{"response":{"docs":[{"id":"gych_rogp_115","title":"Bob Cohn, 30 June 2010.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Alabama, 32.75041, -86.75026","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Short, Bob, 1932","Cohn, Bob"],"dc_date":["2010-06-30"],"dcterms_description":["Part 2: Bob Cohn shares his iconic picture of Denmark Groover taking the legislative clock down and explains the story relating to reapportionment that went along with it. He discusses starting his public relations firm with partner Norman Wolfe. Cohn discusses working with Coca-Cola on Olympic promotions from the 1970s. He recalls working on the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Cohn recalls several legislative issues that his public relations firm handled in addition to six political campaigns. He discusses being Zell Miller's appointee to the Metropolitan Olympic Games Authority and his perception of party politics in Georgia.","Bob Cohn began his career as a news writer and photojournalist after graduating from the University of Alabama. He has worked on Olympic and event marketing for many years and has served as a chairman of the National Parade and March Oversight Committee for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday and as Governor Zell Miller's appointee to the Metropolitan Atlanta Olympic Games Authority.","Finding aid available in repository.","Part 1: Bob Cohn recalls being born in Booklyn, New York, joining the Air Force and attending the University of Alabama through the G.I. Bill. He recalls his first job working for the Montgomery Advertiser and subsequently working as the city editor of the Augusta newspaper. In Atlanta, Cohn covered the capitol and had a fair relationship with Governor Sanders. He discusses his work as a reporter during the civil rights movement in Augusta and Montgomery. Cohn discusses his fears for personal safety as a Jewish reporter but comments on the non-partiality of the companies he worked with later in life. He recalls playing darts in the Press Office during Lester Maddox's administration and his friendship with Jimmy Carter. Cohn recalls his first forays into public relations.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Coca-Cola Company","Olympic Games--1996 :--Atlanta, Ga.)","Olympic Games","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Jewish journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Civil rights movements--Georgia--Augusta","Civil rights movements--Alabama--Montgomery","Apportionment (Election law)--Georgia","Political campaigns--Georgia","Public relations firms--Georgia","Public relations and politics--Georgia","Apportionment (Election law)","Civil rights movements","Jewish journalists","Journalists","Political campaigns","Public relations and politics","Public relations firms","Alabama--Montgomery","Georgia","Georgia"],"dcterms_title":["Bob Cohn, 30 June 2010."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-115/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 115, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (81 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Miller, Zell, 1932-2018","Cohn, Bob","Carter, Jimmy, 1924-","Maddox, Lester, 1915-2003"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Bob Cohn interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2010 June 30 \r\nAtlanta, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-115 \r\nOriginal: video, 81 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription: July 16, 2012 \r\n \r\n      BOB SHORT:  Im Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics, sponsored by the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia and Young Harris College.  Our guest today is Bob Cohn, a former Georgia political reporter and a very successful business tycoon.  Bob, welcome. \r\n \r\n BOB COHN:  Good to see you again.  Its been a long time. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Its good to see you Bob; it has.  From Brooklyn to Georgia. \r\n \r\n COHN:  Okay.  Both of my parents died before I was eleven-years-old, my mother of throat cancer, my father of a heart attack, and I was raised by an aunt and uncle.  And when I graduated from high school, I didnt have the money to go to college so I joined the air force and I was in there for four years.  The last place I was stationed was Montgomery, Alabama, at Maxwell Air Force Base.  I came out with a G.I. Bill, which enabled me to go to school.  The nearest place was Tuscaloosa, so I went up there and began school there.  If they had dropped me in Minnesota, I would have been a graduate of the University of Minnesota.  So it was strictly by chance.  \r\n      I was there for four years.  I became editor of the Crimson White, which was the student newspaper, and had a very successful campus career there.  The campus had the vote on who the editor would be so I ran and was successful with that.  A great experience; I met my wife there.  She wasIm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, shes a Southern Baptist from Haysop, Alabama, which is about twenty miles east of Tuscaloosa.  Thats fifty years ago; we just celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary on June the 5th.  Back in those days, the odds of a marriage like that succeeding were not high, but somehow we muddled through it and got to fifty years.  We have three children, all of whom live in Atlanta.  All of whom are successful in not only business but also have raised five grandchildrenthey are raising five grandchildren, and all those kids are very bright and are doing well. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So youre interest in journalism goes back to the University of Alabama. \r\n \r\n      COHN:  Actually, it precedes that.  The uncle that raised me was a sports writer for the New York Journal American, a newspaper which is now defunct.  So all of my life, growing up, I wanted to be a newspaperman.  Thats where it went back to and thats where it stemmed from. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Do you remember your first job as a reporter? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, yeah.  It was with the Montgomery Advertiser.  I had worked when I was at Maxwell at night for the Advertiser on the sports desk.  And when I got out of the service, they neededwell this is after college so I was familiar with the people there and knew [indiscernible] by name.  When I got out of college, I went down there and I went to work as the police reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser.  Once again, I was a Jewish kid assigned to the police department in Montgomery in the middle of the whole civil rights thing.  I never dreamed Id get through that period of my life in one piece.  But as it turned out, I was such an underdog from a policemans point of view that they adopted me, and they gave me a break on every story that came down the road.  There again I was successful.   \r\nFrom there, the city editor of the Montgomery paper was offered the managing editors job in Augusta and he brought me with him to Augusta as the city editor of the Augusta Chronicle.  I can easily go on after that and tell you that I worked there.  I worked in Augusta for two years and when the Atlanta bureau job for the Morris papers, which was Savannah, Athens, and Augusta, became vacant, I immediately knocked on Billys door and asked if I can have it because I was dying to get out of Augusta.  Oddly enough, I had a neighbor whose name was Jim Furman and while I was trying my best to get out of Augusta, he came to me one day and said, Im moving from here to Boone, North Carolina.  I said, Youve got to be kidding me.  Im trying to get to a bigger city.  Well, to make a long story short, Jim has been a lifelong friend.  He owns six pharmacies up there and a 100 Wendys around North Carolina; hes become fabulously rich, so his move to Boone was pretty smart after all.  I didnt have that kind of good fortune.  \r\nBut in coming to Atlanta, prior to that, during the two years I was the city editor of the Augusta paper, I came to the first two legislative sessions and covered them for the Augusta delegation, which, back in those daysI dont know about the legislator today because I havent followed it, Im not around herebut a wild men back in those days.  Guys that drank heavy, gambled, and did other kinds of things we wont talk about.  Theyre very colorful people.  Nothing like Bobby Pafford, who would cry and they would keep him in a chamber, locking the house doors, Bobby roaring.  All these unbelievable characters and there were some from Augusta as well.  Jim Hull, Bill Fleming, but theyre another story and theyre a good story about, which I wish I can tell you later, about the passage of the Mixed Drinks Bill.   \r\nSo I would room with them at the Dinkler Plaza Hotel.  And Hull was a gambler who couldnthe was always gambling.  Hed set up a glass in the room there, and putt a golf ball into the glass, and bet.  Hed go down to get his car in the garage and hed start pitching quarters to the wall with the garage attendants.  There was no stopping him.  He actually stopped himself a number of years later, tripped over a log in his backyard with a shotgun in hand, blew himself up.  Dramatic ending.  His daughter is a federal judge, Frankie Hull, was her name and a wonderful person.  Fleming also became a judge but in Augusta.   \r\nSo it was a good time.  J.B. Fuqua was in the senate with Gene Holley.  Holley later went on to become an oil magnet in the far Middle East, but he developed a problem there where the oil mixed with some sediment and it had to be removed before it was usable.  And he would have had to build a multi-million dollar plant just to do that and he went broke, unfortunately.  Holley was a great friend of mine.  When we went into business, he said he would pick up the cost of the rent for as long as we needed it, which was a very gracious thing.  So at that point in time when we no longer needed it, I went to Augusta and I bought him a gold Rolex watch, had it inscribed on the back what a wonderful friend he had been.  Many years later, I went into that jewelry store for another reason and here the jeweler told me that Holley had hocked the watch with him, and that was a heartbreaking kind of a thing because he really was a good guy.   \r\nOf course, Bob Fuqua and his immense success.  I didnt, as far as covering him politicallythe funniest experience I ever had with Fuqua was when we went out of business.  I figured Id call on all the people that I knew and see if they would help me.  I went into Fuquas office and, by this time, he was super rich, and I waited for him to come out of his office.  He came out, shook my hand, and he said, Bob, what can you do for me?  And I thought for a minute, what can I do for you?  I have no idea.  Youre rolling in money.  I want you toit was a twist on the thing.  He never did anything for me but I thought heI dont know if he did that with everybody or just with me.  What can you do for me?  And Im looking around, No, not much.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Lets talk about some of the people and issues that you covered at the State Capitol.  When you got there, I think you told me, Carl Sanders was governor. \r\n \r\nCOHN: Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And you covered his administration. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  He was from Augusta. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What sort of relations did you have with Governor Sanders? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Fair, really.  He played more to the Atlanta papers, Reg Murphy, Charlie Pugh.  I was sort of an asterisk over here somewhere and understandably, understandably.  Sanders, and all the guys around him really, they had big egos.  Competent people but they thought well of them themselves, overly so, and Sanders led the pack in that regard.  Hes the only guy Ive ever met in my life that in his law office had a bust of himself, which spoke to what kind of a person he was; he thought well of himself.  And he did some good things, no question about it.  He and Larry Lloyd, Doug Barnard, John Harper, his press secretary, all of those people had an attitude.   \r\nWhen you came in, you were like a good old country boy.  You never struck me as somebody with an attitude, but all those people had attitudes.  And Ill never forget I almost got into a fistfight with Doug Barnard, who was his executive secretary, because I knew that a press release was coming outI dont remember what the subject wasBarnard dismissed it, nothing like that was happening, about an hour later it happened.  And I went into his office and I pushed him.  He didnt do anything; he didnt come back at me.  But Sandersthey called him Cufflinks Carl.  He was a wealthy guy, he belonged to the Augusta National, he came to office having had already a very successful law practice in Augusta.  He had that air about him of wealth, confidence, and Id like to refer here if I can to a couple of notes which I made here.  But I thought he was somewhat self-indulgent, had a cottage at Sea Island, it was upper crust stuff and I was of course not upper crust stuff.  Far from it.  I dont remember how much I was making at that point in time but it certainly didnt entitle me to a cottage at Sea Island; never has, its a fact.  Only Reg Murphy has a place down there and Herky Harris, I dont know if you remember that. \r\nSanders, of course, designed and built the Governors Mansion only to see somebody as opposite as he be the first occupant in Lester Maddox.  It was built in a stately manner; had it been designed for Maddox, it probably would have been a lot different than it was.  Im sure they were distraught over that.  Very snappily dressed.  He was a health enthusiast in college.  He used to run around Ansley Park when the mansion was in Ansley Park, and he wore a warm-up suit but everybody in the capital referred to it as Carls Bunny suit; to me hed look like a bunny with a light blue and they made fun of him.  But he was one of the first guys that was actually taking good care of himself.  And I guess its paid off, he must be eighty-five, eighty-six years old now.  \r\nCarls second campaign for governor, the thing I remember most about it, was we were down in south Georgia, I think it was Brunswick, and he had a private plane.  And we got up in the air and that planeI have traveled all over the world many times, never been in turbulence like that plane was in.  It was a small two-engine plane and we got bouncedI thought this is the end of the world for me.  How we got out of that thing alive, Ill never know.  It was really quite an experience and really the only thing I remember from his campaign was gettinghe was in the plane, I was in the plane, there was a pilot, and man, that thing was tumbling all over the place.   \r\n \r\n(BREAK) \r\n \r\n      SHORT:  I dont know how much cover you did of the civil rights movement but if you have any memories of covering that, like to talk about that. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, I didnt cover a lot of the civil rights movement out of Augusta; I did some of that.  And of course, in Montgomery, I was right in the middle of it during the height of the movement and of the turmoil that surrounded it.  I was in a church with Martin Luther King when just guarded with federal agents.  It was a frightening time really getting involved in the coverage of the civil rights movement in Montgomery.  I was at the bus station in Montgomery when the Freedom Writers came through and John Lewis came off the bus and got his head smashed in.  I actually saw that.  Interestingly, the head of the State Highway Patrol, who was a very straight and narrow guy, jumped on the guy that was beating Lewis and stopped him.  \r\nBut prior to that, that evening that they were supposed to come inthey didnt come in that evening, but were all at the bus station expecting that they would be there.  And when they didnt show upit was nothing but Ku Klux Klan guys waiting for the bus to come inand when they didnt show up I decided to go home.  And I lived only a few blocks from there up Court Street.  So I got in my car and drove out of the driveway and all of a sudden, another car pulls up behind me and follows me.  And I turn left, the other car turns left; another left, other car turns left.  Boom, into my backyard, I jump out of my car, I run upstairs, and I call the police.  Nothing happened but the next morning another guy, the police reporter for the afternoon paper, said, Where were you going in such a hurry last night, Bob?  I followed you til you got home.  But it was tense; tense times where you suspected danger lurked around every corner.  Again, a Jewish reporter.   \r\nI remember, Sea Island has got some problems now, but when they had the Southern Governors Conference down on Sea Island when Sanders was governor, there were two guys that the Cloister would not house, two reporters, Herb Kaplow and me, because we were Jewish.  We had to stay over at the King and Prince Hotel.  But in terms of anti-Semitism and feeling it throughout my career, I really havent felt much of that.  Chick-fil-A was a client of mine for twenty-eight years.  I never felt that I had suffered because of it; I felt okay about it.   \r\nI went towhats the name of the town?  Thompson, Georgia, and theres little towns down there where the Klan held rallies and things like that and I went to those, I covered them.  I have a picture of me interviewing Bobby Shelton who was the Grand Dragon of the Klan; should have brought it.  But I didnt have that much involvement in covering the civil rights movement, just a few things that Ive talked to you about.  Now, as far asyou said the legislator got its first black person in 63.  This is before reapportionment? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  After reapportionment. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  After reapportionment.  Now, Im telling you that reapportionment didnt take place til 64. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Okay.  Well \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Here it is. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Okay, well after reapportionment the Georgia House was integrated with several well-known blacks from Atlanta.  Lets about that for a minute, if you will.  There was Julian Bond. \r\n \r\nCOHN: Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  There was Grace Hamilton and others who played prominent roles in legislature after that, but what Im interested in talking about is the reaction by the legislature to the integration of its ranks back in those days. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  I dont recall general reaction except what is related to Julian Bond.  He was the firebrand.  He was more opposite of the general population of the house that any of those other people.  Those other people were sort of quiet but he wasnt.  Unbelievably articulate guy who I thought a lot of.  In fact, I did a very interesting story for Atlanta Magazine.  I got Roy Harris who was then the president of the White Citizens Council to sit down with Julian Bond, and I taped the discussion like you and I are doing right now.  And that played in Atlanta Magazine; it was really a terrific thing.   \r\nI had a good relationship with Julian Bond and I think most reporters did.  Matter of fact, he was in the hospital for an unmentionable thing and I went to his hospital room to visit him.  There was a guy that I thought had an immense amount of talent politically but he never did anything with it; it never went anywhere.  And I remembersome things I shouldnt say herebut he used to brag about women he slept with and how many.  I wont go into it.  I saw him at the Atlanta airport one time and he said, Have you ever slept with twins?  I said, No, I havent.  I dont know if the women took it out of him or what took it out of him but something denied him by his own doing I thought.  But I liked him.  Going to the convention in 68, that was a tough time for both Maddox and Bond.  They tried to work out a compromise.  It didnt sit well with Maddox and he bolted the convention with me on the front page of the New York Daily News. Want me to show you that? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  That was a very uncontrollable convention. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  It was insane, yeah, really insane.  Our hotel was filled with stink bombs in the air conditioning system.  Steve Ball and I were there and we roomed together.  And were so joyous by the time that thing was over, instead of flying back we said lets take a train and just relax, which is what we do.  We took a train, I dont know how long it took, but it was a much more relaxingjust to try to decompress from the experience in Chicago.  Its a crazy time, crazy really.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Im sure that \r\n \r\nCOHN:  The one thing that, before coming here I did, I went on the web and did some research and some research on Lester Maddox.  Not a word anywhere about the fact, in any history, that he actually ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.  And its strange that thats the case because he was accorded the rights of every other candidate that was running for president.  Wherever he went, secret service went with him.  When he traveled, there was a helicopter above to make sure nothing happened to his car.  And that struck me as unbelievable, being there and seeing Lester Maddox getting that kind of attention.  But he got it all.  And Ill never forget the one thing I remember from that is him going to the Michigan delegation and standing up there and saying, Boys, weve got them on the run, which I thought was very funny.  Lester was positive I guess.  Ive been surprised that there is not a glimmer of that in any history and it should be noted because it was interesting; he was a sideshow to what was really going on, but it was a pretty good show.   \r\nSteve and I wrote, probably one of the best things Ive been involved in writing, we wrote two very long pieces on Lesters experiences as a presidential candidate for Atlanta Magazine.  I tried to track them down this week to see if I wouldnt recall some of the very funny stuff in there.  It was hilarious; the whole episode was funny.  You mentioned some other things and I dont remember what. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let me ask if you recall what happened after that Democratic convention.  That year was the bolting of several constitutional officers who switched parties.  \r\n \r\n COHN:  Yeah. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Around the capitol, they were known as the clique.  Do you remember that? \r\n \r\n COHN:  I remember specifically Jimmy Bentley was a good friend of mine and I didnt think much of the idea.  Obviously, those guys were forerunners of whats happeners, which is very unfortunate that I dont have a vote here.  In fact, Atlanta is like an island in the middle of sea ofI dont even known what youd call it, not good stuff.  I get calls on the telephone wanting me to vote for this guy, that guy; I said, You know, I really dont have a vote.  Theres nobody I can vote for because theyre going to lose for sure.  Its not even close.  So that switch was Jack Ray, Jimmy Bentley, I dont remember who the other guys were, which I thought was odd really at the time.  Bentley came out of a political past where segregation was very much a part of his make-up.  But even so, I didnt expect that he would do that but he did.  He made a lot of money and then I think he lost it in real estate.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Then he ran for governor as a Republican; \r\n \r\n      COHN: Yeah \r\nSHORT:  Was defeated by Hal Suit. \r\n \r\n COHN:  Right, Hal Suit.  When I mention Hal Suit, I can only remember one thing about him.  In my time in Atlanta, the absolute best reporter, the best that Ive ever seen here in this city, was Aubrey Morris at WSB Radio.  This guy was a dynamo.  And Ill never forget him walking intoHal Suit was at six oclock news was on the air and Aubrey walked in and threw a microphone in front of him and said, Are you running for governor? which took Suit; shocked him by complete surprise.  But that wasAubrey was just a phenomenal guy that had no barriers stop him.  He went right in there, even in his own company, and did that.  So I always had a great deal of respect for him.   \r\n The other guys that were around at that time, you know Reg, you know his history and what hehe made a lot of money.  And Charlie Pugh, I dont know whatever happened to him.  He must have died.  I never heard much about him. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Charlie did some history work over at the University of Georgia. \r\n \r\n COHN:  Did he? \r\n         \r\nSHORT:  Research and in fact, he has some timelines on the computer that are very helpful for people who like to look back on past. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Good.  Then Steve and there was another guy, Burrell Sellers, who worked for the Savannah papers during the session.  Burrell was the most prolific writer Ive ever met.  Hed file ten stories a day, I dont know what hes writing about, but he filed a lot of stories.  I wasnt that prolific.  I didnt see that much in a lot of the stuff that he wrote but the Savannah papers loved it and that was good.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You had your wire service reporters. \r\n \r\nCOHN: Yeah.  Ted Simons.  Remember Ted? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Oh, yeah.  Pete Haines. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, Pete.  Well of course, he had a get in with Sanders, Pete Haines, very close to Sanders.  I best remember Ted Simons.  There was a girl I think working in the Speakers officethis shouldnt go into history but I dont give a damnthat worked in the Speakers office, had the best looking legs that youve ever seen.  And Simons said, That girls legs are so great she could walk you off.  And he referred to her as Legs.  I had a secretary when I first went into business who could type ninety-six words a minute; that was her nickname, ninety-six.  But Pete had a wonderful rapport, was considered very accurate; he was a very good reporter.   \r\nI dont remember who else.  Remer Tyson may have been around there or came later.  Celestine Sibley, who everybody loved, which is odd for a reporter to have that kind ofthat people had that kind of feeling about her.  Its a good thing; she was really a special person.  In the pressroom itself, I remember during Lesters administration, that Lester would come out in the morning, and say something crazy, and then top it in the afternoon.  You never had to worry about covering both the a.m. and the p.m. papers.  After a while, we got bored with it.  We knew he was coming; we could count on that for a story.  So Steve Ball and I erected a dartboard in the pressroom.  And we played darts about five hours a day and became so proficient at it we started hitting bars and playing for money.  We really did very well.  It was shortly after that that I realized my life has got to be something bigger than this, shooting darts, and thats when I decided to go into business with Steve, who I reluctantly dragged along with me.   \r\nHe ran into some problems a few years later.  He was married and had a couple of kids.  But the family went down to Panama City on vacation and he met this very voluptuous girl on the beach, who was the weather girl for the local station down there in Panama City.  And when I say voluptuous, I mean this broad was something else.  She landed up with him; he landed up with her.  She turned him onto drugs and he went straight down the tubes.  He recovered from that, and has been married for maybe seventeen years now and lives in Fort Deposit, Alabama.  I called him last night, asked him if he remembered any good Lester Maddox stories, said, Nah.  What he does now ishe was an outstanding reporter, great reporter also.  He now delivers flowers for his wifes flower shop.  Too bad.  \r\n \r\nSHORT: What do you remember about the Maddox-Callaway race for governor? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  I remember Bo Callaway particularly because he had eyebrows like a Lhasa Apso; you could hardly see the guy, these giant bushy, bushy eyebrows.  But I also remember Callaway, if there was a receiving lines, he would be shaking hands with you but looking at the next person.  So he didnt really understand the warmth of personal communication and I really think that hurt him, thats what really hurt him.  As far as the race or details of the race, I really dont remember a hell of a lot about it.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  It went to the legislature. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, I remember that, absolutely.  Of course, it was a shocking thing for everybody that Lester emerged from all of that as the governor.  But given what happened with Callaway failing to get a majority of the vote and the legislature voting on it, obviously it was virtually all Democratic and they gave it to Lester.  The Republicans really sort of screwed themselves in the Democratic primary; they didnt have a primary.  So they went into the Democratic primary and voted for Lester Maddox believing he would be the guy that Callaway would beat easily.  And then there was a run-off and they did the same thing.  So it landed up, sort of backfiring on them.  Callaway was a nice guy, capable individual that served secretary of the army and Im sure in some other distinguished jobs.  There too was a guy from big money.  And in contrast to Lester Maddox, who was a man of the people sort of speak, as opposed to Callaway, who was a man of the money.  As exemplified by Callaway Gardens and the history of textiles mills and all that. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Were you around when Carl Sanders and Jimmy Carter had their very famous race for governor? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, that was the race in which I had the trouble in the airplane.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Oh, it was. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You knew Carter? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Oh, yeah.  Ill tell you a story about him.  I went down to visit him, do a story down at his farm, and the nats were so unbearable coming up my noise, my eyes, and my ears.  I said, I dont know how the hell anybody can live with this.  And I guess, if you could live with this, you could do anything because I couldnt live with it for sure.  Interestingly, Jimmy Carter, in my book, turned out to be a bad guy.  He was signing, autographing books in Ansley, over in Ansley Square.  And my little grandson was maybe three years old.  And we were there at the cafeteria and walked past the bookstore, saw him in there, and went in there with my little grandson to introduce him to the former President of the United States.  And Jimmy said to me, Ill never forget those horrendous stories you used to write about me.  And I looked at him and I said, What are you talking about?  I dont know what youre talking about.  I said, The newspaper editorially was dramatically opposed to you, but I never wrote any bad stories about you.  He said, Ill never forget it.  I said, Ill tell you what, we handled, my company handled the opening of your presidential library.  The executive director there ordered about three years worth of embossed stationary and other fancy frills.  You fired him and refused to pay us about $150,000.  We can settle this if you just stroke a check now.  And I said, I dont even hold that against you.  One of those things that happened in business.   \r\nBut Carter was, I dont know, like I said, we covered his campaign.  He had one of the guys who was involved financially in his campaign was Jim Cushman who was developing Colony Square, P Street and 14th Street.  So when we went out calling on the Fuquas and the other people in the world, I went to Cushman because I knew he had given money to Carter, had this project.  And he was our second client.  Our first was George L. Smith, who hired Steve and I to create the first public information office for the House of Representatives, and then we did the same thing with the senate.  And for several years, we staffed it during the legislature.  And then Cushman hired us, gave us free office space, paid us some money.  The first thing he asked us to do, Steve and I, was to create a slideshow for his complex there.  Steve and I looked at each otherwhat do we know about doing a slideshow.  So there was a guy with Amber Grant, Weyman, who had worked for Bentleys campaign with that school bus, I dont know if you remember that commercial.  Lets get this guy Weyman in here and see if he could help us.  We worked for three days and three nights and finally put it together.  Brought it up to show it to Cushman and again this is the first real client.  Showed it to Cushman, the lights came on, and I looked at him and said, Well, What did you think?  And he said, Sheep dip.  And I looked at Steve and I said, What does he mean?  I guess that was the polite way of saying something else, so that was my first PR experience.  And with a lot of clients, it never got better than that.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You made a very famous photograph while you were covering the State Capitol. \r\n \r\n COHN:  Yeah, brought it with me.  Denmark Groover.  Denny, for years afterward, he used to say, You know, Bob, you showed my ass to the world.  This picture ran on the front page of every major newspaper in this country.  Ran in Newsweek, I have a copy of that here.  But what happened here was I always carried a camera with me in the event that I was in a situation based really upon my experience in the civil rights era that if anything happened that I happened to see that I could shoot it.  Well, there were a load of photographers in the house at this point of time, but for some reason I was the only guy that saw Denny run out the back door, and jump over the rail and tear the clock.  I was the only one who got this picture.  And its an iconic picture for Georgia politics.  It was entered in a Pulitzer competition and, unfortunately, came in second to the Ruby Oswald picture.  So I got bumped by Ruby Oswald. \r\n      But what used to happen in this thing here, George T. Smith was the Speaker at the time.  They couldnt make a decision on how to reapportion.  And he stopped the clock at ten minutes to twelve because they had to adjourn sine die at midnight, and so he ordered the clock stopped and they continued to debate for several hours.  Usually on the last day of the session, the legislatorsI dont know about todaybut back then, drank a lot.  So there was a heavy dose of alcohol floating through the place.  And I guess Denny had a drink or two, I dont know, but I saw him bolt after the vote in which his guy lost out in the reapportionment.  And so I saw him bolt and then I figured where the hell he going?  I looked up at the balcony and there he was coming.  I had my camera and boom, got him.  Denny, I liked him.  He was a nice guy.  His political views were very different from mine; I think he later recanted as he was dying about some of his years.  But I didnt know he was a fighter pilot hero in World War II; I didnt know that until I read about him at some point in time.  Distinguished guy. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  The Black Sheeps Quadrant. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, that surprised me.  He didnt look like a fighter pilot, a little too stocky.  I didnt know he could fit into a cockpit.  So that was an interesting evening to say the least.  That was fun to watch. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Why did you leave your job as a reporter? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well, as I said, we were sort of bored with Maddox.  I wasnt making very much money, you know how reporters were paid in those days, probably still are today for all I know.  And I had a growing family; I had a wife and three kids.  I was working for the Mars newspapers but I was also stringing for Newsweek and The New York Times, just trying to make a decent living.  Id work sixteen-hour days and I just got tired of it.  I said, Ill tell you what, Ill go to George Goodwin, who had the Bell and Stan, the biggest public relations firm in Atlanta.  Goodwin didnt want to hire me.  So I decided Ill go try it on my own, figuring that if I failed I could always go back to being a newspaper reporter.  But as it turned out, even at the very outset, we were very successful.   \r\nWe hit a bump in 1974 that was a real estate recession.  Cushman lost everything he had in it, but he was an honorable guy, and he wanted to somehow compensate me.  He owed us about $150,000.  He had a big ranch down in south Georgiahopefully the name of the town will come to meit was called Millarden Ranch and he had thousands of Black Angus cattle on that ranch with a magnificent southern mansion.  And he said to me, Bob, I cant pay you the money, but Im going to give you 100 Black Angus cows for $1,500 a piece.  So here I am again, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn with a herd, which was okay except for the fact that shortly thereafter meat prices plummeted and feed prices went up.  All of a sudden, Im feeding these damn things.  So I said to him, We got to get rid of the cows man, I cant take it.  So we had an auction and I took them in at $1,500, they were auctioning them off for about $600 apiece, which is okay except for the fact that Cushman was so desperate.  He kept the money from the auction and I had to sue him for cattle wresting.   \r\nIn business, collecting receivables is a very distasteful thing.  And the best story I remember about that is down in Tampa there was a guy who used to be a policeman, his name was Captain Smith, but he retired from the police force.  He was developing things for the police, clubs, handcuffs, whatever.  And he came over with an idea called the killer keychain, Captain Smiths Killer Keychain.  And he hired us to promote it.  What it did was if somebody attacked you, youd take your keychain, and push up against the person, an electric shock into them, and throw them back about ten feet.  His receivables built and billed; he wasnt paying the bills.  The problem was nobody wanted to go down there and try to collect.  Those were fun days. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Cohn and Wolfe. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, Norman Wolfe was the editor of the Orlando Sentinel Star.  He went through a divorce in Orlando. And he was a very proper guy and was very embarrassed by it so he moved to Atlanta and I met him.  And at that time at Colony Square there was an ice rink in the middle of Colony Square, and he and I met in a little fast food restaurant that was next to the ice rink.  Must be 45 degrees in the restaurant, we were shaking.  We talked about it, and I landed up giving him a third of the business.  And I felt he had administered a large staff of people, those were skills I didnt have.  And in fact, whenever I speak to a journalism class or public relations class, not that often these days, I always tell them you have to get over to business school because sure enough after four or five years of this youre going to be handling people and developing budgets.  You need to get into business school for some of this stuff.  So I had none of that background and Norman did, so we were a great combination together because of our different skills.  Mine was creative and selling and his was managing the business.   \r\nNorman, much older than I and not in great health today, but we had an unbelievable run.  I sold the business and when we sold it, we had twenty-four offices around the world.  The company I sold it to WPP out of London, Cohn and Wolfe, the company I founded, now has sixty-three offices around the world.  Its amazing really.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Are you still involved? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  No, no.  I ended in 1998 after the Atlanta Games.  We had tremendous amount of OlympicI was something of an Olympic expert having worked for Coke on the Olympics from 1979 on.  We made a lot of money in 96, 97, and then decided it was time for me to go. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What makes a good PR guy? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well, there are different kinds of people in the public relations business. I was there to make money and to have fun.  I wasnt there to solve the worlds problems.  Then there were guys in that business who were there to solve the worlds problems or corporate problems, crisis communications, all that kind of stuff.  I didnt really have any interest in that.  My interest was in taking on things that you could have fun with, that were lighter than that.  Now weve gotten involved in some heavy stuff, likewhat was Ernie Vandiver, what was the guys name?  Who was close to Ernie Vandiver, a legislator? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Peyton Hawes \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Peyton Hawes, yeah.  Peyton Hawes hired us when Carter was President to fight for the funding for the Russell Dam.  Steve and I came up with a campaign, which we played against Congress.  Carter had killed every major water project in the country as a way of reducing the budget including the Russell dam.  So we went to Washington and we developed a campaign, both ran it in the Washington Post, and we had come up the idea of delivering special stuff to the congressmen that was very unique.  In the Washington Post, the ads that we wrote said, Give a Dam!  Vote wet.  It was good stuff.  Then what we did was we had that same line onwe got big sheets of steel, not something you could, big sheets of steel, and we had those things delivered to every congressmans office.  You couldnt throw it in the trashcan; you had to get rid of it some other way.  But it stuck with them.  We had  a box of rocks from the river and we put them in a box, a black box, and what we said is the only thing thats down there that were going to wash over these rocks, theres no animals down there endangered by this effort.  And sure enough, they voted for it.  They overrode Carter and voted for it.  So that was a very big thing.   \r\nWe handled the extensive of Georgia 400, the opposition to it; we handled that.  We handled the opposition to the fourth runway at Delta at the airport.  We handled the expansion of the interstate system.  In terms of handling, we handled the public relations to soften opposition to these things.  So we did a lot of that kind of work later on.  Earlier on in 1974, we handled six political campaigns and afterward vowed to never do that again.  I took one guy down to the Atlantic Constitution, got their endorsement.  Three days later, he decided to drop out of the race.  I felt like an idiot.  So there were five left and they all won, every one of them won; only two paid.  I said to Steve, No more of this.  I have to tell you one guy, Ford Sphinx, was one of the guys that didnt pay.  So we held a fundraiser for him and I got Chip Carter to come down to speak at the fundraiser and raised quite a bit of money.  Ford kept it all.  We were hoping that would result in us getting paid.  Bad business. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Didnt you once have an ostrich race at? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  No. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You didnt? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  No, that was Bob Hope.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Oh, Bob Hope. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  At the Braves. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well he was once associated with you. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, he worked with us.  He has his own firm now, very successful, and a very talented guy.  Yeah, we hired him from the Braves.  We had some really top-notch people.  Lee Walburn worked for us.  I could name a lot of people that you would know that worked for us over the years; in fact, I think we created an industry.  People would leave with some accounts and go somewhere else.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  It said that you added glitz to public relations in Atlanta. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Glitz?  Yeah thats probably true.  I dont know if youd call it glitz.  Depends on how you define glitz.  We did a lot of things that have never been done before to promote clients.  George Goodwin would describe them as glitz.  Both he and I were pitching KLM, the Royal Dutch airlines, and he told the guy that was handling the pitch that if you hired them all theyre going to do is plant tulips up and down Peachtree Street and the guy said, Thats just what were looking for.  It was those kinds of things thatbut a lot of it was serious but then again I can tell you all kinds of crazy things we did.  When I say crazy, effective crazy things we did.   \r\nMaybe the best example of that is, like I said, we handledI pressed Coca-Cola in 1979 that they werent doing anything with their Olympic sponsorship.  So I wrote a program, had twenty-three elements in it, to put into place at Lake Placid.  I went into the old Coke boardroom, panel walls, pictures of all the guys up there.  Ive never been in a presentation thing like that.  Long tables like this, Roberto goes why dont we sit on the one end, and I was standing at the other end.  It was warm in that room and of course, I was nervous as hell so I began to sweat.  And I went on about the twenty-three different things and I didnt see him makehis face never moved the whole time and I said, not only am I going down the tubes here, Im thinking to myself, but all these guys in this room who brought me here are going with me.  And when it was over, he said, Mr. Cohn thats a treasure trove of ideas.  But he said he had to pass it before Paul Austin, who was then the chairman of the company.  One of the ideas we had was as each team arrived at Lake Placid, lets say from Finland, that we would get a sheep dog, a Saint Bernard, and put a can of Coke around its neck in Finnish, take a picture and send it back to Finland to the media.  And Austin wrote in a column of that particular thing, Dont use puppies, puppies piss on people.   \r\nSo we did the other twenty-two things.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You mentioned the Mixed Drink Bill that made Atlanta a convention center. \r\n \r\nCOHN: Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about that. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well, the Marriott hotel was building the first new hotel in god knows how long in Atlanta and J.W. Marriott went to Sanders and said, We have to sell mixed drinks to this place.  You got to help us get it done.  And a coalition of house members, all of whom I knew well, Jim Hull, Bill Fleming, Charlie Jones from Hinesville, Harry Dicus from Columbus, they were the guys who plotted how to make this happen.  If you recall, the only way it could happen was to handle it as local legislation for Fulton County only and the Speaker could just gavel it through in the afternoon when they handled local legislation.  But there was one guy from northeast Georgia, and I cannot remember his name unfortunately \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Howard Tamplin. \r\n  \r\nCOHN:  Was a confirmed dry. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Howard Tamplin from Madison, Georgia. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah.  Sat in the house; wouldnt move while local legislation was being passed.  So Hull said to me, Bob are you covering this guy?  I said, Yeah, hes in our territory, Augusta.  He said, Why dont you take him out in the hall and interview him?  Which I did, and they gaveled it through.  That was the only time I ever participated in anything like that, but thats really what happened; thats how that bill passed.  Just an interestingof course, he went nuts.  But it stood. