In sports, we chose photos based on several criteria:
* Which photo best tells the story of the article it accompanies?
* Which photo could simply stand on its own? Say you got something off the wire that was unusual, a jockey falling off a horse, a football player turned completely upside down by a hard tackle, a collision in an auto race. The story that accompanied it may not be that important, but the photo was so unusual, it would tell a story of its own.
* What photo would reproduce well? We tried to stay away from anything that would come out fuzzy or in any way difficult to distinguish. Newspaper photographic reproduction has become much better in the past ten years, so this is less important now. But we are talking nearly two decades ago here.
* Was the photo a cliché? Basketball armpits, baseball player slides into second, football piles of laundry, golfer out of the sand trap. Clichés all.
It wasn’t like that on the news side, however. The dialogue:
NEWTON: Cholly, get me a two-by-six for the front.
SALTER: Here’s an interesting photograph, Carl. Look and see what you think.
NEWTON: Dammit, Cholly. I don’t have the time to look.
SALTER: Well, Carl, how about this one? I think it’ll reproduce quite well, and look how the rays of the sun are pouring down on the water.
NEWTON: Dammit, Cholly. I don’t care what the damn thing looks like. Just give me a two-by-six and go fishing.
What would have happened if during World War II Newton had asked Salter for a two-by-six and refused to look? Salter might have throw out the Iwo Jima flag-raising for a picture of a guy holding a fish.
Newspapers don’t call photo captions by that name. They are called “cutlines.” I was a strong believer in good cutlines. I liked Newsweek’s style. Let’s say Newsweek was carrying a story about Leonid Brezhnev. They might include a photo of the late Soviet premier making a speech to the Politburo. But Newsweek would never write a cutline that read, “Soviet premier Brezhnev makes a speech.” It should be quite obvious to the person looking at the photograph that Brezhnev, with his mouth open behind a podium was, in fact, doing just that. What Newsweek would do was identify the person in the photo, follow that with a colon, and then have a line that makes reference to the main thrust of the accompanying article. Maybe:
“BREZHNEV: Are the Soviets softening?”
Over in sports, we all awaited the spring cliché photo—the picture of a college coed sitting under a tree on campus enjoying the recent warm weather on the news side.
The cutline would always say: “Agnes Scott student sits under tree on campus and enjoys the recent warm weather. “
I can see that. You don’t have to tell me in a cutline. Give me this: “SPRING FOR A DAY: Agnes Scott student greets that lucky old sun.“
Frank Hyland and I were the overseers of outlines in sports. We would cringe if a bad one got past the desk. Take something like Jack Nicklaus hitting out of a trap on the second hole at Augusta National during the Masters.
BAD CUTLINE: “Jack Nicklaus hits out of sand trap on second hole at Augusta during third round of Masters.“
IMPROVED OUTLINE FOR THE NEXT EDITION: “M R . SANDMAN: Jack Nicklaus finds his way off the beach and into Masters third-round lead.”
When the Braves actually shocked the world by winning the 1969 Western Division pennant in the National League, Minter and I worked all night putting out the first edition for the next day. He had me write the outlines for the many photos.
Our main photo on page 1 was a picture of Brave outfielder Rico Carty, who called himself “the Beeg Boy,” pouring champagne over the head of Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen, who had been the main force behind getting the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta.
My cutline said something like:
“BUBBLING OVER: The Beeg Boy and the mayor celebrate the miracle on Capitol Avenue.”
When the paper came up, Minter looked it over and said to me, “You’re a great cutline writer.”
I hope whoever writes my obituary makes a note of that.
After the first edition was finished on the Journal city desk, the next order of business was to decide what we wanted the only female member to go and fetch us for breakfast. Today, of course, they would look at us and say, “Go get your own goddamned doughnuts.” But we’re still in the early seventies here, so each morning she dutifully went for doughnuts, sausage biscuits, and even an occasional box of Krystal cheeseburgers, which we came to know affectionately as “gutbombers.” After we ate, the first edition would come up, a few changes would be made for the final, I would edit a few more stories about a county commission meeting here and a mayoral press conference there, and I would be on the tennis court by one-thirty.
I tried a couple of things.
I was reading a small wire story in the first edition. It was about a Georgia man who had been found shot dead in front of his estranged girlfriend’s house in Atlanta. The man turned out to be a high school classmate of mine. I hadn’t seen him since we graduated in 1964.
I called a friend back home to ask if he knew anything about the circumstances. He informed me there was a lot of talk around town about our former classmate going around saying about how he had been involved with the CIA and had been heavily decorated during the Vietnam War. “Nobody is real sure,” he said, “if anything of that is true, or if he is lying or suffering from delusions of grandeur.”
I assigned a reporter to do the funeral. It turned out to be one amazing story. There was a friend at the funeral who broke up during the service and finally spilled the beans about what had happened.
