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| Clippings from my first paid newspaper job in Atlanta |
By Sanders LaMont
May 2020
My journey through pandemic isolation included unloading lots of boxes that stored memories of my life. Turned out to be a fun trip.
The first batch of boxes included mostly photographs; more than 60 years of pictures of old friends, long-dead relatives and once-new babies. That took several weeks.
The best boxes were a mix of personal letters, photos, and newspaper clippings that remind me I am one of the luckiest people on earth.
In addition to the blessings of wife and children, I was able to work at a profession -- a job if your prefer -- that I loved, for almost 50 years: a newspaper journalist.
The seeds were planted in high school, specifically on the staff of the "Skirmisher," the newspaper at Marion Military Institute in Alabama. In my junior year I joined the staff as a writer in the 1950s. It was fun and challenging to get information, get it right, and get in down on paper.
The next lucky step was when I transferred after junior college to the University of Alabama and decided to try journalism as a major. As a transfer student, I did not know many classmates so I wandered into the campus newspaper office of the Crimson and White looking for something to do. I was instantly recruited to write and report stories, none of them earthshaking but all of them providing me a license to go anywhere, be nosy and ask questions. Every day was a learning experience.
Within months I was a managing editor mostly because I had little social life outside the newspaper, worked hard and the paper was fun. I was even paid -- an unexpected bonus -- $28 a month, enough for beer and steak dinner on Friday nights. By the time I ended my junior year I had found my place, the kind of people I liked to hang out with and my career.
And then things got better. Based on the recommendation of my classmate Patricia Potter, later a successful romance novelist, I got a letter from City Editor Harold Davis of the Atlanta Journal, then the largest newspaper in the South, accepting my application for a summer internship as a reporter in 1961.
A real job.
A real daily newspaper.
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| Interns at the Atlanta Journal newsroom 1961. The only name I can remember -- a very Southern name -- was Stark Sutton, standing with his back to the camera. He later worked for Coca Cola. |
I was one of four students brought to Atlanta from all over the country, paid $50 a week ($10 more than minimum wage), and promptly assigned to learn the basics by writing obituaries.
We interns became friends, connected by poverty and ambition. I quickly moved out of the local YMCA's barren room because the $60 a month rent was way too expensive. I moved to the Sigma Chi fraternity house (where I did not belong) for $50 for the entire summer. My roommate from Minneapolis and I ate at the school cafeteria, cheap but filling, and took the bus downtown to work. We drank beer together, and even attended a weeklong Shakespearian Festival on the Emory campus, our idea of fancy culture. We ran around in a group that included three guys and one girl.
(It turned out later that I was the only one that stuck with newspapers as a career.)
As you would expect, interns on a newspaper are the lowest form of life in the newsroom. Even the "copy boys" were held in higher esteem. The first week we arrived all five of us had to read and sign a notice that "whistling in the newsroom" was known to bring bad luck and strictly forbidden.
When things were quiet we were required to assemble what we called "books," consisting of three elongated sheets of typing paper (made of cut up newsprint to save money) with two carbons inside, so that every reporter had one original for the editor, one copy for the writer, and one for the Associated Press office upstairs just in case it was interesting. These books were stacked on every reporter's desk.
Editing was done with heavy pencils, and scissors and a glue pot. Filling the glue pots was another chore for anyone who did not look busy.
The newspaper editors in Atlanta believed that everyone had an interesting story, and it was up to us to find out what it was.
The city editors were the kings of our domain. The copy editors sat around a circular desk, scowling once in a while in our direction, and fixed our rookie mistakes. They played bridge on their lunch break.
The senior editors in the newsroom were so far above us we rarely even saw them. The managing editor Pat Waters welcomed us the week we arrived. The executive editor Jack Spalding worked on another floor in the building and we met him once in passing.
We initially were assigned to write obituaries.
We were required to verify every bit of information provided by funeral homes by personally interviewing a family member, and then find something that told the story of the life of the deceased. It was an education to pick up the phone within hours of a death and speak to the widow or family member of the person who had just died. One lesson I learned: almost everyone, even when grieving, wants to tell a story. Another lesson: just because I had learned the person died did not mean the people on the phone knew that.
Obits were usually short but if you got a really good story you had a chance to achieve every intern's ultimate goal: a page one story. It never happened that summer.
Once a week I was assigned to cover the cops beat, which meant multiple daily trips to Atlanta's police headquarters where I plowed through reams of reports looking for stories. As I began to know the cops and secretaries, they would tip me off to better stories.
Part of that beat was the fire department. One night I found myself standing on Peachtree Street in the heart of downtown watching a multi-story building burn. A fireman suggested I step back, and as soon as we did the front of the building collapsed onto the street near where we had been standing.