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Youve had a very successful PR business and youve sold out to some firm, but I understand after that that you also formed a new company here in Atlanta.  Is that still \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Biggest mistake of my life.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Was it? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, I got into business with two people.  Unfortunately, one of them was fiscally irresponsible, and the other one went on a two and half year alcohol binge.  And from the very outset of the business, shortly after it began, I realized I had to get out of here.  The thing that was hanging over my head was I was a co-signer of a note.  And they not only co-signed on that note, the other two, but they took an additional $500,000 loan, which I was not a party to, thank god.  I would of never signed it.  In any event, it wasnt until last year that my suit against the company was settled where I paid my third of the first loan.   \r\nBut four years before that I was gone; I just didnt want any part of it.  It was a woman who had fanciful notions about how to finance things and she was stupid.  She was very creative but not very smart.  Jekyll Island ran up about a $250,000 tab on her, and they fired that guy down on Jekyll Island, and the next guy wouldnt pay it.  I assumed all along that she was telling the truth, that she could back it up, that had the emails and letters and contract.  She didnt have anything.  I had to walk away from that, just a very unpleasant experience.   \r\nA guy who had been with me for many years, who I had a lot of respect for and wanted to go into business with, he hit the alcohol trail.  He would come in around ten go to Bones at noon and either not come back or come back about three and there was no work he could do.  It was a sad, sad situation.  Same thing with Steve.  It was sad that he got into drugs, very troubling, but thats was the way it was.  I havent been a part of that in a long time.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Didnt you one time be very active in real estate? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  What do you mean active in real estate? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I thought you at one time owned the Sears building in Chicago. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  No. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Thats not you? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  I owned part of a big tower in Houston, but it was sort of a tax dodge.  And of course, I had a small, maybe $250,000 worth of it, and it was multimillions.  And what happened was investment firms got people to put up the money because there were terrific tax benefits to it.  That was the only reason I ever got into that, I never made any money doing that.  No, real estate is something IIve done well with the homes Ive been in.  Sold our Buckhead home for a huge profit, two years before the market crashed, thank god.  And moved out to Cobb County were taxes are almost nonexistent; its a good thing. So, no, no real estate. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  No real estate.  Getting back to your company Cohn \u0026 Wolfe, you were very active in that for how many years before you sold? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Twenty-eight years. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Twenty-eight years.  You had some very responsible clients. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Oh yeah, we had big clients all over the world. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Who were some of them? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well, Coke of course.  Chick-fil-A, AT\u0026T, Bosche and Lomb, Kodak, on and on and on.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And you did public relations and not advertising. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Right, right.  Strictly public relations. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell usgive us an example of what you would do say for AT\u0026T. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well, let me talk to you about it.  Well, AT\u0026T we had handled for a long time and when the Olympics came to Atlanta, were coming to Atlanta, I was part of what they called a dream team, AT\u0026T, with a guy from their advertising agency, from their promotional agency, from their direct mail agency, and their interactive group.  There were five of us.  And I negotiated with A.D. Frasier to sponsor the Centennial Olympic Park, and we put this $6 million edifice out there called AT\u0026Ts Global Olympic Village, where we entertained about 15,000- 20,000 people every night off of the stage.  The PR piece of it, which was great, was that NBC was the television network so in the first floor of the Global Olympic Village, we made studios available to every NBC affiliate that was coming to the Olympics.  So every night they would be broadcasting from the AT\u0026T Global Olympic Village, unbelievable coverage.  That was the PR side of it.   \r\nThere were other public relations benefits to it.  Visibility, which was terrific, great entertainment, Ray Charles, big name entertainment; it was quite a project.  So that was part of a team effort to come up with that concept.  In terms of  something that I did by myself, which I was very proud of, there was a lot of stuff that I did that I can look back and say that was pretty good stuff.  At Calgary Olympics in 1988, I sat at a table, a conference room table, with people on my staff and I said, What is it that you cant do at the Olympics Games?  The conclusion was you cant commercialize the opening ceremonies.  So I said, Lets do that.  Lets figure out how to do that.  And had never been done before.  As it turned out the Calgary Organizing Committee was short on cash so they were looking for help.  And I went to them with the idea, went to Coke first with the idea of forming a world chorus where coke bottlers around the world would hold contests for singers who would then become a part of the Coca-Cola World Chorus in the opening ceremonies of the Calgary Games.  And we made that happen.  And the coverage of that Jim McKay did five minutes during the opening ceremony on the whole Coca-Cola thing, what they had done, we got David Foster to write the music for it.  It was just an unbelievable breakthrough in terms of looking at a situation from how difficult could it be. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Was that the famous Coke Chorus that sang \r\n \r\nCOHN:  No, this was a whole new ballgame.  A lot of the stuff we did for Coke in the Olympics was breakthrough, not done before, and they continue to do most of it right now. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were actively involved in the planning for the Olympics in Atlanta werent you? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah, I was the governors appointee to the Metropolitan Olympic Games Organizing Committee, not organizing committee, Metropolitan Olympic Games Authority, which I served on for eight years with the mayor, top officials.  George Barry was on it.  Our job was to make certain that the city, county, and state were not encumbered by any debt.  So we had to approve every contract over $100,000.  And thats what we did over an eight-year period.  A lot of politics involved in it.  And not only Maynard but also his, the guy that followed him in, whats his name? \r\n \r\nSHORT: Campbell. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Bill Campbell, forgive me.  Joekeep forgetting these thingshe was the head of Natural Resources. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tanner. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Joe Tanner and Ione of the final pieces that we had to approve was the construction of a facility at Lake Lanier for the rowing venue.  And as it turned out, Billy Paynes people had hired a company out of Dallas to do it because they were renowned for havingthat was a specialty of theirs.  Well, Campbell objected to it; wanted minority participated.  And both Tanner and I stood up in opposition and he called us racists.  And I said, No, these are the only guys who know how to do that.  Who else are you going to put into this thing?  And he made a lot of noise, made the headlines of the newspapers, and in the next day, he quietly recanted.  It was all a sham, a show, a joke.  So we had to handle issues like that and we at that conjunction I think they would set a goal of 30% minority participation and were at about 43% over the whole project.  So we were way beyond where we were expected to be and he should not have objected to doing the right thing here.  But thats politics. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Thats politics and you know a lot about that. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Yeah.  See, Ive been to so many Olympic Games and worked for so many Olympic sponsors that Zell felt like I could make a contribution there.  He appointed me then reappointed me.  It was a very interesting thing; it also got me unbelievable access, tickets, the whole nine.  Something about pay off down the end of the road for the service put in. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  On scale of one to ten, how would you rate the Atlanta Olympics compared to others you attended? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  I dont know.  Beijing was just unbelievable.  I dont know if you saw the opening ceremonies there, but they spent over $300 million on it.  I think we spent ten or twenty here.  It was just staggering.  Sydney was better than Atlanta.  But I think Atlanta did a decent job.  I think the thing thatthere were two things, two issues, that sort of fouled things up.  One were all the street vendors, which made a pretty honky-tonk feel to the thing.  Then the other was Billy, a very astute guy, he used all the money from the sponsors that came in from NBC to build the facilities, no state Marriott, none of them was involved.  And the IOC objected because they didnt get their slice of the pie.  And thats one of the reasons, in my opinion, what happened in Atlanta and then following that what happened in Salt lake City with the bribingthat put the U.S. in a penalty box.  Were still not out of it.  Chicago bid and should have gotten the games but didnt and I think its because of what happened in both Atlanta and Salt Lake.  But the games as a whole in terms of the athletics of it was great.  It was wonderful. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And good for the city. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Oh, yeah, yeah, very good for the city.  Theres a lot of things that happened here following that, that you could attribute to the games.  Of course, Billy came out great.  Hes now running the Augusta National Golf Club, which is, for a retirement job, about as good as it gets.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, looking back, Bob, is there anything that we missed? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  I tell you that I, probably is, I finishedJune and I were married fifty years on June the 5th, my wife and I took on a six-month project.  I wrote a book about our family going back as far as I could go.  And I, there were about 1700 photographs because I had taken photographs of my own children, of my own children, and my grandchildren, all of it from the day we were married; so I had a lot of that.  But I went back and did some research into how her family and my family came to the U.S., how they got here.  Her family story was more interesting than mine and I dont know if you want me to tell it quickly, which I can do. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Sure. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Her forbearer came from southwest Germany in 1711 and it took them six weeks to go from southwest Germany to Rotterdam on the Rhine River; some creaky old boat.  So it was he and his wife, and daughter, and son.  Well they went from there, took a boat to the U.S. across the Atlantic; the ocean crossing took three months, half the people on the ship died from disease.  Luckily, her forbearer, his name was Kornegay, he survived, he and his family survived.  They were off course so they landed near Jamestown, Virginia.  And before they could land the boat, they were still out in the water, shortly out in the water there, they were raided by pirates who took everything they had, including their clothes.  So in the middle of the winter they had to wade to shore naked.  The people in Jamestown helped them get to their original destination, which was New Bern, South Carolina.  They were there a year.  And the people, the Englishmen, were hiring or using Indian women as slaves and the Indians got upset.  So they raided their development there and killed everybody, everybody, except the son of John Kornegay.  He was a little kid and he managed to get away.  \r\nAnd thats how June came into being.  And what you realize when you go through a process like that, what a narrow passage there is for us to be living here alive in America today.  Its a fascinating thing, how we slip through.  It really is very, very interesting.  And I gave a copy of the book to each one of my grandchildren so theyd have what I didnt had; I had no idea where my father was born nor my grandfather.  I had none of that because my parents died when I was so young.  The message was how lucky we are that these people went through what they went through, and were here alive.  None of us would be alive if it werent for these people.  So I dedicated the book to those people who managed to come out of the Ukraine, England, Germany, and France, and create the possibility of us being alive here today. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Looking back Bob, is there anything you would have done differently in your career? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Oh, yeah.  I think the one great regret I have is that at the time we were hired by the Independent Bankers Association to fight the Branch Banking Bill.  And it was a big retainer for us and it was legitimate.  We werent representing Michael Thevis or anything; it was a legitimate thing.  And we lobbied the house and the senate and we beat it in the senate by one vote.  I think as a result of that the Atlanta banks werent able to grow and the North Carolina banks were able to continue their growth, and ultimately led to them taking over all the banks here.  I never even thought about that as a possibility.  We were trying to protect the little banker in Eatonton, Georgia.  It was a noble client sort of thing; not let the big guys chew him up.  But looking back on it, I got to say Im sorry I did that. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Any regrets? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Regrets?  As it relates to business or personally or what? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Politically, business, or personal. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Id say that my biggest regret is that I wasted a lot of time in my life; wasted time.  I was in the Air Force for four years, complete waste of time.  It resulted in a positive action, being able to get the G.I. Bill, but we used to sit in Alaska.  I was up there for two years in the mens room, in the latrine, because it was the warmest place in the barracks, and played Blackjack for hours on end.  It was ridiculous and even now.  But once I retired, I find that Im just killing time.  I wish I wasnt, I wish I could be helpful, but Im not.  So theres a lot of wasted time in my life that I wish I could have been more constructive during those periods of times. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, youve been helpful to us by remembering these great things about your career in Georgia politics and in business, so we want to thank you for that. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Okay.  I regret that the state has become a Republican stronghold with Sonny Perdue. \r\n \r\n[BREAK] \r\n \r\nCOHN:  We were at the, I had taken my family up to Williamsburg to the Southern Governors Conference and my oldest daughter, who was very young then, had to get back to school before I could get a plane to get her back there.  So I asked the governor if he would be kind enough to fly her back with him, which he did.  And Terri, who is now forty-eight years old, came home and painted a flag, an American flag, and gave it to the governor and it still rests in a case up on the third floor with other memorabilia of his.  So that was a really neat little story aboutmy family was fond of him because of that really. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Which governor? \r\n \r\nCOHN: Yeah, yeah \r\n \r\nSHORT: Which Governor? \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Maddox \r\n \r\nSHORT: Ah Maddox \r\n \r\nCOHN: I have a picture of them in that plane.  The one thing I didnt go into and I dont know if I need to, but despite his image, Maddox did quite a few good things, things that were not expected.  And if you want me to go into some of those, I just have to go through my notes here.  Going out of office, he had a favorable poll rating of eighty-four percent.  He appointed more African-Americans to state government positions than any governor before him.  He appointed the first African-American to head a state department.  Named the first black GBI agent.  Named the first black trooper, state trooper.  Ordered state troopers to desist from using the word nigger and to address African-Americans using mister instead of their first name. \r\n The other good story, which I forgot, was that there was a story that broke that in north Georgia in the middle of winter, prison guards were using prisoners to retrieve ducks from the lake.  I hope you remember that.  When Maddox was asked about it, he said, What the state needs is a better class of prisoners.  Famous quote of his.  It was unimaginable that these people were doing that but that was his response.  Like I said, there was a whole slew of things that he did that were very good.  A lot of it was lost.  I looked last night after seeing the, I think they are on record at the University of Georgia, a lot of the Baldy Maddox cartoons.  Very telling in terms of his term in office, but in the end, he did a lot of good stuff.  \r\n       \r\n[BREAK] \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us all about your experience at the convention.  When was that, 68?  When you were up there running Maddox for President. \r\n \r\nCOHN:  Well this is the front page of the New York Daily News, which shows the Georgia delegation, led by Lester Maddox, walking out of the Democratic Convention after he failed to get an acceptable compromise with the Julian Bond delegation.  Maddox is not in the picture, unfortunately, but I am, right in the middle of it.  And I alwaysIve kept this thing because of that.  Its not every day that you get to appear on the front page of the New York Daily News.  Mostly murders and rapes, but this is sort of a murder, in a way.  But theres nowhere in the history books, I said earlier, where theres any mention of the fact that he ran for the Democratic nomination and Im here to tell you and show you this to prove that he did. "},{"id":"gych_rogp_104","title":"Reg Murphy, 09 February 2010.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Murphy, John Reginald, 1934","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2010-02-09"],"dcterms_description":["Reg Murphy recalls growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, and attending Mercer University. He discusses working for the Macon Telegraph and covering the integration of the University of Georgia. Murphy recalls receiving a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University for a year. Murphy recalls covering the state capitol for first the Macon Telegraph and then the Atlanta Constitution. He recalls uncovering corruption in the Griffin Administration. Murphy recalls covering events during Governor Vandiver's administration including the demise of the unit system and the Baker v. Carr reapportionment case. He recalls working with Ralph McGill and explains how he was offered the role of editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Murphy discusses Bill Hartsfield's and Ivan Allen's roles in advancing the national reputation of Atlanta and Georgia overall. He recalls the development of Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia and Dr. Martin Luther King's influence on African American political activity in Atlanta. Murphy weighs in on the Three Governors Controversy in 1944 and the tumultuous 1966 gubernatorial election that involved the United States Supreme Court. Murphy comments on the \"one man, one vote\" decision and explains its significance in Georgia history. He also discusses the importance of Atlanta as a hub for the Civil Rights Movement, recalling the actions of Ralph David Abernathy and Vernon Jordon. Murphy reflects on Jimmy Carter's campaign for governor and subsequently President. Murphy recalls being kidnapped by extremists, discusses the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and comments on the state of print journalism in America.","John Reginald \"Reg\" Murphy was born in 1934 in Gainesville, Georgia. He attended Mercer University in Macon, and worked for the Macon Telegraph. In 1955 he opened the Atlanta bureau of the Macon Telegraph. He was chosen to be a Neiman Fellow at Harvard in 1959, and in 1961 went to work for the Atlanta Constitution as political editor. He became managing editor of Atlanta magazine in 1965, and returned to the Constitution in 1968, succeeding Ralph McGill as editor. In 1975 Murphy left Georgia for the San Francisco Examiner, and in 1981 went to the Baltimore Sun. In 1996 he joined the National Geographic Society as president and chief executive. In 1999 his biography of Griffin Bell, Uncommon Sense: The Achievement of Griffin Bell was published.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Georgia--Governor (1959-1963 : Vandiver)","Mercer University","University of Georgia","College integration--Georgia--Athens","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Three Governors Controversy, Georgia, 1946-1947","Political campaigns--Georgia","Journalism--United States","College integration","Journalism","Journalists","Kidnapping","Political campaigns","Politics and government","Universities and colleges--Alumni and alumnae","Georgia--Politics and government","Georgia","Georgia--Athens","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Reg Murphy, 09 February 2010."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-104/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 104, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (96 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Murphy, John Reginald, 1934-","Hearst, Patricia, 1954-","Carter, Jimmy, 1924-","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Reg Murphy interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2010 February 9 \r\nSt. Simons Island, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-104 \r\nOriginal: video, 96 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\n BOB SHORT:  I'm Bob Short. This is Reflections on Georgia Politics, sponsored by the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia. I'd like to welcome Reg Murphy, former political reporter and editor of The Atlanta Constitution, who's covered and written about Georgia politics for many years. Welcome, Reg.  \r\n \r\n REG MURPHY:  Thank you, I'm glad to join you.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  With your permission, Reg, I'd like to divide our conversation into three parts.  \r\n  \r\n MURPHY:  Alright. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  First, your early life.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Next, your reflections on Georgia politics. And lastly, your life after those very historical political careers. So, may we begin by talking about your experiences while growing up in north Georgia?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, I was born in Hoschton, Georgia, which is one mile south of Braselton, Georgia, which is in Jackson County. And most people have never heard of Hoschton, Georgia. When I tell people that, they laugh at me. My parents moved to Gainesville, and I grew up in Gainesville, Georgia. My dad was a wholesale grocery clerk. My mom was a first-grade school teacher. I went to Gainesville High School. I played football and basketball and baseball; none of it very well, but we had a great time. And I thought that my high school years -- unlike most people, my high school years were some of the best years of my life. I had a handicap. My mother didn't have anywhere for me to live -- or to stay home while she was teaching. And so, I started school at four, and I graduated from high school at sixteen, which means that I had to date freshmen girls, not senior girls. Not my counterparts, because they were way, way beyond me in maturity. But I had a great time.  \r\n Decided to go to Mercer University, and I really wanted to go to Med school. I really would love to have been a doctor, but in those days first grade teachers and shipping clerks didn't make a lot of money. So, I worked my way through Mercer as a reporter for the Macon Telegraph. And that's kind of misleading. I didn't work my all the way through, I still lack about twenty hours getting my degree. They did take mercy on me a few years later and gave me a doctorate, but an earned degree I don't have. Loved to work for the Telegraph, and that's when I started covering Georgia politics. I covered the federal courts when the courts ordered the University of Georgia integrated. I remember at that time doing a survey, and Herman Talmadge said, \"Blood's going to run in the streets in Georgia if they implement that.\" And Judge Bootle, who had made that ruling, was steely in his determination to follow the law of the land. I don't what his personal preference was and nobody will ever know, but he was resolute in his determination that he would follow the law of the land. And that's how that all began.  \r\n Then after that, I moved to Atlanta to cover state politics for the Macon Telegraph. And then we had two newspapers, and to be the correspondent for a morning and an afternoon newspaper stretches out your day so that there are two news cycles. The first news cycle is a very difficult one, because you're starting out early in the morning for an afternoon newspaper, and then later in the day, you start another cycle for the morning newspaper the next morning. And I was a one-man bureau, so I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of editor's questions and a lot of long days. Had a great time, however. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So, you go from the Telegraph to The Atlanta Constitution.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  With an interim period where I had a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and that's one of the great experiences for any journalist. What you do is go to Harvard and you're responsible for completing all of the work in one course. And other than that, for the whole year you're free to monitor any subjects you want to monitor. For example, I sat in on lectures with John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, all the great people who then later -- the next year, actually -- went to Washington as part of the Kennedy Administration. So, I was on a not friendly, but knowledgeable basis with all the people who were in the Kennedy Administration. And in fact, my first coverage of presidential politics, except for Georgia campaign swings, was John Kennedy's early campaigning in New Hampshire during that year. One of my treasured photographs is of me standing with John Kennedy out in the bitter cold in New Hampshire, outside, I think, a GE plant greeting the workers. And that was a great piece of exposure for me, having until that point lived my life in the South.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Tell us about your first experiences as a political writer at the State Capitol.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. When I first went to the State Capitol, I was still working for the Macon Telegraph in Atlanta, and Marvin Griffin had come into office and all of those people who came in with him. My specific instructions from the newspaper were, you see, that, \"Everybody accuses the Atlanta newspapers of lying. You go up there and just figure out what's real and just report it. Whatever it is.\" And I went to the Capitol and began to report. And I discovered that not only were they not lying, it was the politicians who were lying. And wherever you turned in the Griffin Administration, there were people who were stealing.  \r\n For example, George Whitman was the superintendent of schools in the state. Actually, that's not true. He was the chairman of the Board of Education in the state. But he also was selling a fair amount of school materials -- books and other workbooks and things -- to state school systems. And I was kind of curious about where his warehouse was and who he was selling through and what his sales' force looked like and how it was being handled, and I began to look around for the facility. Couldn't find it anywhere. Finally, found a phone number and traced it down, and his entire facility was a coin phone booth in College Park, Georgia. After that, I think he left the Board and had some other legal troubles. But that was the kind of thing that happened all the way through the Griffin Administration.  \r\n Now, having said that, Marvin Griffin could be the most charming human being I have ever seen and certainly the best storyteller. We used to go into his office for a morning -- it wasn't as formal as a news conference. But we'd go in for a talk with him in the morning, and he always greeted us the same way, \"What are you jorees up to this morning?\" And I didn't know what a joree was, and it turns out it's a small bird that hides in the bushes and peaks around the corner to see what's going on. And it was a very demeaning term, but he said it in such a funny way that nobody there took any offense to it.  \r\n He started a campaign for building rural roads, and that was a big argument. It was actually a very good program. It brought a whole lot of people access to the towns with a much easier way to get there and to facilitate farm operations too. But they were not always clean either. Jack Nelson, who worked for the Constitution, found that somebody had been paid for three and a half miles of paving down in Appling County. And he went down there and used the odometer on the car, and found that actually it was about one and a quarter miles of blacktop paving, and that they had paid for three and a half miles of paving. Those were the kinds of things that went on every single day in that administration. And at the end of that period, when we totaled it all up, 32 different state officials had been indicted and 17 of them actually served some time in jail. It truthfully was one of the corrupt times in Georgia politics. I hesitate to say that it was the most corrupt time. I don't know that. Nobody knows that. But it certainly was one of the corrupt times in Georgia politics.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  And in those days, Reg, and I'm sure you will remember this, Marvin Griffin was a very strong leader in what was known as the States' Rights Council. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  And the States' Rights Council, you know, was his front for all that segregationist effort that he went through. One of his appointees spent a lot of time and money trying to prove that somewhere up in north Georgia and Tennessee, there was some Communist conspiracy that was going to take over the South, because they had an integrated staff, I think it was, or some integrated conferences at least. I've forgotten how much money they spent, but it was an outrageous amount. And then, you know, they had an ally, Roy Harris, who lived in Augusta and had a sheet called The Augusta Courier, which always had red type on the front -- big, red, black block type. Spent most of his time exposing that and the Koinonia farms, which was a peaceful little settlement down in south Georgia that had no intention of trying to overturn the world. But it was trying to set an example for how people could live together. And so, if you put Roy Harris and Marvin Griffin and his associates -- all the same group -- segregation was the only thing that mattered in political races. And I remember Charles Pou, who was the great old political editor for the Journal, used to say, \"If you ain't for stealing, you ain't for segregation.\" They stole and they segregated. That was the kind of things that were the staple of Georgia politics.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  It was interesting, I thought, that Marvin Griffin, who was in the Talmadge camp, and Ernest Vandiver, who was in the Talmadge camp, had a big war over the rural roads business and fell apart. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. And Vandiver at that point decided he would go in a totally different direction from the Griffin people. And he began to figure out whether he could then move from lieutenant governor to the governor's office, and he had great connections, as you know. He had connections -- his wife was connected to Senator Russell's family, and he himself had built his political connections. And he came to office with a segregationist platform that said that -- his slogan was, \"No, Not One.\" Meaning no one Negro child -- as they were called then -- could pass through that door and into a white school and integrate the school.  \r\n Ernest Vandiver -- I never was sure that he believed quite what he was preaching at that point. He was really a very decent man, a very decent man. And when he announced that he was going to close the University of Georgia because Charlayne Hunter and Mr. Holmes were going to integrate the school in the next day, there was a lot of demonstrating going on. And he told me that on a deadline -- as I was reporting for the Constitution, he told me he was going to close schools. And I wrote the story. We used it as our headline the next morning, and unbeknownst to me, there then assembled out of the State Capitol -- the governor's mansion -- about 25 to 30 of his staunchest supporters. And over the course of that discussion, which included Griffin Bell, he changed his mind and the next morning, to my chagrin at that time, because I had been made to look like a fool as a reporter -- but the right thing to do -- announced the next morning that he was going to keep the schools open. They did have some skirmishes, but nothing of any real significance happened during that period. It was one of the acts of bravery in Southern politics to say, \"Wait a minute, I'm making a mistake here. I will decide the right thing to do with the help of all my friends.\" Some of whom objected vehemently, and others who really thought that he was making a courageous step in the direction towards making Georgia a modern place.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  In addition to the integration at the University of Georgia, I believe it was 1962, Vandiver got hit with two other significant and historical decisions that affected and, I think -- and I hope you'll agree -- changed Georgia politics forever. And that was the demise of the county unit system, which the Talmadges and Roy Harris had manipulated for many years. And then the Baker vs. Carr reapportionment case, which, you know -- \"One man, one vote.\"  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. Well, when a vote in Fulton County was worth one-hundredth of the amount of a vote in the smallest county in the state, that clearly was the most inequitable thing that could have happened in Georgia politics. And it gave control of the state to south Georgia and all the counties below Atlanta. And of course, what you heard in those days -- if they ever gave the one man, one vote to Atlanta, the block vote, which really meant that that was a code word for the black vote -- would give control of Atlanta to the blacks. What happened instead was that no black person was elected governor, the State Legislature has never been populated majority by African-Americans. The truth is it broadened the base of Georgia politics, and that probably as much as any single thing, changed Georgia politics. Well, certainly more than any other thing, because before that, the state was among the most, if not the most conservative Southern state. And then it moved to probably one of the most moderate, maybe the most moderate Southern state. And that changed the way the state was governed -- dramatically changed the way the state was governed.  \r\n And when you add in the reapportionment decision that allowed the state to change the way districts were formulated, so that there wasn't total control in every part of the state -- Democratic rule, actually, not just white, but Democratic rule in a state that was clearly going toward Republican rule. That changed a lot of different things. And in a way, it created a delegation that went to Washington to represent the state that was much more diverse and in many ways more forward looking than it had been before. Not all together, but in lots of ways a way that was significantly different. And the way you could tell that it was going in the direction of Republican conservatives instead of Democratic conservatives was that in the 1964 campaign immediately after those changes had swept through the state government, a team of Constitution reporters fanned out across the state just before the Johnson-Goldwater election. And we came back and added all these things together, and I wrote a story which said that unless there was some dramatic last minute change, Georgia will go Republican for the first time in a century. And my editors were very skeptical of that story. They didn't think Goldwater could win, and my heroes all desperately wanted the Democrats to win that year. But Goldwater won, and he won pretty heavily. I don't remember the percentages anymore, but they were substantial. And after that, you began to see a total change in the direction of state government. And became one of the stalwart states in the Republican party.  \r\n \r\n SHORT: That, of course, benefitted the more moderate Georgians. In that year -- 1962 -- Governor Carl Sanders was able to defeat Marvin Griffin. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Of whom you spoke. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yep. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Simply because of the \"One man, one vote\" law.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Exactly, and Carl Sanders was in my view a very progressive governor for his time. He would not be considered a big liberal -- he wasn't then -- but comparatively he was a liberal. And he was able to capture the middle of the road vote that was critical. And it also gave power to the larger towns and cities in the state.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's get back for a minute to The Atlanta Constitution. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were one of a great group of writers, Reg, including Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson and others, who worked hard to persuade Georgians to change their old South mentality by looking to the future and forgetting the past. Tell us a little bit about that period.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, nobody ever refers to me in the same breath as Ralph McGill. He was truly my hero. I thought he was the most courageous man I ever met. He lived through death threats all the time, and he wrote what was the most perceptive column I have ever read. The headline said, \"There Will Come a Monday.\" And what he meant by that -- and explained in the column -- was that one Monday, sometime, the Supreme Court would come down with the decision that ruled that segregation, the way it had been practiced in the United States, was unconstitutional. And he tried very hard to prepare his reader for that day. Some of them loved him and some of them hated him. There was a man somewhere out in Buckhead who paid his newspaper boy an extra fifty cents a week to clip McGill's picture out of the front-page column before he delivered his paper. And McGill was great about this. He understood what he was doing. He would write about three columns a week that were liberal by anybody's standards, but were very liberal by Georgia standards. And he'd always say, \"Okay, I've written my three. Now, I've got to go tell two stories about field trials in Waynesboro, because I've got to win them back somehow.\"  \r\n And he knew that he offended people, but he didn't delight in it. Everybody thought he delighted in it. But that's not true. He didn't delight in it. He worried about it all the time. But he was very literate and he had that sportswriters' background that gave him the ability to connect with people even when they were skeptical of what he was writing. And when I first went back to the Constitution as the editor, he was the best thing that could have happened to me, because he would take me to breakfast with them. If there was a visiting Israeli chief of intelligence, we'd go to breakfast and talk about it. If there was a presidential candidate who happened to be coming through town, he and I would go talk to the presidential candidate. And actually, he was very good at developing that kind of sources, very good. And he despaired sometimes with what he was writing about, but he wrote it. And during that period, he wrote a book called The South and the Southerner, which will always be one of the insightful books about Southern history.  \r\n And Patterson, Gene Patterson was a distinguished journalist. He'd been in London running the UPI Bureau, and he came back to Georgia and began to write a column which was lyrical. He was a true craftsman in terms of being able to write lyrically and beautifully. And he and McGill formed a partnership that lasted for several years, and it was an extremely effective force. He, more than McGill, concerned himself with Georgia politics and with the social trends and all of those things. And then there was a blow-up, and he and Jack Tarver just didn't get along, and he left. Unbeknownst to me -- I was out. I had left and I was freelancing, doing pretty well for myself. And I enjoyed being a freelancer, although I had two little girls and I drove very carefully, because if anything happened to you as a freelancer, you didn't have any other income. You break your leg and you're in big trouble.  \r\n But I was sitting at home one morning at seven o'clock, working on some piece -- I don't remember what it was now -- and the phone rang. Jack Tarver said, \"Hello.\" And he was nice, and he said, \"You ever downtown?\" And I said, \"Well, sometimes.\" And he said, \"Why don't you come by and see me today.\" And I thought, \"Okay, he wants me to come back and be the political editor again, and I don't really want to do that.\" It was a great job. I loved it, but I didn't want to do it again, because I had begged him before I left the paper, \"Let me write anything. Write sports, write fires, whatever.\" I was tired of politics. And I almost forgot to go. And I walked into his office about one-thirty, two o'clock in the afternoon, and he sat me down and he said -- after not much preliminaries -- \"Would you like to be the editor of the Constitution?\" And I thought, \"What in the world is he talking about?\" And I thought about it for a minute, and I said, \"I don't know. I really need to think about it.\" And he said, \"Well, I don't want you to think about it very long, because I really want you to do it.\" I said, \"Are you sure? Because you've had some problems with editors.\" And he said, \"I'm not particularly sure, but McGill is.\" I said, \"Well, I guess I don't have much choice, do I?\" And so, I took the job and became the editor of the Constitution. And I was a little more conservative than either McGill or Patterson. I've been always more middle of the road, but you know, you can't really compare yourself to those guys. They were giants in the journalism world.  \r\n And there were some reporters. It's important to remember that there were some reporters in those days who also were -- not advocates -- but clear-eyed reporters who did great jobs of exposing things. Jack Nelson was a terrific Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. Charlie Pou was the political editor of the Journal who never got the acclaim that he deserved. Margaret Shannon at The Atlanta Journal was a wonderful reporter, very insightful, who later went to Washington to run a bureau for the Journal in Washington. And her insights into how the Southern delegations, and particularly the Georgia delegation, were meshing and sometimes not meshing with national politics were insightful. So, there were a lot of really quality people who were working on the front lines in those days to make politics understandable and thoughtful for Georgians.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So your becoming editor expanded your duties with the paper. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yeah, I spent most of my time working with the editors and editorial writers. And because part of my agreement with Tarver was that I'd write a column seven days a week, that took a lot of time. A daily column is a challenge that most people won't ever have to deal with, and nobody in journalism has to deal with anymore. Nobody tries to do that anymore. And that's a wise thing, because I doubt that there are many people in the world who have seven really important ideas a week to write about. But I did. I grinded it out for seven years, and that was about all I had. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Saturdays for remembering.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It was sort of a McGill idea in a way. McGill always said he had to bring them back into the fold. And by accident, I decided to start writing about Saturdays for remembering, because I thought I could relate to lots of people in lots of different ways that were homey and more emotional than the other stuff. Liberals hated them. And I don't blame them, that was exactly what they ought to do. They didn't think they were important enough to be fooling around with. Some conservatives thought they were not conservative enough. But a whole lot of people did sort of remember their high school days and for their college days and for hunting and fishing, and they seemed to relate to them.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's get back to Georgia politics for a minute if you will. There was a time when both you and I remember that politicians treated Atlanta with a lot of jokes and certainly no attention. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  But with the passage of that bill we were talking about -- the Supreme Court decision, really -- they had to pay more attention to Atlanta. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  They did, and it was a good thing that they did pay more attention to Atlanta. The politicians who had scoffed and discounted everything that Atlanta needed to do, now had to think about it. And as a result of that, they began to be a lot more helpful to the growth of the city. Out of that came a lot of good things. For example, they began to cooperate to some extent with Bill Hartsfield, who was the mayor in Atlanta. And when the schools were integrated in Atlanta, they furnished a lot of the state troopers and a lot of the help that kept that from being as bloody as it could be. \r\n I remember the wonderful, old, African-American minister named William Holmes Borders, who used to say that the country was better off because Georgia was better off; and because the county unit system was gone, Georgia was going to be an important part of the country. You could go to his church on Sunday morning, and he was a spokesman for a peaceful integration of not just the schools, but the churches and for social life. And when I went back to the Constitution, one of the pieces he inspired me to write was that no civic clubs in Atlanta had any African-American members. And I remember saying, \"You couldn't have written that in the days before the county unit system fell.