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DEL.ICIO.USAkerman’s soundness leaves impression in print
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dr. Bob may have been the last editorialist in the country who wrote his opinions with a No. 2 pencil on a yellow legal pad.
And yet when you go back and read them 15 years after he wrote his last column or editorial for The Atlanta Journal, their intellectual soundness stands the test. The No. 2 pencil allowed him to reflect as he wrote, to approach his commentary with the calm judgment of a superb historian who fully understood the ramifications of public policy decisions.
Dr. Robert Akerman of Kennesaw, a former dean of Kennesaw State College whose commentary appeared on the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal twice a week for almost 20 years, made a final journey back to his hometown of Orlando last week at the age of 80. During most of those years on the Journal, he was chief deputy to Editorial Page Editor Durwood McAlister, who preceded him in death by less than a month. He and wife, Jean, had 60 years together and three children, including Mary Virginia Akerman Frazier and Georgianne Nabors, both of Kennesaw, and Robert H. Akerman Jr. of Largo, Fla.
How quickly in life we find ourselves our parents and our elders.
Back in the days when smoking was allowed, Dr. Bob and his pipe were a welcomed sight at the office door. He’d stand, puffing occasionally on his pipe, and offer follow-up commentary and historical perspective on an issue in the news. He was the wise elder, the historian by training, whose brief conversations were just the touch of restraint often needed by a brash young editorialist who lacked the long view.
Dr. Bob was born into a Southern Republican family, though he found himself at odds with the party of Richard Nixon on its Southern Strategy, which he believed exploited racial division. His great-grandfather, Amos T. Akerman, who practiced law in Elberton, was U.S. attorney general under President U.S. Grant, and a fierce opponent of the Ku Klux Klan. An uncle of Dr. Bob filed suit in 1949 to integrate the University of Florida. On civil rights, therefore, his views and those of most Southern whites were in conflict. Just out of high school in Orlando he took a job as a copy boy, though, as he wrote on retirement from the Journal in 1993, “my journalist ambition was to be an editorial writer and columnist. I knew it would take time and experience, as well as more education, but I thought it would be great to be paid to express my opinions — and I had a lot of them.”
He found early experiences as an editorial writer frustrated by beliefs, especially on civil rights, that were at odds with editors or owners. So he left to pursue a career in higher education, never expecting to return to editorial writing.
As a historian, he spent 15 years in higher education, serving as chairman of the social science division and as chairman of the history department at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, and as dean of Kennesaw State College, then a two-year school. While he loved the classroom, college administration was not particularly satisfying, so he “sort of blundered into an offer to become a writer for The Atlanta Journal editorial page” in 1973, he once wrote.
“These 20 years have been the best of my professional life,” he wrote on retirement. With Dr. Bob, opinion writing was a professor’s opportunity to educate from another pulpit. His commentary was never personal, never hurtful, never ruffled, never written in anger. It was for the reader, as it was when he dropped in to elaborate on the historical perspective that reinforced a point he’d argued earlier, a chance to step back and reflect on the choices we were about to make.
Read his commentary now. Read it tomorrow. It has endured and will.
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