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Monday, December 24, 2007
Publisher loved to help others succeed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Family-owned newspapers, this one among them, are the love of my professional life.
It is an affection seeded in happenstance — and, indirectly at least, in the promise of a West Macon boy whose potential opened a door to others. I was among them.
It is the season for gifts and thanksgiving, for remembering those whose presence in our lives made a lasting difference.
For me, and for the boy of promise who preceded me at our hometown newspaper, the man was Peyton T. Anderson Jr., owner of The Macon Telegraph and News. Almost two decades after his 1988 death at the age of 80, Peyton Anderson’s gifts continue to make a difference to the communities that his paper served.
“Jim: You should consider doing a column one day on what Peyton did for you, me and others. Just a thought. Tom”
“Remember ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?” I asked. “How would we have been different had he not been born — or disposed to help Macon’s children?”
“Had Peyton not provided me with financial aid, I could not have attended college,” replies Tom Johnson. And without that, none of the other opportunities that came his way, says Johnson, an assistant in LBJ’s White House who later became president of The Los Angeles Times and chairman and CEO of CNN before retiring in 2001.
Had Johnson, who started at the morning Telegraph as a ninth grader reporting on his school’s sports teams, not succeeded early, Anderson might not have been inspired to continue funding the college educations of those who passed through his newsroom.
In 1963, I graduated from high school and Johnson graduated from the University of Georgia. “Tommy, what is it you want to do with your life?” Anderson is quoted as asking in Jaclyn Weldon White’s “Bestest: The Life of Peyton Tooke Anderson Jr.” Replied Johnson: “I want to be a publisher, just like you.”
Anderson offered to pay his way through Harvard Business School if he could gain entrance. He did, afterwards applying for a White House Fellowship.
As a Mercer University freshman, my summer’s cotton mill earnings were exhausted when I heard of a weekend opening at the afternoon News. I got it. Out of money again the next quarter at school, I took a full-time job assembling school buses at Blue Bird Body Co. in Fort Valley, while continuing to work weekends at the paper.
At the end of the summer, I too met Peyton Anderson. If I’d continue at the paper, he’d pay the bulk of my college expenses.
I had seen life in public housing. I had tasted the fiber-filled air of a cotton mill spinning room. I had bucked rivets with an old man proud to show me his unfinished Jim Walter Home, the first he’d ever owned.
And I had felt the awesome power of a free press to make the world a better place, starting from our front door.
It was an easy decision.
Maybe it was Johnson’s early success, maybe just Anderson’s devotion to the community. Whatever it was, he made the same offer every year to a high school or college student working at his newspaper.
Had he not sold the paper to Knight-Ridder while I was away in Vietnam, there was no question that I’d return to his service. It wasn’t a contract. It wasn’t a condition of his gift.
But there’s never been a day of my life that I dreaded coming to work, or failed to marvel at a newspaper’s potential to uplift the communities, and the state, it serves. For that gift, I am always in his debt.
At his death, Peyton Anderson left the bulk of his estate, $26.6 million, to a foundation ably led by Juanita T. Jordan, an aide he helped teach how to manage his post-sale investments. That foundation now contains $101 million and has given $58 million to the good works of Macon and Middle Georgia. “Throughout his life,” the book jacket reads, “he performed numerous private acts of kindness, but it wasn’t until his death that his hometown learned the full extent of his generosity.”
Tom Johnson, a poor boy from West Macon whose father was disabled and whose mother worked long days at Foy Grocery Store, well knew of those private acts of kindness. And so, too, did a lad from the projects of South Macon.
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Five who made a difference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s the mellow season of the year, a time to reflect on our blessings of family, friends and people who have made a difference in our lives.
I’ll not take the bait from the morning paper’s front-page feature on Cynthia McKinney’s bid to become the Green Party’s presidential nominee. But one quote in it is priceless. It’s from Joe Beasley, Southeast Regional Director of the Rainbow/PUSh Coalition. “She says things nobody else is saying.” Yes — and there’s a reason. But it’s Christmas.
There’s a front-page warning, too, that Americans are falling behind on credit card payments at an alarming rate and that the worst may be yet to come. Hey, man, it’s Christmas. Lighten up. Preach to me about carelessness with credit before I make the extravagant Christmas purchases — and after we’ve experienced the joy of opening our presents.
The season does invite us to remember those who are or were important in our lives. That’s today’s assignment.
Identify for us here five people — not necessarily by name — who have made a real difference in your life. Mothers, fathers, spouses and children are a given. So identify others. My list:
• Fred Tucker, a newspaper carrier supervisor in South Macon and a father figure through most of my high-school years. During the long hours I rode with him as he checked on carriers and responded to customer complaints, he talked me through some of the most difficult questions of a teenager’s formative years.
• Betty Lou O’Keefe, a high school English teacher, who decided I shouldn’t wait to go to college, as I’d planned, and got me in Mercer University on a Saturday morning in the spring of my senior year.
• Otho Pirkle, a guidance counselor, always upbeat and positive, who provided sound fatherly advice and many kindnesses throughout high school.
• Durwood McAlister, former editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal, who hired me twice. He, like Fred Tucker, is the kind of person you’d want at your side in trouble, good fortune or a long journey through space.
• There is another, but since I’m writing about him tomorrow, I’ll keep that surprise wrapped.
Merry Christmas. And thanks for the pleasures, the laughs and enlightenment, your contributions have brought us this year.
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