Frank called me.
“Want to keep Plato while I’m gone?” he asked.
I should have consulted my bride, but I was afraid Frank might change his mind, so I agreed, with much pleasure.
Before it was over, Plato won Paula over, too, despite the drooling and the howling and the wandering and the eating of panty hose and the sleeping on the bed.
After Frank left, Chuck Perry came. Claude Gibson Perry. He was seventeen when I first met him, only two years younger than I was. He had been born and raised in Athens. His father delivered candy. His mother stayed home and raised the five kids. Chuck was the eldest. He was born with the same affliction I was—the tendency to take on more than one person could possibly handle and remain fairly sane. Please note I said fairly.
When the Daily News began publication, Chuck was a rising senior at Athens High. He was hired to work part time in the mail room, stuffing sections of the paper together and running the address machine that sent the paper out to the subscribers.
But Chuck was also the Athens High placekicker. In August, football practice began. Two-a-days. No matter. Chuck would still report to the mail room at ten in the evening and work until the wee hours.
Chuck was on the team I covered for Wade Saye my first years at the Daily News. I’d run into him in the mail room a few times. We had become friends, too, and it got me a few meals at his Mama’s table. The woman could cook.
Chuck turned out to be more than just the Athens High placekicker. He was one of the top high school placekickers in the country and set a national record for points scored by a kicker in 1965.
Weyman Sellers, the Athens coach who had mistaken me for a Japanese exchange student, had a power in 1965. Athens won a game 86–0, and they went all the way to the state finals. They were to play Valdosta on the Athens High field on a freezing Friday night. Valdosta was then, and remains, a high school football factory. When somebody started giving out such a thing, Valdosta even won a national high school championship.
The state championship game led the Daily News on Friday morning. Glenn went to his typewriter and came up with the banner heading that read, “OKAY, VALDOSTA: YOU’RE NEXT!”
But Valdosta didn’t go quietly. As a matter of fact, with five seconds to go in the game, Valdosta led 14–7. But Athens scored from the one with no time left on the clock. That made the score 14–13. Chuck Perry came on the field in front of twelve thousand people to kick the extra point to tie the game and make Athens and Valdosta co-state champs.
Chuck had kicked something like fifty straight extra points. The college scouts were drooling.
The ball went sideways. Athens lost.
When people hear Chuck’s story, they always ask him, “What on earth did you do after the game?” And he always tells them, “Went to work in the mail room at the Daily News.”
Chuck never got his football scholarship, either. After missing on the big kick, he went on the unwanted list. He would wind up in the newspaper business, instead of in pro football.
There were constant staff changes going on at the paper. People came. They left. They came back. Larry Young started hitting the bottle again. Glenn then moved Wade to managing editor and made me a nineteen-year-old sports editor of a daily newspaper. He even allowed me part-time assistants and gave me a nickel-a-week raise. The Daily News budget held together only because so many of us would have worked there for nothing, I suppose.
I hired Johnny Futch, another journalism student. And I hired Chuck in 1966. He had enrolled at journalism school after graduating from Athens High. I covered Georgia. Futch handled layout, editing, and enjoyed writing about track, which I didn’t. I gave Athens High and golf to Chuck. He wrote the celebrated “Around the Green” column. He also reminded me of myself. When did he sleep?
There are so many names.
Jones Drewery. Glenn hired him as a reporter. He was a classical pianist who had suffered some mental distress as a result of service in World War II. Jones chain-smoked. When he finished his cigarettes, he would toss the butt, still afire, in a trash can that sat next to his desk. The trash can usually was filled with discarded copy paper. It was never a matter of “whether” Jones was going to set his trash can on fire, it was “when.”
Colleen Kelly: Another journalism student Glenn found. She was gorgeous. I tried to date her, but I didn’t get very far. I later married and brought Paula to Athens, and Glenn hired her as our receptionist. Somebody told my wife how charmed I had been with the lovely Colleen, and there were many fits of jealous rage. Ah, the start of a pattern in my life.
And Sharon Bailey. She had moved to Athens so her husband could do graduate work. In order to make it possible for him to concentrate on his studies, Sharon came on as a reporter. She was indefatigable, a quiet, frail woman who could bleed the news out of a city-council turnip and he would never know what hit him.
And Fran Smith. Another student. Another reporter. I never got to know her very well, nobody did. She always seemed troubled, somehow. But she could get a story. And that’s what counted.
Thirty months of energy, aggression, colossal scoops, insane antics. Thirty months of camaraderie, competitiveness, and there was even some love then. It was grand.
Then Christmas Eve, 1967, it all came to an end.
Chapter 10
AFTER THE MORRISES bought the Banner-Herald and began upscaling it, ad salesman for the paper began telling clients the Banner-Herald would soon be able to run color photographs and color ads and that the Daily News would never be able to compete with that.
The Banner-Herald, which did have a superior production plant to ours, announced it would change over from hot type to offset and be able to produce four-color photographs. Newspaper color photography at that time was in its infancy. Even weather maps were black-and-white, as hard as it may be to believe today.
