The character Lee May exemplified could be summed up as gentle and immediately approachable, but there was much more than that: May was a soulful man of the soil.
“He knew the soul of gardening,” said his friend and colleague Walter Reeves. “There was hardly any distinction between his body and the earth; he just appreciated everything about a plant.”
May was a journalist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Los Angeles Times for more than 25 years. He was one of the AJC’s first African-American editorial writers, said his wife, Lyn May.
May was a news writer and editor at the AJC in the 1970s and left for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. During his tenure with the Times he wrote on a variety of issues including immigration and economics. He covered the White House during the Reagan administration. May moved from Washington to become the Times’ Atlanta bureau chief in 1989.
Friend Kurt Jocoy remembers how May humorously broke the ice when he interviewed Fidel Castro. “Lee looked at him and informed him that he was from Cuba; he said, ‘that’s Cuba, Alabama’,” said Jocoy. “He was just a very gentle soul.”
In 1992 May returned to the AJC as a food and gardening columnist before moving to Connecticut in 2001. May and his wife returned to Marietta in 2013.
“When he was writing about gardening, I always had the sense he was writing about his sense of human harmony in a world that often seems anything but a well-tended and loved garden,” said Bert Roughton, AJC managing editor. “He was teaching us.”
There are gardeners who take courses to become master gardeners. A friend said Lee wasn’t a master gardener but a master of gardening, said his wife. “He was a gardener, he was a writer, he was a good man,” she added.
A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he won many awards including the National Conference of Christians and Jews’ Gold Medal Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize.
“He was a real person and consistent,” said his wife. “He was just as good privately as he was publicly.”
Eddie Lee May, of Marietta, died Wednesday of cancer. He was 73. A memorial service will be held early in 2015, date to be announced.
“If he shook hands with you and said hello, from then on you were friends with Lee May,” said Reeves.
May was a senior contributing editor for Southern Living and an essayist for US Airways’ in-flight magazine, Attaché, and for many home and garden publications. He is the author of the books ‘In My Father’s Garden’ and ‘Gardening Life.’
“Lee was one of the most elegant and engaging journalists I have ever met,” said Roughton.
Reeves said, “He taught me the art of writing.”
He is survived by his wife Lyn May, three daughters, two stepdaughters, two sons-in-law and twelve grandchildren.
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