\"  \r\n Then, the campaigns shifted toward Atlanta. And by the time of that Goldwater victory in '64, it was clear that everybody had to pay attention to it. Carl Sanders had paid attention to it, and he made in my view a very good progressive governor because he did work hard to get Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, Savannah involved in politics. For example, the Atlanta school systems were starved because of the way money was allocated. They didn't get nearly as much money as the schools out in the state. They didn't get any money even for -- or not much money for -- what became the Hartsfield Airport -- the Atlanta airport that suddenly got a lot more money from the state. And a lot of other improvements happened because of that.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You mention Mayor Hartsfield. Can we talk for a minute about the political leadership in Atlanta during that period? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Sure can. Bill Hartsfield, in my opinion, was the person who started the road toward peaceful desegregation, by saying Atlanta was a city that's too big to hate. And it was. It was a city that knew that it was moving. Not everybody liked it, but knew that it was moving. He had a police chief named Jenkins, who was a very good police chief, and he was determined to keep order. And then, following Hartsfield, Ivan Allen came along, who I believe was one of the best urban political leaders in the country. Ivan Allen was a tremendously progressive guy. And during his time, they began that \"Forward Atlanta\" campaign. I think it was during his time. And that campaign produced all of the shift toward thinking of the South as a place to establish national company headquarters. He always wanted to bring in bigger fish than just the branch office. He loved the idea that the branch offices were moving to Atlanta, but he really thought that he could be more ambitious than that. And as a result, Atlanta had a growth spurt unlike anything I've ever seen. I left kind of in the middle of it. I moved in the middle of it. But during that time to the late '60s and early '70s, when the rest of the world was in turmoil because of the Vietnam War, Atlanta was growing economically on almost an everyday basis. There was a new announcement of something new economically happening in Atlanta that was a result of the Atlanta political leadership.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  During that period -- boom period, I call it -- certainly Georgia and Atlanta was one of the most lucrative spots, I would think -- I would say, for business in the country. Do you think that was because of the new people who were moving into the state, or because of the drastic change that we had made in our politics? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It was a combination of the in migration and the politics. But the politics that were changing it were more important than anything else, I think. For example, Georgia Tech went from being a very good technical school to being a true great school. And its business management groups and its innovative groups were enhanced dramatically by the fact that it was then getting some state support. The University of Georgia was beginning to be a much better place. What people had always called a great party school was moving toward becoming a good research university. Those were things that were significantly important.  \r\n And during that period of time, other good things were happening too. Some people didn't call it good, but Martin Luther King came along and made peace with the Atlanta leadership, and began to promote things. Morehouse College began to be an important producer of middle-class and leadership African-Americans. The other schools at that point were struggling -- the other historically black schools were struggling, but they also were producing some middle-class and upper-class people. And that combination created an incredible petrie dish of how one finds economic growth. And as a result of that, the city went through a building boom that was unprecedented in the South, and its old rivals, like Birmingham, were outgrown just dramatically. They were left in the dust by this Atlanta transformation that most of us didn't really understand at the moment how important and significant it would be to the future of the state. The future of the state was more or less determined by that growth spurt.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You mentioned Dr. Borders. Prior to 1964, I guess in the Kennedy election, weren't the majority of the African-American leadership in Atlanta Republicans?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Absolutely. The Republican delegation to the national conventions prior to 1964 were composed of blacks and whites. And in 1964, Dr. Borders and Dr. King and other leaders like that -- Andrew Young, other people -- brought into the Democratic Party a lot of the African-Americans. That year, going to the Johnson -- not inauguration -- convention, they were a significant number of the people who went to that convention. And they then got a majority of the black vote, but by no means an overwhelming amount of it. Only in the '64 election, I think, did that vote flip. I'm not sure that's right, that may not be right. But a large number of people changed parties. And that was because the Republicans had gotten a lot more conservative and the Democrats had opened up the doors. And because Atlanta then had a vote, as opposed to the time of the county unit system when Atlanta didn't have a vote and black folk were just totally unimportant in Georgia elections.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Governor Vandiver is said to have played a role in the Kennedy election when he helped Robert Kennedy get John F. Kennedy out of jail. Do you remember that story? Is that a true story?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I knew Robert Kennedy reasonably well. And Robert Kennedy interceded with President Kennedy to get Dr. King out of jail, and who else interceded in that was Griffin Bell. Griffin Bell then was the chief of staff to Ernest Vandiver, and was about to become the Georgia campaign manager for the Kennedy campaign in Georgia. And between them, Vandiver and Griffin Bell were the people who convinced President Kennedy to intervene. And all of this was very sub rosa at that moment. Nobody was aware of it until -- give him credit -- Charles Pou at The Atlanta Journal broke that story. And there was great disgruntlement with him for breaking that story, but it's true that that's what happened.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Dr. King was in jail in DeKalb County on a traffic violation. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Which was the most trumped up, outrageous, foolish arrest anybody had ever heard of. And everybody knew it was just a trumped up charade. It was disgusting. Made no sense.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Reg, we Georgians have had great success in making fools of ourselves in politics, in the eyes of the nation in 1946, when we had three governors, in 1966, when we couldn't elect a governor and had to have the Supreme Court to tell us how. What kind of record is that? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It's about as bad a political record as you can have. And it tells you about as much about how the leadership in this state, how awful it was, as anything ever could. You know, Talmadge, Arnall, and Thompson were all trying to figure out to change the locks on the door at the governor's office. It was the worst kind of politics, and everybody in the country, I guess, was mesmerized by it. I don't really remember being conscious of it. I mean, I knew about it, but I wasn't really reporting at that point. But it was just sort of this stupid kind of thing.  \r\n But all that went back, you know, to the Talmadge era. Gene Talmadge started all the stuff with his campaigns, like, \"Yes, it's true that I stole, but I stole for you.\" And then his wool-hat boys climbing in the trees and yelling, \"You tell them, Gene.\" He'd say, \"I'm coming to that.\" His three-dollar tag and, you know, the squire of Sugar Creek foolishness, all of that. And it was great drama. And it was just lousy leadership, but that's how it was.  \r\n And then, Herman came along. Herman took up right where his father left off with terrible, terrible tirades about segregation and things like that and blood running in the streets. And you know, according to both court records and legend, he may have had more to drink and did more women chasing than just about anybody. His wife certainly thought so anyway, and left him. \r\n And then you move along and you get to Marvin Griffin. And you get to the corruption of the Griffin years and you get to all of that, and it just built up a case where nobody could make all of this work. And it had to impede growth in Atlanta. Atlanta being situated where it was, at the crossroads of all the rails and all of the airlines and everything else, had to grow, but they managed to keep a damper on it for a very long period of time, because the rest of the country thought that Georgians were just complete idiots. Which never was true. There were plenty of very smart people, but a lot of them were congregated in areas where they had no political power at all. So, it was an impasse that only the Supreme Court could have broken.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, in '46, you say you weren't reporting it, but that was one of the incidents in government where the guy who got the most votes lost. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's true. And every single person in America who was thinking about it, said, \"How in the world can that be? What are those people doing? What are they thinking about? What kind of elections are they having?\" That also was a time when there was really a very wide spread of vote fraud, very widespread. Down in Telfair County, they actually went out and got names off tombstones and registered those people to vote, and cast votes for them. George Goodwin won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing that. The joke used to be that they had more votes than they had pine trees in some of those counties. There was no accountability for it at all. And nobody ever was punished for it.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah. Those votes, which were alleged to be alphabetically cast, got Herman Talmadge in the race for governor that he won when he was appointed by the Legislature. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. Exactly right. And all of those votes -- remember, they kind of held out all the votes in several south Georgia counties until they knew where -- for two or three days, until they knew that they would then be important votes to be cast in the election. And some of the ballot boxes disappeared and never were found. They were probably at the bottom of some abandoned well or something like that. I don't know where they were, but nobody could ever find them. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That was the county unit days.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yep. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  I remember reading Roy Harris, who said that he could change the outcome of an election in more than thirty-nine Georgia counties, even after the polls had closed.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. I had forgotten that. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  It used to be said that all you needed to become governor of Georgia was fifty thousand dollars and Roy Harris.  \r\n \r\n` MURPHY:  That's right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That's the way our politics was at the time. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Now Reg, if you will, let's move ahead to 1966, when ironically the guy who got the most votes in the governor's race lost.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  You know, when you think about it, that's sort of the heritage of Georgia politics. The heritage is that we did everything backward for a long period of time. And that one didn't make any sense at all, or to me it didn't make any sense at all. How that one happened I still don't understand. Maybe somebody else will clarify. You know, what would really make history would be for somebody to go back and redo that race and trace all of the ins and outs of that political campaign, because Bo Callaway clearly won that election. Didn't he? \r\n \r\n SHORT:  He did. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  And how they decided to overturn it in the legislature still is -- I mean, I sort of know the history, but the result was bizarre. And if you think about Lester Maddox and about what he represented in those days, he was the most peculiar combination of politician I've ever been around. He chased people down the street with his pickaxe -- axe handle, I mean -- and yet he had some fairly humanitarian ideas. He did some stuff that I respected, like he threw open the governor's mansion every once in a while, had people in. They don't do that anymore. He would talk to various and sundry groups that disagreed with him. He fought with Zell Miller every day, but they weren't really all that far apart on some things. He didn't know how to deal with the Legislature. That's not true, he did know how to deal with the Legislature, because they elected him. But he wasn't very effective with them after that. And yet, when you look back on it, he was pretty -- I remember one time, I wrote a column about something, I don't remember what it was anymore, and he wouldn't allow the paper to be brought into the Capitol anymore. And Ben Fortson, who was the secretary of state, got himself a bucket and a rope, and somebody would put a paper downstairs and he'd bring the paper up with his rope and his bucket. And those were the zany kinds of things that used to happen in Georgia politics. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, you've covered many, many significant stories over the Capitol over the years. Which are most imbedded in your memory? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  The Supreme Court decision about the one man, one vote. I remember it came down at about two o'clock in the afternoon one day. I guess it was a Monday. And I spent from then until the time -- whatever the deadline was, probably 8:30, nine o'clock at night -- trying to piece together all the ramifications of what that was going to mean. And I haven't read that story -- I don't read stories like that anymore, but that I remember was pretty comprehensive coverage we did at that point. And I figured it was the most significant, long-lasting, far-reaching decision that we were going to have in Georgia politics maybe ever. Looking back on it, I think it may have been the most significant, epic change of era in Georgia history.  \r\n  \r\n SHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about the effect of civil rights movement on politics. Most of the news during that period emanated from Atlanta, because the civil rights' leaders were located in Atlanta. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right.  Well, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed in Atlanta it brought together people who didn't necessarily all live there at the beginning, who all moved there. And the Southern Christian Leadership Conference became a formidable force in politics. And it was implemented -- people forget this now, but it was rather supplemented by the fact of some other organizations being there. I remember the Urban League was located directly across the street from the Constitution. And Vernon Jordan, who then was not the famous Vernon Jordan he is today, had an office up on the third floor, and he was running, I think, the Urban League at that point. And my office was on about the same level as his, and in those days we didn't live in hermetically sealed buildings, so we could raise the windows. And he would raise a window on his side and yell across the street, \"Reg, you want to go to lunch today?\" And I'd go to lunch with him, and we'd talk about all the civil rights movements that were going on. And the civil rights movement included some firebrands. Ralph David Abernathy was one of them. Lots of other people joined in all of that.  \r\n And then they began to fan out into the smaller communities. A memorable one was in Crawfordville, Georgia. They started this in an effort to integrate the schools in Crawfordville, and the school system made an arrangement so that they could transport all the white children to the next county by school bus. But wouldn't let any black kids get on the bus. And so, the state troopers out there were tackling these young high school kids like they were playing tackle football to keep them off of the buses. It was just terrible. I went down there and I was covering the story, and that was the kind of thing that was a spark that created all kinds of furor. Dr. King came down there, and Andy Young came down there, and there was a red brick church about a mile outside town where all the African-Americans gathered to listen to Dr. King speak. And he spoke. And at the end, they decided that they would march into Crawfordville. And Crawfordville was a little town -- hometown of the vice president of the Confederacy, of course. And they began to march, and it was about mile, a moonlit night on a black top road. Along the way, in the shadows, because the moon was very bright and the trees were casting big shadows, the state troopers found three guys with guns waiting in the shadows. Nothing happened as a result of them finding those three people. Andy Young led them. Dr. King went back to Atlanta and they had a rally on the court house square. And as a reporter, I remember I was in one of those telephone booths that used to be on court house squares that were wooden and I was in there trying to dictate a story back to the paper. And a bunch of rednecks began to tilt the phone booth back and forth, slamming me from one side to the other when I was trying to get the story written. Those were the kinds of things that changed the perception of America about what was going on down here, and brought all of the demonstrators who eventually would go to Selma for the march and that would cost Dr. King his life down in Memphis.  \r\n But by then there was a cadre of younger people who carried on that fight. It was perhaps the biggest clash between two cultures that this country has ever seen. The culture of white supremacy and the growing culture of black explosion of anger was the one thing that I sometimes thought would blow this country apart. Because after Dr. King was assassinated, those riots in the cities all across America almost tore the place apart. And for the next week for Life Magazine I covered the slow march through Atlanta of Dr. King on the case line, and took the film from all of the photographers. And there were worldwide photographers. I had a huge bag of film. And there was a pool from everybody. And I took it back to New York and we had it developed and produced some of the most dramatic photography anybody's ever seen, and that sealed the fate of the segregationists in the South. Those images were stronger than anybody can now remember. But there was a photograph in the church of Mrs. King with a black manteau over her face, but her face visible through it that ran on the cover of Life Magazine that was the epitome of grace in a world that had just been torn apart. And it resolved the country to move forward and to rid itself of segregation.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were around when Jimmy Carter mounted his great campaign, first for governor and then for president. Tell us about that.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. Well, Jimmy Carter had been in the Legislature, and I will tell you that he was not my favorite state senator. We had discussions. And he decided that he would run for governor and he decided that he would run against Carl Sanders. And he thought that he could figure a way to beat Carl Sanders. I always believed he decided to run because he saw it as a stepping stone to bigger things. But the way he ran the campaign, you would have believed that he didn't have ideas about bigger things. First of all, in that campaign he began to call Carl Sanders \"Cufflinks Carl,\" because Carl was a nicely dressed man who probably should not have been wearing cufflinks, because Georgia folks don't like that. And that resonated with a lot of people. Then, in the last stages of that campaign, things got kind of tough. Sanders had become a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. And there was a photograph of him with his arm around one of the black players. And they were drinking, I guess, some champagne after they had won some kind of a title, I don't know what one. And that then was circulated all over the state, and the Carter people claimed that they didn't have anything to do with it, but it wasn't clear that anybody else had anything to do with it. It was pretty clear where it came from.  \r\n Then, with two or three weeks to go in that campaign, Carter went to Montgomery, Alabama, and asked George Wallace for his support and endorsement in the campaign. And Wallace was the symbol of the people who stood in the schoolhouse door to stop any desegregation. Then, in the last two or three days of the campaign, Carl Sanders was trying to talk about some kind of progressive things, and Jimmy Carter visited five of those segregationist academies -- those private schools that were set up to avoid desegregation. And his last visit prior to election day ended up at Roy Harris' house, the man who claimed he could swing thirty-seven counties in the old county unit days, because he was a really rabid segregationist. And that's how Carter ended the campaign. And it just overwhelmed the electoral process. And he won. He won pretty well.  \r\n And two weeks later, TIME Magazine published a very important piece. And the cover of the piece was a photograph of Jimmy Carter and it called him, \"The New Face of the South.\" As if he had run a very progressive, forward-looking campaign -- to the astonishment of just about everybody. And that was his stepping stone. And then he forecast for all the rest of us -- previewed for all the rest of us -- of what his governorship and his presidency would be about. It was micromanagement of an awful lot of things. Part of what he tried to do was a government reorganization that I thought was pretty good. He wanted to streamline some things and he wanted to make some things work better. But his budgeting process, it wasn't zero-based budgeting, it was sort of, \"Let's see where we're going here.\" And he argued about everything, just created all kinds of dissension within the Legislature.  \r\n And in the middle of his term, he began to lose popularity in the state, a fair amount of popularity. And at the end of that administration, the polls showed that he could not be reelected. He decided that he would run for president. And the day he announced, I wrote what was the most famous column headline I'd ever written, or ever will write. It said, \"Jimmy Carter is Running for What?\" -- with a question mark. And I made fun of his campaign, because I didn't think there was anyway in the world he could win. And then I realized he was going to win, because I had known all the national political reporters from covering campaigns with them. And they would come by my house and they would tell me, you know, how proactive he'd been and how progressive he'd been and how he would like to be the most -- they thought he'd make a great president. The New York Times decided that it was going to profile one race by one candidate; on a weekly basis it would tell the story of how the campaign was going. And it chose Jimmy Carter as its subject for that series that it ran, so that every once a week -- I think it was on Monday -- Jimmy Carter was featured, and his campaign was featured -- what he was doing in the campaign. And it got a man who wasn't all that well-known in the country to be well-known over the course of the summer. And he won the primaries.  \r\n And then he went into the presidency, and he was very fortunate. Gerald Ford had pardoned President Nixon, and Gerald Ford unhappily had stumbled and fallen coming out of an airplane -- coming down the steps from an airplane. And everybody made fun of it, about how he stumbled all the time and how he was a clutz. Carter took advantage of that, and he got elected. He ran a good, good presidential campaign, a really good campaign. They were very tightly organized by then. They were awfully young and they had a lot of enthusiasm. And he became president. And a lot of Georgians moved to Washington as a part of that administration. Some of them left after a period of time, because they didn't like how things were going. But a lot of them stayed and remained after his presidency. But the same kind of alienation took place in the presidency that took place in Georgia politics. They used to say, and I don't know if this is true or not, but they used to say that one of the things he did in the mornings in the White House was decide who'd have access to the tennis courts that day. I don't know if he did that or not, but that was the running joke. And then of course he lost forty-nine states to Ronald Reagan. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were a good analyst of presidential politics. In fact, you wrote a book entitled Southern Strategy, back in the Nixon days.  \r\n \r\n MURHPY:  Yeah. I tried to do a thing state by state of how people were beginning to change, and how Nixon was playing both sides of the political road in trying to use a Southern strategy that was not strictly based on race. But his civil rights groups had toned down dramatically what had been happening under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And he and his associates in the White House did that. I wrote that book in conjunction with Hal Gulliver, who then was the associate editor of the Constitution and a real scholar of Southern politics. Between the two of us, we took those states and analyzed them pretty well. And some parts of it now wouldn't read very realistically, because they're kind of out of date. \r\n But one of my favorite stories about that was Jim Folsom, who then was the governor of Alabama. And he and a silver-haired governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia were meeting in the Southern Governor's Conference. And they went out on the Navy boat one day, because the Navy wanted to show them something out in the Norfolk harbor. And they were meeting out there, and they wanted to show them how one of those planes could take off from the back of the aircraft carrier. And unhappily, the plane took off, got out about three or four hundred feet over the blue waters of the Atlantic and it nose dived. The pilot ejected. It got up in the air, but didn't get it up far enough for the parachute to really be effective. It came down and he hit the water with a splat like that. Plane fell into the water, crashed. Jim Folsom turned to this aristocratic Virginia governor, nudged him in the ribs, and said, \"If that ain't a show, I'll kiss your ass.\" Never seen anything quite like Jim Folsom. He literally would lie down on the State House grounds and take a nap every once in awhile. He was a funny, funny man. Anyhow, all of those people were beginning to try to change their politics. And Nixon was not helping them at all, and they were trying to understand where the South was going to go after this turmoil of the civil rights movement.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, as editor of the Constitution, I'm sure you met many unusual characters, including one that was not very pleasant.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Oh, I think you might be talking about the colonel. Yeah, you're right. One day, I was sitting in my office and the phone rang -- or my secretary came in and said, \"There's a man on the phone. He needs to talk to you about some donation.\" In those days, editors of newspapers did help people make charitable contributions. And the man said that he had two or three hundred thousand dollars in gallons of fuel oil that he'd like to contribute to some charity. Would I help him find a charity? He said he was changing out of one business and into another business. I thought, \"I don't know.\" But I said, \"Yeah, I'll look into it.\" And I went down and asked our legal guys if there was any real tax benefits as he claimed, and what to make of that. And they said, \"Yeah, that's plausible. He probably could.\" So, I called around. I called you and the Rabun Gap School, and I called the Egleston Children's Hospital and somewhere else, and sort of began to allocate some of the fuel oil to people.  \r\n He was supposed to come by one night and pick me up to take me down to the lawyer's office so I could sign some papers, he said. But he didn't come by that night. And he came by the next night, and when he walked into the house, it was clear to me that I didn't want that man in my house. He was very nervous, a big male, red face; obviously very nervous. And I had an eight-year-old upstairs doing her homework, and I needed to get him out of there. So, I went out and got into the car with him to go sign some papers at his lawyer's office. Instead of him taking me to a lawyer's office, we went out and he was driving, and he pulled a gun and he laid it across his elbow where he was driving. And he said, \"You've been kidnapped.\" And I said, \"I don't have any money.\" He said, \"No, newspaper does, but that's not what I'm after. We are going to straighten out this lying, leftist press in America.\" And I said, \"Well, I don't know how you're going to do that.\"  \r\n But he made me put some tape over my eyes, and said, \"Get out.\" And he came around and led me to the trunk of the car. Bound my hands and my feet behind me, so that I was a bowed position, and put me in the trunk of the car. And for most of the next forty-nine hours, I was in the trunk of the car. And every once in a while, he'd take me out and I'd have to make a tape. And that's how I communicated with the office. At the end of that period of time, he demanded 700 thousand dollars from the newspaper. And lots of people joked later that they never thought Jack Tarver would pay seven hundred thousand dollars for me, but he did. And there were a lot of FBI people standing around when Jim Minter, who then was the managing editor of the Constitution, delivered a suitcase full of money. I got into the car, he made me get into the trunk, but then through the -- you can talk between the front seat and the trunk of the car, very hot back there by the way. And I thought, you know, the way I left, the FBI's got to pick him up now. This is easy. They've seen him, they know what he looks like, they've got helicopters overhead, they've got guys out in the field chasing horses -- pretending to, when they were really observing the exchange. And damned if they didn't lose the car when night came.  \r\n And then we drove somewhere, and he stopped the car and came over and got out, and said, \"Get out of there.\" And he untied me. I was standing there and he said, \"Don't move.\" And drove off. And I thought, \"Hmm, this is not going to be good. This is where I die. Somebody's going to come along and I'll end up in a ditch.\" Instead, nothing happened, and I went into a Ramada Inn. And I said, \"Give me a room.\" And the guy, of course, knew who I was by then. I said, \"I'm not coming out until I hear a voice outside that tells me there's somebody out there I know.\" And FBI came out and brought somebody out. They took me down to the office. We identified him from photographs, They went out to his house and picked him up. And they recovered all the money. They said he was the only one involved. But they found twelve thousand dollars worth of marked bills in his wife's wallet. So, she probably knew something about it.  \r\n And we went to court. And the court convicted him. And he got forty to fifty years. And to everybody's amazement, an Appeals Court overturned the ruling. They said there'd been too much pre-trial publicity, all of which he'd asked for and demanded. And we had to go down to Key West of all places and have another trial, and they convicted him again. He got exactly the same -- forty to fifty years of prison time. And I think he served nine of them. And I haven't seen him since. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You haven't heard from him, huh? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  No. Long story, sorry. \r\n  \r\n SHORT:  After leaving Atlanta, you went to, I think, San Francisco. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I went to San Francisco.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Where Patty Hearst had been kidnapped. And two weeks after I got there -- I think it was two weeks -- they picked her up on the street in San Francisco, wandering along, and she went down to the Redwood City Jail outside San Francisco. Her father was in New York, and he asked me to go down there and sit with her until he could get a plane and get there. I went out there, and she didn't want to talk to me at all. She was mad at everybody and she certainly didn't want to talk to me. And then we went through that long trial, and her father and mother were in terrific pain all during that period of time. Awful time. However, she has rehabilitated herself and she has done extremely well. She's a mother and serves on the Board of Hearst Corporation and is a very responsible person.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  And then to Baltimore.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yeah, went to Baltimore, the most antiquated newspaper operation I'd ever seen in my life. They still were the dullest, grayest type you've ever seen. And they had a morning and an afternoon newspaper, and neither of them was doing very well against the Hearst newspaper in Baltimore -- The Journal American. But ultimately we prevailed and had a good time. One of my proud times was to have an afternoon where we got two Pulitzer Prizes in one year. And it all became a very successful operation. After awhile, we sold it to the Times Mirror Company, which owned the L.A. Times and some other papers, and it was based in Los Angeles. And I went on to their newspaper -- on their executive committee, and did that for awhile. And then I decided that I really wanted to get out of the newspaper business and I retired, I thought. I took off for a period of time, and went to the National Geographic for five years.  \r\n \r\n SHORT;  And then you retired again. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I tried to retire again. I haven't been able to do it yet, but I'm going to.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let me ask you this question about your profession. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yes. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  How is technology changing journalism? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  In the big cities it's ruining it. The days when newspapers could afford the investigative reporting that they traditionally did are gone. Most of the advertising has gone. Most of the support that they had claims to have gone to the Internet or to cable television. Most people are getting a lot of their news these days from  blogs, which have very little reason to be totally accurate. The community just no longer supports newspapers the way they did, and if they do, they read it on the Internet. And the truth is that newspapers all made a terrible, terrible decision when they decided to give away their news from the Internet instead of sell it. And now they're having a very hard time trying to figure out a way to make people pay for what they've become accustomed to getting for free. And I don't have a lot of hope for some of the big city newspapers. Now, small town newspapers are doing a lot better, because there is no other source of news in a small town. And more importantly, there's no other way for the merchants to market except through advertising in the newspapers. And they will last for a longer period of time, but the technology has absolutely outrun the days when newspapers were the vital force. They used to be the best franchise in town, and in most places they are not anymore. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let me ask you this, Reg, do you think that web journalism meets the standards that we're accustomed to in the print media? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  No. It doesn't come close. There is not a Jack Nelson to dig into things. There is not a Charlie Pou to dig into things. There is not a James Reston who can talk authoritatively about Washington in The New York Times on a frequent basis. There is not anybody who is pointing out how many errors and rumors and misconceptions that both the blogs and the television talk shows -- the cable television talk shows -- are creating. And consequently, what you see is you see a complete impasse in Congress. It's just totally blocked. You see an incredible amount of anger in the public, because they've heard all these crosscurrents about \"Is Obama -- was he really born in Honolulu?\" Of course he was. But you know, you get all these crazy theories running around that aggravate people -- different kinds of people. Democracy does not work unless there is a common body of factual knowledge from which people can make decisions. And we don't have that anymore. Now, were newspapers flawed in the past? Absolutely. All of them were flawed. But compared to the amount of misinformation that's being spewed around the country now, it's not even close. And I despair sometimes -- not despair, because we will find a way out of it. But for right now I despair at the kinds of information that people are trying to deal with. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Do you think newspapers will ever be profitable again?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I can't imagine how they will be, because they have two problems that -- they have three problems that other people don't have. They've got heavy capital costs from building plants and modernizing. They've got heavy costs for newsprint that -- the air is free and the newsprint is not. And they have transportation problems of delivery that technology is going to have a hard time overcoming. Yes, you can deliver it over the Internet, but it would take forever to get it done. And sorting it out would be very hard to do. So, I think there will be a way to put it back together, but in the form that you and I think of newsprint -- papers that we can hold in our hands and read whenever we want to read them -- I don't see much future for that. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well Reg, it's been a very insightful conversation, and I deeply appreciate it.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It's fun for me to go back and think through those things. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Is there anything we've forgotten? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, I probably have forgotten more than you have, but I don't think we've forgotten a lot. We've ranged over a lot of subject matter. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  A long period of time.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yes, sir. I've enjoyed it.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, on behalf of the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Russell Library at the University of Georgia, I want to thank you for being our guest.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, thank you sir. I appreciate it. "},{"id":"gych_rogp_076","title":"Aubrey Morris, 08 April 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Morris, Aubrey R., 1922-2010","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2009-04-08"],"dcterms_description":["Aubrey R. Morris was born in 1922 in Roswell, Georgia, and grew up writing for the local newspaper. He attended the University of Georgia and studied journalism. He worked as an intern for the Atlanta Journal, and edited the UGA yearbook. On the day of his college graduation, he started as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, and covered Atlanta and city hall. He also started the first public information office at the state transportation department. After thirteen years at the Journal, he joined WSB-TV, and helped to develop the first radio news department in Georgia. He covered the major events of the day--at local, national, and international levels--including desegregation, the Vietnam War, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He served thirty years as news and editorial director at WSB, retiring in 1987. Aubrey Morris died April 14, 2010.","Morris discusses his long journalism career, including his days as a journalism student at the University of Georgia, his work at the Atlanta Journal, and his reporting at WSB Radio. He describes his experience working closely with Atlanta's mayors and reporting on major events like the 1962 Orly plane crash and the Winecoff Hotel fire. Morris also talks about reporting on events of the civil rights movement, such as an early speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., near the state capitol and the integration of the University of Georgia.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["WSB (Radio station : Atlanta, Ga.)","University of Georgia","Henry W. Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication","Atlanta journal-constitution","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Journalism--Georgia","Civil rights movements--United States","Civil rights movements--Georgia","School integration--Georgia--Athens","College integration--Georgia--Athens","Aircraft accidents--France--Orly","Aircraft accidents","Civil rights movements","College integration","Journalism","Journalists","School integration","Universities and colleges--Alumni and alumnae","France--Orly","Georgia","Georgia--Athens","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Aubrey Morris, 08 April 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-076/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 076, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (105 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Morris, Aubrey R., 1922-2010"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Aubrey Morris interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2009 April 8 \r\nAlpharetta, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-076 \r\nOriginal: video, 105 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription:  September 29, 2009 \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  Im Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics sponsored by Young Harris College, The Richard Russell Library and the University of Georgia.  We are delighted today to have as our guest Aubrey Morris, former Atlanta Journal Reporter and Dean of the Atlanta Radio Newsmen.  Aubrey, were delighted to have you.  Glad youre here.  Were honored. \r\n \r\nAUBREY MORRIS:  Thanks.  Delighted to be here.  Who were those sponsors again? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Young Harris College. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  I think of Zell Miller when I think of Young Harris. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yes, a very famous alumnus.  \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Right \r\n \r\nSHORT:  The University of Georgia, of course. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  The University of Georgia  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And the Richard B. Russell Library. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  One of the very fine institutions at the university.  Very proud of it and what its doing. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Good.  All right, you area native of Roswell, Georgia. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Roswell, part of metro Atlanta, native all the way, several generations. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You went to school there in public schools and then you went to the University of Georgia. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Correct. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about your experience at the university. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Well, first of all you've got to get to the university.  How in the world would a guy, country farm boy from Roswell, Georgia get to the University of Georgia to the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism which I had heard about from two very good teachers I had in Milton High School in Alpharetta which is the high school I attended just up the road from Roswell in the Fulton County School System.   Well, they encouraged me to study journalism and said, The only thing you can do is go to the University of Georgia, and I thought it was predestined that I go to the university.  So I ended up at the University of Georgia with a couple of paper bags, I think, and maybe an old worn out suitcase as we called them back then and a few rag tag pieces of clothing.  One neck tie, I remember, and I remember on the day I arrived at the university at the bus station, west of the arch and the next block headed toward Atlanta well, there was the bus station.  I guess its still there today in Athens.   \r\nGot off the bus and by the way, I had been writing for the local weekly newspaper in Roswell in Alpharetta throughout high school and when I got off the bus another aspiring young university student had arrived from somewhere down in South Georgia by another bus and he started across the street and immediately was hit by a taxi cab.  So what did Aubrey Morris do?  He reverted to his original calling.  He became a reporter, got out my notepad, pencil, went over and asked the policeman the name of the student-to-be.  Oh, hes not hurt badly.  Were going to send him over to St. Marys Hospital and have him checked over.   \r\nI wrote his name down, quoted the officer and said what happened; he just stepped in front of a taxi.  I guess he was enamored at arriving in Athens, wasnt watching where he was going.  Maybe he was looking at the co-eds already.  But this student, I remember I got his name and before I went to register at the university I went to the Athens Banner-Herald within the very hour, saw Byron Lumpkin, who was then managing editor of the Banner-Herald and introduced myself.  Told them I just arrived to studied journalism and the university, told him what I just witnessed and I told him I had the name of the guy.  He wasnt hurt badly, he would be okay but he was taken to the hospital for treatment.  Hed just arrived and quoted the policeman saying he would be okay, no charges were made against the taxi driver.  That basically was the story, a couple of paragraphs.  And Mr. Lumpkin was so taken by this way of getting a news story about a new arriving student being injured by a taxi that he had decided to run a little box alongside the story about the reporter who reported it, Mr. Aubrey Morris from Roswell reported this story and he had arrived to study journalism at the university. \r\nYou can imagine how a new student at the university would have been taken aback by that sudden opening of the door to fame and fortune. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So you studied journalism at the university and upon graduation you got a job with the Atlanta Journal? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Well, I studied journalism at the university and during the summer between my junior and senior years I got a job as an intern at the Atlanta Journal, covered city hall and there I got to know the great Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield.  