Glenn got anxious. It was his move. He had to counter.
He called in Cecil Dill, his head pressman, and asked if he could figure out a way on our small press to run processed color. I still am not certain how all that works, but it had to do with turning pages around here and back through here and there wasn’t all the technology we have today, and Cecil was this quiet little guy who always had dirty hands from fooling around with our press.
But Cecil was also some kind of genius pressman. In the press room at the helm of his machine, Cecil could make the thing talk.
Cecil said he would give color a shot, and what Glenn needed now was a proper color photograph. Of course, he had his sources and the word came down that the Banner-Herald’s next Sunday edition would feature a color photo of the old Civil War cannon in front of the courthouse.
” ‘Still’ color photography,” Glenn mused, the fist-in-the-palm routine going again.
“What about ‘action’ color?” he asked Browny. It was nearing our Saturday deadline, and Glenn wanted color in the Daily News before it appeared in the Sunday Banner-Herald.
He dispatched Browny on his motor scooter. “Just go out there and find something,” Glenn told him.
There was very little sunlight left. Browny had to hurry. He came upon a Little League baseball game. You know the scene. Parents in the stands.
As I said, we were charmed.
What Browny got was a masterpiece. The biggest kid on the team had just slugged a grand-slam homer to win the game. As the big kid stepped on the plate, his teammates swarmed him. He dwarfed them.
The photograph showed several of the kids’ feet off the ground as they jumped to congratulate their slugger. In the background, parents were standing and applauding. Norman Rockwell.
The incredibly clear color photograph came out on the front page of the Daily News the next day. This was a quarter of a century ago. It would be years before USA Today would even occur to somebody. Cecil had pulled off a miracle.
The photo reproduced so well, I can still remember that one of the parents standing and applauding in the background was wearing a blue
shirt with an emblem over one of his pockets. This was in the background of the photo. You could actually make out what the distant emblem said. It said, “Gulf.” The guy worked at a service station.
“Action Color,” Glenn called it in the paper that day.
The Banner-Herald came out late the next day. There were all sorts of production problems. If you looked hard and long enough, you could, in fact, make out that the color photo on the front page was some sort of large gun. That was about it.
The Banner-Herald began referring to itself as “No. 1”, or “the Big One” in promotions. The message was that they had a bigger staff (even an Atlanta bureau that served the Banner-Herald and other Morris papers) and a bigger plant. They covered the world, and we, well, did whatever it was we did. But whatever the Banner-Herald tried, Glenn was one step ahead of them.
Glenn had another stroke of genius. He cornered an Athens artist named Don Smith, and out of that union of creativity came the concept of “the People Paper.”
On one side “the Big One.”
On the other “the People Paper.”
“We care about what’s happening in the world, too,” read our promotion ads, “but we also care about what’s going on down your street. The Athens Daily News, the People Paper.”
There were People Paper bumper stickers and People Paper pins, and there was even a radio jingle that went:
The People Pay-per
Is the Pay-perr
People pick.
Kids were singing it all over town.
When the Georgia Press Association annual awards came, the Daily News, the first year it entered, swept through it and won more awards than any other paper in the state, including the dailies of the larger cities.
We won best local photography, naturally; and best local sports coverage and best local this and best local that, and we also won the most prestigious award, that for first place in community service, for getting a new state park built near Athens.
To celebrate these awards, Don Smith came up with another promotion. Said the headline: “EVEN PAPER PEOPLE PICK THE PEOPLE PAPER.”
For all the things Glenn Vaughn and the Daily News did that were a little crazy, it also had a profound effect on the city and area it covered.
* A Glenn Vaughn editorial supported a mixed-drink and liquor referendum in Athens, and voters passed it something like seven to one.
* A Daily News stance saved Athens’s oldest residence from being torn down.
* It forced an expansion of the school board.
* It discovered the weakness of the local library and led to a huge new one, “certainly more appropriate for the learning center of the South.”
* It helped get a new, unpopular fire chief canned.
The Daily News even outsold the Journal and Constitution in Atlanta one day.
In 1966, a black Washington, D.C., educator named Lemuel Penn was driving through Athens one evening, headed back to Washington after two weeks of National Guard summer camp at Fort Benning. Penn had no connection with the civil-rights movement. According to Bill Shipp, who wrote a book about the incident called Murder at the Broad River Bridge, Penn deliberately steered away from activism.
“He was just a hardworking guy who didn’t want to cause anybody any trouble,” Shipp told me.
As Penn drove through Athens, three locals with Ku Klux Klan connections noticed a black man driving a car with Washington, D.C., license plates.
Said one of the Klansmen, “There goes one of Lyndon’s boys. Let’s get him.”
They followed Penn into rural Madison County. As he drove across the Broad River Bridge, they pulled along next to him and one of the Klansmen fired a twelve-gauge shotgun blast into the car, killing Penn.
It quickly became a national story. The three men were arrested and brought to trial for murder in Madison County. The trial was a complete joke, according to Shipp. The three men were acquitted. But the Daily News stayed with the story and wrote several editorials regarding the fact justice hadn’t been done.