Another time a detective asked me if I wanted to meet a murderer He allowed me to watch as he interviewed a tearful and pathetic woman who had stabbed her lover. She admitted it, and said she really did not regret it because he beat her.
Still another time I watched in the emergency room at Grady Hospital while a detective tried to revive a gunshot victim long enough to identify the person who shot him. The man died on the gurney while I stood there watching.
And then there were the bank robberies.
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| A page one story, every intern's dream. And yes, covering bank robberies was fun. |
Being a street reporter in a big city I saw more life and death in a few months than in my entire life growing up. I learned quickly that poverty and ignorance and crime were part of life, and that power corrupts.
After more experience the city editor would send us out on special assignments.
Depending how trusted you were the assignments included stories like "Brother Saves two-year-old Sister from Drowning," which was my first page one byline story. After congratulating me the next morning, my editor explained with a smile that the story probably landed on page one because the photographer had captured a very cute picture of the two-year-old sister with her cat.
We were not allowed to take ourselves too seriously.
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| Looking across a reporter's desk in the Journal newsroom to the City Desk in the summer of 1961. Harold Williams was the City Editor and Reese Cleghorn was his assistant. The pneumatic tubes carried stories down to the composing room, and the wire service machines lined the back wall. |
I finally got one out-of-town assignment, covering a historical re-enactment of a wagon train from the North Georgia gold fields to Atlanta, riding wagons during the day, and staying at company expense in cheap motels at night. Big stuff.
But it was the daily news that we thrived upon. Cops. Fires. Local government meetings. Conventions. And even man-on-the-street interviews which were a staple.
We took pride in being the paper people read every day.
The Journal -- "Covers Dixie Like the Dew" -- was the largest paper in the state, far larger than the Constitution which seemed to be modeled after the more conservative-looking New York Times. The Journal published in the afternoons and had multiple editions with deadlines starting as early as 9 a.m. and running until about 1 p.m. for the big street sale editions.
So we had to learn to show up early, move very fast, work the phones or the offices of newsmakers, and file a first edition story by 9 a.m. If it was a big or developing story we would have to collect more information and rewrite it for later editions. The writing style mirrored that of the Associated Press: most important stuff on top, short punchy sentences, and supporting information followed. If it needed to be trimmed they did not have time to rework a story . The editors simply cut off the bottom few paragraphs. It was called "the inverted pyramid" style of writing, common in journalism and hated by really good writers.
Ernest Hemingway was our hero. Short sentences. Action verbs. A punchy style. He apparently said he quit newspapers before it ruined him.
Our work days started at 6 a.m. and often ended by 3 p.m. Our social life was drinking beer after work with colleagues at a place called "Journal Alley" across the street. Once in a while the interns would move on to a tavern in Buckhead that had a piano, cheap beer and a colorful hostess. One beer-influenced night we tried to drive to the Georgia coast for a seafood dinner, discovered it was several hundred miles away, and showed up late for work tired, hungover and embarrassed the next morning. The editors were amused.
Toward the end of the summer Atlanta was facing the biggest story since the movie premier of Gone With The Wind, taken by a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, who had once been an Atlanta Journal reporter.
The summer was marked by racial tension and unrest, and the Atlanta Public School System was going to integrate for the first time in history. The South was generally in turmoil.
No one could predict what would happen, so the newspaper staff prepared as if for war.
The city fathers -- including the major business owners and elected city politicians -- had spent a decade selling the city as the "New South," friendly to business and all newcomers and they did not intend to let that get away.
The police were trained well, and the city leadership made it clear they would not tolerate violence from any source.
But we did not know what might happen and the Klan was still active in the state, so the game plan for the newspaper read like a military planning document with troops everywhere.
Interns showed up at the bottom of the assignment list: "other work." I was assigned to work with the state desk editor, helping round up news from the rest of Georgia. It was a minor feather in my cap.
The stars of the newspaper were spread all over town, people whose bylines recorded history: Margaret Shannon, Walter Rugaber, Fred Powledge, Raleigh Bryans and John Pennington.
(Our daily competition at the Atlanta Constitution, in the same building but fiercely battled every day for big stories, was led by Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson, both Pulitzer Prize winners. They dropped by for a chat one day, and it was a thrill.)
The biggest story of the year in Atlanta turned into a win for the community: there was no violence and the city that bragged it was the leader of the South quietly stepped into the future.
The biggest newsroom argument that day was between the top reporters and the editors: should the story of a peaceful integration of schools justify a really big top-of-the-page headline, or not? The editors won, and the transition was reported almost as if it were commonplace, with routine headlines and no big splash.
Within a week I was back on the college campus, working on the campus newspaper there, and looking forward to spending the rest of my life on a newspaper.
Next: Growing in Atlanta, and moving onward.
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