And he really inspired me even more to continue with my career.  So I went back to the university, edited The Pandora during my senior year and on the day I graduated from the university I lived in the old college right across from the law school and I took my few belongings outside and I left immediately for Atlanta.  Rode the bus, by the way, back to Atlanta, went to register at the YMCA and went to the Atlanta Journal that afternoon thinking, well, Id be able to go to work that Monday morning.  It was Saturday in the early afternoon and Fred Moon said, Well, hello, welcome back, Aubrey, said, Youre our new police reporter.  Youre covering the police beat tonight.  So I went to work the night the day I graduated from the university having pledged that I would come back to work.  They wanted me just to stay but I told them I was going back.  Theyd asked me to be editor of The Pandora, the annual at the university which I was proud to do.  Id already picked my staff.  We had it all lined up.  So I went back and thats the day I began at the Journal.  Dont ask me the year.  I think it was 46, 45, 46. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You mentioned Mayor Hartsfield.  Tell us a little bit about Mayor Hartsfield. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Well, as soon as he found out I was at the University of Georgia he, shall we say, took a liking to me.  He was his own best press agent.  He knew how to get in the newspapers, always with something positive about Atlanta.  But he also was a man of great erudition, is that the word?  Hes very suave, very smart, very good politician and he knew that it was good to be a member and to be caught hanging out to use a modern phrase with certain people if it were suitable.  So he found out that I was at the university, what clubs or organizations I was a member of.  Id been elected to the Grid Iron Club, the secret society, Grid Iron Secret Society at the university.  He then said, Well, can you help me get in?  Can you recommend me as a member?  And I remember this about Hartsfield in particular, I passed along his desire to become a member of this select group which it still is and he even asked me to go with him and his chauffer to their initiation meeting at the Grid Iron Club when he was initiated into Grid Iron.  And I found out a little bit about Hartsfield believing in each man looking after his own job and letting the other man handle his assigned task. \r\nOn the way back to Atlanta late that night somewhere outside Monroe, Georgia the police vehicle -- the mayor and I were sitting on the back seat, the lieutenant driving for him was sitting on the front seat and we were headed back to Atlanta and the right rear tire blew out about 2:00 in the morning.  And Hartsfield just sat back there in the back seat.  I sat there and I started to get out.  The lieutenant started getting out to change the tire.  I started to get out and help him.  Hartsfield, Get back in here.  Thats his job.  Said, You sit in this.\"  And this was in winter, a cold winter night.  Hartsfield insisted on the lieutenant changing the tire which he did.  I said, Well, this guys an interesting character.  I think Ill get to know him a little bit better, which I did.   \r\nAnd Hartsfield was a very obstreperous individual.  He let me know all about him.  Hed even invite me to his law office.  He had a lot of hobbies on the side.  One of them was mining.  He liked to prospect for minerals in the state of Georgia.  He had a wide variety of interests.  Well, he had an interest in everything, would invite me up there and then I got to know him.  And then one time Fred Moon my city editor at that time gave me a pointed question to ask Hartsfield when I arrived at city hall.  And I asked him and Hartsfield picked up a paperweight on his desk, threw it at me.  I dodged and it hit the door in the mayors office.  I said, Well, Im getting to know this guy.  Hes really getting to be my buddy I think.  So he threw the paperweight at me and then he let out a real wild laugh and his secretary came running in to see what had happened. \r\nHe said, Oh, nothings happened.  He reached over behind his desk there in city hall where he had a Coca-Cola cooler where the cokes were cooled by a block of ice and who saw to the steady supply of Coca-Cola there other than Bob Woodruff, who owned Coca-Cola himself and who was Hartsfields leading confidant among business people.  And Hartsfield reached back and got one of Mr. -- Coca-Cola came in everyday and stocked the thing with fresh Coke.  Got a coke and he and I drank a cold Coke and then we talked to some more and then he gave me the interview and I did the story, but I learned incidentally a little more about Mr. Woodruff.  Mayor Hartsfield, he consulted people all over the country -- high and low, people in high office, people in low, from the president on down whoever it was and he was just able to make decisions.  Like with Mr. Woodruff, he would ride around in a police car late at night, Woodruff would be on the front seat with the police lieutenant driving, Woodruff always smoking a cigar or chewing on one and Chief Jenkins, Mayor Hartsfield, and occasionally they would invite me.  As I say, Hartsfield took a liking to me and so therefore I cultivated that because I learned a lot that was going on.   \r\nSo we were riding around early one Saturday morning.  Hartsfield, Woodruff, Chief Jenkins -- Herbert Jenkins, and myself.  Woodruff looks out and sees people loitering on the street corner.  He takes a drag on his cigar and says, Herb, clean up that mess.  We just keep driving right along.  So thats the way politics was in Atlanta when people of power and immense knowledge of the city and its people who knew people all over the city where they could afford to make decisions in the best interest of law and order if you want to call it that, safety on the streets.  At that time they simply didnt allow people--there was an ordinance against idling and loitering.  Youd be thrown in jail if you even suggested somebody be arrested for that today, wouldnt you?  Would you?  I dont know.  Maybe you have a right to idle and loiter but not to threaten other people on the street. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mayor Hartsfield was very interested in aviation. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Hartsfield and Atlanta are the same on aviation.  Now, I know we have Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport but lets go back to the beginning.  Hartsfield is a member of the Board of Alderman I think it was called back then.  He was head of the aviation committee and saw the chance for the city to purchase the old Candler Field which was a privately owned airport beyond on Hatfield owned by a member of the Candlers.  I think it was Asa Candler of Coca-Cola.  Im not sure.  But it was own by the Candlers and was called Candler Field.  Thats where owners of private aircraft could take these new toys and go out and have weekends for recreation, fly wherever else they wanted to.  But Hartsfield saw what was coming because also at that same time came on the scene a guy named Mr. C. E. Woolman who had been a crop dusting pilot, owned a crop dusting company.  A crop duster, by the way for you people who are not familiar was a guy pilot who flew a plane that spread poison over cotton fields and crops to kill insects.   \r\nWell, Mr. Woolmans background was in Louisiana in the cotton, the delta cotton land in Mississippi and Louisiana but he wanted to get into the airline business and he came to Atlanta to begin Delta Airlines.  And if you mention Hartsfield you have to mention Mr. Woolman who had his shop setup right there right at the edge of Hapeville at the old, old terminal.  That was Atlantas first terminal.  Now, I dont know -- there were Eastern Airlines.  There were other pioneers like Eddie Rickenbacker, the famous World War I pilot.  Rickenbacker started Eastern, Woolman started Delta and together with Hartsfield, they built the airport, taking it away from the upstarts -- Birmingham, Alabama really was ahead of Atlanta in the early days.  Hartsfield saw what they were doing and he said, I want that for Atlanta.  Birmingham almost got ahead of Atlanta a couple of times until Hartsfield boldly started expanding, you know, and convince the business community, the travel industry that Atlanta could become a travel center, which he set out to do.   \r\nWhen I talk about Hartsfield, though, having built the Atlanta Airport, well, thats because for a long time thats what it was called -- Hartsfield.  People called it Hartsfield instead of being named after William B. Hartsfield.  Hartsfield I would say was the idea man and I think in retrospect Hartsfield would give due credit to those who followed him, who picked up the cue that he gave the city not only during the time that he was mayor but the years to come even up to today because theyve all been imbued with Hartsfields spirit to push Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. \r\nI remember, for example, when Mr. Woolman was still on hand when he began service to Paris.  I dont know whether it was Delta, Pan Am, International Flight or what it was but Mayor Andrew Young was mayor of Atlanta at that time.  I remember a great speech that Mayor Young--later Ambassador Young--made in Paris about Atlanta and about the South, about the leadership that Atlanta was poised to give the world when it showed what interracial progress was meaning to a big city and would continue to mean.  Then, of course, Mayor Maynard Jackson, superb leadership.  I covered many, many speeches when Mayor Jackson bragged about the Atlanta Airport, when he, himself, went all over the country to get funding to expand to build new runways, to get new technology.  Mayor Ivan Allen, Mayor Sam Massell, all of those who have followed right up to Shirley Franklin have done--and I am indeed proud of what they have done to enhance what Hartsfield thought about way, way, way back in Atlanta history. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Speaking of flights to Paris, you were on hand to cover the story of the Orly crash that took so many Atlanta lives. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yes, one of the--I guess in reporter and newspaper or journalist parlance you refer to a big story.  Well, I dont refer to it as a big story just for that reason.  It was a big story because it affected Atlanta in a big way because it, in effect, wiped out much of the civic and cultural leadership of this city.  I said it didnt wipe it out but it wiped out a lot of it.  Just like the Winecoff Hotel fire of years earlier, the Orly Airport crash in 1962 decimated the city of well over 100 of its leaders in the field of the arts in particular connected to the Cultural Arts Center it was called.  This is where some 120 of Atlantas leaders, member of the Atlanta Art Alliance had flown to Paris and to other major cities in Europe, Rome, London, Berlin to study what they were doing in the area of enhancing all elements of the arts for their cities.   \r\nThis group had been in these cities in Europe for about two weeks.  I covered their departure earlier from Atlanta and former Mayor Hartsfield because Mayor Ivan Allen was mayor at this time.  He had asked former Mayor Hartsfield to see the group off when they left Hartsfield Atlanta Airport at that time.  That was in 62.  Well, I imagine my horror on a Sunday morning when the day that I knew they were to return to Atlanta I got a telephone call at church.  An usher came up to my pew and said, Mr. Morris, youre wanted at WSB.  King Elliot, the newsman in the WSB Newsroom, the news announcer said the plane crash at Paris has killed the Atlanta people.  I knew immediately what he was talking about and I said, Well, Ill be at the station right away.  My wife had remained home that day with our children and I left church alone, calling my wife and telling her I was going to the station. \r\nAnd immediately on arrival, I went to the Air France Office across from the Atlanta Journal Constitution Building on Marietta Street and the Air France staff was beginning to get over the old teletype a confirmed list of those who had died in the crash.  But by then it was almost 11:00, it was about 10:30 Sunday morning and Mr. Elmo Ellis, my boss, was at the station.  He and Rev. Harry Fifield the pastor of First Presbyterian Church, we were to go on the air, broadcasting as we had done for years the First Presbyterian Service at 11:00 and it was decided between Rev. Fifield and Mr. Ellis that instead of Rev. Fifield delivering his sermon at 11:00 on the 11:00 broadcast would be taken up with my use of the telephone in calling in the names of each victim of the Orly crash as it arrived on teletype. \r\nAnd at that time, one of the prominent business men was an Atlanta banker, Mr. W. O. Duvall, ran Atlanta Federal Savings and Loan Association and he was at the Air France office and it just occurred to me to get him to tell me a little bit about each one of these people.  So we preempted Rev. Fifield's sermon with a broadcast and confirmation of each person and Mr. Duvall was able almost without exception to tell me something personal about each of those people.  They were all so important and he knew everybody in Atlanta anyway.  As for the crash itself, how does a reporter--remember back then to be on television would have been filming something and supplying the film to New York and putting it on the network.  Well, that was that and I was frustrated because Mayor Allen -- I went to city hall by the way after leaving the Air France office, I went to city hall.  Mayor Allen had arrived wearing his farming clothes.  He liked to go to his farm down in Heard County, Georgia and piddle around on a Sunday afternoon but just as he got down there, he had gotten out in the fields, called back into his telephone, got the word, came immediately to city hall.  I met him there.  We interviewed him there and I said, What are you going to do?  And he decided he and Edwin Stern, the Atlanta City attorney would go to Paris on the next flight they could get out of New York and it would be leaving at 5:00.  And I called my wife and I said, Im going to get on the plane, bring my passport to WSB, Elmo Ellis going to bring me to WSB to take me to the airport.  The mayor said I could go along.  I told him I was going along. \r\nSo he took me along and we arrived in New York.  Mayor Hartsfield, by the way, saw us off at the airport.  Stern, the mayor, and myself arrived in New York.  I told the mayor, he said, What do I do? Because every reporter in New York was at Idlewild Airport.  Well, is that Kennedy today?  I think, yeah.  Every reporter was there.  All of the TV film cameraman, radio people.  They were there and I said, Well, you speak from your heart.  Just dont be uptight about it.  Just go out and meet them and whatever they say, do it.  Answer them.  Boy, he did a superb job.  But man, I tell you, he showed his manhood in my heart by the way he handled that.   \r\nFlying out over the Atlantic about midnight that night, headed into Paris, we could look and see the northern lights of the Aurora Borealis, over the North Pole and the mayor was looking out there and just very quiet and I just put my hand on his and I said, Youre doing okay, man.  Said, Youre going to get a different audience when you get to Paris.  Sure enough he did.  A phalanx of photographers, reporters, stumbling all over each other wanting to get to the mayor and everything.  He hadnt even been to the site yet.  So I told one of the aides to the Paris mayor, I said, Well, tell the guys the mayor will meet with them but he wants to visit the site first.  How would emotionally be able to respond?  Furthermore, I knew that they would get a better story.  He hadnt even been to the site yet.   \r\nThe mayor got in a limousine, we drove to the site.  The mayor looked at all of the luggage of the victims strewn about this apple orchard and a little village at the end of Orly Airport called Villeneuve and the plane had aborted the take off and it crashed and burned in this apple orchard.  And the mayor was coming up and then is when I, sort of, kicked in as a report to the mayor, I said, Mayor, I think the French authorities a little bit overreacted.  I said, You tell them you will see the press now.  So they were all crowded at the fence some distance away and they gave the signal and they came like a horde up just as the mayor started looking at everything and they were able to record his reaction as he saw it for the first time, see.  In fact, I remember Mayor Ivan Allen looking down.  I wont call the name of the victim who died in the crash but the mayor looked down and saw a necktie that he had given one of these victims as a Christmas present.  \r\nI remember that necktie, and then he called out who he gave it to.  That was on Monday morning.  They followed all Monday, rest of Monday, Tuesday and by Wednesday Attorney Stern and I suggested to Mayor Allen that he hold an ecumenical service.  Both of us knew the dean of the American Cathedral in Paris and its on Avenue George Fifth, a very huge cathedral right in the heart of the city and since these were Americans we figured that would be the proper place and the dean at the cathedral had been dean of Holy Innocence Episcopal Church in Atlanta.  We both knew him.  So he arranged the ecumenical service which was held on Wednesday morning at the American Cathedral with the dean from Atlanta saying a goodbye to the Atlantians who had died in the crash and the most memorable music the ecumenical choir sang during that service was an old prayer from the Sarum Primer form the Sarum Rite of the Anglican Church.  It appears in hymnals under various forms.  Its called God Be In My Head, or from the Sarum Primer, God Be In My Head, the first few lines: \r\nGod be in my head and in my understanding.  God be in my heart and in my keeping.  God be at mine end and at my departing. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  One of the stories you covered while you were with the Atlanta Journal was the tragic Winecoff fire. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  That was when I was a single man living still -- as really a cub reporter, a young reporter on the Journal and I got a call from an Atlanta Fireman who was a watchman in downtown Atlanta.  His name was Swamp Walker.  They called him Swamp because he hung out in what was then known as the underground which is now underground Atlanta, the entertainment site and these were really dark, dank, under the railroad overpasses, dark corners and everything, where winos and people like that would hide out and the police would drive the paddy wagon in there and load up two or three times a night.  Well, Swamp Walker was doing his checking down in there one night to see if there was any fire danger and he looked up and saw flames coming out of the Winecoff Hotel up Peachtree Street. \r\nHe called me.  Id made great effort to promote sources at the fire department, too.  And he called and said, Scoop, the Winecoffs on fire.  He called me Scoop.  That was his nickname.  Some of my police friends were calling me that by then and you think I need some water?  My wife is handing me a glass of water.  Thank you, darling.  And Swamp Walker said, The Winecoffs on fire.  I picked up the phone in my rooming house at Juniper and Fifth Street and the dispatcher Yellow Cab Company, Bella Isle ran Yellow Cab Company, one cab company in Atlanta.  I said, Is the Winecoff on fire?  Said, Yes, it is.  He said, Theyre jumping out everywhere.  Yellow Cabs headquarters was across the street from the hotel.  He said the same thing.  People were jumping out of the hotel.  Tragedy.  So my cab arrived in no time.   \r\nI was down there, first reporter on the scene of the Winecoff which at that time was the worst hotel fire in history.  I think there may have been another one equally as bad since then.  Im not positive but up to that time it was advertised as fire-proof and it was a very popular hotel.  Now, I remember Governor Marvin Griffin was governor at that time and the Georgia YMCA, High Y, the YMCA, YWCA young men and women in those youth groups from throughout the state of Georgia were in the Winecoff that weekend for the upcoming legislative session in January.  And most of them housed there.  Most of the over 100 people who died were these young people.  There were other guests from all over the country, too, of course. \r\nAnd when I arrived the tragedy was still going on and I called the city editor and we had a whole staff of reporters and photographers in addition to me.  I remember Bill Key, our Chief rewrite man -- Bill Key, if there was a big story, I dont care if it was a star reporter anywhere out in the country he called in the store to Bill Key.  He grasped the drama of the event and the guy on an old manual typewriter hunt and peck, he wrote the story.  He wrote it just like that and handed the copy over to the city editor immediately so Bill Key did the first story and it was a big story, tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.  There were many heroes in that fire.  Some of them are firemen who rescued people.  On the 40th anniversary of the fire there was an observance at the old firehouse on North Avenue where a very touching moment occurred.   \r\nOn the event of that fire this police captain whose name Im sorry, I cant remember, stationed at North Avenue, he rescued a woman and her small baby from one floor, brought her down to another and then brought her down--the ladder truck would reach only so high and then he got her from one floor down to the other by bringing her out the window tied to sheets, she and the baby and then transferred them to that fire ladder and brought her down and saved her.  And on the 40th anniversary of the fire heres this woman about 45 years old, came up and gave this fire captain a big hug, said, Youre responsible for me being here.  Her mother had already passed away but she was there to thank him for saving her back then. \r\nI like to catch the drama of people.  People are always big hearted.  People are kind.  You have to show them the call of duty and they respond. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, after 13 years with the Journal, Elmo Ellis lured you away into radio and you and Elmo Ellis came up with probably the first full-fledged radio news department in the city of Atlanta. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  That is true but, Bob, theres a little bit of forerunner to that.  As police reporter I knew that I wanted to expand my horizon.  I really wanted it to be a broader reporter rather than just covering the tragedy, the pitfalls of human behavior as exemplified in each days television news cast.  I wanted to get out and cover a broader aspect of life.  So actually what I did, a friend of mine at the University of Georgia who was working in the Marvin Griffin administration prevailed on me to leave the Journal and to go and start the first public information office at the state transportation department. \r\nState transportation department was in the news back then, too.  Always is.  And I went over and worked for about nine months under Roger Lawson who was then director of the highway department and frankly that was when Governor Griffin was beginning a new program of road building called the Rural Roads Authority.  We really took Georgia out of the mud.  He instituted of building, of paving roads in rural communities all over Georgia, a great monument to a great governor.  Well, that lost its allure and I liked being a reporter.  I couldnt stand being away from the newsroom.  So even when I was at the University of Georgia I had wanted to be in radio.  So Elmo Ellis was general manager of WSB, our program manager I believe at that time and wanted to begin in earnest the coverage of news by radio.   \r\nThis sounds interesting today with the advent of television and all of the other technology and communications that has come about but here was this new device called radio and WSB Radio had been the first radio station in the South, begun in March 1922, the year of my birth, by the way and Elmo wanted me to come out and begin a radio and news department.  He had news announcers but they would have to come in and deliver the news on the air and there wouldnt be anybody to plan radio news coverage, so that was my job.  I was a one-man news department until I built up a staff and I hired some guys who later became great radio reporters and television reporters and we built it on the sound of the news.  After all, thats what radio is, is sound.  You know, thats the reason radio is still a creative medium.  Radio still has its place. \r\nAnd I discovered that by the use of the telephone that I could cover the news anywhere simply by direct call to the station from the scene.  If it were a live interview using the mouthpiece of the telephone simply as the microphone for radio.  And other stations started doing the same thing in Atlanta and pretty soon the networks were doing that in New York.  I wouldnt say that I pioneered that.  Im sure it was being done everywhere all over the country.  Im sure that I was not the pioneer but I certainly knew about it and I started doing it in a big way and thats the way we were able to get a lot of scoops on the news. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I can remember you also had a program called Open Mic.  \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yes. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  That was a great program.  I remember it very well. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Is this daily or weekly? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I think it was daily. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Daily, well, it was sort of a man on the street interview type thing where you take a topic of the day, you would have your microphone.  In fact, people would see me or another WSB reporter on the street holding a WSB mic.  Hed just be standing on the street holding the mic.  I guarantee you within five minutes somebody would come up and say, Mister, would you like to interview me?  And I would. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  How was covering the news for radio different from covering the news for a newspaper? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  It was immediate and it had to be very succinct, very brief, very precise because the details were left for news casts or for print or for a more extended interview for television which soon was very much on the scene and then along came combined radio and television interview which is what we call talking heads.  You didnt see a lot of action on the scene photography.  I remember Joe Fain, one of the early photographers.  You remember Joe Fain, dont you? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Very well. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Joe Fain was a very good photographer.  He and I would go to cover a story, I would hold his mic for television.  I would hold my mic for radio recorder and we would do a dual interview and that portion of the television news would be my talking head interviewing whoever I was talking to.  Or I could have been doing a stand up alone myself, just a commentary describing something or I could have been interviewing a politician, which I often did. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, lets talk about some of those politicians you interviewed.  I guess Herman Talmadge must have been governor when you -- \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yeah, I get a little bit personal about almost all of them.  I remember Senator Herman Talmadge.  I remember succinct quotes that they had.  Talmadge had one when we got involved in the Vietnam War.  Of course, Dean Rusk, the Georgian was secretary of state.  The cold war came along.  We got involved in Vietnam after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in which the French War of Indochina, you remember, had been fighting that battle back and forth, back and forth and we were really drawn into it but it really tied in very, very closely to the spread of communism throughout China and Russia.  So therefore it became a matter of great urgency and so all of the politicians supported it until it became an unpopular war very much as the war in Iraq.  We went in for what the politicians and what I personally think was a just and noble and real national purpose in going into Vietnam to protect freedom and to protect our country because we had become a world power and if we didnt exercise it, it would be a vacuum and somebody else would.   \r\nSo we went in to Vietnam and then we went into Iraq when President Bush, the War on Terror, these things--and this has to do with the sophistication of the media.  Everybody, every consumer of the news nowadays in effect becomes his or her own reporter or analyst or critic and while I dont like to be critical I think the news media is simply evolving.  We have to except the fact of the change of technology.  We find new ways to do it.  If were going to have a war we sure had better find a better way to inform the public as to why were there and what were doing there because when--you see for the first time as you do today the caskets draped with American flags bringing men and women killed in a foreign country back to their loved ones back here.  You've got to approach war in a different way.  This doesnt mean the wars not going to continue to happen but we have to get the United Nations more involved again.   \r\nWe have to get NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more involved again.  These organizations that men like Senator Richard B. Russell, Senator Herman Talmadge, Congressman Carl Vinson, some of the others who are such--we called them hawks back then.  They were very much for defense.  Were it not for the fact that Richard B. Russell was head of Senate Arm Services Committee and Carl Vinson head of the House Armed Services Committee -- had headed those departments during World War II, we would not have been able, I guarantee you, to mobilize, to prepare to defeat Hitler in World War II.  We almost waited too late as it was.  So I look at some of those people, they were often the controversy of the days news.  That was the segregation/integration battle where they all got caught--history caught them at a time when the world was beginning to change, communications were changing, people were changing, their views were changing.   \r\nThe dramatic change of history in this country began, in my view, at the end of World War II.  Or maybe during the war we were beginning to see the change because even during the war when African/American citizens of this country werent even allowed to be in the same units with other fighting men and women in the military, all of that finally changed.  Well, we saw that these changes were coming and as I look back on a long career of almost a half century, reporting these changes as an observer, not a prejudiced observer but hopefully always an open-minded reporter, I was enabled to witness the appearance of Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. in police court representing black men and women who had been imprisoned or Judge Prudence Herndon -- then a black woman attorney, representing them in court. \r\nAnd then when police chief Herbert Jenkins decided to hire the first black policeman and fireman in the fire department, Hartsfield, again, when they came on the scene I was there to report it, you see.  I saw these men of good will; Hartsfield was the exponent of the idea \"the city too busy to hate.\"  Ivan Allen carried it on to its fullest during a critical period.  Progressive mayors like Mayor Andrew Young, people like that, Mayor Maynard Jackson, Sam Massell, all of these people came along and Atlanta was very fortunate along with another thing had.  Atlanta had a group of five predominantly black as they were called universities, the Atlanta University Center.  All of the leaders without exception, the leaders of these colleges, Dr. Benjamin Mays, the mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr.   \r\nI remember him.  They taught others who then taught future generations.  Andrew Young on the scene, you know, people like John Lewis, the people that got their teaching from people who knew the change was going to occur and to me, having witnessed that change was one of the high points of my career.  And I would think mentioning Martin Luther King, I remember when Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to deliver his first public speech from the back of a flatbed truck on the Metro Street Bridge right in front of the state capital.  Is that it on the west side of the capital?  And he made his speech.  I recorded it on a windup tape recorder, an old tape recorder that you had wind by hand and then I took this audio tape back to WSB, put it on an editing machine, cut out sound bytes or excerpts from Martin Luther King, Jrs speech.  This is about 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon and I said, Im going to make the 6:00 news for this. \r\nI made the decision, the announcer, we all communicated.  We knew it was coming up.  It would be the lead story that night and it was the lead story at 6:00 on WSB, the lead story at 11:00, every half hour throughout the evening it was, in fact, this thing that had happened in front of the capital.  But by mid morning the next morning Mr. Elmo Ellis had gotten a telephone call from a very irate woman--a white woman--in northwest Atlanta.  This woman wanted to know from Mr. Ellis, \"Why is WSB putting this negro\"--I use that word because that was her word--\"why is he putting him on WSB?  We dont need hear that.  And Mr. Ellis simply said, Well, let me let you talk to our news director, Aubrey Morris.  Which he did.  He transferred her in.  She repeated the same thing only she was a little bit more caustic.  She was down the line in authority.  Mr. Morris, why did you put this negro on the air?  And I said, Because its news.  Because he made a speech in front of the state capital and somebody making a revolutionary speech in front of the state capital, if that isnt news, what is?  You tell me. \r\nShe said, Well, we dont need to hear that.  I said, What do you mean, you dont need to hear it?  She said, We never heard this before.  And I said, Well, youre going to be hearing a lot of it.  If you want my opinion because youre going to be hearing a lot of it right here on WSB because our job is to report the news.  And her finally remark, Well, Mr. Morris, I just wish I had died before it all came along. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were active then in the integration of the University of Georgia and the schools of the state. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  In the covering.  Yes, very definitely because the University of Georgia being my alma mater, I remember Charlene Hunter and Dr. Hamilton Holmes.  I sent Scott Harrington, one of my new reporters I think who had worked in Connecticut, sent him over to do the reporting from the campus at the university.  Of course my job as news director was to be in the station to see what we needed to do and oversee our coverage.  But that morning I went out to the--before he left for Athens I went out and he was escorted, as I recall, by agents of the state government -- Dr. Hamilton Holmes, a young man in northwest Atlanta who wanted to study pre-med at the university.  And I went out and interviewed his parents as he was leaving to head to Athens.  That was a way I felt we could cover it and I interviewed his mother and father and it was a great day for them and then I think any open minded Georgian says its a great day for Georgia.  It was a major day in history, wasnt it?  Great day for the university. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  It kept it open. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  That kept it open and, of course, all of that was done simply because the leadership of the University of Georgia, the Board of Regents, the leadership, the president of the university, the state leaders, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the adjutant general, state board of education certainly because they knew the public school integration was coming, too, see?  They all knew that the time had come and that Georgia would lead the South.  If not lead it, be certainly among the leaders in peaceful desegregation. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I believe you covered the Sibley Commission Studies. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Oh, yes.  You know, there are several desegregation basically of public education, public accommodation throughout the state of Georgia.  Didnt involved just leaders.  It involved progressive business leaders, education leaders, community leaders, newspaper, journalists throughout the state of Georgia.  You know, coalescing to help to make Georgia a state that we could all be proud of rather than the laughing stock of a nation or being stuck with something we didnt really believe in because we knew it was coming, we knew in our hearts that God makes decisions and that we cant be God and play one man against another.  That was the way we approached it and when the University of Georgia -- I knew there would be no trouble.  I knew it had to be covered, though.  I knew that it was an item of public interest and I look back and I have nothing but praise for everyone who participated over at the university, everyone who had a part in it.  Because it wasnt just what happened that day.  That was just the beginning of something that happened.  Its now a university of equal opportunity. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Aubrey, if you will Id like to go back to 1956 when the Georgia legislature passed a series of laws prohibiting funding for local schools that were closed.  That led to the Sibley commission. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Effectively leaving out those that integrated. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Right, that lead to the Sibley Commission and as I recall you covered most of the meetings of that commission around the state. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  That is correct.  I as news director of WSB radio made it my personal responsibility to cover not a few of them, not part of them but all of them because I wanted to know what all the people of the state of Georgia geographically thought.  So that meant Mr. John Sibley, the prominent Atlanta attorney who had held many positions of importance and the state board of regents and public positions of importance locally and very prominent attorney and banker, trust company of Georgia, highly respected, well, he was named chairman of the Sibley Commission.  And the then governor, that would be Governor Earnest Vandiver, named him chairman and asked him to write a report but there was no prohibition against news people covering the meetings.  Of course that was one of the purposes -- to air and see what the people thought.  So that provided me as a radio man a good chance to broadcast the voices of people who knew the importance of their public schools and who were not afraid to speak out.   \r\nThere were those on both sides of the question who appeared at every meeting, though.  Mr. Sibley gave each one of them their due time in a courteous manner to express their opinions but in retrospect it appears to me that the hearings of the Sibley Commission gave the political leaders every ounce of political leverage they needed to stand by a continuous operation of public education in the state of Georgia in every aspect from public schools to the university.  I went to these hearings.  I reported and as I recall they were held weekly, so they gave plenty of time to do a thorough job of reporting and this included the most vehement opposition to integration of schools.  I included the opposite end.  I included the middle of the road.  I included every aspect.  Frankly, we aired what people had to say.  And when you talk about the education of your children you speak from the heart, you speak your innermost feelings.  And it was an emotional albeit historic and certainly culturally enlightening experience for the people of Georgia. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Aubrey, its been said of you that you would go anywhere to get an interview.  Is it true that you once interviewed President Jimmy Carter in the men's room at the WSB radio station? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  You mean Ive got to reveal all of this?  Okay, you want the wherewithal. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Exactly. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  This was during the--what happened in Teheran where some of our people were kidnapped, Jimmy Carter tried to rescue them.  What was that crisis? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hostages were taken over in -- \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  In Teheran remember?   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yes. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  This was during Jimmy Carters presidency and it lingered on for several days, the hostage taking and this country was really getting ready for some action.  Secretly, of course, the military prepared several different plans for their rescue and I dont remember what had taken place the night before but I think it was an aborted rescue and Jimmy Carter was at his farm in Plains that Sunday night and this was Monday morning.  I went into WSB Monday morning and it was about, 5:00, 5:30 and the guard at the back door said, The presidents inside.  And I said, What?  I knew darn well it was something.  He was fixing to make some kind of a statement.  He may have been about to announce that they had launched this rescue.  Im sorry.  I dont remember the specifics but I remember it was an important day in that major news event and I went rushing inside and the man in the news room said, Yeah, the presidents downstairs.  Hes getting ready to do a national feed to the TV network.  Its going to be a joint feed to the nation.  And I said, When is he going to do it?  They said, At 7:00  I said, How am I going to do this?  I think it was at 8:00.  Little mixed up in my times.  At any rate, I knew that I had time to get an interview with Carter before he spilled the news to the rest of the country.  So I had pretty good relationships with the president since hed been in the legislature from Plains and during his time as governor.  \r\nI went rushing downstairs to the TV studio and they said hes in the makeup room where they dust him up to get ready.  Went in there, No, hes just gone to the mens room.  So it was rushing on the time for my 7:00 news.  And I think about six or seven minutes before then and he was in the mens room and I said, We got a major news cast at 7:00.  Hes going to talk to the nation.  Why should I wait an hour?  So the secrete service agents outside the mens room said, Hes in the booth.  I said, Well, how long is he going to be?  And I heard this voice say, Is that you, Aubrey?  I said, Yeah, its me.  He said, Well, come on in.  So I went in the mens room and he was there at the booth--the toilet booth.  Shall we say, you know, making the fine adjustments to his coat and everything and about to walk out of the booth and I said.  Im going on the air in six minutes.  I want you to tell me basically what youre going to say about the crisis in Iran.  And he gave me about three or four minutes.  As he came out to be rushed upstairs to get ready for the TV thing, I was getting ready to go on the air without doing any editing on the tape.  So we just got the engineer to slap it up on there. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, you interviewed during your career every president from I guess Truman to at least Regan.  Do you remember anything special about some of those interviews? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yes.  Harry Truman.  You know, Truman never visited Atlanta as president but he came pretty soon after he left the office of the presidency and I got a tip from one of the airline employees.  He was traveling by commercial plane and I and a group of other reporters went out and met him at the plane and walked down the steps, went in the old terminal and he sat down and all the other reporters--I usually would be ready to throw in a question and everything and I said, Lets get a sound byte.  Im going to ask you Mr. Truman, how does it feel to be an ex-president?  He shook his finger up and said, Son, Im not an ex-president, Im a former president. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Thats a good story. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Very short and to the point.  Im going to tell you another one on that.  I dont know whether you want to record this or not.  I think maybe you might not.  Truman was a very temperamental individual and you remember it was Truman at Yalta with Churchill and others and you remember the existence of the state of Israel came into being.  What was the name of the ship that kept taking refugees from Germany, getting them into Israel?  What was the name of that?  Odyssey?  At any rate I'm going to tell you this and Ill tell you what I did with it.  When Truman got off the plane the Jewish War Veterans Auxiliary was celebrating Jewish War Veterans Day which was separate from the regular poppy day, November 11th when Veterans Day is celebrated.  They have a different day of observing it and they pass out poppies raising funds for Jewish war veterans.  And this lady came up to pin a poppy on Truman.  He said, Get away, lady, get away.  What are you trying to do, lady? He didnt want her touching him.  Well, Mr. President this is a Jewish War Veterans Day and we want to pin a poppy on your coat lapel.  He gave her a dressing down just like he did me, he said, Why dont you Jews celebrate war veterans day when everybody else does.  He said, I created Israel.  And then the woman and everybody was taken aghast and I got back to WSB and I was listening to the tape.  I came to that, I just flipped it out and laid it aside.  I said, Im not going to use that.  I didnt use it.  Now, thats what you would call an old time editor versus today.  That might have been used today.  Am I wrong or not?  He was beside himself but he was mad because they were not celebrating war veterans day when everybody -- you know, he was a big World War I veteran himself. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Captain in the military, yes.  Any other presidents you remember? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yes, Eisenhower.  Ill give you a little rundown on President Eisenhower.  Eisenhower came to play golf at the August National Golf Course, stayed in Mamies Cabin, which they built over there.  And on this particular visit to Augusta, Mr. George Humphrey who had a plantation at Thomasville, Georgia secretary of commerce I think he was a big Rotarian and he spoke to a group of Rotarians centered around their Monday regular meeting at the Atlanta Rotary Club at the old [indiscernible] Plaza Hotel.  And I arrived there, took the elevator up to the Rainbow Roof where he was to speak.  And when I got up there these secret service agents said, You cant come in here.  I said, I cover this meeting every Monday.  Yeah, Ill be covering the meeting.  Dont you worry about that.  So they asked somebody from the rotary, Yeah, Mr. Morris, hes well-known here, yeah, he covers it.  I did, I covered it, so pretty soon Harry, this military aide that Eisenhower had, Harry Vaughan, remember him? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Captain or Sergeant Harry Vaughn arrived and I marched over to him directly.  I said, Im Aubrey Morris WSB.  I cover this meeting every Monday and, of course, if I can Id like to get a few words from the president before his speech.  He said, Well, what can I do?  He had already said, Theyre aint going to be any press.  This is going to be off the record.  So Harry Vaughn decided to open it up after I started talking to the president anyway without asking Harry.  Thats the way you had to get a lot of stuff. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, you got a lot, didnt you? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  I dont tell it facetiously.  I dont do this at all.  That was just my technique.  Because I love people.  I love the challenge. \r\nSHORT:  How about Haile Selassie? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Haile Selassie, not many reporters get an opportunity to talk to an emperor but his Highness Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia came to Atlanta not long after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Went out to South View cemetery to visit his grave.  There were a large number of reporters there.  This was to be a very brief visit where the emperor would simply arrive, visit the cemetery, pay his respects, put a wreath at Dr. Kings grave and then leave and go back to his private jet at the airport.  And he placed the wreath, went back to his limousine.  Instead of going to where he placed the wreath, I went to the limousine and talked to his military aide of the Ethiopian army.  I said, Is it okay if I get just a few words with the royal highness before you leave?   \r\nAnd his royal highness came in and got in the back seat of the limousine.  A little lap dog, a little wire haired terrier dog that was shedding his hair pretty badly at that time.  He jumped in the emperor's lap and he started petting the little dog.  And I was invited to get in the limousine, sit right by the dog which was between me and the emperor and I turned on the machine.  The emperor's English was a lot better than mine, very well educated and he had some very profound words to say although very brief and he told me, \"Well, just dont take over a minute,\" which I didn't.  I was so awe struck by this experience that when the limousine pulled off all of the other reporters came down and said, Whatd he say? Whatd he say?  I said, Listen to it on WSB.  So I went rushing over to a service station to a telephone to do a live report, cued up the tape machine to where I could play what he said, got ready for it, learned that I had forgotten to turn on the machine.  Fortunately, my lame brain did remember the exact words that he had said. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So you were able to report anyway. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  I reported it anyway. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Lets talk a little minute about WSB.  WSB has been the premiere radio station in Atlanta for a long time but nowadays theyve turned into a talk station.  What do you think was the reason for that? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Simply innovation.  You know, I might answer that by saying, when you get in your automobile now do you prefer to listen to music, to talk, or to information, or do you have a special digital radio where you listen to transmissions of all sorts, all of the technology thats available in the world?  Well, the first person that ever asked me what I thought about talk radio, I said, Well, nobody ever asked me when I was putting all these people on the air who are making the news, in a way it was talk radio.  I think that the advent of talk radio -- beginning in New York, Chicago and other places, Los Angeles -- was simply an innovative way for radio to provide more variety for its listeners whether it was shock radio, shock/talk or whatever you want to call it, opinionated, political, right wing, left wing, conservative or what.  My assessment is that this type of entertainment and after all isnt communications of all type, showbiz.  Its showbiz how youre getting someones attention.  You can bore them.  You can put them to sleep.  You can get the quick turn off like I used to call people who complained at WSB.  I said, Well, just turn it off.  I would invite them to turn it off.  I said, I hope youll keep listening but if you just cant stand it, but this is the way it is.\" \r\nBut on, like--who are these people?  We had one the other day.  It was on one part of Obamas trip to Europe where some guy on CNN during a talk, he had another guy who had his same point of view.  Their idea was to blast this thing without any reply, no counter view, no opposing opinion.  In other words to me it would have been better had they had, as we did on many occasions on WSB, we held discussion programs but if it were an interview with some person about a particular book, for example.  For example, if someone wrote a book on Watergate, I interviewed principle writer on Watergate, what was his name? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Who?  The Washington -- Bob Woodward. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Yeah, Bob Woodward.  I interviewed Bob Woodward at WSB and I played the devils advocate in the book a lot, too.  I said, Well, to what extent is the news media, the press, under the guarantees of the United States constitution, what liberty does it not give --\"  As my dean at good ole UGA, Dean John Drewry of the School of Journalism told his students, This does not give you liberty to call fire in a crowded theater.  It gives you the responsibility, and I think thats what our founding fathers meant, the responsibility to open up a breath of fresh air into clouded issues, to shine some light upon a subject and to give the viewer or the listener or the reader an opportunity to assess the situation themselves where they do the thinking.  They think what they want to instead of having someone come out and never once did I attack anybody I was interviewing.  I was there to get their opinion.  You wouldnt do that.  You dont do that. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let me ask you this question.  How in your opinion do modern broadcast journalists compare with those of your day? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  There are probably many more consumers of modern broadcast journalism or modern journalism today than ever before.  More consumers of information getting it online with new technology; however, at my age Ill have to admit upstairs in my home I have two computers.  We have email access and I use a computer for writing today.  I was much more comfortable when I had an old linotype machine and then a manual typewriter and then an electric typewriter.  But I think you've got to be a sophisticated viewer or reader.  You got not to be a dummy and not ask questions just because somebody says something.  You dont take it as the gospel truth.  You ask your own questions.  Use your own intellect to apprise a situation like a presidential campaign, how do you come to a consensus.  For example, if youre a modern consumer, my grandchildren are far, far ahead of me.  They understand every aspect of computers.  In fact, one of my grandchildren now a junior in high school is teaching computing and working in the computer department of a local college. \r\nSo it doesnt mean you dont have these things but you got to have the overall general education.  A liberal arts education needs to be there to go with every other aspect that you focus on.  In other words, youve got to be able to -- \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Speaking of education, if you were asked by a young person today who is interested in a career in broadcasting -- news broadcasting, what advice would you give them? \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Get a liberal arts education focusing on economics, politics, geography and especially languages and sociology. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, Aubrey Morris, its been a great pleasure to be with you today.  Weve enjoyed this conversation and I want to thank you on behalf of Young Harris College, the Richard Russell Library, the University of Georgia and myself for being our guest. \r\n \r\nMORRIS:  Thank you, Joe, by the way, Joe is an old fellow Atlanta Journal reporter.  From how many years ago, Joe?   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I was there in the 1950s. \r\n \r\n[END OF RECORDING] \r\n \r\n       "},{"id":"gych_rogp_068","title":"Glenn Anthony, 29 January 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Short, Bob, 1932","Anthony, Glenn, 1924"],"dc_date":["2009-01-29"],"dcterms_description":["Glenn Anthony was born in Lenoir City, Tennessee, in 1924. He attended the University of Tennessee and studied journalism. He transferred to Florida State University and graduated in 1952. He first worked for a company newspaper at the Oakridge National Laboratory in Oakridge, Tennessee. After his marriage, he started work at the Palm Beach Post Times in Florida. When he reported for the United Press International, he covered various civil rights groups in Alabama and Tennessee. He entered politics when he went to work for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, lobbying for business interests. He was involved in establishing numerous programs, including Stay and See Georgia, a travel program. He lobbied for over twenty years with the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Forestry Association.","Finding aid available in repository.","Related materials available in the following collections of this repository: Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 146 Bill Hardman; Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 056 Mary Anne Summers.","Glenn Anthony recalls his childhood in Lenoir City, Tennessee, and subsequent Navy service in the South Pacific. Anthony discusses his work at the Oakridge National Laboratory, the Palm Beach Post Times, and United Press International. He recalls working in Montgomery during important civil rights events such as the bus boycott. Anthony discusses his friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Anthony recalls being reassigned to Atlanta to work as a capitol reporter. He discusses his experience as a journalist covering Governor Marvin Griffin, including Griffin's indirect answers and his investigations into corruption in the Griffin administration. Anthony discusses Governor Sanders' approach to integration, his ties to Washington, D.C. and his role in bringing professional sports teams to Atlanta. He also comments on what makes a good lobbyist, a bad lobbyist, and public perception of what lobbyists do. Anthony recalls being hired by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce to lobby for business interests. He discusses coordinating governmental affairs tours with political participants such as Governors Sanders, Vandiver, Talmadge, and Maddox and Congressman Landrum. He also mentions his work with Congressional dinners and the Star Student program. Anthony explains the nicknames he has been assigned over the years such a \"joree\" \"tiger\" and \"Colonel.\"","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Journalists--Georgia--Atlanta--Interviews","Lobbyists--Georgia--Interviews","Civil rights demonstrations--United States","School integration--Georgia","Political corruption--Georgia--History","Professional sports--Georgia--Atlanta--History","Tourism--Georgia","Civil rights demonstrations","Journalists","Lobbyists","Political corruption","Politics and government","Professional sports","School integration","Tourism","Georgia--Politics and government","Georgia","Georgia--Atlanta","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Glenn Anthony, 29 January 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-068/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 068, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (44 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Talmadge, Herman E. (Herman Eugene), 1913-2002","Anthony, Glenn, 1924-","Vandiver, S. Ernest (Samuel Ernest), 1918-2005","Maddox, Lester, 1915-2003","Sanders, Carl, 1925-2014","Griffin, Marvin, 1907-1982","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Landrum, Phil M. (Phil Mitchell), 1907-1990"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Glenn Anthony interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2009 January 29 \r\nAtlanta, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-068 \r\nOriginal: video, 45 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription:  September 23, 2009 \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  Im Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics,  sponsored by Young Harris College, The Richard Russell Library and the University of Georgia.  Our guest is Glenn Anthony, a noted Georgia political reporter and well-known lobbyist for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.  Welcome, Glenn. \r\n \r\nGLENN ANTHONY:  Thank you very much. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You know, I told the people over at the university that I was looking forward to this conversation, because you and I are contemporaries in Georgia politics.   \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Right.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  We came along at the same time, we were both journalists and we have had many of the same friends for many years.  But before we get to that, lets talk about Glenn Anthony and Lenoir City, Tennessee. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, Bob I was born in Lenoir City in 1924 in the depth of the Great Depression and Im still haunted by some of those terrible years that I spent there.  But I graduated from high school in 1943 and went into the Navy and spent most of my career down in the South Pacific on this charter transport.  I came back to the states after the war and I went on the GI Bill to Rice University of Tennessee.  Majored in journalism and I had a friend -- a fraternity brother there -- who had an opportunity to go down to Florida State University to get some course work that you couldnt get at the University of Tennessee.  So, he came back to Knoxville with this glowing story about that campus down there.  He said, You cant believe this.  He said, They've got 1,500 men and about 5,000 ladies.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Right.  \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, it was -- prior to the Florida State University it was called Florida State College for Women and then they made it co-educational in 1946 to take the overflow from the University of Florida from the veterinary -- I mean, the vets that were coming in there.  So, I said, Well, Ive got to go down and check on that.  So, I spoke to my dad and mother about it and dad said, Well, how are you going to get down there?  I said, Well, I guess Ill ride a bus or hitchhike.  So he said, Well, okay.  Ill give you the bus fare.   \r\nSo he gave me the bus fare.  I went down.  I liked the campus down there and everything.  So, I came back to Knoxville, and at that time, I decided that I was going to definitely go.  And I asked the university to transfer my transcript down there, which they did.  And in so doing I lost a lot of credits, so I finally graduated now in 1952.  But prior to that, I met a lady named Janet Anderson.  She was a wonderful, talented lady.  She was a violinist.  She was born and raised in New York City and her family moved down to Titusville, Florida, where her grandfather had been a successful land developer down there.   \r\nSo, she came to Florida State and thats where I met her.  And we got married while we were still in college.  And the financial situation was so bleak that she went back to Titusville and worked in a dental office there to help me get through college.  So I did.  I graduated in journalism and my first job was at the Oakridge National Laboratory in Oakridge, Tennessee.  Thats where the hydrogen bomb was developed.  So, I stayed there, -- worked on a company newspaper there for about a couple years, I guess.  And Janet wanted to go back to Florida where her family was living in Palm Beach County.  So I went back to Palm Beach and got a job on the Palm Beach Post Times.  Stayed there a couple of years and then from there we went -- came back to Knoxville.   \r\nAnd at that time -- then I was hired by the United Press International.  They sent me to Nashville a year or so and then they sent me down to Montgomery, Alabama and I was there when Martin Luther King began the bus boycott.  I was there when Rosa Parks, who is one of the main movers and shakers in Montgomery, refused to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus.  So I stayed there for a couple of years, and then I was transferred to Atlanta, where I worked at United Press International as a capitol reporter.  Stayed there for two years.   \r\nI was hired by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce to lobby for the business interests.  They had about 5,000 members in Georgia.  I was recommended to the job there by a fellow named Mike Cheatham.  And Mike was a very fine young man and he had spent some time there and the Coca-Cola Company hired him.  Theres an old war horse named Bobby Davis that hired Mike to go to Coca-Cola and work in government affairs there.  So Mike introduced me to the Georgia Chamber -- Walter Tates, an old warhorse.   And they hired me and I spent 18 and a half years there with them.  And I put together some governmental affairs -- tours there.   \r\nWhen I joined the chamber in 1959 they had a pre-legislative form that theyd go around the state for about ten days.  They were taking -- they would take a lawyer, who was skilled in the labor relations, and hed take a business man along to talk about issues.  So, that was 1959.  I went on a first tour and after I got back -- I finished and got back -- and I talked to Tates, I said, Why dont we get legislators and government officials to go on this tour?  So the Executive Committee okayed it.   \r\nSo the first tour that I took was 1960 with Carl Sanders.  He was there for Governor Ernest Vandiver.  Also, there was a fellow named Frank Twitty up in Brady County, so that was a very successful trip  So, the next year we put that together and several of the lobbyists had heard about the success of it, so they started signing up.  And we would work with the Georgia -- the local Chambers of Commerce and theyd put the program together.  Then wed bring the governmental affairs people in there and they ranged from Senator Herman Talmadge to Governor Lester Maddox, and we had -- during that period wed also have a member of Congress.  I think the first one to go on the tour with us was Phil Landrum up in North Georgia.  He was one of the authors of the Landrum-Griffin bill.   \r\nSo, after that program, we had one there called a -- let's see here.  What was that?  Yeah, a Congressional dinner.  We put that on each year.  And now the chamber had been putting this together and they would invite the Congressmen, Senators and members of the House for a dinner meeting.  So I suggested the next year, I said, Why dont we invite the staff people, too?  Theyre the people that I have to deal with.  So then we enlarged it and it became a very, very big dinner.  Sometimes wed have 500 people there.  The people who were -- the business people in Georgia, they would come up and they helped us with the expenses of increasing the size of this dinner.  It became a very successful program.   \r\nI think that -- but we had another program there at the Georgia Chamber that I got involved in.  It was called Stay and See Georgia.  We set up a travel department.  And the lady in charge of that, Mozelle Christian, she invited top travel writers from around the state -- I mean, around the country -- to come in and see Georgia on about a week tour of the state.  And it became very successful.  It was copied in other states.   \r\nWe also had a very popular Stay and See Georgia -- I mean, the Star Student Program, where we would select the star student and then the star student in turn would select his favorite teacher.  So, one of the offshoots of that was I had a friend at Pan American Airways.  He was Vice President for the South and I said, Is there anything you can do for us?  He said, Yes, I can.  I can give you and this student a trip anywhere Pan American services.  So we took that and that was my -- then for the next ten years we had that and it was my duty -- and I emphasize duty -- to accompany this young student all over Europe, South America, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru -- went to all those countries --   France, London, Paris, Rome.  So I had that duty for ten years.  And so, that was a good addition to my program. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Glenn, before we get too far away from it, lets go back to Montgomery. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yeah, okay. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You covered the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery, so you knew Dr. King. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Knew him very well.  After he made -- when that boycott -- that boycott first began, I got know him pretty well.  And after he started making some big news headlines, the Atlanta office of the United Press International called me and said, See if you can get an in-depth interview with this young preacher over there.  And so I called him up and he said, Yes, come on out to the House and well talk about what I have in mind.  So, I went out there.  I spent an hour or more with him, and this fellow was quoting poetry.  He was quoting the philosophers and he was a very bright man and I went back and told them in Atlanta.  I said, Youre going to hear from this fellow.  Hes got some talent.   \r\nSo he went on to win the Nobel.  You know what he did for the Civil Rights movement.  But that was a great part of my life during the period of two years I spent there, during that bus boycott.  I saw him even when he won the Nobel Prize.  I saw him a couple of times.  Hed always remember me and he was always very friendly.  So, I knew that he was going to make some news, which he did worldwide. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So, you came then to Atlanta to cover the capital when Marvin Griffin was Governor. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Thats right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Marvin, of course, was a staunch segregationist and a very colorful man.  You remember much about him? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, he had a great sense of humor.  And as I was a reporter, we'd come in this office, maybe half a dozen of us from the Atlanta Journal and the Constitution.     And it was hard to get anything out of him because he would turn our questions into humorous answers.  So the press, of course, really hit him.  He had some things going on in his administration that the public needed to know about.  So we reporters, we got down and tried to cover it all.  But even through all of those bleak days when he was going through this -- what somebody called the assassination of his character, and then somebody said, Well, what character does he have?  \r\nBut anyway, he had his brother Cheney.  He was in the office and he was his hatchet man.  I mean, he did all the gory stuff that had to be done in the administration.  We had an older gentleman there named Hamilton that was the Secretary of the Treasury.  And we had a fellow in the purchasing department; I cant remember his name right now.  But anyway, it was a very colorful administration.  Thats the part that I remember most about it. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  He called you Gentleman Jorees. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Joree, well, yes, he did.  He called all the reporters Jorees and the Joree is small bird, which traipses around in the meadows and picks up the droppings from the cattle and so forth.  So Marvin Griffin put us in with them.  After I joined the Georgia Chamber I decided to organize a golf tournament for all the news people in Atlanta and anywhere else in the state.  We called it the Joree Open and that program we carried for about ten or 12 years.  And we had all the top journalists in Atlanta -- the TV, print journalism -- we had them all.  They all came to the program and that was very good. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Were you covering the capitol when Governor Griffin and Lieutenant Governor Vandiver got into a big fight over money that Griffin wanted for rural roads? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes, I was there, yeah.  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What do you remember about that? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  A little bit vague on that, trying to remember the name of the highway department --  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Roger Lawson. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Roger Lawson from Hawkinsville, Georgia, I believe. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Right. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  And I think that bill was killed as I remember. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Right. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:   So, I was there for that. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, despite all of his trouble with corruption, Griffin turned out to be a fairly progressive Governor. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes, he did.  He had some good points and some good traits.  But now, Earnest Vandiver came in.  He was a quality individual -- a fine man, a fine person, a man of great character.  Wed just gone through those years with the Marvin Griffin administration and it was really a bright day in Georgia when Earnest Vandiver came in.   And he came in at the time during the integration movement and he said he would abide by the will of the people in Georgia in the South, that no school in Georgia would be integrated.  But then he backed off on that, as you know, and the schools weren't segregated. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And the University of Georgia. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Thats right.  The University of Georgia and -- lets see, Im trying to remember the names.  Cant remember right now. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Of the students? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hamilton Holmes -- \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Hamilton Holmes, yes. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  -- Was one, and the other was the young lady Charlene Hunter. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Charlene Hunter, right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Right, and they were the first students to integrate the University of Georgia.  Griffin ran again following Vandiver's term against a young state Senator from Augusta, Carl Sanders, who defeated him.  Most people think that Griffin lost the race because of charges of corruption, but there are others who think that Sanders just out-campaigned him and won.  What do you recall about that race? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Hmm.  A little bit vague on that, but -- \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Some people think that the election of Carl Sanders in 1962 was one of the real turning points in Georgia history. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Absolutely.  Now, as I mentioned earlier, Sanders was the floor leader in the Senate and Twitty in the House, and there was one quality that Sanders had.  Now, when we would take this large group around the state to speak -- the Congressmen and a member of the Georgia legislature or the Georgia government -- and we had a lot of lobbyists in our group.  And after each evening session wed all gather in a room somewhere -- drink a lot of whisky, tell a lot of lies. \r\nBut the one person who did not attend those evening sessions was Carl Sanders.  He would always go to his room after the meeting and hed prepare for the next meeting.  We had a lot of times -- breakfast, noon and dinner -- breakfast, lunch and dinner, and he was very well-prepared in his statements that he made, and it was very obvious then that he was a serious guy.  And so, Frank Twitty -- he was a much better speaker than Twitty, and Twitty came at him with a -- he called the Senator my short shirted friend.  And that didnt go over too well with Sanders!  But anyway thats what it was.  Short-shirted friend! \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Actually, Governor Sanders was the first Governor that we had, as I recall, who had ties to Washington.  Most of our Governors had always cursed them and not gotten along with the federal government, but Sanders became a very good friend of Lyndon Johnson.  And as a result, it was a great help to Georgia -- from the federal government. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  And another thing Carl Sanders was instrumental in was getting the sports in this city -- I mean, professional teams.  Sanders was one of the leaders in that.  And few people know about that, but he was really, really big in that program. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  He had what, I guess, was called a moderate approach to the race issue during that period. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes, he did.  Yes. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And a lot of people think that when he ran for reelection in 1970 that that hurt him when he was defeated by Jimmy Carter.  Do you think thats true? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, Im not sure about that.  I really am not, Bob.  I just dont know. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about lobbying.  What makes a good lobbyist? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, number one is honesty.  Youve got to deal with these legislators and be completely up front in dealing with them.  You cant come on and tell them two or three different tales and have to come back and say, Well, Im sorry.  So, I would say honesty is the number one.  I lobbied there for more than 20 years with the Georgia Chamber and the Georgia Forest Association, and I can say that at no period during that time did I ever have any problems -- individual problems with the legislators.    \r\nAnd I felt that -- I think they recognized me, because the House Representative commended me for my honesty and integrity.  Passed a resolution.  The Senate did likewise.  And Senator Bill English from Swainsboro, Georgia, introduced the resolution in the state Senate, commending me for my honesty and integrity.  So, those were quite a highlight of my career there.  And I was told by some of the old timers there that theyd never heard of a lobbyist in the history of this state ever being commended for the service.   So that was a very proud moment for me and my family. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, you deserved it.  But on the other hand, you took a lot of flack, also. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes, I did.  We had one instance that went all the way to the top with Governor Jimmy Carter.  He had Elliott Levitas, a Representative of DeKalb county, to introduce a bill, which was called Consumer Protection Legislation.  And so, after we analyzed it -- we had a table of accountants and tax lawyers and so forth -- they said, This is a killer bill for business.  And so, I rallied the troops then and we killed the bill.  And so after that, Jimmy Carter, in a press conference a few days later, he called me the most damaging lobbyist in the state, because I killed a bill that would have benefited the people of Georgia.  So, after that commendation from the Governor, my Board of Directors said, Charge on, Anthony. Youre doing your job, youre just doing it for free. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  They called you tiger. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  They called me tiger, hmm-mm.  It was a nickname. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, there must be a story behind that. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, when I got onto a project -- got onto a bill, you know, I charged -- I saw it to conclusion.  I would see that wed get the bills passed or killed and I was unrelenting in my time that I was involved in those legislations and I wouldnt give up.  So that was a -- that was an honor bestowed upon me by my fellow lobbyists.  They called me the Tiger.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Now they call you Colonel. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Colonel, thats right, yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  How did you get that rank? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, did you know that the Governors there, they have honorary Colonels that they hand out.  But the one who really -- Lester Maddox started calling me the Colonel and every time Id go in his office, he'd say, Colonel, what can I do for you today?  And so he was quite a showman as everybody knows. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Lets explore for a minute, Glenn, if you will, the mechanics of lobbying.  For example, what is the first thing a lobbyist does when he finds out that a bill that affects him is about to be introduced? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, what I did -- and I assume what most of the lobbyists did -- they go back to their employer and sit down.  I would go back.  If we had a bill that I could get my hands on Id take it back to my office.  Wed rally the lawyers and the accountants and so forth, and they would study the bill and they would up with some good, concrete evidence of what it would do to business.  Now we were not unreasonable over there in representing the business, but most of the time most of my energies were expended on killing bills, not passing bills.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hmm-mm. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  And we would take down the bills that would affect the business community. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  But sometimes you might settle for amendments. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Amendments? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  To the bill. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes, yes, we did.  Occasionally wed settle for one. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And youd go to the sponsor and suggest those amendments. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And what if a sponsor rejected them? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, if he did wed just go ahead and kill the bill. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You know it seems, I guess, to most people, that lobbying work is done there in the capitol.  But thats not it, is it? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Oh, no, no. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about what you do during the interim. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  All right.  I had a plan every summer.  I would get out.  I would go to every legislator in the Georgia General Assembly and Id go see him in his home town.  I visited with him.  I might take him to lunch or I might take him to dinner.  And I got every legislator I saw between sessions on trips around and that was impressive to these people, going up to Young Harris or going to Walker County.  So, that was well received by these people -- that this fellow from Atlanta thinks enough about me to drive 200 miles or 300, 500 miles.  And so, that was a good program that I put together. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Representing the Chamber of Commerce, you obviously at the same time represented a lot of the businesses who had their own lobbyists.  How did you interact with those? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, that was  generally, if a lobbyist who came to me was a member of the Georgia Chamber we would join in with him if he asked for our support and we didnt take it on unless he asked us to.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hmm-mm.  I bet you remember when there were only four or five lobbyists around the capital. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yes.  Yeah, four or five.  I guess now you got -- \r\n \r\nSHORT:  2,000. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  2,000 or more!  But I remember that the Southern Bell had a good lobbyist.  Had one of the old timers -- Bill Bryant. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Bill Bryant.  I remember Bill. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Bob Simonette. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Bob Simonette, yes, he was with the Georgia Fire Company.  He was a very fine young man and well-respected by the members of the General Assembly.   And beyond that I cant recall the names, but we had a small group. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Glenn Phillips. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Glenn 'Cookie' Phillips -- that was the nickname they gave him.  Cookie Phillips was -- at the Grady Hotel they had speaker that stayed there, Speaker George T. Smith.  And most evenings you could go there and theyd have a liquor room setup and everybody would get in there and compare notes and drink some Jack Daniels.  But that was a good program.  So we always kept the liquor bottles filled up. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I think I might have asked you this question, but Id like to rephrase it and ask you this.  What does it take to be a good lobbyist?  Personality? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, yes, thats part of it and a sense of honesty.  Theres no question about that.  And we've got some lobbyists over there that I dont want to spend much time with.  But anyway, the members of the General Assembly, they know whats going on with these people, so they just -- \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What makes a good public servant? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, Bob, thats a pretty tough question.  Again, honesty, thats number one and -- I would say thats the number one issue. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hmm-mm.  What do you say to those who criticize lobbyists and accuse them of being something other than Sunday school teachers? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Lets see, how about rephrasing that? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  How do you respond to criticism of the profession of lobbying? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, thats a pretty hard question.  Most of the lobbyists I would say now working these days -- most of them are honest people and they want to do whats right.  But theyve got to represent their clients.  They've got to represent their companies, but the bad ones -- the bad lobbyists, they cant make it.  Theyre ineffective and they get the reputation thats damaging to them. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Getting back to the pre-legislative forums which were so important at that time.  Tell us about some of the participants and if you recall some of the issues they discussed on these tours. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, theres a wide range of subjects and a lot of times people in North Georgia might have a different set of ideas than the ones in South Georgia.  Taxation was always a big issue.  They had -- oh I dont know, that was a big one. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let me ask you this question.  Tell us about some of the most effective legislators that you remember. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, yes, a former state Senator named Roy Lambert from Madison, Georgia was an outstanding state Senator -- a very honest, very compelling man.  Also had Representative Harold Clark, who later went to the Supreme Court in Georgia.  A very fine statesman.  Hes a man who stood by his principles, and could not be swayed.  But hed always be upfront with you when you were dealing with him.  Those two come to mind as being exemplary good legislators. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You worked over there during the famous feud between Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller and Speaker Murphy.  How did you fair during that period? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, personally, I did all right.  You know, I dealt with both of them and Id be upfront.  I would tell them if I was dealing with Murphy, or vice versa, you know. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Glenn, as you look back over those years you spent over at the capitol, what do you think was your greatest accomplishment? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  My greatest accomplishment?  Well, representing the businesses of Georgia, seeing their programs enacted in the Georgia Legislature and killing the programs that would be not in the best interests.  So, those were some of the things. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hmm-mm.  What was your biggest disappointment? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  You know, I really cannot -- I did not have any disappointment to tell you the truth.  Over the years I pretty much had it my way to put it bluntly, but I didnt have any real disappointments.  I feel like I served the business community of Georgia. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that if all lobbyists were like you, than we wouldnt have the headlines we read far too often in the newspapers today.  I want to ask you this final question.  What advice do you have for those who might want to become professional lobbyists? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  I would say that they would have to have a bent toward the government or legislature.  Personality is very good.  Personality, honesty and -- \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Communicative skills.  Do they figure? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Very important, yes, very important. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  How is the best way to communicate with a legislator?  Is it privately in his home or in his office or is it the famous three martini lunches? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  I did a lot of my -- I did a lot of those activities.  I spent a lot of time at the Commerce Club with those so-called three martini lunches and most of us did a lot of business in the halls.  In the evenings youd go out where youd see these good folks.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Was it difficult to change votes when you needed them? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  No. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Was it? \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  No.  I was very successful in my career over there.  I cannot remember a single instance where I fell flat on my face on an issue.  So, I feel very good about my career there. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, you've had a --  \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  And those two -- Im very, very proud of those two recommendations that the House and the Senate made on my behalf, commending me for my honesty and integrity.  And as I mentioned earlier, one of the pros over there said hed never heard of anything like this -- a lobbyist being honored.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Hmm-mm. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Most of them are looked upon as lurking in the dark with their topcoats and their top hat pulled down.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Wearing those Italian suits. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Thats right, wearing those $1,500 Italian suit and silk underwear. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, Glenn, its been a pleasure having you and I want to thank you on behalf of Young Harris College and the Richard Russell Library, the University of Georgia and myself, for being with us. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Well, thank you very much, Bob, and you know, weve been old friends since 1957. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Thats right. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  So that goes back a long way. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Been through a lot together. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Yeah, we surely have. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Shared a lot of good friends. \r\n \r\nANTHONY:  Absolutely.  Thank you very much. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Thank you. \r\n \r\n[END OF RECORDING] "},{"id":"gych_rogp_063","title":"Millard Grimes, 07 January 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Short, Bob, 1932","Grimes, Millard B., 1930"],"dc_date":["2009-01-07"],"dcterms_description":["Millard Grimes discusses his childhood in Newnan and LaGrange and working for the Columbus Ledger as a teenager. Grimes recall his work with The Red and Black and Pandora at the University of Georgia. He elaborates on his coworkers at The Red and Black and how his work there prepared him for work in the newspaper industry. Grimes discusses winning the Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into corruption in Phenix City with the Columbus Ledger. He elaborates on the circumstances of the investigation and his decision to begin a daily newspaper in Phenix City. Grimes discusses his later acquisition of the Opelika Daily News and how he expanded its circulation. Grimes recalls his return to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and the series of events that led him to become the editor. He discusses his book The Last Linotype: The Story of Georgia and its Newspapers since World War II. Grimes recalls outstanding journalists he worked with, including Wade Saye, Lewis Grizzard, Ray Jenkins, Grover Hall, Jim Bane, Jim Bellows, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, and Bob Fowler. He also elaborates on what makes a good newspaper and whether newspaper editorials shape public opinion. He specifically mentions influential editorials from Ralph McGill and Carl Sanders. Grimes discusses the administrations of Governors Sanders and Vandiver, the 1966 gubernatorial election, and the demise of the county unit system. He also discusses the importance of investigative reporting and the tension between segregationist publishers and African-American readers. Grimes discusses his interest in the history of Warm Springs and President Roosevelt and party politics in Georgia. He also recalls the magazines he was involved with, Georgia Trend and the Georgia Journal.","Millard Grimes was born in Newnan, Georgia, on March 8, 1930. He grew up in LaGrange and Columbus. In high school, he worked at the Columbus Ledger first as a copy boy, then as a proofreader and sports writer. At the University of Georgia, he worked as an editor for The Red and Black, and graduated from UGA with a degree in journalism in 1951. He returned to the Columbus Ledger as associate news editor, and in 1955 the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for documenting corruption in Phenix City, Alabama. He then served as publishing chief executive officer at numerous newspapers, including the Opelika-Auburn News and the Rockdale Citizen. In 1991, he entered magazine publishing when he purchased the Georgia Journal and Georgia Trend. In 1999, he sold Georgia Trend, and funded the Millard B. Grimes Laboratory for Excellence in Print Journalism at the University of Georgia. Additionally, he has served on Franklin D. Roosevelt Warm Springs Memorial advisory board.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["University of Georgia--School of Journalism","Red and Black (Athens, Ga.)","Columbus ledger (Columbus, Ga.)","Columbus ledger-enquirer","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Newspaper editors--Georgia--Columbus--Interviews","Newspapers","Governors--Election","Investigative reporting--United States","Segregation and the press","Political parties--Georgia","Investigative reporting","Journalists","Newspaper editors","Political parties","Universities and colleges--Alumni and alumnae","Newnan (Ga.)--History","LaGrange (Ga.)--History","Warm Springs (Ga.)