particularly close to. I simply figured black people should be able to eat in any restaurant or stay in any hotel they pleased. It was fine with me black students shared classrooms with me as a student at Georgia.

I had only worked with two blacks in the newspaper business. Minter had a part-time stringer named Alfred Johnson who covered Atlanta University (Morris Brown, Morehouse, and Clark College) sports. He was paid on a per-game basis and had another job with the Atlanta boys’ club. I sort of liked Alfred, but I admit it didn’t go any further than that.

In my last summer as executive sports editor, Mac had hired a black reporter named Chet Fuller, who came with impressive credentials out of college. Mac didn’t have an opening for him on the news staff at that point. One wouldn’t come open until September. But the paper occasionally hired journalism students for summer internships. Mac gave me Chet Fuller, who would be my summer intern and then move to the news side.

Chet Fuller was talented and had tremendous potential as a writer. He also had a great sense of humor. We were sitting on the rim one day, and Kent Mitchell, who had replaced Priit Vesiland as outdoor editor, asked Chet where he lived. Chet told him. Kent said, “I don’t live far from there.”

Chet went on to write a critically acclaimed book, to become an editorial-page columnist, and is now an assistant managing editor at the Atlanta newspapers.

Ten days after my interview in Chicago, Jim Hoge called me in Atlanta and offered me the job as executive sports editor of the Sun-Times. It would pay $28,000 annually.

I accepted. Kay and I immediately drove to Chicago and found a top floor, two-bedroom apartment in a four-story building for $425 a month. Apartments in Atlanta of the same sort would have gone for maybe $250. But I was making $28,000 a year, remember?

The apartment was on Chicago near the North Side, on Arlington Place, just off busy Clark Street, eight blocks south of Wrigley Field, where the Cubs played their home games, all in the daytime. In 1975, nobody would have thought of putting lights up at Wrigley Field.

We were close to Lincoln Avenue, the only street in Chicago that runs diagonally. The Biograph Theatre, where John Dillinger was fingered by the Woman in Red and shot down by the G-men, was still in operation, showing nostalgia movies. There were clubs on Lincoln Avenue where you could walk in with your guitar and get up and sing. Bette Midler had been discovered in one of those places on Lincoln Avenue.

We were close to Lincoln Park and the Lincoln Park Zoo. We were only a few blocks from Lake Michigan and the Oak Street Beach.

I had given away all of my dog Chauncey’s puppies. I found a good home for her, too. No dogs in our new apartment.

I was to report to the Sun-Times on November 8,1975, a Monday. On Saturday, a beautiful, bright autumn day in Atlanta, we left Casa Loma apartments and headed north on highway 41 toward Cartersville, Georgia, where we could pick up 1-75 North. The last traffic light between Atlanta and Chicago in 1975 was in Cartersville, Georgia, just before you hit the interstate. The route was 75 to Chattanooga, 24 to Nashville, 65 to Gary, Indiana, and into Chicago on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

I started having my doubts at that last traffic light in Cartersville. Was I doing the right thing here? Whom did I know in Chicago? Nobody. What if I were a flop? What would I do then? Come back to Atlanta and beg Minter to hire me for the third time? What if I absolutely hated Chicago? What if the people were rude to me because I was from the South? Where could I get a sliced pork-pig barbecue sandwich and good fried chicken? What about the crime? I used to watch The Untouchables all the time on television. Was that an accurate depiction of Chicago street life?

Hoge seemed tough. But was he also mean? Could I work for him? What about the sports staff? Hoge had told me it was my section, and I could do what I wanted to do. There would be shake-ups. There would be assignment changes. Would the staff resent my age and the changes I would make and the fact I was from the South?

Where would I find a great bar like Harrison’s? What if I went in there and didn’t meet anybody? Nothing worse than sitting in a bar and not knowing anybody. Would I miss my friends Hyland and Hudspeth and the other men I had sported with?

Nashville. What if something happened between Kay and me? What if I wound up alone and divorced in Chicago with no Harrison’s to fall back on?

Chicago and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Six lanes on each side, trains running down the middle. It’s raining. I’m looking for the Fullerton Avenue exit, but it’s dark and it’s raining and I can’t see a thing and people are whizzing past me at seventy miles an hour bumper-to-bumper.

We find the Fullerton exit. We find our new apartment. We’re both too tired to unload anything. I bring up a six-pack I’d had iced down in the car. I drank it and went to sleep. I had my first Chicago nightmare that very first night. I dreamed I was on the Dan Ryan Expressway and all the other cars were being driven by the Grim Reaper and there were no exits, and I had to drive on and on in total exhaustion and I’m halfway to Des Moines when I finally wake up.