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Sunday, December 28, 2008
Remembering a newspaperman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At an uncle’s funeral more than a decade ago, cousins and I recognized that connections dear to us were passing from our lives.
We promised to renew connections. True to the promise, we have.
At Durwood McAlister’s funeral, the newsroom staff of The Atlanta Journal, most of whom Mac had hired, came to the same realization. While our lives have gone their different ways, we once shared something vitally important to each of us, and we should gather again to tell stories and remind each other of that.
The passing of milestone people in our lives always has that effect, jolting us with fear that precious parts of our past are passing.
Mac, who hired me twice at The Journal, was one of those milestone people. I started as one of the droves of young reporters he hired. By the time he retired two decades later, I was a friend who loved him.
I don’t know when friendship evolved into something deeper. Maybe on Christmas Eve. For years, my daughter Jennifer and I had a Christmas compact. I’d match the dollars she earned doing odd jobs for her mother and neighbors. On Christmas Eve, she’d come to the office, and when work was done we’d walk to Rich’s so she could buy presents for grandparents, her mother and I and friends and neighbors.
There was never enough money, so Jennifer had to shop intelligently and creatively. When she was about seven, she bought her mother a cup and saucer from Rich’s marked-down china and marveled at its high price. Twenty-five cents.
Mac was my boss through those years, and at Christmas, he was the doting grandfather children adore. To the little red-haired visitor, he was the living Spirit of Christmas, a joyful reminder that warmth and attention make the ordinary magical in the lives of children.
Maybe the attention was because Fay, Mac’s wife of 58 years, was a red-haired girl. Maybe it was because the excitement of a little red-haired girl on a Christmas Eve shopping adventure filled the room with glee. Maybe both.
Those visits fixed Mac in the little red-haired girl’s heart forever. “Mac’s kind eyes and loving smile always made me feel like the most special girl in the whole world,” the now 35-year-old said on the day of his funeral. “He will forever remain among my treasured childhood memories.”
When did friendship and admiration start to become love? Christmas Eve, maybe? Because love my daughter and I start to love you.
Love takes time. Time to know how people treat others. How they react to tragedy and triumph. How they think and act and behave when they have the advantage and when they don’t. How they treat waitresses and children and unimportant old people. In almost 40 years of friendship, Mac passed all tests, a thoroughly decent, good and selfless man.
As a newspaperman, he had one of life’s most difficult jobs: managing reporters and editors. We are an independent, rebellious lot, as unintimidated by authority as cantankerous three-year-olds.
But the qualities that make journalists hard to manage are also those that make them good public watchdogs. They’re self-directed, skeptical and not easily cowed. If management wants something, they want to know why.
Mac, though, had the gift. Reporters and editorial writers knew from instinct and experience that he could be trusted, that he was never motivated by anything other than the desire expressed in 1939 by Gov. James M. Cox, founder of the chain that owns the AJC, “to tell the truth as only intellectual honesty can discern” it.
Mac inspired people to believe what he believed, that we were trying to build a great newspaper, honestly engaged in trying to discern and tell the truth. He would look at you with that expressive face, the face from an Irish pub sing-a-long that exuded the fullness of life’s joys. But when he gave you that other look, that look of impending displeasure, it was chilling, reducing the most rebellious of the unintimidated to humble submision.
He was a fine newspaperman, a finer human being.
That is the truth as I know it, as Mac taught me to tell it.