--History","Georgia","Georgia--Columbus","Georgia--LaGrange","Georgia--Newnan","Georgia--Warm Springs","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Millard Grimes, 07 January 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-063/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 063, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (89 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Bellows, James G.","Sanders, Carl, 1925-2014","Grizzard, Lewis, 1946-1994","Jenkins, Ray, 1930-","Vandiver, S. Ernest (Samuel Ernest), 1918-2005","Grimes, Millard B., 1930-","McGill, Ralph, 1898-1969","Hall, Grover C., Jr. (Grover Cleveland), 1915-1971","Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Millard Grimes interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2009 January 7 \r\nAthens, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-063 \r\nOriginal: video, 90 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription:  September 29, 2009 \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  Im Bob Short, and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics, sponsored by the Richard Russell Library at the University of Georgia.  Our guest is Millard Grimes, who is a well-known newspaper man and author.  Millard, welcome to our program.  \r\n \r\nMILLARD GRIMES:  Thank you.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You are a newspaper man.  You literally grew up in the newspaper business, working as a copy boy, a proofreader and a sports reporter for the Columbus Ledger while you were still in high school.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Thats right.  Ive never made a dollar since then in any business except publishing, newspapers or magazines.  So, I guess, yeah, Im a newspaper man.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were born in Newnan.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yes, I was born in Newnan in 1930, just a few months after the Wall Street crash that ushered in the Great Depression.  My father lost his job during that time, and so I only lived in Newnan a few weeks as a baby.  Although that was the county, Coweta County, was where the families of both my parents had lived for generations.  And a lot of them are still buried there around the Welcome Church, if you know where that is.  Well, Elim Church in the Welcome community.  But we moved to LaGrange when I was still a baby, as I said.   \r\nAnd so I grew up in LaGrange, which actually was a great place to grow up in the 1930s.  It was a small, small town, about 18,000, 20,000.  But it was a cotton mill town, I guess.  But we lived only about a block from what you might call downtown.  So you could walk everywhere.  You could walk to the theater or the stores on Main Street to the church.  So, actually, I had access to a lot of that stuff.  And back in those days, of course, a kid could walk all over town by himself if he wanted to.  And I mean, we were poor, I guess youd have to say.  I dont think my father ever made much more than 20 dollars a week, 25, maybe some  he was a traveling salesman for the Culpepper Company there.  Ive often said we were so poor, we could hardly afford a maid, because maids then were two dollars a week.  So we did afford a maid, which was fortunate, because my mother was sickly and stayed in the bed most of the time.  And then, my father, he traveled a lot.  He didnt get home a lot, sometimes on purpose and sometimes because he had to work.  And I think he sort of took to drinking during this period and some nights didnt come home at all.  \r\nBut my grandmother came to live with us, so I guess my grandmother sort of raised me.  But we lived right there on Broom Street.  I dont know whether you know where that is or not in LaGrange, but its just, like I say, right off the square.  But I loved growing up in LaGrange, because it was such a big difference in those days, in the 1930s.  If you lived in a relatively urban area, I guess you would call it, and about two to three miles away, outside the city limits, people didnt have running water, they didnt have electricity, they didnt have a lot of comforts we now have.  And the difference is just maybe a couple of miles.  And it wasnt how rich or poor you were.  It was actually if you lived in a town or if you lived out in the country, no matter how rich you were, you usually had to have a well, and it was a long time before you got electricity.   \r\nSo growing up in a small town, also, you had access to stores much easier, and theaters.  I keep saying the movie theater, because in the 30s, going to the movie for a dime was the big entertainment for children.  And I started buying Big Little books.  You remember those?  Comic books and things like that.  And I was always a reader and always wanted to be a writer.  And I really started out wanting to be a fiction writer.  And wrote a lot of stories.  Wrote stories for comic books and science fiction, the pulp magazines, as I got into my teenage years.  But I soon realized it was going to be hard to make a living at a penny at a word.  I just couldnt write that many words.   \r\nSo in the summer of my junior year at Columbus High, I went down and applied for a job at the Ledger-Enquirer, the daily newspaper there.  And they had a job for a proofreader during the vacations of the other proofreader.  I was only 16 years old, which I thought was a little young for that job.  And then I was a copy boy on Saturdays.  They dont have copy boys anymore, and sometimes Im not sure they have proofreaders anymore.  Everybody has to kind of proofread their own stuff.  But the copy boy was very important in those days.  He not only had to go get coffee for all the people in the newsroom, which was very important, but he had to strip the wires and, later, wind up the paper tape that was sent by the wire services that you put through the linotype machines.  Well, if the copy boy didnt come in in the morning around 5:00 or 6:00, the editors didnt have any wire copy, which back in those days was extremely important, because we didnt have as much local as they do today.  But in any case, that was my introduction.  And I worked at the Columbus paper during my years here at the university in the summers.  \r\nMy father died when I was a senior in high school, and my mother used the money to sort of send me through school.  It was insurance money, and thats how I happened to get through Georgia.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So you came to the University of Georgia to study journalism.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And Im sure you must have worked on the Red and Black.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Absolutely.  I went down to Red and Black the first week or so I was here and worked on it til my senior year when I worked on the Pandora, the yearbook.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What was the university like in those days?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, it was, I think, great.  But Id never been anywhere much.  Id been to Athens once.  I came up here to cover a track meet.  When I was a senior in high school I started writing sports for the local Columbus paper.  And Id been to Florida a couple of times.  But like I say, we didnt travel much during the war, didnt go anywhere.  So Athens, of course, today people say its a lot different, and, I guess, sure it is.  But when I was walking over here today, I realized I could still find my way, because it was similar to the way it was when I was a student and used to walk on north campus a lot.   \r\nAnd it was right after World World II, so a lot of the men students  Id say probably more than half of the men students were veterans coming on the GI bill.  And of course, men outnumbered women about five to one on the campus in those days.  And I was a fuzzy-faced 17-year-old who came up in 1947 as a freshman at 17.  Id been about 15 when the war ended, so  I missed the war, or at least as a serviceperson.  So it was certainly really hard to get a date for a guy who didnt have much money and who was younger than most of the other men.  And we lived out in the prefabs on Ag Hill.  The prefabs there, they stayed there, I think, til the 60s.  And then I moved over on Milledge Avenue for my last three years.  \r\nBut I worked at the Red and Black and would have to say it was the best training ground for newspaper people that you could have had.  And the people who were on the Red and Black during the period I was there just went on to have very successful careers in journalism.  When I was editor, John Pennington was the managing editor who Jimmy Carter gives a lot of credit for saving his political career when he investigated a voting fraud that kept Carter from winning his first race.  Jim Mintor was the sports editor.  He went on to become the editor of the Atlanta papers.  Dewey Benefield, who didnt stay in newspapers, but who became a very prominent developer down in Sea Island, was there.  Mike Edwards, who went on to become a writer on National Geographic and is still writing for National Graphic. Glenn Vaughn, who went on to be the publisher of the Columbus newspapers.  It was an unusual group of people there.  And some of them were veterans, and some of them werent, like Jim and I werent, and Dewey.  \r\nSo the Red and Black, as Ive often told folks, was the most exacting newspaper at that time that I have ever worked on.  Every line had to fit.  Every headline had to fit just right, and we rewrote them time and time again.  And of course, we printed here in Athens in an old print shop.  But it was an experience that, if you went through all the rungs on the ladder, when you got out, you could put out a newspaper, a real newspaper, I think.  And I think a lot of those people did.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were there during the Sinkwich-Trippi years.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, no, I missed those.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You missed it?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  I was there right after that.  However, I saw Trippi play several times, because they played the Georgia-Auburn game in Columbus every year at that time.  And so we got to usher the Georgia-Auburn games when I was in high school.  In fact, one of my great scoops when I was sports editor for the high school paper is I got an interview with Charley Trippi in the lobby of the Ralston Hotel.  I called up his room.  Im not usually that brash, and Charley Trippi answered, and I asked him to meet me down in the lobby.  And so I interviewed him a little bit about his  it was one of the Georgia-Auburn games.  But, no, they had left.  Roush and that group were here.  Zippy Morocco, whos still here in Athens, I was talking to Zippy the other day.   \r\nBut I think it was a great time to be at the university.  We had big bands come in for all the big dances, like homecoming and the commencement.  And the city wasnt as big.  Certainly it didnt have any bars.  In fact, I dont think you could serve drinks in Athens at that time, although a lot of people managed to get some.  But it was a great time be here.  \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  So after graduation, you wound up back in Columbus.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yes.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Lets talk about in 1955 when your newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for documenting evidence that there was corruption in Phenix City, which is across the river.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Thats right.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about that.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, it was an interesting year, needless to say.  And I would like to say that, as it was on the Red and Black when I was here at Georgia, we had an unusual group of people on the Columbus Ledger during that time who went on to  Bob Brown was the editor, and I think he was the person most responsible for us getting the Pulitzer.  Bob had worked with Harding Carter in Mississippi on that Delta paper, and then he went through NBC and came to the Ledger-Enquirer.  He was fairly young, I guess his middle 30s.  And he died fairly young.  But he did help us get that Pulitzer.  He was a very good political journalist, in the sense that he knew all the people in the business.  Well, we won  I mean, we overplayed the story, quite frankly.  I mean, the key to cleaning up Phenix City was that Albert Patterson, an attorney in Phenix City who pledged to clean it up, was elected Attorney-General of Alabama.  And one night, in a dark alley downtown, he was shot to death, on June 18, 1954.  Ill always remember that night.  But when he was shot and killed, that naturally created a lot of attention on Phenix City, which had been corrupt for years and years.  I mean, going back to the riverfront days when riverboats came in, it was a gambling center.  Of course, Fort Benning being across the bridge there helped create the need  not the need  but a lot of nightclubs and so forth.  And we used to go over there a lot, my wife and I, my fiance at that time, and the people from the Ledger-Enquirer.  And frankly, I never saw all that much corruption.  I mean, they could serve drinks, and they had dancing.  And I guess they had gambling and things like that in the back rooms, but I never saw any, and other things.  But, in any case, when Patterson was killed, the Governor or Alabama declared martial law in Phenix City and sent the National Guard in.  And the National Guard took over the entire government of Russell County and Phenix City.  You had a National Guardsman who was the sheriff and another one who was the police chief, and all the people who were there were ousted.  Then they brought in a special grand jury from all over the state, and a judge.  And in the next nine months, they charged and convicted a lot of the gamblers, which they felt would never have happened with the old regime in place.  So then they arrested the Solicitor General of Russell County, the Deputy Sheriff and the Attorney General of Alabama, whichever was attorney general at the time, and charged them with Pattersons murder. It was a very interesting trial.  \r\nThe district attorney was probably the most powerful politician in the county, a fellow named Arch Ferrell.  And at the trial, the witnesses testified, several of them, that they saw Ferrell and the deputy sheriff, Fuller, shoot Patterson in this alley right there.  Ill tell you a little interesting story about that alley there.  It was right on the main street of Phenix City at 9:00 on a Friday night.  So a lot of people walking up and down the street.  But it was a little off the sidewalk.  But despite eyewitnesses  and the main eyewitness, by the way, was killed in a knife fight before the trial.  Just a coincidence, according to the books and all.  And I recently read about a book about this.  Its why I remember it well, because I just read a very good new book about the assassination.  In any case, Fuller was convicted, the deputy sheriff.  Ferrell was acquitted.  The Attorney General went to a sanitarium, as they called it back then, in Texas, and was declared mentally-unfit to stand trial.  And, of course, he wasnt in Phenix City that night.  In fact, Ferrells defense was he was talking to him on the phone.  Now, I wont get into all those details.  But in any case, he was supposed to have helped plot it, though.  \r\nJohn Patterson, Albert Pattersons son, of course, was elected in his place to be attorney general and later was elected governor, defeating in 1958 George C. Wallace.  The only time Wallace ever lost an election in his career is when Patterson beat him.  But despite Patterson being the attorney general, they did acquit the guy he really felt was the person who was responsible for the assassination.  And Ferrell died in prison  not Ferrell, but Fuller died in prison about seven years later.   \r\nBut in any case, getting back to this, we played up all this stuff, of course, and ran many stories on it.  Im trying to remember exactly what we did that revealed things.  I think we kept the story alive because we bannered it every day and we had lots of news sources.  But the key was the Governor declaring martial law and sending in the troops to find out why Patterson had been murdered.  And they cleaned out all the gambling establishments.  They threw out slot machines.  They destroyed the places and, of course, arrested the gamblers.  So, yeah, we won the Pulitzer Prize and were real proud.  But as Ray Jenkins, whos still a real good friend of mine and was the main reporter at that time in Phenix City, said, we kind of overplayed the story.   \r\nBut the sequel to that is, on the day we won the Pulitzer Prize, it was announced, I had already resigned and had decided to go over to Phenix City and start a weekly newspaper.   They had a small weekly, but it was not very good.  So I got this guy who ran a radio station over there, put up two-thousand dollars.  Id always wanted to be an entrepreneur.  So I got an office in the same building that Patterson had had his office and had walked down the steps from the night he was murdered.  And so we had an office there for about two years, and I tried my hand at weekly newspapers then.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, actually you must have liked it, because even today you own several weekly newspapers.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I dont know that I liked it that much.  And, of course, I didnt have any money much, and we didnt have a print shop.  And the pace was so different from a daily.  Still is.  I mean, you have to really make yourself on a weekly go on and do things.  Whereas a daily, sort of, the deadline forces you to.  Actually, that experience convinced me at that time that I wanted to just be involved with dailies, if I could.  And so the Columbus paper took me back, which was fortunate.  Ive been very lucky through the years to have a job somewhere.  And I went back to the Columbus paper.  And I left one other time for a few months to work on a paper in the Valley, which had just gone cold-type.  And it was owned by a guy named Carmage Walls, whom you may be familiar with.  Carmage had been publisher of the Macon Telegraph.  And he also had a hand in more weekly news dailies and weeklies, I think, than anybody in the country, because he helped young people starting.  And his stepson was the publisher, I think, in the Valley at that time.  But I went up there briefly.  But I had a family situation.  Both of our mothers lived with us, my wifes mother and grandmother and my mother.  And we almost had to stay in Columbus.  But we tried it for a while.   \r\nWhat I was going to say about the people on the Ledger-Enquirer, when I worked there as a young copy boy, Jim Bane was a news editor who later went on to Atlanta and became the managing editor there, and then went on to be a big official in Cox newspapers.  Jim Bellows was the city editor, and Jim became editor of the New York Herald-Tribune.  And Tom Sellers and Ray Jenkins and various other people who went on to pretty good careers.  Joe Hall, I think he also went to Atlanta.  So we had an unusual staff.  Carlton Johnson.  Later, when I was editor, I brought in Charlie Black, and we sent him to Vietnam seven times.  And Charlie, I think, became sort of a legend covering Vietnam during the 1960s.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  That was a good decision you made.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  Did you know Charlie?  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yes.  And you got firsthand coverage from Vietnam that other newspapers in the state really didnt get.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, Charlie wanted to go.  He had been in World War II and in the Korean War.  And he interviewed the soldiers and the people more than the officials.  So he didnt depend on news from official sources.  And we got letters from all over the country from people wanting Charlies items because they included names of their sons, fathers and husbands who were in Vietnam.  And Charlie died fairly young, too.  And it was at the memorial service, the guy who won the Pulitzer Prize for Vietnam service was there and called Charlie the greatest reporter of the Vietnam era, because he did report on the people.  The people, that is the soldiers who were actually fighting.  And I think it did give us a boost.  Because during that period, the Enquirer became the largest circulated paper in Columbus.  The Ledger had always been the top paper, and, of course, they used some of his articles, too.  But back in those days, the newspapers had separate staffs.  The Ledger was the afternoon paper.  The Enquirer the morning paper.  Of course, as we know, morning papers were then gaining traction to become more circulated than the afternoon papers.   \r\nAnd there was a period, of course, I was editor, too.  I became editor when I was just 32, in 1962, and had come back to the Ledger-Enquirer from my little excursion to the Valley.  And I was working on the desk again, the same job I had when I got out of college, making about 100 dollars a week.  And we had two children, and that was probably the low point of our career and in our lives, in a way.  But then, by a series of coincidences, I became editor in a couple of years.  The editor of the Enquirer died one night of a heart attack.  And I was already writing a column and a lot of the editorials.  I just used to do it on the side when I was really the [indiscernible].  And so I got to be the associate editor because I was writing the editorials.  Well, back in those days, the editor overlooked the whole operation, not just the editorial page.  But somebody had to write that.  So then they reorganized, and somehow I ended up as editor of the morning paper.  Well, Id never worked on it.  I always worked on the afternoon paper.  And that was a period when Carl Sanders was running for governor and was elected.  So my years as editor of the Enquirer coincided with his first term.  And that was a great period in Georgia history, I feel.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Did you ever know Bill Burson, who was a correspondent in Korea?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  Mm-hm.  I knew him.  He was in college when I was.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  He was here when you were here?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  Mm-hm.  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Bill and I worked together as press agents for governors, as you well know.  In your book, The Last Linotype: The Story of Georgia and its Newspapers since World War II, you described the years between 1950 and the 80s as the Golden Age of  Newspapers.  What was so special about that era?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, first, I think newspapers values went up.  The value of the papers, that is.  It was years when newspapers began to go on the stock market, so you could judge their value, the big papers.  Small papers, if you were fairly successful, these big groups were always calling you wanting to buy you, if you were in an area they liked.  So it was certainly golden from that standpoint.  Also, we had changed from hot-type by then, most newspapers, to cold-type and offset, which allowed us to run many more pictures and local pictures.  Before offset, you had to have a plate made of every picture you ran, and it was costly, among other things.  Well, after offset, you could just run picture pages pretty easily, and eventually you could run color much more easily.  So it gave newspapers a chance to run more pictures.  Frankly, most of the  I dont know whether this is good or bad, but for whatever it was worth, most of the editors and reporters by then were college graduates because theyd gone to college on the GI bill.  Whereas, before World War II, it was people who werent.  I dont know whether that improved it.  Some of them were good and some of them werent.  Plus, there was very little competition for the advertising as there is now and later.   \r\nNewspapers were the medium in town, Id guess youd have to say.  The publishers and editors were fairly prominent people.  After the chains bought up most of the small dailies and many weeklies, of course the publisher just became another person that the chain happened to send in for a few years, rather than somebody that lived in the community for many years.  And they certainly improved a lot of papers, but they also de-proved some.  \r\nBut my experience during that period, of course  in 1969, I left the Ledger Enquirer and got some lawyers in Opelika, Alabama, to help to put some money up to buy the paper in Opelika, the Opelika Daily News. And so we did.  I became publisher and editor in March, 1969.  And that was a great experience.  Id never had a business course in my life.  And I mainly continued to do what Id always done: I put the paper out every day, and got somebody else to sell the ads and do the business.  And we had about 6,000 circulation.  It didnt circulate much in Auburn, which is a sister city of Opelika and was the key.  For six months after we bought that little daily, which was really considered, I think, the worst paper in Alabama at that time, I mean, they ran nothing on the front page except wire news.  Back in those days, you could take the wire news off the machine and fill up your paper, which some papers kept doing and still do today.  Well, we ran a lot of local.  We started covering Auburn.  And six months later, we changed the name to the Opelika-Auburn News so that we could have that extension into Auburn, and also added a Sunday edition, which theyd never had.  And those were the two keys, I think, to expanding and succeeding in Opelika.  Auburn, I should say.  The plant was in Opelika.   \r\nAnd we did a lot of photos.  We covered sports very heavily, Auburn sports.  And nine years later, we had gone from 6,000 circulation to 9,000.  So one reason I call that the Golden Age of Newspapers is, back in those days, you could gain circulation, which is very hard to do now.  But, of course, we didnt charge much.  I mean, it was like a dime during the week and a quarter on Sunday.  And Ive forgotten what the monthly price was.  And the Opelika-Auburn area was extremely competitive in those days from outside newspapers.  And there was a strong weekly in Auburn that was actually stronger when we bought the Daily News than it was.  But you had Columbus, Montgomery, Birmingham and Atlanta all sent, both afternoon and morning papers, into Lee County, Alabama. And two of them had bureaus there, Columbus and Birmingham.  Birmingham had a real strong circulation there when we first went there.  \r\nBut in any case, as I saying, we went from 6,000 to 20,000 in nine years and quadruple the income, which was lucky, in a way.  But we had this plan, as I said.  And the reason it was the golden age, we bought it for about a million dollars and sold it for about seven million eight years later to Thompson newspapers.  Thompson didnt do as good a job as I was hoping they would.  But at that time, they were the largest owner of small papers in the country.  And they owned newspapers all over the world, including the London Times.  I told the guy when we were selling, I said, Boy, Im real proud to be associated with the group that owns the London Times.  And he said, Well, thats one of the newspapers weve got that doesnt make money.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let talk for a minute about some of the real newspaper men during that era.  Who do you recall that were outstanding journalists during that period?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, as I mentioned, people that worked on the Red and Black when I was there went on to be pretty outstanding.  One who probably doesnt get enough recognition is Ray Jenkins, who was at Georgia at that time and worked on the Phenix City story during the Pulitzer year, and then went on to be editor of the Montgomery papers.  And I think one of the really great writers of that period was Grover Hall, Jr., who was the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser.  Grover got mixed up one time when they sold it to somebody and he left Montgomery, which was really  he never became as good a writer after that, because Montgomery was his heart.  Its where his father had lived and been editor of the Montgomery paper.  But Grover was a unique writer.  He made editorials interesting, which is hard to do.  I mean, most newspapers sort of throw the editorial page in, without the kind of thought and writing that Hall put in it.  So, of course, he was in Alabama, but he was one person I feel was very important in influencing me.  And he and Bob Brown were good friends, who was editor of the Ledger.   \r\nWhen you were in Columbus  back in those days, I worked on the Columbus paper for 20 years and then on the Opelika-Auburn News for another ten.  And even though I was very involved in Georgia, it was just across the line, for those 30 years, I was much more involved with the people right there.  And although I knew some of the others  I mentioned Jim Bane and Jim Bellows came from Columbus.  I was actually on the board of the Georgia Press Association, as well as the Alabama Press Association.  So I knew a lot of those people, but I dont know if their names would be that familiar to anybody.  Bob Fowler was one who started the Gwinnett Daily News, and he sold it to the New York Times for umpteen-million dollars.  And then they closed it down.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Before I forget, Id like to ask you your opinion of what makes a good daily newspaper.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, thats a good question.  I have thought about it a lot through the years.  When we bought the Opelika paper, as I said, it was not real good, Id have to say.  I would say, both then and now, even more so, you had to cover the local news.  Television had already been a factor for nearly 20 years when we took over the Opelika paper, but, obviously, it was not the factor it is today.  You didnt have cable, and you didnt have quite as close a coverage.  And I think covering the local news is number one.  And everybody says that, but there a lot of ways you do that.  And then youve got a lot of audiences out there.  Youve got an audience that wants a lot of sports news, and probably some papers overemphasize sports.  And Im a big sports fan.  And just to compare what we did in Opelika and Auburn, we started really covering Auburns sports.  And we covered high school sports.  I dont know how many high schools we must have covered.  They had so many then, because all these counties were getting private schools in addition to the public schools.  And Alabama has a lot of public schools.  In Lee County there was Beulah and Beauregard and Notasulga and Loachapoka, as well as Opelika and Auburn.  They all had Indian names.  And so we covered high schools real closely.  We ran a lot of pictures.  We were probably  and I think thats a key for papers today.  We do that in our weeklies, is run a lot of pictures of people.  Thats one thing that is still difficult for any of the other media to do.   \r\nPlus, we ran obituaries, deaths and funerals, which very few of the media doesnt do well, except newspapers.  So I think, today  I notice the Journal Constitution has emphasized deaths and funerals a little bit more, spotlighting somebody.  And I think their Vent column has become very popular, and many newspapers are doing that now to try to give the audience a chance to participate.  But I would say that our success in Opelika and Auburn, which I think is reflected in a lot of dailies, was increasing the amount of local news and running more pictures.  We also, of course, ran a lot of columns.  \r\nId like to mention another trend that we got into.  After we sold the Opelika-Auburn News, we really didnt have that much money.  I didnt have but about 15 percent of that paper.  And I didnt have any money, of course, when it started.  Id been in the newspaper business all my life.  And I had to borrow what I had in it.  But then we got into suburban papers.  Because suburban papers in the late 70s and early 80s were about the only thing a small group with not much resources could buy.  But you could get real good bargains in suburban papers, because the dailies, the large groups, had not discovered the suburban papers.  Of course, in the next 20 years, those suburban papers became real hot commodities.  Our first one was  well, Phenix City was sort of a suburban paper.  Our first one, though, was the Rockdale Citizen in Conyers, which I got right after we sold the Opelika-Auburn News.  And we had it for 17 years.  And it was a weekly when we bought it, and we converted it into a five-day daily, and ran an all-local front page.  But we did have wire news inside, and we had comics, and we had other things.  But somehow we managed to get all local on the front page.  It was pretty tough some days.  In Rockdale County, you wouldnt think that much happened.  And Im not sure it did, but it must have.  Something happens all the time.  You just have to be creative, I think.  \r\nBut at one time we had the paper in Rockdale, Clayton County  which was a real good county back in those days for news, where Newt Gingrich was headquartered, so to speak.  Henry County, which I never guessed was going to grow like it has. And Fayette county, which obviously was a hot county.  But at the time we had the paper there, it didnt even have a motel.  You had to go to either Newnan or Clayton County to spend the night.  And all those counties, of course, became very strong.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You mentioned editorials.  Do you think that newspaper editorials help to form public opinion?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I dont know for sure.  Thats what I have mainly done through the years is write editorials and columns.  I never was a reporter too long.  I started being an editor, that is.  So back when I was editor of the Enquirer, we had to write about two or three editorials a day and a column, and oversee the paper.  I mean, back in those days, the editors really worked.  I think today they just write maybe an editorial once in a while.  I never got a lot of feedback from editorials.  I think letters to the editor get more feedback almost.  And I say that as somebody who wrote editorials and thought they were pretty good, and still do write.  I still write a column pretty much every week.  But I think the news has more impact on people, not just for selling the paper to them, but even influencing them.  I think they look on editorials as somebody elses opinion.  So Im not sure.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Now, with your permission, Id like to get your thoughts on some of Georgias most well-known political writers and editorialists.  And, of course, the first one that comes to mind is Ralph McGill.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  Well, I thought he was real good.  I mean, I used to read his column regularly.  Im sure he must have had some influence on the situation that evolved in Georgia.  But I think the person who had the most influence was Carl Sanders, who was the governor during the 60s, at a time when, if you remember the 60s, cities all over the South were exploding.  States  of course, living on the Alabama border, I was quite familiar with what was going on in Birmingham, Montgomery, various places.  Somehow, if you look at the difference in Georgia and Alabama during the 1960s, when Wallace was governor in Alabama and Sanders was governor in Georgia, you can see that Georgia fared much better and became the commercial capital of the South, particularly Atlanta.  Now, I dont know if you can give Sanders or McGill, either one, credit for all that.  But they were  Sanders, particularly, was in a position to sort of keep things calm.  And, as Ive said, Sanders, while he was governor, all three major league sports brought teams to Atlanta.  Baseball was the Braves, and Atlanta built that great stadium, which I still think was great, because you saw it when you came into the city real vividly and dramatically.  Brought the Falcons, the NFL football team, and then the Hawks, the basketball team.  And I think that put Atlanta on every sports page in the county, a little line every morning in the major league sports.  And then you had that stadium, which many people came to.  \r\nAnd I think also it probably gave Atlanta that boost that Birmingham  and even some of the others, Charlotte for a long time and Jacksonville  didnt have, because they had the major league teams.  And you have to give Sanders a lot of credit for that, because he personally brought a couple of those teams in.  And he and Ivan Allen working together got that stadium built in something like a year, didnt they?  You were there, Im sure.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  And that was really one of the miracles of Georgia.  It also was the period when the major hotels all came to Atlanta: the Hyatt-Regency, the Marriott, later the Peachtree Plaza, or whatever it was, Westin.  And I think Sanders cleared the way for a lot of that by convincing people outside of Georgia that we were calm.  I dont know that we were all that calm or not.  But in any case, that all came about.  McGill died in, what, 1969 or 70.  But I think his influence and Pattersons influence helped keep Atlanta  gave it an image, in any case.  And thats very important, of course.  And I think we had an image, Atlanta and Georgia did, that was much better than the other states, and has still created the atmosphere that enabled us to finally get the Olympics and so forth.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Lets talk about that period for a moment.  Preceding Sanders as governor was Ernest Vandiver, who most people believe was one of the most courageous governors we ever had because of the circumstances he faced during his administration.  What did you think about that period?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I think he felt like he had to do what he did, which was allow integration here at the university and integration in general.  When we did this article on Sanders for Georgia Trend years later, Vandiver wrote me a letter and was upset, that he felt like he should have gotten more credit, because he allowed the integration and so forth.  But I think it was reluctant.  And in his campaign for governor, he vowed never to allow any kind of integration, which I think he carried every county but three.  So apparently the right way.  But I felt like Sanders did more than Vandiver overall, because he came in and sort of  I cant remember all the things he did.  Of course, he was a great education governor.  I havent brushed up on some of that, but I know he did a lot of things.  And Vandiver did, he had a tough time and allowed the integration of the university, two or three people.  He was a good governor.   \r\nMost of our really great governors never were elected to anything else.  I thought Ellis Arnall was a very progressive governor.  Never was elected again.  Sanders never was elected to anything again.  And Vandiver was never elected to anything again.  So we dont reward our real progressive officials too well.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Do you remember that race in 1966 when Governor Arnall ran against a group of people which included Lester Maddox?  And even Bo Callaway from down in your way was the Republican.   \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What do you remember about that race?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, quite a bit.  I wrote a little book about it.  I was editor of the Inquirer then and was a pretty good acquaintance of Bo Callaway.  He had become the first Republican congressman two years earlier.  And that was the district that Columbus was in.  And, of course, Pine Mountain was very near Columbus, and we would go over there a lot.  And Callaway today will admit that he ran a very bad campaign that he should have won.  What happened was, though, there were four major candidates running for the Democratic nomination.  Maybe five, I guess you could say.  And Maddox only got something like 19 percent of the vote, but that was enough to get him into a runoff with Arnall, who got about 28 percent.  And Garland Byrd was in that race, and Jimmy Carter, who came in third, and James Gray, who was sort of the establishment candidate.  So there were five major candidates, yeah.  And then Arnall beat Maddox in the runoff.  Of course, there were a lot of rumors that the Republicans voted for Maddox because they thought hed be easier to beat.  But I dont think that was true.  If you analyze the vote in the primary and the general election, the candidates that went heavily for Arnall in the runoff were the same ones that went heavily for Callaway in the general election.  So I dont think there was quite as much so-called crossover voting as people thought.   \r\nAs you recall, Callaway finished slightly ahead of Maddox in the general election, about 3,000 votes, but he didnt get a majority.  And at that time, the General Assembly selected the governor from the top two. And, of course, the General Assembly was heavily Democratic still and selected Maddox over Callaway.  And I think that delayed the Republican domination of Georgia politics for several years, because Callaway was the last Republican to get more votes in the general election than the Democrat until Perdue in 2002.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mm-hm.  The demise of the county unit system in Georgia, which a lot of people nowadays dont understand, dont you think opened the door to better government in the state?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Oh, absolutely.  I was a strong opponent of the county unit system when I was at Georgia.  Some of my editorials as editor of the Red and Black were against the county unit system, because it just seemed to me it wasnt fair.  And, of course, we had a lot of cases where  well, it wasnt so much that we had a lot of cases where the person who got the fewest votes won, although that did happen in 1946 when Gene Talmadge got fewer votes than the guy he was running against.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Jimmy Carmichael.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Jimmy Carmichael.  But most of the time it was because the county unit system gave people who only got 35, 40 percent of the vote, they were the winners.  I think that was the case with Marvin Griffin when he ran.  Because that only applied to Democratic primaries, the county unit system did.  Talmadge twice tried to get that put into the constitution to apply to the general election, and it was defeated, actually, in Georgia.  And, of course, while it cleared the way for Sanders to win, actually, he would have won anyway.  He carried the county unit system.  Maddox would have won heavily had it been on the county unit basis in 1966.  But anyway, he went on to become a fairly acceptable governor, I guess.  And Bo Callaway finally moved to Colorado, and then came back.  And I see him quite often now at Callaway Gardens.  He lives there now.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  In Chipley.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, Pine Mountain they call it now.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Chipley.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Still Chipley to me.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  I wish they hadnt changed the name, because its confusing with Pine Mountain Valley, not to mention the mountain.  And some places around there are still called Chipley.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Id like to ask you this question.   \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  All right.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Do you think theres more or less interest in todays newspapers in investigative reporting?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I havent noticed that there is.  Atlanta still does a lot.  Columbus does some.  The paper up here in Jefferson does quite a bit.  I think its difficult for small papers to devote the resources and so forth, depending on what the investigation is.  I think if we can report the news, which is what we try to do, and report whats going on, sometimes that almost feels like investigative reporting.  We had a situation in Greenville, Georgia, recently in which the guy elected mayor was not living there.  And we brought that out and took a picture of this mobile home that he had as his address, which was obviously abandoned.  And I dont know  they finally put a judge in charge of the county  of the town.  And hes mayor now, and he claims he lives there.  But he really, I think, doesnt.  That was not really investigative reporting.  What we do is try to bring out whats happening.  And we have a little paper in Talbot County, which is certainly one of the smallest counties in Georgia.  You remember Talbot County, the Henry Jurden  Jordan and persons.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  They were from Talbot County.  And there was another prominent family.  And the Strausses were from there, who founded Macys department store.  And they have just, in this election, elected the first black sheriff and the first black probate judge in Talbot County, even though its about 80 percent black. And so coming into this year, well have a black judge and a black sheriff for the first time in Talbot County.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Speaking of that, how did you treat the civil rights movement from a news standpoint in your newspapers?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, in Columbus, we had a real strong family ownership, the Chapmans and the Ashworths, during all the years I worked at the Columbus paper.  It was later sold to Knight Ridder.  I think they had real good newspapers because they wanted real good newspapers.  But I would have to say we mainly covered it by ignoring it.  During the 1960s, we did not play up civil rights commotions around.  And we were kind of like the eye of the storm.  Not only Georgia, but Columbus, in particularly, to my knowledge never had a riot, never had any problems.  And I dont think that it was strictly because of the newspapers, but we didnt have many problems.  They integrated the schools.  In fact, my children were in the first wave of integrated schools in Columbus.  And I think Columbus probably has more problems now than it did then.  But we did not play it up big.  And Ill never forget the first time a black couple brought in an engagement and wanted to run it, a wedding.  The publisher was really against it.  So we finally ran it, but we didnt run it in the society section.  We ran it back in the grocery section, I think, and they got real upset.  I dont know.  He was an old-time Southern publisher.  And we forget how  well, not very easily.  But most of the people were, of course, strongly segregationist.  We didnt run high school sports on blacks.  And weve all changed.  Now we cant hardly get any whites in.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What happened, do you think, that changed that attitude?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  I dont know.  I dont know that the attitude changed so much as the circumstances had to, both from a business standpoint and a rights standpoint, I guess, and a readership standpoint. We forget.  We say newspapers are in dire circumstances today, and to some extent they are. But we never had blanket readership, because the blacks didnt read the newspapers down in the 50s and the 60s.  And that was true for Atlanta and Columbus.  Even though they were a huge  Id say a third of the population, we didnt run any news that appealed to them.  We didnt, like I say, run the sports.  The only thing we ran about blacks, frankly, was crime.  Maybe church news, obituaries, which were carefully segregated.  But it was 40 years ago. We forget how much that has changed.  But today, I think our weekly newspapers run more about blacks in those counties than we do about whites, including social events and so forth and pictures.  