Williams, Dick
Atlanta journalist Dick Williams died Thursday, Jan. 20 from congestive heart failure. He was 77.
He worked for TV broadcasters around the country, including some of the national giants, before settling into Atlanta. Here, he was a three-medium threat. He worked for newspapers at The Atlanta Journal and later ran a small newspaper (the Dunwoody Crier), and he did political radio. But the weekly televised news talk show "The Georgia Gang," which began as the "Sunday News Conference" in the early 1980s on WSB-TV, was his pride and joy.
Over 36 years, Williams taped more than 1,700 episodes, starting in the early 1980s when Atlanta children were going missing and murdered. Over the years, he parsed every major Atlanta City Hall scandal, pontificated on the tenures of six city mayors, assessed the Olympics arrival and legacy, picked apart downtown development and watched Georgia's political winds shift. It continues to be broadcast, but he retired in 2019.
Williams told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution then: "I'm proud that this program stayed on the air 36 years. That's pretty remarkable. I'm always gratified by the sheer number of people who watch the show and engage in it across all walks of life and income levels. It's amazing."
"He was an affable guy and also incredibly prolific," said Jeff Dickerson, who worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the 1980s and 1990s and was a "Georgia Gang" panelist.
"He'd start a column at 10:02 a.m. and have it ready at 10:17 a.m. He was amazingly fast. At one point, he was writing three, four columns a week as well as a bunch of unsigned editorials."
The conservative Williams co-hosted a radio show with liberal Tom Houck in the 1980s.
"He was a die-hard Reagan conservative back then," said Houck, who also was part of "The Georgia Gang." At the same time, Houck said he and Williams loved covering election nights on the radio. "We'd set aside ideology for a night and focus on who's winning and who's losing," he said.
Read more about Dick Williams on ajc.com
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