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Thursday, October 5, 2006
Remembering Johnny Apple
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Over the years we spent some time around Johnny Apple, the legendary New York Times political reporter who died Wednesday – usually in jampacked press rooms, reporting under deadline on a debate or an election with hundreds of other journalists. But it was the first time we ever saw him that came back to mind this week.
It was 1970 in Alabama, at the end of what Kennesaw prof Kerwin Swint, in a recent book, has called the dirtiest political campaign of all time: George Wallace’s rawboned Democratic primary victory over Albert Brewer, who had become governor upon the death in office of Wallace’s wife, Lurleen.
That summer one of the guys in the picture above was a college intern at the Montgomery Advertiser, and Apple, fresh back from his exploits as a reporter in Vietnam, was in the spring of his career as a political writer.
On the night of the primary he borrowed a desk in the Advertiser, toward which he bounded every few minutes when his editors called with new questions from New York. He was the busiest-looking guy the intern had ever seen, though some of that seemed for the benefit of the ladies from features who stuck around the newsroom on this momentous night.
But it was not the dashing figure Apple cut as he walked around the newsroom that struck us most that evening, memorable though he was. After dictating the final grafs of his story, late in the evening when it was clear Wallace had won solidly, he got up and strolled over to the big New York Times wire machine that sat beside the AP and UPI machines in a corner of the newsroom, and his story was already printing out on one of those big brown paper rollers.
In an age when this sentence can be viewed from most places on the globe a few seconds after one of us hits the “Save� button, that seems like such a small, slow thing. But that night, Johnny Apple was like a NASCAR driver behind the hottest engine on the track.
The dance card is filling up fast….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Elections are like the perforation line on a paper towel. Now matter how fast you rip one section off the roll, you always get a piece of the next one.
No matter how quickly you rip through the ‘06 races, you’re bound to tear off a piece of ‘08.
Friday, Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney is down here, somewhere, to help raise money for Casey Cagle, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. We know not whether he’ll meet with reporters. No doubt he’s busy, and the air is filled with certain questions national Republican leaders would rather not be asked just now.
On Monday, look for U.S. Sen. John McCain, another presidential wannabe, to show up at another fund-raiser for Cagle. Look for Ralph Reed not to be there. Look for Cagle not to endorse either of these guys for president.
On Tuesday, President Bush pops into Macon on behalf of Mac Collins, the GOP ex-congressman who’s trying to unseat U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall.
And on the Democratic side of the equation, we note that U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who is unopposed this season, will host former President Bill Clinton at his home on Oct. 20. The minimum $1,000-a-head luncheon is on behalf of other Democratic congressional candidates.
If memory serves, Clinton’s got something in Savannah that same day.