And they got mad with us, one guy, the county commissioner, because we didnt run a banner story about Obama winning the presidency.  But we dont run  we didnt run one when Bush won.  In fact, I dont think we even ran one when Roosevelt one, although he lived there in Meriwether County, so to speak.  Thats just not what weekly newspapers do.  I mean, we ran how it ran in Meriwether County, Obama and McCain.  Interestingly, Obama carried Meriwether County, slightly.  And going back, I think, perhaps the Roosevelt influence is still strong in Meriwether County.  Democrats have remained pretty dominant there.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Did you visit any with President Roosevelt when he came to Warm Springs?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  No.  No, I was just a child then.  But I was always sort of a Roosevelt historian, I guess youd say.  And Ive always been proud of the fact that we have a paper there and promote Warm Springs and promote the historic role that Warm Springs played.  Just a few weeks ago, I carried a friend of mine out on Dowdells Knob there in Meriwether County, which is where Roosevelt looked out over Pine Mountain Valley and where he went the day before he died to look out over the valley.  And the grill that he used is still there.  And theres a statue there of him now that was dedicated just last year, if you havent seen it, that overlooks the valley.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mm-hm.  Lets talk a minute about party politics in Georgia.  How long do you think the Republican Party will be able to continue its dominance in the state of Georgia?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I dont know.  I think it still depends a lot on individuals.  Right now, if you want to win an office in Georgia, in a lot of places you figure youve got to run as a Republican.  For many years we know that it was true that if people wanted to win an office, they ran as a Democrat, no matter how they felt at the national level or at the state level.  And at the state level, issues didnt break down along party lines.  I dont know if they do now.  Well, they make them.  As I said, I was a strong supporter of the two-party system.  But Im not sure now that one-party politics doesnt work better, because you dont have these conflicts develop as easily over issues that really arent issues, but become party issues.  And I think the Republicans have gotten to squabbling among themselves about whos going to run next year.  So I dont know.  We may develop a real two-party system.  Weve sort of gotten away from  we almost went back to the one-party system with Republicans being the party. Last time what did Perdue get?  About 60 percent, 65 percent of the vote.  And mainly because blacks still vote heavily Democratic, and I think they will continue to.  I assume Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic.   \r\nCounties change so drastically.  Rockdale County, which, like I said, we owned the newspaper there, for 17 years operated it.  It has changed from being solidly Democratic, when we bought the newspaper, to solidly Republican, and its almost back again to being Democratic, because blacks, now, make up something like almost 50 percent of the population.  And when I had the newspaper there, it was about 90 percent white.  And that does affect politics.  We cant get away from the fact that theyre a very strong influence on politics.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Many disenchanted Democrats feel the Georgia is too urban and too dependent on minorities and labor.  Do you think thats true?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, yeah.  I think that thats why the Democrats need to nominate somebody from below Macon for governor who can help them pull rural votes.  Because theyre going to get the urban vote, now, around Atlanta, and thats a heavy vote.  But if you looked at the last election last month, or November, its rural counties below Macon and up in the mountains that vote so heavily Republican.  And so I think theyve got to get somebody who can pull votes down in the southern part of the state, because were still a very  were not only party line voters; were regional  its always been a very regional basis for the vote.  And I think a guy like Dubose Porter might be able to win a statewide race if he ever runs.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Getting back to newspapering, what effect has television had on the newspapers?  And the Internet, has that affected circulation?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, yeah, obviously.  I mean, Atlantas pulled back.  Columbus was pulled back.  You cant even get an Atlanta paper now in Harris County, down there where I spend a lot of time.  And I actually hate starting the day without an Atlanta paper, although sometimes I get upset at various things.  About the way they cover news, not their positions, and about the way they  I feel that, obviously, newspapers face a challenge to their very existence right now.  Actually, when I got out of college, people were saying that, because television had just begun carrying news.  And they said, Well, this is going to mean the end of newspapers.  But it wasnt.  It was the beginning, as I said, of the golden age.  And right now, young people dont read newspapers.  My children dont read newspapers, and they were raised in the business.  So I dont know where were heading in the newspaper business.  Ive been in large dailies, fairly large, small dailies and in weeklies.  I think weeklies still have a pretty good niche.  And I think thats the key for newspapers, is to maintain a niche in the market for media, just as radio has managed to do, and as a lot of magazines have managed to do.  I think newspapers used to feel like they had to be the dominant media, that everybody had to take it.  And thats not going to happen anymore.  But what theyve got to do is aim at the market they can serve and the role they can fill and can sell advertisers on.  I mean, advertizing still pays the way for all these media.  \r\nBut the Columbus papers and the Atlanta papers did something last week that I thought was really dumb, and that was increase their price.  We dont get much money out of circulation in the newspaper business.  What we really want is circulation.  Well, when you go up a quarter from 50 cents, as Columbus did, thats a 50 percent increase.  It may not seem like much, but, I mean, it makes a difference.  I know when sometimes Im trying to buy a paper on a rack, I might not have but two quarters or three quarters when its a dollar.  Back in the old days, of course, when I was first coming along, like I said, newspapers were a nickel or a dime, because we were a mass media.  Weve got to realize theres other media out there.  Television, Internet, they are considered free by most people.  So I think weve got to hold down our costs.  The newspapers got accustomed to such high profit margins.  These groups, they had these plans, and they did make way too high of profit margins.   \r\nIf you pick up your Sunday Journal Constitution, though, if you can pick it up, its still hard to pick up, because it carries so many inserts.  The same way is true of Athens and lots of other papers.  Even a little paper like our Manchester Star-Mercury averages about six inserts a week, and thats in a county that hardly has any stores in it.  It really doesnt.  So newspapers still have a function, but its to carry inserts and hopefully get a few other ads, and tell people we still are the only medium that tells people who got born, who died, who won the homecoming queen crown, who won the local football game and who scored the winning touchdown.  So from birth to death, its the little incidents that weekly newspapers can still carry, and a lot of dailies.  But weve got to get away from charging too much, I think, to remain a mass media.  And theres just a lot of competition out there, and weve got to try to make sure were one of the competitors, the newspaper business.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Can you see any way to encourage young people to read newspapers more?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I guess  as I said, I get discouraged watching my own children and grandchildren.  And I think they do look at sports still.  Sports is one thing they seem to still go to the newspaper for.  But you dont get that much sports off television.  Even when it carries a game, you dont know exactly what happens.  You dont know who the leading ground-gainer was.  I was watching the Tech-Georgia game last night in basketball, but I still didnt know who the leading scorer was or anything about  if you want to know the details, youve got to look in the newspaper the next day.  \r\nAnd I know my daughters, they look for stuff about their children.  If theres something about their children, its still real important.  My grandson is a pitcher for the Norcross High team.  And I used to drive over to Winder in the mornings to pick up a Gwinnett paper to see what they had about the games he pitched.  And Im sure that people still do look for items in the newspaper about events they were involved with.  Its hard to get that kind of stuff off the Internet or off television.  So this probably isnt what they teach in journalism college, but that is what weve got to become.  And we can also  we still cover all the county commission meetings, the school board meetings that nobody else is at.  And weve just got to make that kind of news more relevant to the reader on what the county commission is doing, because you can sit through a long session and not get much.  \r\nSo Im optimistic a little bit that we can continue being a niche provider of information.  But can we keep selling ads to the people?  Thats a big issue.  Because our main advertisers through the years as newspapers were grocery stores, which we no longer have; retail stores, which are fading out; and automobile dealers, which had a terrible year, and real estate.  All four of those areas are hurting right now.  Walmart kind of killed the retail business, because they dont advertise much.  And they showed retailers they didnt have to advertise to be successful.  And so about all retailers run now are inserts.  Wed come to rely a lot on auto dealers.  They were kind of the new supermarkets.  And then last year they had a terrible year.  And I just dont know.  If they come back, maybe itll help us.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You mentioned magazines, which brings up the Georgia Trend.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about the Georgia Trend.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, after I got out of Opelika-Auburn News, as I said, we mainly ran these suburban dailies during the 1980s.  And then in 1991  Id always really loved magazines.  As I said, when I was a kid, buying comic books and science fiction magazines is what really got me interested in writing.  And so Id always thought, If I could ever get a magazine, thatd be great.  And Georgia Trend, when it first started, was started by Gene Patterson when he worked on the St. Petersburg Times.  And they had a Florida Trend, and it was a business and political magazine.  Well, the recession of the early 90s was very hard on print media.  I was reading an article yesterday which finally compared the recessions of the post-war era.  And the one in the early 90s was pretty bad.  I dont think a lot of folks realized how bad it was.  We did in the newspaper business.  Because, I know in Rockdale County, we had never had a year in which we did not do more business than wed done the year before until 1990.  And the magazine trade got hit very by it, the Atlanta magazine, Georgia Trend.  \r\nAnyway, St. Pete decided to sell its magazines.  So we got Georgia Trend in a pretty good deal.  But, I mean, it was like losing about a million dollars a year, so you had to kind of act fast.  But it was in this tower in downtown Atlanta.  It was great, the Atlanta Gaslight Tower at Peachtree Center.  We had an office up there on the top floor, and you could almost reach out and touch the blue dome there on the Hyatt Regency.  And I really enjoyed  it was the highlight of my career, almost, was running Georgia Trend.  And we later moved it  well, we moved out to Norcross to an office, but we also had an office here, which is where we actually put it out.  It was in Athens, because I lived here and I didnt want to move.  So we had an Atlanta office, but we actually put Georgia Trend out here in Athens.  And I thought it was a great opportunity to tell stories about Georgia that I had not been  I did have another magazine, Georgia Journal, it was called.  You may remember.  And it focused on tourism and gardens and towns.  And it was very popular with some people, but not enough.  And you couldnt get ads for it.  But you could sell ads in Georgia Trend, because it went to  we mailed it to everybody in tourism and government and CEOs and so forth.  If they just asked for it, they got it.  So that was the way you had circulation.  And you had about 50,000 of the key people.  And it had a lot of features folks still like, like Top 100 and the Georgian of the Year.   \r\nSo it was a lot of fun.  And I got Bill Shipp to come over from Atlanta magazine and write a column.  Bill was never involved in production, but he did write a column every week.  And we had some terrific photographers, which I think were very important.  But I sort of burned out, because I wanted the magazine to be a certain way.  And so I think I kind of burned out trying to do much on it, writing every headline, every cutline.  But my children worked with me on it, two of them did, and what a great experience.  And I thought they wrote some great stories, like I said, the one on Carl Sanders.  And I remember one article Jim Minter wrote for us called Is Henry County the Next Gwinnett?  And actually, that was in 1992, and it did become the next Gwinnett, almost.  Not quite.  I think its on its way to becoming what Gwinnett is becoming now.  And we did an article on Vandiver later on and his role, which was very important.  He was still bitter with Carter for not appointing him to the Senate when Russell died.  And I did a series on Bo Callaway and how he ran for governor, his life, both in tourism and in politics, which Ive got a little booklet of Id like to give you.   \r\nBut, in any case, we managed to write it up.  I mean, it became a strong advertising medium during the 90s as the economy improved.  And then, after we sold Georgia Trend back to the people wed sold our south metro Atlanta papers to, Neil Young and Tom Cousins, 10 years ago, 1999.  Ive got these little weeklies down around there where Charlotte, my wife, and I had grown up.  And thats what weve done for 10 years, and its been sort of a tough road.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I imagine you stay pretty busy with that number of weekly newspapers.   \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, not real busy.  Because Im here.  Im in Athens.  I live in Athens, and theyre all 140 miles away.  So you dont have to be quite as involved, but Im pretty involved with them.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, youve certainly had a brilliant career.  Youve also introduced some people into journalism, Lewis Grizzard.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about Lewis.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, Lewis was a sports writer on the Athens Banner-Herald when a couple of guys and I got this idea to start a paper here in Athens back in 1965.  Glenn Vaughn and Claude Williams were the main  well, they turned out to be the main people.  But I went to Claude, who had a little weekly here, and asked him about what he thought about turning it into a daily and challenging the Banner-Herald, which at that time was a fairly weak newspaper.  And we knew it was going to be sold, because the person who owned it had died and it was in his estate and had to be sold by the end of the year, in 1965.  And about the only thing I did for that paper, except kind of give them the idea  I was still in Columbus at that time.  I was editor of the paper in Columbus  was hire the sports editor of the Banner-Herald, which was a guy named Wade Saye.  So we felt like, Hey, if we have a really good sports editor and section.  That will give us a start.  I think Wade was making like 60 dollars a week, and so we offered him 70.  He said hed come if he could bring this intern he had, and that was Lewis Grizzard.  So thats how Lewis came to the Athens Daily News.  And in his book, If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, he recounts his experiences on the Daily News, which he remembered very fondly, in particular Glenn Vaughn, who came up and was the publisher.  Glenn was in Columbus with me at that time.  If I decided I couldnt come, he came.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Rheta Grimsley Johnson.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Yeah.  I remember Rheta when she was still here writing for the Journal-Constitution.  She worked for the Opelika-Auburn News while she was a student at Auburn.  Met her husband there.  He was working as an assistant sports editor, Johnson.  And Rheta was a great columnist, even when she was very young, and went on to become a  shes still a columnist for Scripps Howard, I believe.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mm-hm.  Yes, she is.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  But I have not seen Rheta in several years.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  If someone asked you for suggestions for a young journalist who is just beginning a career, what would you tell them?  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, I dont know.  I might tell them to try to get into the electronic media some way.  Because its a hard  well, I wont say its a hard job.  Its difficult in a way, although I feel very fortunate to have been in a position in the media for so many years.  Theres no heavy lifting, as we say.  And you usually get to stay out of the hot and cold, unless you get sent to one of these foreign assignments.  But it can be long hours.  It kind of depends on the individual.  Ive had people who worked 12 hours a day and others that worked four or five and do the same amount of work.  Some people just get married to the job and like going there.  I think newspapers, as I said, have a niche role to play.  Theres also magazines, which most newspapers are now putting out magazines.  Its amazing to me how many magazines theyre selling, have sprung up in the last few years.  That was a lot when I was in the magazine business back in the 90s.  But Mark Smith, who used to be here in Athens as a publisher and worked for Morris for many years, his father, his family owned the paper in Eatonton.  And Mark took it over when he retired from Morris and has done a great job of expanding it into the Lake Oconee community.  And he puts out two or three magazines and puts them in there.  He has a real estate health magazine and then a regular magazine.  And the Newnan paper puts out two magazines, I think, and Columbus puts one out.  Its real funny.  Everybody puts one out now except Atlanta, which started the newspaper magazine business many years ago.  \r\nI was looking at these questions you sent me about great experiences, achievements, disappointments  I guess Im mainly a news journalist, I guess youd say, and so I enjoy that part of it.  But my greatest achievement undoubtedly was in Opelika, where we increased everything so much.  I think there was a lot of luck involved.  By going into Auburn, we became a border-based paper.  And then somebody opened a big shopping mall between Opelika and Auburn, and that always helps when youre a publisher.  And, of course, I had two great circulation people.  One of them was a real good friend of Rheta Grimsley Johnson, in fact.  They managed to get our circulation just expanded all of a sudden  and back in those days you could do that  into the Valley and into the surrounding area. \r\nAnd I think my greatest disappointment is that I havent been able to develop a successor.  I have three children, two of whom have worked in the business.  But I dont know whether theyre going to be able to be a successor, and I havent been able to find any people that work for me.  I think you need a good business type.  And most of the successful papers of other companies have had that.  Ive never had a really great business type.  And Im sure thats hurt our company.  We're probably poorer today because of it.  But newspapers took a real hit during the past year, as did a lot of companies.  And weve just got to hope for the whole nation and worlds sake that 2009 is going to be a better year some ways.  And Im 78 years old.  As I said, I was born just a few months after the Great Depression started.  Looks like Ill be going out that way.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, lets hope not.  Millard Grimes, a great journalist, a great Georgian, Id like to thank you on behalf of the Richard Russell Library, the University of Georgia and myself for being with us today.  \r\n \r\nGRIMES:  Well, thank you, Bob.  And I really enjoyed it.  And I appreciate you asking me.   \r\n \r\n[END OF RECORDING] \r\n \r\n \r\n "},{"id":"gych_rogp_052","title":"Jim Minter, 06 October 2008.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Minter, Jim","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2008-10-06"],"dcterms_description":["Minter discusses his childhood in Inman, Georgia, during the Depression, and his mother's family, the Harps. Minter talks about his education, his work at The Red and Black student newspaper, and about being a sports reporter for college football. Minter discusses his career at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. He mentions troubles with in-house unions. Minter discusses the political influence of the Cox Family, owners of both the Journal and the Constitution. Minter explains that the Constitution was meant to be more liberal while the Journal was meant to be conservative. He discusses the powerful influence of the newspapers' converage of politics and the state capitol. He discusses how the editorial board decided which political candidate to endorse and what role the newspapers played in the Civil Rights Movement. Minter also discusses Reg Murphy's kidnapping and subsequent ransoming. Minter recalls working with John Pennington, Mike Edwards, Ray Jenkins, Dan Magill, Ed Pope, Eddie Barker, Guy Tiller, Bill Fields, Reg Murphy, Harold Raines, Bill Shipp, Hal Gulliver, and Zell Miller.","Finding aid available in repository.","Related materials available in the following collections of this repository: Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection 004, Bill Shipp; Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection 147, Bill Shipp.","Interviewed by Bob Short.","James G. \"Jim\" Minter was born in Inman, Georgia, in 1930. He attended North Georgia College, and graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia. He worked as a sportswriter for UGA's The Red and Black newspaper, and then went on to the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, working with Lewis Grizzard, Bill Shipp, and Reg Murphy. He was appointed executive editor of the newly combined Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He retired from the vice presidency of Cox Enterprises in 1988."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["University of Georgia","Red and black","Atlanta journal and constitution","American newspapers--Georgia--History","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Press and politics--Georgia--History","Civil rights movements--Georgia--History","American newspapers","Civil rights movements","Journalists","Kidnapping","Press and politics","Universities and colleges--Alumni and alumnae","Inman (Ga.)--History","Georgia"],"dcterms_title":["Jim Minter, 06 October 2008."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-052/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 052, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (82 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Murphy, Reg, 1934-","Gulliver, Hal, 1935-2016","Miller, Zell, 1932-2018","Minter, Jim","Cox family","Harp family","Magill, Dan","Shipp, Bill"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Jim Minter interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2008 October 6 \r\nAthens, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-052 \r\nOriginal: video, 80 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription:  June 24, 2009 \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  I'm Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics.  We're happy to have as our guest, Jim Minter, well known author and former executive editor and editor of the Atlanta newspapers.  Welcome, Jim. \r\n \r\nJIM MINTER:  Well, Bob, I'm glad to be here.  I remember when you were a great journalist.  As a matter of fact, I take responsibility for you being in politics because I'd been in two colleges, North Georgia College, the University of Georgia, School of Journalism with Sam Caldwell.  And then I was in one army with him, it was the American Army, the same regiment at Camp Rucker, Alabama.  And Sam and I were well known to each other.  As a matter of fact, when we were at North Georgia College that newspaper was The Cadet Bugler and we both ran for office.  And I beat Sam by one vote.  Sam had not perfected his political skills at that time.   \r\nAnyway, Sam called me one day and says, \"I'm getting another job,\" and he was in the state wildlife commission or whatever it was called, Game and Fish Commission.  And he said, \"Wouldn't you like to have my job?\"  And I said, \"What does it pay?\"  And it was about a $5 raise, maybe about $65 a week, and I said, \"Sam, let me think about it.\"  I thought about it and then I told my friend, Bob Short, I said, \"You might be interested in this,\" and is that a correct story? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  That's true.  As far as I know, yeah. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  And you've had this distinguished political career and I'm proud of you. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, thank you, Jim.  I'm proud of you also.  You've not only been a great journalist but you have been a great author, and I have read your books with great interest and with a smile on my face. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, my book didnt exactly make the New York Time bestseller list, but a few of my friends read it.  Like my friend, Lewis Grizzard said, it's sort of a book of columns and so forth.  Said they make nice gifts because you don't have to read them.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Inman, Georgia. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Inman, Georgia's in Fayette County.  The tag number used to be 112 and before that it was less than that.  Remember when they numbered the tags by the size of the county? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mmhmm. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  But Inman, Georgia was a farming community.  It had a railroad until 1938 when they took the railroad out because the business was not that good.  I remember my dad telling a story that they got a group of people from Fayette County to drive to Atlanta before court.  The judge, it was a hearing, some sort of a hearing, I don't remember that he knew exactly what it was.  But anyway, he said there were two car loads that went up there for the hearing about not doing away the railroad.   \r\nAnd the presiding judge or whatever listened to them to say that we just can't do this because we'd have no way to get to Atlanta to the doctor, would have no way to go to shop and so forth, that this is our way to Atlanta.  And daddy said at that point the judge went down the list.  \"Mr. Minter, how did you get here today?\"  \"Well, I drove.\"  That was short, and he said that he knew that their protest was over.  But Inman was a farming community.  It had gin, a gin house, and of course there was a railroad station, which incidentally I restored and have a little office there, and two or three stores.  It was getting smaller by the time I grew up, but the main thing I remember about it was it was sort of, the roads, the way they ran it really made sort of a square circle, do you know what I mean, a rectangle.   \r\nWell, we lived here.  Had an aunt who lived here, my grandmother was here, another aunt lived here.  And I loved to eat.  They were great cooks so I would sort of go around and sniff and if I smelled fried chicken, I'd stop here and eat.  If I smelled something that was down the road -- but we ate well, but of course I grew up in the Depression.  There was no money.  My dad had planned to come to the University of Georgia to be a county agent.  He had made one trip over here to scout the place out and so forth, but then his dad died.  That was about 1929 and so he had to stay home and run the farm at 17-years-old, and then the Depression and so forth, and so he wound up losing our land to taxes and so forth.  He was very proud that he didn't go bankrupt as a lot of people did.   \r\nBut Bob, after he died I was going through his desk and I would see what he would do.  He'd go to the bank in Fayetteville and borrow $50 for a plough.  A plough was one crop, you know, and I think he had about 13 families living with him.  So he had borrowed $50 for each family to raise their crop -- sharecroppers.  And then when the bad times really hit, that little note he borrowed for $50 from the bank in Fayette would be sold to somebody in Atlanta, and then pretty soon it'd be sold to somebody in New York, sort of like the crisis we're going through with the banks now in 2008.  But there was no money, I mean there was no money at all.  And I remember, I think it was about 1936 that my dad kept a ledger, and I was an only child.  My mother was a schoolteacher but she was not getting paid, and that year our total cash expenditures not counting fertilizer, and clothes, and all that stuff, the total was $60, most of that being for Prince Albert tobacco, my dad smoked.  He smoked Prince Albert during the week and rolled his own, and smoked Camels on Sunday.   \r\nBut it was a great place to grow up.  I mean, you knew everybody.  The black family next door, my great treat on Sunday morning was to go out and eat Sunday breakfast with them.  They had smoked link sausage and I used to do that, and I remember that when I was growing up, we took the Atlanta Georgian.  My grandmother Minter took the Atlanta Journal.  My grandmother Harrell took the Atlanta Constitution.  Well, I read all three to the finish and the Georgian had great funnies but they went out of business, and -- but this tenant family that lived across the road from us had papered the house with the colored Georgia comics, and for several years I guess I would go out there and see my old comic friends on the wall out there from the Georgian that was extinct. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about your mother's family, the Harps. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, the Harps came around in here behind the Indians, and as a matter of fact we had traced it back and one of our Harp ancestors probably was an Indian agent, very likely might have been married to an Indian woman.  But, because that went back before the Treaty of Warm Springs.  But my mother's family, the Harps have been in Fayette County since about 1820.  My great grandfather Harp, his name is on the cornerstone of the Fayette County Courthouse, which for many years was the oldest operating courthouse in Georgia.  It's now a chamber of commerce building.  But anyway, they've been there a long time and they were saw millers, farmers, and so forth.  And my uncle Harry Harp was quite a character.  He had a lot to do with, he was the one who went around the county signing up people for the OEA when the electric lights came through here.  And he was Senator Russell's Fayette County campaign manager when Senator Russell ran for governor.   \r\nAnd after -- this is a story my daddy told me -- and after Russell was elected in the governor, youngest in the state and so forth, was that 1932? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  '32. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yes, but anyway daddy said Uncle Harry was invited to go to Winder  to sit on the rostrum, the podium or whatever at Russell's speech, the celebration of the victory.  So Uncle Harry was a terrible driver, so he asked my dad who was not related to him but married to my mother to drive him to Wynder.  So dad said he'd drove him over there and on the way they stopped to get a Coca-Cola, and remember in those days at little country stores, you sat on nail kegs.  And Uncle Harry started drinking his Coca-Cola sitting on a nail keg which had a little nail in it, and when he got up he tore his pants right in the seat of his pants.  And daddy said, \"Well, Harry,\" he said, \"Now when you're up there on the podium with Senator Russell,\" he said, \"just keep your feet on the floor and nobody will see.\"   \r\nAnd according to my dad, Russell was introducing his guests and he said, \"Now, my great friend from Fayette County, Harry Harp,\" and he said Uncle Harry was smoking a [indiscernible] cigar, put the cigar in his mouth, crossed his leg and said everybody giggled, he showing his underwear.  Uncle Harry got to be mayor of Fayetteville and he was always into something, but I've always said if he hadn't tore his pants that time he might have been elected to statewide office.  But anyway, when I had graduated from Fayette County high school, and of course I went through Fayette County high school during World War II.  At the time, we had seven and a half miles of paved road in Fayette County.  It was Highway 52, went from Jonesboro to Mr. Charlie Redwine's [ph] place of business.  You know who Mr. Charlie was. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mr. Charlie, yes.  Well, let's tell folks who he was. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  He was for many years president of the Senate and when the -- and I think it was the year when Gene Talmadge ran against Senator George  that year, Mr. Charlie Redwine ran for governor.  He got beaten pretty badly, but anyway, he was very powerful in state politics.  So the paved road came to his house and it stopped, and there were no other paved roads in the county.  But anyway, I was saying that the Fayette County high school, because there were no paved roads and the train had been taken out, and I guess we had maybe you could ride the mail bus to Atlanta, but during World War II we couldn't get any teachers because they didn't have any gas to come to Fayetteville and there was no way to get there.  So we had housewives.   \r\nSo my education was pretty skimpy, increased by the fact that when I got old enough to go to school, we lived about a mile from the bus stop and my dad thought I was too scrawny to start school.  I was only five years old, you know how it works in those days.  So my mother taught me at home my first year.  So I only had ten years of schooling when I graduated from high school.  What I'm getting around to, my Uncle Harry who said he was a great friend of Senator Russell drove down to our house right after I graduated from high school and said, \"I saw in the paper where they're making appointments to the naval academy.\"  And said, \"I called Senator Russell,\" and he said, \"I can get you an appointment at the naval academy if you would like it.\"  And I said, \"Well I appreciate it but I don't think I'd last very long up there.\"  So I don't know whether I could have gotten -- whether Senator Russell would have given me an appointment to the Naval Academy or not, but I know one thing, if he had I would not have lasted long. \r\nSo I went to North Georgia College, which was a great place. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And then transferred to the University. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Transferred here after two years and one quarter at North Georgia College. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  When did you decide to become a journalist? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, we had a great teacher in high school, Ms. Francis Carter who's been deceased about two years from Union Point.  And she was -- she came to Fayetteville I guess when I was in about the -- right after the war, and she started the school paper called The Fayette High Times, done on an old mimeograph machine, which was a mess cutting those stencils and so forth.  And she made me editor of that paper and she told me that I ought to go to journalism school, so I said, well, I guess, you know, I had no idea what to do, you know.  So I said I'll go to journalism school.  And my mother and daddy judged that the University of Georgia was both too large and too expensive, and I think the enrollment was approaching 6,000 with a big boost from the veterans coming home. \r\nSo for some reason, I went to North Georgia College.  For one reason, you got free uniforms and you didn't have to buy clothes, and I remember my mother wrote the dean of admission, Dean Will D. Young, a great man, North Georgia, and said, \"My son wants to study journalism.  Can he learn journalism at North Georgia College?\" And Dean Young wrote back and said, \"We are starting a department of journalism next year,\" which was an outright lie.  So I went to North Georgia to study journalism and of course there was no journalism there.  But after I beat Sam Caldwell for the editorship of the Cadet Bugler and served in that capacity for one quarter, I decided to transfer over here.  And my mother and my daddy said, \"No, we can't afford it.  We just -- you just stay where you are.\"  So I transferred myself and went home that Christmas and told them I had transferred, which incidentally was the time that Dean Drewry got shot and I had to wait for a while to be in his course.   \r\nBut anyway, you know, North Georgia was a school of about 600 and over here it was about 6,000.  And I never had -- I was pretty naive and got a room in Joe Brown Hall, and my two roommates were from New York State, and they were veterans of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, and they brought liquor to the room, and women to the room and everything, and I was terrified.  And so as soon as I could, I managed to get transferred out to a room with my friend Ray Jenkins from Camilla.  And Ray was a journalism student, and he went on to be an assistant to Jody Powell in the White House.  He was on the staff of the Columbus Ledger when they won the Pulitzer with the Phenix City investigation, and of all, I've never believed it, but he wound up in H.L. Mencken's chair at the Baltimore Sun.  As editor there, Reg Murphy hired him, and so anyway I've had a checkered career.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were on the Red and Black here? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Oh, yeah.  My one great experience, I transferred from the Monitor over the Christmas holidays and I was assigned, really my ambition was to be a political writer, but at the Red and Black they assigned me on the sports staff.  And it came time for spring practice, football, which I was to cover.  And of course I had never seen a college football -- well, I had, but, you know, I'd never been anywhere I didn't know anybody.  So I introduced myself to Coach Butts and then saw him a couple of times.  And then Frank Leahy from Notre Dame was coming down to observe the Georgia practice and study Coach Butts' famous passing game.  And Leahy was, well I guess, Touchdown Jesus -- know that he was next to God at least at that time.   \r\nAnd so I was assigned to go down and talk to Frank Leahy and get a story about him, and I was terrified.  So I went down in the stadium and I'm sort of backed up in the hedge because I was really nervous, you know.  Anyway, Coach Butts who barely knew me, walked over to me and says, \"Frank and I are going to watch this from the stands.  Would you like to go up and sit with us?\"  And I did, but that was a great thing about Coach Butts, he could be so nice and, you know, not many coaches would have done that to a little, old scared kid, you know.  But he was helping me out.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Who were some of your contemporaries on the Red and Black at that time? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, let's say, of course there was John Pennington, you know, who discovered -- played a big role in Jimmy Carter's getting in the legislation, getting elected and so forth.  John was our star.  He had been on the Stars and Stripes and the Pacific, I believe.  And then there was Mike Edwards who went onto the National Geographic, and of course there was my roommate Ray Jenkins was not on the Red and Black.  He was the editor of the Pandora, which we thought was a pretty lowly job compared to being on the Red and Black.  And then my great friend, Glen Vaughn who became the editor and publisher of the Columbus Legend-Enquirer, and also with Claude Williams started the Athens Daily News here in Athens.  But Glen has had a distinguished career.   \r\nThen there was a guy named Dick Brooks who was a correspondent for Stars and Stripes in Korea and made quite a name for himself over there.  And of course, one of our stars was a guy named Dewey Benefield who really never got into the newspaper business after he went through law school and wound up a key player at Sea Island with the Jones Family.  And gosh, before me there were other people like William Atierson [ph] and they were just running up.  It was a good bunch of people that came along.  They did well. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And you caught the eye of the Atlanta Journal. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I caught the eye of Dan McGill who was the PR person for the Georgia Athletic Association.  He worked through Guy Tiller who was the assistant to Ed Danforth, and arranged for me to be hired, and this was in the -- after I graduated from here in 1951, I was waiting to be called in the army.  And the deal was, I'd go work there for the summer because I was going to be called in about September, and because of the rule you had to get your job back if you were called in service.  So I knew I'd have a job when I came back.  So anyway, Dan got me that job and pretty soon after I got that, Danforth called me in and says, \"Son, you know what's the matter with you?\"  And I said, \"No, sir, Mr. Danforth.  What is it?\"  He said, \"You're suffering from acute youth.\"  He was right, but I've been cured. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You worked with some mighty good people, Ed Pope. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Ed Pope was my boss for a time, the greatest boss I've ever had.  Bob Christian who, we didnt get along too well while we were working together, but became great friends after when he became a vice president for Eastern Airlines.  Your friend, Eddie Barker, well he was on the other paper though, wasn't he?   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Eddie was on the Journal. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Oh yeah, that's right.  Yeah, but now, Eddie was writing a column for a while too, after he got out of sports. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Syndicated column, syndicated. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  And of course, Ed Miles, that was the great golf writer, and of course Guy Tiller was the -- was probably the finest reporter I ever knew, and Guy liked to drink a little, and he -- I remember when he died, I think there were more women that showed up in black since Major John Pelham from the Confederate Army, and I think Tiller held the record until Lewis Grizzard died, which you know I hired Lewis four times. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Had a good relationship with Lewis. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Oh, yeah.  He was a wonderful person. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Great writer. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Great writer. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Big Georgia fan. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Great Georgia fan, but the thing about Louis was, he probably had the best newspaper mind that I've ever known.  I wouldn't say he was the best newspaper man I've ever known, but he had the best mind on how to get it started, what people wanted to read and so forth.  And he was -- he was offered the job as editor of paper in, I think, North Carolina, maybe Greensboro or somewhere.  He was offered the job as editor of the Cox paper in Austin, Texas, which is a good sized newspaper in the capital city in Texas, good job.  And then in one of his sabbaticals from the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, he went to Chicago, and he was about to be made managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, which he felt like he had to commit to being there a while, so he called and said that he didn't really want to be in Chicago, and so he came home to write the column, which he had never really done before. \r\nBut I thought when we brought him -- when I brought him back to Atlanta to write the column that I had no idea that I knew he would be okay.  I didn't know he would be great, but I thought we were really bringing him back for an editor's job, and I told him, I said, when he started writing the column and it got sort of successful, I said, \"Lewis, you know, you can't do this forever.  You can do it ten years at the most.  You'll have to do something else or you'll just burn out.\"  So in his last days when I was visiting Lewis at Emory Hospital every day, he was in his hospital bed and had his typewriter beside the bed, because every day he was going to feel like resuming his column and be able to write one tomorrow.   \r\nSo I went by one day and he had his typewriter, and he said, \"Well, I think I'm going to be able to write one in the next couple of days.\"  \"You know,\" he said, \"You told me when I started this column that I could only do it about ten years and I'd burn out and have to do something else, and I just wanted to remind you it's been over ten years and I'm still at it.\"  And I said, \"Lewis, that's amazing, how do you do it?\"  And he said, \"I got a secret.\"  \"What's that, Lewis?\"  He said, \"I remember a lot of things that never happened.\"  He was the best. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about now ascending up the ladder into a big management position with the, at the time, both newspapers.   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, I never really thought that I would go into management.  I thought that I might be sports editor when Furman Bisher retired.  Good thing I didn't count on that because he still has it, but I thought I would have about ten years writing the sports column after Furman had retired, but that didn't work out.  But anyway, I don't know exactly why that they decided to move me from sports to the Constitution, except really I do know.  We had a union movement at the Journal and it was pretty tight, and of course the management was not in favor of a union.  Well, the Journal's sports department was unanimous against the union, and so they said, well this guy must be pretty good, take him to the Constitution where they had a little in-house union that they wanted to get rid of.   \r\nI imagine that, just between us, I was probably sent to the Constitution probably to bust the union, which was no trouble to do because there was not much of a union anyway.  Just had to treat people a little better because the union, when they negotiated for a contract, because the Constitution had a union, they made sure that the Journal people got paid more than the union people.  So all you had to do was just start paying them the same thing the non-union people were making and the union's gone.  But anyway, it was a great experience.   \r\nOne thing sort of bad about it was that the editorial page where they carry who's who, you know, well, it said Reg Murphy, editor.  Well, and the way it worked, Reg Murphy was not really the editor.  He was editor of the editorial page.  Had no control over the newsroom and so he answered to the publisher.  I, the managing editor of the newspaper, answered to the executive editor, who was Bill Fields, and by the way, the most underestimated, underappreciated journalist in the state of Georgia ever.  And so I answered to him, and I had -- the managing editor had nothing to do with the editorial page.  The editor had nothing to do with the rest of the newspaper, but the public didn't know that.  So, you know, the people were always calling Murphy wanting him to do this and do that, and Murphy didn't want to -- couldn't say, \"Well I had nothing to do with that.\"  So anyway, Murphy and I, well at the time, bitter enemies and didn't get along at all.  And it was too bad because, you know, Reg went on to a great career, and if Reg and I had had the gumption and had the help from other people there to have formed an alliance, Reg brought a lot to the table.  He knows how to deal with people and he's a good salesman, which I'm not, and I think if Reg had stayed there that maybe the Dayton takeover could have been fended off and the history of the newspapers, and even the history of the state of Georgia might be a lot different.  But it didn't happen that way. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about the newspapers.  They finally merged, but the newspapers were owned by the Cox Family, Governor Cox of Ohio, who ran for president. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Ran for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate, right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  And his heirs have continued to run the newspaper. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Right. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What sort of political influence do they have with the management of that newspaper now? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I don't really know.  I know this, while I was there, see when I was first there, Jim Cox Jr., who was a good newspaper man, ran the -- Jack Tarver answered to him.  And I only met him once.  Anne Cox Chambers, who lives in Atlanta, who is listed as, I think she's officially the president of the Atlanta newspapers or something, that's all legal, corporate stuff.  I never got a telephone call from her the whole 40 years, the 10 years, the 20 years I was in management, I never got a call from her.  She didn't recognize me if she met me somewhere, you know.   \r\nSo I got nothing from the family.  And then Jim Cox. Jr. died and the funeral was in Dayton. I remember Tarver coming home from the funeral, stopped by my office and he said, \"Well, this is probably the end of it\".  And I said, \"Why is that?\"  He said, \"Well, you know, the two sisters who -- \" Governor Cox had left it so that the two sisters would have no say so in the management of the company, only Jim.  And then with Anne Cox's neighbor, the great lawyer, Buster Kilpatrick, they -- and some of the family, they decided to break the trust and will or whatever it is.   \r\nBut anyway, they wanted to take the newspapers over from their brother, who was -- did have a drink now and then, and fooled around with women and so forth, lived in Miami, and they wanted to declare him incompetent, and take over.  Gene Patterson, who was then the executive editor of the Journal-Constitution, they tried to enlist him.  Well, when they did, he instead went to Tarver and told him about the palace revolution.  Tarver went to Jim Cox, and they had a big meeting, and Tarver said he was there and Jim, and his sisters, and so forth, and Tarver said, \"I said to the sisters, 'I said, girls, your brother knows more about newspapers drunk than you all do sober.' \"   \r\nAnd now the brother's gone, and so Tarver says, \"Well, I think I'm in trouble.\"  And sure enough, then Barbara Anthony lived in Hawaii, and her husband came in and was made the -- took Jim Jr.'s place.  And pretty soon Tarver was gone.  I mean, he officially retired, but he didn't, and then things changed.  Now, the Dayton people who had been subservient to the people in Atlanta, Tarver had been their boss, they were always jealous of Atlanta.  Dayton's really sort of a hayseed town, but I remember we had a meeting at the Commerce Club.  The editors and the Dayton people were down.  The guy who was publisher of the Dayton paper at the time was with us.  We had a big room and Tarver was the host.  Waiter comes around for you to order drinks and so stopped somebody over here, [indiscernible] said, \"What will you have?\"  Said, \"I'll have a scotch on the rocks,\" and gets to the Dayton publishers, and he says, \"I'd like a scotch too, but make mine Chivas Regal.  I don't want the bar scotch,\" and the waiter said, \"Sir, Chivas Regal is a bar scotch at the Commerce Club.\"  There was a lot of that, you know. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about Tarver.  As I recall, Tarver was a pretty heavy hitter in the Atlanta business -- \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Big time, big time. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  -- and political community. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah, Tarver was, he sat at the table with, I don't guess mules sit at a table, but he shared the story what they call the big mules, you know, Mills Lane, and Richard Rich, and bank people, and so forth.  Yeah, Tarver was really locked into state politics and he was in a meeting, I remember.  He told me, when the bankers and some of the money people invited Carl Sanders over to talk about running for lieutenant governor, and they met with him an hour or so, talked with him, and after he left, they said, \"Well, you know, this guy probably ought to be governor.\"  So they called Carl and said, \"No you're not running for lieutenant governor, you're running for governor.\"  So that's kind of -- that's the way they played, and of course Mr. Woodruff, you know I never met Mr. Woodruff.  He's the one person in my era that somehow I just never -- didn't know him.  Ivan Allen was a great one.  He and Tarver were the, I guess they were the closest of anybody. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What happened when Tarver left? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  When Tarver left, they made Tom Wood, incidentally he and Dick Nick Smith had gone into the community newspaper business and probably the greatest newspaper story of the last decade, and they were just tremendously successful, brought Tom in, but they didn't make him publisher, they made him president.  And then they moved Cox Headquarters from Dayton to Atlanta with Chuck Glover as head of Cox Enterprises.  Well, they immediately wanted to start running the Atlanta papers, which they couldn't do when Tarver was there.  I mean, they couldn't even touch them.  As a matter of fact, Tarver rode them pretty hard.  So it was a little bit of get even here, you know. \r\nAnd, but what they could not understand about the Atlanta newspapers was that we had all these people over at the capitol, and that we sent reporters and photographers out in the state, and that nobody was interested in politics.  It was dull.  Of course, they weren't interested in it.  They didn't know anything about Georgia politics, and of course they had grown up in Dayton, which Dayton is not a capital city, and there's a difference in a capital city newspaper and one that's not.  So anyway, that's when they began to fiddle with the Atlanta newspapers, and when you would -- I did not ever get a call from Jim Cox Jr., I did get one, but I can't tell about it.  [Laughter]  Has to do with some -- might come out a little racist.   \r\nBut anyway, well at my level there was never any contact with the Cox family.  There got to be a great deal of contact with the family through Garner Anthony, nobody else but him.  And because he had his ideas about what a newspaper ought to be and so forth, and didnt really understand that, for example, a Cox news release, he would say you want to run it exactly as it's delivered to you.  That would never happen in the old days, but anyway.  So they began to, first thing, they considered us all to be terribly racist.  I mean, we were just Southern racists, and then they considered the readers wanting to read about Hollywood stars, and music, and entertainment, and not politics.   \r\nSo that's when the papers began to change.  But at the end of the Tarber-Woods regime when I was there, the Journal-Constitution grew to the largest newspaper in the South, exceeding the Miami Herald.  And our after tax, our pre-tax revenues were tremendous, around $20 billion a year, and now I think they're about zero.  Of course, a lot of that has to do with internet, but it's like one of my newspaper friends in Nashville told me, said recently a newspaper can survive the internet and it can survive bad management, but it can't survive both at the same time, and I think that's what's got it finally.  Terrible management, which is surprising to me because Jim Kennedy, the grandson, is a great fellow and I don't know why this has happened, but Jim is a -- he's in the tradition of his grandfather and his uncle.  But Cox Enterprises is making tons of money, at least it was until the current crisis.  But I think it's obvious to everybody that the newspapers have changed a great deal, and it's not all due to the internet. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  There's been a public perception over the years that the Constitution is a very liberal newspaper and the Journal is a very conservative newspaper.  Was that by design? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  By design, yes, and of course in many ways if you look back to the Constitution, it's never been as liberal as it was said to be, and the Journal has never been as conservative as it was thought to be.  But yeah, you had to have a liberal editor for the Constitution.  We didn't necessarily have to have one as liberal as Tom Teepen, whoever they've got now, which I guess we're talking about Cynthia Tucker who is editor of the editorial page, and of course has no influence over the news guiding operation.  But yeah, it's picked that way, and of course McAllister who was the Journal editor was picked to be, of course he was not especially a liberal, but he certainly was not conservative.  But it's sort of a phony house arrangement. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  When did the Atlanta Journal-Constitution change from the days when Marvin Griffith called them \"those lying Atlanta newspapers\"? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I don't know.  It's not been too long because when I was there, there was still a lot of -- you still heard that from time to time, and I remember, Bob, when we were going to South Georgia to cover sports, you know, used to have those staff cards with the name Journal-Constitution on there.  You know, I didn't care too much about going to [indiscernible] with one of those cards.  Did you? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  No, I really didn't.  I really didn't. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  But the strange thing is, my son who works there now said that he was covering something, the road race in Atlanta last week and he said, one of his colleagues is a photographer.  Not necessarily from around here, was -- said he was surprised to hear the photographer complain that, \"Gee, you know, it's getting as hard to interview people because people don't like us because the paper's so liberal.\"  Well, you know, that's not new.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about covering the capitol.  Did you have an overall plan of how you would cover politics and the state capitol? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Oh, yes.  Of course, you know, first we had a political editor who was really about the, in-house, about the third ranking person on the paper.  You know, Bill Shipp was a political editor, and my friend Tyler Raines who is another story.  Charlie Pew, remember him? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Charlie Pew. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  And they were the chief political writers and wrote a column.  And then you had people assigned to the House, several of them, people assigned to the Senate, the Governor's office.  And I guess even when we had a very small staff back in the '70s and early '80s, we probably had, maybe the two papers had maybe as many as 15 people every day over there, plus covering the state courts and so forth, and everything.  And maybe we did over-cover a little, but to be a successful paper that makes money and has circulation.  There's also this thing called power.  I mean it's got to have a stick.  The Dayton people didn't understand that, that you've got to have a stick.  And for example, when I was editor of the Constitution, of the Journal-Constitution, you know, I wasn't in great shakes, but I had that job.  And if I wanted to call the Governor, I mean he'd pick up the phone.   \r\nThey tell me that doesn't happen now and, you know, they pay attention.  I remember when George Busby and Tom Morland made the deal with the Feds to get a lot of extra money that was laying around for the highway program, I mean he comes over, wants a meeting with the editorial boards.  He comes over and he wants to, before he does that, he wants to explain what he's doing and get you on his side.  They don't do that anymore, but gosh, it was -- the newspaper was a powerful influence at one time.  You know, I've always said the governors come and go but the newspaper stays.  Well, it's probably not staying anymore, but it was a -- the Atlanta Journal Constitution was almost a third branch of government, and another thing, the other papers pretty much followed their lead on a lot.  I mean, not totally, but particularly on news coverage and so forth, they dominated.  \r\nAnd had great statewide circulation.  Remember the Journal Predate?  The Journal Predate was like today's Journal -- it came out and then we would go into composing and change a little and chip off the datelines and send it to the people in South Georgia.  It was a morning paper and it had a circulation of 40,000 and then our accountants who didn't understand what they were doing said, \"You know, look, let's get rid of this paper.  And we will resell those 40,000 in the Atlanta paper.  It would be cheaper, would be more attractive to our advertisers and we'll have more circulation, and have more money.\"  And so in one day we lopped of 40,000 newspapers, the Journal Predate.  Know what that was, Bob? That was the third largest newspaper in Georgia. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Gee, whiz. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  And our geniuses in the circulation department, in the business department had no success in getting those papers resold in the Atlanta area.  So it's -- but when we began pulling out of the state, I think the papers just lost a lot of their clout and changed a lot of things. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let me ask you this question speaking of this big stick and power, how did you decide which political candidates you would endorse? \r\n \r\nMINTER: Well, I really never played much a part in that.  The editorial board, of course the Journal had one and the Constitution had another, presided over the editorial pages, and at that time I think it included a cartoonist and two or three other writers.  Well, they pretty well decided that by themselves.  I'm sure they might talk to Tarver a lot and see how they were leaning, but only one time did Jim Cox ever mandate that somebody would be endorsed. He ordered his newspapers to endorse Richard Nixon over McGovern and that's when our friend Greg Favre resigned in protest in West Palm Beach. But the Journal and Constitution both endorsed Nixon. But that's the only time to my knowledge that the ownership ever played any role in endorsement other than, you know who the ownership is and why you're working here and so forth.  And I guess that has some influence, but actually the Cox operation was a great one, I thought, and very open, and let people do their job. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Do you think those endorsements are effective? \r\n \r\nMINTER:   Not anymore.  I think they might be -- I think they might be effective to endorse the school of superintendent of Raybun County or something like, I mean of your county, but not that that's wrong.  But I'd say one of the minor offices in Fulton County , the Dekalb County where people don't know, they might just pick it up and read it.  But as far persuading anybody, they may even hurt.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What was the role of the Atlanta newspapers in the Civil Rights Movement? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I'd say it was a large role and not particularly in the Civil Rights Movement, but it was a large role in making Atlanta sort of an oasis and keeping the violence out of Atlanta.  That's what it did.  I think the main [indiscernible] truthfully was protecting Atlanta, because I'm not sure that, you know, those like Tarver and Ivan Allen at that time, and Mr. Woodruff, and all those people, I don't think they were great liberals.  I don't think they were on the cutting edge of change.  But I think they were -- I think it was pretty much a protective thing.  They wanted to keep business in Atlanta, safe, and moving ahead, and they did.  But Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson, they were -- and that relationship with Dr. King, they played quite a role.   \r\nGot a lot of criticism, Tarver did for not covering the Selma march, and of course that led to a lot of trouble in the future and Gene Patterson particularly was very critical of it.  He was -- because Tarver did not -- told him whether to not go, well they just should have gone.  One thing about Tarver, I was at home at Inman one day putting up a pasture fence and Tarver liked for you to work seven days a week, and I might have had Saturday night off, after working Friday night, but about eight o'clock got a call from Tarver Saturday morning.  He says, be at the paper at ten.  He says, Jimmy Carter's coming by, and of course Carter was running for governor.  So we all go up there ten o'clock and meet Carter who's all by himself.   \r\nGo down and sit down in the library and Bill Shipp is there, and Shipp's got his tape recorder, and Murphy is there.  Murphy won't speak to Carter.  And of course, Tarver didnt like Carter either.  So we go in and sit down, and Carter essentially says this.  Says, \"Look, you know\", says, \"I'm running for president, as you know.  Got a lot of things going for me.\"  Says, \"I can win this election.\"  Says, \"There's one thing that I desperately need and he says, I need somebody from my hometown newspaper covering my campaign.\"  He says, \"If the Journal-Constitution would put somebody on the road with me, I could wrap this thing up.  I could be president and so forth.\"  And of course, he was a next door neighbor of Anne Cox Chambers, you know, had been when he was governor.  And she was his principal financial backer, and so, but that didn't phase Tarver.   \r\nSo Tarver turned around and says, \"Well, governor,\" he says, \"I'll tell you something.\"  He says, \"I don't think you've got a chance to win,\" he said, \"but if that changes and if I see where I think you are a real candidate,\" he said, \"I'll put somebody on the road.\"  He said, \"Meanwhile, we're just not going to do it.\"  And you know Carter, you know that look he gets.  I knew then we were about to be up the creek.  So anyway, also at that meeting Carter was talking about some issues and Shipp turns and faces Carter and says, \"Well, governor, you said this then, then you said this then.  How do you explain the difference?\"  It was an awful, awful meeting.  I mean, it was embarrassing and so at the time we had a rule that you had to get Mr. Fields' permission to send a reporter out of state.  But Carter, next week he was going to Chattanooga to talk to Jody Powell and so I was feeling sorry for the little son of a gun.   \r\nBut, you know, I called in Rex Granum and I said, \"Rex, go up to Chattanooga just across the border, and cover Carter's speech up there.  So he went to Chattanooga and covered the speech, came back and wrote the story, and I was waiting for Tarver to come down on me.  It never happened.  Rex Granum stayed on him for the rest of the campaign and Tarver never said a word.  That's the way he was.  If he knew he was wrong, he would -- he would not admit it but he just wouldn't say anything about it.  But so that's how we got a -- how Carter got somebody from the Journal-Constitution to cover his campaign. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Jim, if you will, let's talk for a minute about some of your prize pupils.  You mentioned Hal Raines.   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, that's an interesting story at least to me.  We had a TV editor named Paul Jones and a movie editor.  Paul was a character, but in those days, we didn't have a TV guidebook, and the TV editor, who was also the movie editor, had to call the station every day and find out what was going to find out what was going to be on every night and so forth and everything.  Well, Paul was not very good at details, complicated by the fact that Jack Tarver was a great TV addict.  So every morning, Tarver would come in just raising hell about the TV clock that Paul had gotten wrong.  \r\nSo we had a guy named Dick Greene who was -- who had been working in Alabama, an old friend of mine.  He walked in one day and Dick was [indiscernible] and he said, \"I know how you can get that TV clock fixed and get Tarver off your back.\"  And I said, \"For God's sakes, tell me how\".  He said, \"There's a TVmovie that's in Birmingham that I worked with in Tuscaloosa named Harold Raines.  He's a smart boy.  He'll fix it for you.\"  So I called Hal Raines, asked him to come over to be interviewed and he came on the fourth of July which, the newspaper is closed down.  So I picked Harold up at the airport, drove into the office, we had a long talk and as soon as I found out that he was not going to be a union organizer, we started talking about a job.  And I said, \"Harold, the standard question, what's your big ambition in this business?\"  He says, \"I want to be the nation's premier gossip writer.\"  He said, \"I want to do Hollywood stuff and so forth.\"  I said, \"Well that's fine, and in the meantime, would you be the political editor.\" \r\nSo I was still, you know, I hadn't entirely made up my mind.  And he asked a question that really wrapped it up for me.  He says, \"If I come to Atlanta, do you know where I can keep my bird dog?\"  And I said, \"Well, my, you're one of us.\"  So we had a great relationship and when my, our friend Harold Gulliver was leaving the paper, I took Hal to lunch at the Ritz Carlton downtown, and that's so many years ago.  And I offered him -- at the time, Harold was, I think he was a bureau chief of the New York Times in Atlanta, and I was trying to persuade him to be the editorial page editor of the Constitution.  And he said, \"Well, you know, I appreciate it,\" but he said, \"I've got a good crack of being editor of the New York Times.\"  And I said, \"Harold, you know, \" I said, \"I'm sure you do.  To burn that bush is a pretty good ways off.\"  And he said, \"I really think I've got a crack at it.\"  He says, \"I'm going to go for it.\"  \r\nSo anyways, some years later when he got the job I sent him a note and I said, \"You know, Babe Ruth called his shot and you called yours.\"  But he was -- Harold Raines, my second best hire.  I put Lewis first, Harold second.  He was quite good and it's too bad what happened to him at the New York Times. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You mentioned Reg Murphy. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah, Reg, you know, it's turned out Reg was fortunate to get kidnapped because --  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I was going to ask you about that.  That's a great, great, great story.  Tell us that story. \r\n \r\nMALE SPEAKER:  Can we pause before we tell the story?   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah, you okay?  You having fun? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Am I doing all right? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You're doing great. \r\n \r\nMALE SPEAKER:  Here's a some water right there. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah, I need a little shot.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  -- this stuff is to people.  Yeah, I do that class up at Young Harris College.  Sill, this is where this started and I used to have people come up.  Poor old Matt Mattingly drove all the way from St. Simon's to Young Harris just to do a little program and drove all the way back, and I said, well hell, that's just too much.  We're going to put him on -- record him.  And so I use these at the class up there now and these people go crazy over this. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I was talking to Earl Leonard this morning.  He was talking about going up to be interviewed by you.  \r\n    \r\nSHORT:  Yeah, Leonard did a Russell thing. \r\n \r\nMINTER: He's a good talker, isn't he?    \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Oh, yeah. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  He's great.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah, Leonard.  He's something. \r\n \r\nMALE SPEAKER:  We're ready when you are. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Let me take another sip.  Where are we?  Do I need to ask the question again? \r\n \r\nMALE SPEAKER:  Yeah, go ahead and ask the question again.  Be careful when you raise your left hand because when you raise it too much it goes in the frame.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Okay, show my ears. That's what somebody said to me.  He said -- of course, I love George Busby.  Somebody says to me, he says, \"How'd you get along with George Busby?\"  I said, \"You know, George Busby to me has been one of our most effective governors.\"  But you know, I like him for another reason and that is when George Busby walks by, people look at me and say, look at that guy with those small ears.  \r\n \r\n[Laughter]  \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I got big ears.  Somebody told me that that's because I probably -- come from the south of London.  Says, people from the south of London have big ears.  That's what one of my friends told me. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Okay, where are we? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  They grow though as you get older. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  I have said, you know, you mentioned Reg Murphy.  Can we pick it up there and let you go about the story?   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, the Reg Murphy kidnapping, which you know a little about, Bob.  But anyway, it was during when Patty Hearst was kidnapped.  One afternoon a special agent in charge of FBI from Atlanta came by the office and wanted to meet confidentially with Murphy and me.   And he says that we have arranged to recover Patty Hearst, that she's going to be picked up, we can pick her up at the Atlanta airport tomorrow night.  But first we've got to have a classified ad in the paper to notify the people we're dealing with and it's got to say, \"Pat is okay\" in capital letters, and it can't be anything else but that.  And so, he says you can't tell anybody about it. \r\nSo of course he left and we told Tarver, and it was agreed that we'd put the ad in the classifieds section, and it was agreed that I would stay throughout the evening to see that nothing was changed and it came out, \"PAT IS OKAY\", exactly like the FBI agent had it.  So the ad ran and we expected the FBI to recover Patty Hearst.  It never happened.  We never heard any more from them.  So that was out there, you know.  And then about a week later we had a nine o'clock news conference in my office.  I'm then managing editor of the Constitution.  Reg is the editorial page editor.  I get a call from Murphy.  He says,  \"I've been kidnapped.\"  I said, \"Well Reg, you're in a hell of a fix because nobody would pay no ransom for you,\" and he screamed.  He says, \"But I'm in the trunk of somebody's car.\"  And then this voice comes on and says, \"We'll be in touch.\" \r\nSo people at the conference said, \"Well, what was that about.\"  I said, \"I think Murphy and Gulliver are out drinking again,\" and so then they left.  And George Tysinger was our copy desk chief.  Baldy was our cartoonist.  Well, Baldy was a great cartoonist but he couldn't spell and he always had something wrong with his cartoons.  So I said, walked down there and said, \"George, call Murphy's house and just be sure he's there,\" and I said, \"if Virginia answers, just don't alarm her, just tell her that you were trying to get in touch with him about the nightly correction to the Baldy cartoon.\" \r\nSo George calls and Virginia, Reg's wife, said, \"I'm concerned, he left with a man about some heating oil who had got some heating oil for the Atlanta school system,\" which there was a shorting of heating oil. And said, \"he's been gone about two hours and I haven't heard from him.\"  And then about that time we got a call from the television station that the man had called there.  The colonel in the American Revolutionary Army, and so anyway, at that time, I called Tarver.  Tarver says, call the FBI.   \r\nI did and the FBI swarmed down to the newspaper and put a recorder on my phone and everything, and they had guns on and so forth.  And we had a news editor named Glenn McCutchen, and so one of the FBI agents walked over to the newspaper and said, \"We need a picture of Mr. Murphy to send out on our -- \", you know, wherever they send them.  He said, \"Where can I get a picture of Mr. Murphy?\"  Well, we've probably got a file of them down in the reference room, but our news editor says, \"Well there's a lot of them on his wall in there in his office.  Go in there and get one of those.\"  So anyway, the special agent goes in there and there's a picture, a framed glass picture with Murphy and Lyndon Johnson, and Lyndon has got his arm draped around Murphy and says to Reg, to my good friend, Reg Murphy, Lyndon Johnson.  So the special agent takes his shoe, cracks that glass with his heel, takes his pocket knife and cuts Reg's face out of the picture.  Reg blamed it on me, never forgave me, and that was Reg's great picture with Lyndon Johnson. \r\nBut anyway, so there are a lot of telephone calls back and forth, and the guy rode Reg around for about two or three days, and also the calls to discuss ransom and so forth, and everything.  And finally it comes down to a call relayed through a little girl, a high school girl who was working part time in a lawyer's office, that the instructions that were to -- how the ransom was to be delivered -- the $700,000, which also insulted Murphy.  He thought he was at least worth $1 million, but anyway, in the meantime the instructions were to deliver it up here on 400 and 400 was desolate countryside then, to drive an open jeep, and to wear tennis shoes and a short sleeve shirt. I don't know that why was necessary, but he did.  And to have no bugs and no surveillance.  If that happened, then Murphy and I both would be eliminated.   \r\nAnd so of course I was elected, I had to drive the jeep, which was disappointing to me because I had been going over to this FBI building.  They had an automobile over there that I was to drive and I was to drive that car, and they would have an FBI agent with a machine gun in the back.  And we practiced that.  He had a compartment back there, and so -- but instead, I had to go it alone and it was sort of a cold, rainy day.  But anyway, drove it up there and saw the man.  Got to the place where we were going.  Dropped the money out and had two suitcases.  One had a $500,000 in twenties.  The other one had $200,000.  They got wedged in there and I couldn't get the damn thing out, and so I thought, this is going to be embarrassing.   \r\nIn the meantime, Reg and the kidnappers are waiting for me down the road to get it out.  And I tried to get that thing tugged out from under the seat, and I finally got it out, and anyway, just as I was about to get it out, this airplane comes down the middle of the median, you know, flying down the road obviously, looking over the situation.  The guy threatened to kill us, and I looked over to across the road and there's a guy out there, old farmer, trying to catch a horse, had the bridle chasing around.  And of course, the next day they was no farmer and no bridle and there was a cab that was broken down there.  We found out later we were covered by high powered rifles.  They were everywhere, you know.  So, but the FBI had already found out who the kidnapper was from a source in Miami and they just followed the guy home and got all the money back except $20 that his wife had spent for groceries.  And Terry Adamson who became one of Griffin Bell's lieutenants in the justice department was a law student at Emory who had worked some with the Constitution.  He picked Murphy up and took Murphy home and it all came out, we all lived happily ever after.  We only had a few problems.   \r\nI remember Tarver walked in and told Tom Wood who was then our business manager, said, \"Tom, call down to Murphy's house and tell his wife that if there's anything we can possibly do, we'll do it.  And just let us know.\"  So he called out there and came back in the room, and Tarver said, \"Does she need anything?\"  He said, \"Yes, said there was a lot of family and there was a lot of extra people there.  They were running out of toilet paper.  Could we bring over some toilet paper.\"  So we took care of that.   \r\nAnd then I'd been up forever and gotten no sleep and so forth, but then they had a press conference after I got back from my jeep ride and Murphy had been recovered in the lobby of the Journal-Constitution building. And I had no idea and -- what was going on really down there.  But Bill Fields comes to me and says, \"You got to go down to be interviewed at this press conference.\"  So I went down there and people were, you know, just full of folks, you know.  I had no idea, scared me.  But anyway, Aubrey Morris comes up with his microphone and he says, \"How did you feel heading out of town in an open jeep, in a short sleeved shirt and $700,000 in the car.\"  And I said, \"Well Aubrey, I felt sort of like Furman Bisher headed for spring training.\"  Because, you know, he always got a convertible from somebody else, and the expense account, and left.  But the happy ending to that story was that because of Patty Hearst being in captivity, Reg having been captivity even for a short time, Patty's father and mother got in touch with Reg.  You know, Randy Hearst worked here when Hearst owned the Georgian and then Patty's mother is from Atlanta.   \r\nSo they got to know Reg talking about the kidnapping thing, you know, what she was going through and so forth.  And since Reg didn't like me very well and had a great offer in San Francisco, he went to the San Francisco Examiner to be editor of Hearst's paper, and did a good job, and then got to be publisher.  And then Hearst made him publisher of the Baltimore papers.  That's in the newspapers worth a lot and Hearst sold the Baltimore paper to the Los Angeles Times Company. And the Wall Street Journal had a story that said that Murphy said that stock was $14.5 million.  So I sent him a wire.  I said, \"Next time you get your behind kidnapped, don't call me, write a check.\"  But Murphy and I have patched that all up and I say I admire him very much. He's had a great career and I just wish that we had -- I wish that he had stayed in Atlanta. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So you retired from the newspapers, but you're still very active in journalism. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  No. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You've stopped writing? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I don't write anything except checks.  I am wrote out. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You're wrote out.  I remember you telling me one time about, I think it was you, that when you became a journalist working for the newspapers that you told your mother that since you turned pro you didn't write home free.   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  No, you know, I've never -- writing has never been real easy for me.  I'm happy enough not to write.  I've never considered myself a writer.  I just was, I don't know, I really enjoyed the editing part of newspaper more than I did writing. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  But you established a lot of friends.  You were good friends with Senator Talmadge, for example.   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yes, he was -- Herman may be the smartest man I've ever known.  But it's amazing he didn't hold grudges -- a great line of his, he told me that he never really got angry with anyone at the Journal-Constitution except Bill Shipp and Hal Gulliver -- and he had reason to.  He said, \"If all I knew about myself is what I read in the Atlanta Constitution, I'd have voted against myself.\"  I don't know whether -- I guess you all can cut these things if you want to, but have you heard that story about our reporter who asked Herman what he really thought of Zell Miller?  You know they had that nasty campaign against.  Said, \"Well, Senator, well what do you really think of Zell Miller?\"  \"Well, I knew his daddy.  He too was a son of a bitch.\"   \r\nBut like I say, I used to go and eat breakfast with Herman when we were both out of office and he cooked breakfast.  I went over there one morning.  He was sitting there in his coveralls with his spittoon over there and chewing tobacco, and reading the Carl Sanders book that Carl had written.  I had read the book and so I said, \"What do you think of Carl's book?\"  He said, \"In his book, Carl comes up well ahead of Thomas Jefferson,\" but Herman was quite a character.  He was -- but he would talk nice about Zell and what the great things Zell had done with the Hope Scholarship.  He'd talk nice about, I forgot who he was going to talk nice about, but -- Carter.  Carter with these homes he's building and so forth and everything.   \r\nAnd I asked him one day, I said, \"Senator, of all the people you've served in the United States Senate,\" I said, \"who were the ones you really admire and respect?\"  He thought and he said, \"I would have to pick Ted Kennedy near the top of that list.\"  He said, \"He did his homework, he was a good senator.  I'd have to put him near the top of that list.  I told Rogers Wade about that.  Rogers said, \"I don't believe he said that.\"  But Herman was different.  I said, \"Well what do you consider your greatest accomplishment?\"  He said, \"I'd have to say that one of my greatest accomplishments was the establishment of the Georgia Forest Commission.\"  And he ticked off, when he started it and how much it had grown and so forth, and everything, and of course he had his own forest.   \r\nAnd we'd go out and we'd eat breakfast, and we'd go out and feed his bird dogs, and we'd get in his old, beat up pickup truck and we would go out there and cruise his timber.  He'd say, \"when I planted these pines back in 1948 I thought they might be useful at some time.\"  He said, \"now they are,\" but he sold a bunch of timber.  We'd go out and he knew how we would look at the top of the tree and take so many steps out, and look, and then we'd measure how tall the tree was by where were standing and we would count the trees in circle and he would figure out how much money he had -- he had a lot.  But he was a very, very -- I just liked him a lot. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  He also had served on the board of trustees at Young Harris College with Zell Miller. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah.  Well, Zell and Lewis and Lee Walburn and I used to go to the country music thing in Nashville.  And I remember coming back after I guess he ran against Herman, we were driving back and Zell said he was going home and getting out of politics.  He was fed up and he was going to get out and go teach at Young Harris and he was not going to be in politics anymore.  That didn't work out, but one time we went up there and Zell had had a speech in Kentucky or somewhere.  So he came through there and was going to ride back to Atlanta, and got back to the building in Atlanta.  He had his bag in my car and we pulled up alongside of the building.  Took his bag out.  I did.  Put it on the sidewalk. Zell hopped out and got in his driveway and left for the capitol.   \r\nAbout 30 minutes later I was in my office cleaning up my desk, my secretary says, \"They want you downstairs in the lobby.\"  Said, \"There's a bomb in the lobby.\"  And I said, \"There's a bomb in the lobby?\"  Well, then of course, Colonel Ortega from Nicaragua had been visiting with Andy Young had come by.  So they thought that it was the reason the bomb got down there.  And I got down there in the lobby and there was this suitcase sitting in the middle of the lobby and they had everybody backed up, and our chief of security had a stethoscope that he got out of medical gear.  And he was listening to the bag, and [indiscernible].  And the bomb squad was on the way, and the bomb squad got there and they were about to open the suitcase and I said, \"You know, don't do that, it's the lieutenant governor's suitcase, we'll see his dirty underwear.\"  And they didn't take my word for it, but about that time Zell's driver drove back up and got his suitcase, but it caused a big commotion.   \r\nWe had great trips on that, and -- but one time I was in my -- sitting in my office which was sort of down at the end of the hall and there got to be a loud noise out in the -- shouting out in the newsroom.  My secretary comes in.  She said, \"Something's going on out in the newsroom.  You'd better go out there.\"  And Bill Shipp had a little glass office off to the side.  Zell was lieutenant governor.  And I got out there and Shipp was sitting in his office not saying a word, and Zell was out there, had his fist up, red in the face.  You know, and when Zell gets made he reverts to his mountain twang.  And Zell was shouting, \"Come on out, come on out, I'll whoop your ass, I'll whoop your ass.\"  And I got so tickled, I was doubled over laughing.  And anyway, they got him quieted down and I guess they probably went off and had a drink together.  But they fought one day and were friends the next. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Love hate relationship. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah, uh-huh. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Jim, looking back over, what do you think is your greatest accomplishment? \r\n \r\nMINTER:  I'd say my greatest accomplishment, what I'm most proud of, I thought I brought -- I really thought with some help from Bill Fields and a lot of good folks, I was lucky to have a great, great staff at the Constitution, I thought that I had a big hand in making the Constitution a lot better newspaper than it had been.  And the one thing I guess I'm really proud of -- when I got to the Constitution, Bob, I found out that those folks wasn't making any money at all because they had that little in-house union.  As the executive sports editor of the Journal I was making considerably more than the news editors and the key people on the Constitution.  And so I just went down and asked for more money and I got it, and I often wondered why McGill and Patterson, with their prestige, didn't do the same because the newsroom payroll is not the big expense of a newspaper.  It's newsprint and a lot of other things. \r\nBut I was pretty successful in raising the payroll of the Atlanta Constitution, and therefore raising the quality of the newspaper, and I guess that's what privately I'm most proud of. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You have a son in the newspaper business. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Sort of.  They've cut back, you know.  They -- he was covering NASCAR, so now they have not -- they're not covering NASCAR anymore.  They do cover the Atlanta race, but for example, this past weekend they think it's better to cover the Road Atlanta than Talladega.  Now, you a little about readership.  You know a little about people, you know, who you think's going to read the most.  Does Road Atlanta have the most readers or Talladega? \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Oh, Talladega by a big margin. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  So he is -- he actually is a contract writer now.  They're not covering really anything like that out of state except maybe the Falcons and pro football team. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well, he must have the Minter genes.  He's a very good writer. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, thank you.  I'll pass that onto him.  He'll be pleased to hear that. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Please do.   \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Jim Minter, thank you very much for being our guest.  We could sit here and talk forever, but we've enjoyed it and thank you very much. \r\n \r\nMINTER:  Well, thank you.  I'd like to interview you.  You've had a great career and somewhat varied, I must say. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Snaky, I'd call it.  \r\n \r\n[END] \r\n       "},{"id":"gsu_uprising_35","title":"Charlie Wetzel, Elaine Pruitt, Bill Pruitt, and Roger Moore Interviews","collection_id":"gsu_uprising","collection_title":"Uprising of '34 Collection","dcterms_contributor":["Stoney, George C."],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, North Carolina, Forsyth County, Winston-Salem, 36.09986, -80.24422","United States, North Carolina, Gaston County, Belmont, R.L. Stowe Mills","United States, North Carolina, Gaston County, Gastonia, 35.26208, -81.1873"],"dcterms_creator":["Wetzel, Charlie","Pruitt, Elaine","Pruitt, Bill","Moore, Roger"],"dc_date":["1990/1999"],"dcterms_description":["Charlie Wetzell was a textile manager and yarn salesman at the Stowe Mill in Belmont, N.C., and later worked for either a historical society or historic site in Gastonia, N.C. 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Bill Pruitt's dialogue is minor and his role in this video is unclear."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":["L1995-13_AV0338"],"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Containers 33 and 83||Southern Labor Archives||https://archivesspace.library.gsu.edu/repositories/2/resources/472||Series III: Archival Footage||The Uprising of '34 Collection (L1995-13)"],"dcterms_subject":["Textile factories","Factories--Employees","Strikes and lockouts--Textile industry","Cotton textile industry","Industrial management","Labor unions","Textile industry","Textile manufacturers","Textile workers","Housing","Unfair labor practices","African Americans--Employment","Labor unions--Organizing","Working class African Americans","African Americans--Civil rights","Civil rights movements","Labor unions--Religious aspects","Labor--Religious aspects--Christianity","Communicable diseases--Transmission","Wages","Reporters and reporting","Journalists","United States. 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L1995-13_AV0338, Series III: Archival Footage, The Uprising of '34 Collection (1995-13), Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University."],"dlg_local_right":["Click the blue timestamps in the transcript above to navigate to any point in the video and transcript.||Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 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