One of the Klansmen involved, as a matter of fact, was part owner of the Open House restaurant across the street from the Daily News. We could often see him and his various friends drinking coffee through the glass door of the restaurant.
I kept wondering, What if these guys decided to fire in here? My desk was directly next to the huge window overlooking the restaurant.
I could see the headlines: “DAILY NEWS SPORTSWRITER FELLED BY SHOTGUN BLAST.” All I was writing at the time was whether or not Georgia could win the Southeastern Conference football championship.
The Klansmen eventually were brought back to trial—in federal court in Athens—and charged with violating Lemuel Penn’s civil rights. The trial was covered by every major news outlet in the country. Shortly before one-thirty in the morning, the jury came in with a verdict of guilty. Glenn had held the Daily News crucially late to see if we could get a verdict.
GUILTY! said our headline the next morning.
That same day, there had been a wildcat strike of one of the production unions at the Atlanta papers, and there was no competition on the street that morning.
Circulation manager Roy Holliday and reporter Pete Trigg left Athens at five the next morning with a station wagon load of Daily News editions. They hawked the papers in front of the Journal-Constitution building.
“Little paper comes to the big town!” they said. The Atlanta papers went for a dime each then. Roy and Pete made sure they gave out the message, “And it only costs a nickel!” They sold out of papers.
We started hearing the rumors in the fall of 1967. The Banner-Herald, it was obvious by then, was not going to take complete control of the Athens market while the Daily News simply fell rotten to the ground. So the word was out—the Morrises were trying to buy the Daily News.
A lot of bitter feelings began to boil.
What would happen if we were sold? Would we still have jobs? Why the hell had we been busting our butts for so little pay all this time when they’re going to just up and sell us to those bastards up the street? What about our loyalty? What about the blood and guts and the beer we used to drink after work, still talking into the morning about how we could whip the Banner-Herald?
I didn’t know the details then. I was still a college kid who would have worked at the paper for nothing, simply for the experience, the camaraderie, the utter thrill of it all.
The Daily News had passed the Banner-Herald even in ad lineage, and we were in the black. But the thing had been started on a shoestring in the first place, and the reserves were small. There had even been a number of last-second loans to meet Friday payrolls. That’s a little scary, even as I consider it now.
The debt service was heavy. And the owners didn’t want to incur any more.
After bargaining sessions that went on even into December, the Morris people finally agreed, according to Millard Grimes’s The Last Linotype, a book about Georgia newspapers, to pay $443,000 for the Daily News and assume its debts. The sale was announced on Christmas Eve, 1967.
“And all we get,” said a Daily News staffer, “is screwed.”
You have to have worked at a newspaper to really understand. A newspaper is a living, breathing thing, and to pick up yours, as it comes off a press when it is still warm, is to hold your newborn. We were all in this together, we thought. We gave our sweat for so little pay, but we did it without complaint. And we hated the Banner-Herald. We hated it. A thirty-seven-year-old managing editor of the Banner-Herald had a heart attack and died during the battle. Somebody said, “You’d have a heart attack, too, if you had to get up every morning and see how you’ve gotten your ass beat once again.”
It hadn’t been Ben Hecht and The Front Page, but it had been ours and we had relished the fight and gloated unashamedly at what we constituted every victory, no matter how small.
And it was over.
I couldn’t go anyplace else. I was still six months from graduation. There were other
s, like Chuck, in the same position as I was.
As much as we hated to see the struggle end, we certainly were relieved when the Morrises announced the Daily News would not be absorbed into the Banner-Herald. We would still be published as a morning entity. Except it wasn’t going to be “we” anymore.
Glenn would move over as editor. I got the sports editor’s job. I could take Chuck along. But Wade split. He couldn’t stomach going back to the paper where they had tried to starve him to death. Browny was off to a newspaper somewhere in Louisiana. There were others in production and circulation and accounting and the ad department who weren’t offered jobs.
Even Larry Young got to go. He had straightened himself out again, and the new owners knew of his value.
One cold January night, we put out the last Athens Daily News in the old building across from the Open House restaurant.
I had covered a Georgia basketball game. I can remember the makeup man finishing the pasteup of my last sports page.
“You want to take one last look before I send it back?” he asked.
I looked at it. There were tears. He picked up the board with my work pasted upon it and walked it out of my sight. There would be a lot of moments of feeling staggering loss in my years to come. But this moment was up there, it was up there.
The sons of bitches made us move our own desks. After we finished the last edition of an independent Daily News, we had to pick up our desks and chairs and our typewriters and our files and we had to load them into the newsroom at something they call 1 Press Place. The Big One, my ass.
We finished about four that morning. They paid us off, maybe five of us, with a case of beer. Schlitz.
I skipped my morning class and slept. I reported to my first day at work for the new owners at two that afternoon. We got a paper out the next day. I’m not certain how. It was a fire drill. We didn’t know how they did it, and they didn’t know how we did it, and the first Daily News under new ownership was awful.
Glenn said to me, “It will get better.”
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 18