My classmate hadn’t been decorated in Vietnam, and certainly had no connections with the CIA. He had made his stories up apparently to impress the folks back home, and his girlfriend, who had eventually jilted him.
He had decided to try to win her back by having her find him with a bullet wound in her front yard. He would tell her he had been shot by the CIA because, as the old movies used to say, he “knew too much.”
The friend would drive. My classmate, upon nearing the girl’s house, would take a small-caliber pistol and put a large paperback novel next to his abdomen. He would then fire a bullet through the novel. He figured the novel would slow the bullet sufficiently so that it would not be a serious enough wound to kill him or inflict real damage. But he would be shot, and his girlfriend would feel sorry for her brave lover and take him back.
He fired the shot. The friend drove to the front of the girl’s house, took the paperback away so nothing looked amiss, and my classmate rolled out onto her lawn. That’s where he bled to death.
What a story! I lobbied for front-page play.
I said to Mac, “We need stories like this. It’s what we looked for in sports. If we just throw it inside with no graphics, it will be lost.”
I knew that would be what would happen to the story—my first on the city side—if I didn’t go directly to Mac. Carl Newton would set it in one column, put a 36-point head on it, and bury it on 8-A.
I managed to get a photo of the dead man from his family. Then I managed to get Mac to allow me to lay it out on the top of page 1. Newton could fill in the bottom.
I blew the picture up to two columns. I set the story in two-column, indented type so I could set it off with a border.
My headline read: “DEATH FOILS A LOVER’S CIA HOAX.”
You have to read a story under that sort of headline, don’t you? You put in “death” and you put in “lover,” and you put in “CIA,” and it’s a cinch.
Minter called down from the Constitution. “You have anything to do with page one today?”
I told him the whole story.
“We missed it,” he said. “Helluva job.”
I thought, Maybe Mac will see now. Maybe he’ll go ahead and make me city editor and let me lay out page 1, and this will be fun after all.
But nobody said much about the story at the Journal.
One day, Preside
nt Carter decided to grant amnesty to the draft dodgers who had fled to Canada during Vietnam. And who happened to be in Montreal with the Braves? Hyland.
I didn’t ask anybody, I just called Frank at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, woke him up at eight o’clock, and said, “Frank, how about one for old times’ sake?”
“What the hell do you want?” he replied. “I didn’t get to bed until four.”
“Listen to me, Frank, I really need this. Carter has granted amnesty to the draft dodgers in Canada. Go find some and get their reactions. Find out how long they’ve been away, what they’ve been doing, and how they feel about having a chance to go home.”
I had to promise to buy him a case of Heineken. Four hours later, the Western Union telex fires up in the wire room. It’s Frank with a great piece. He found a bar—naturally—where American draft dodgers were celebrating the news. He sent back a remarkable human interest story. I got that piece on page 1, too, and I thought, Am I a great scrambler or what? The news breaks, and I notice the Braves are in Montreal, and I get our guy there to do a firsthand, exclusive piece.
The next day, Bob Johnson says, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
We get the coffee and sit down in the break room.
“You made a mistake yesterday with the amnesty story,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You should never have gotten Hyland to do that story. It sent a message to the news staff that you’re still hung up on sports and want to use sportswriters to do stories from the real world. It wasn’t good for morale.”
I sort of gave up after that. Maybe if I hung around ten or fifteen more years, I might wind up with some control over the news side, but I didn’t want ten or fifteen more years of somebody telling me I’d made a mistake by improvising and getting a firsthand, human account of a major story. First, I had figured there was no way I’m ever going to get permission to send a news staffer to Montreal. Resources were a little slim in those days. Second, I know Frank’s got all day because the Braves are playing a night game and all he would do is sleep until noon anyway. Third, I knew Frank, regardless of how much he would complain about having to get out of bed, went after any story full bore, and fourth, I knew Minter would read the story and ask his desk, “Why in the hell didn’t we call Minshew [Wayne, the Constitution’s baseball writer] and get him to do it first?”
The competitiveness was still in me.
I lasted six months. There was no way I could ask to go back to sports. The new executive sports editor, Don Boykin, was quite capable.
Kay and I were living in a suburban apartment complex by then, and she had taken a job working in the resident manager’s office. What she got paid was we didn’t have to pay any rent.
We didn’t have many expenses. There was a car payment. (I had bought a new 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix, blue with white seat covers. The ’68 Cutlass, as happened often with my cars, sort of fell apart. The glove box wouldn’t shut anymore, I couldn’t pick up FM on my radio, and the ashtray was full, so I traded it in.)
I also now had a part-time correspondent job with Sports Illustrated. They paid me around eight thousand dollars a year.
So I decided I would become a free-lance writer. I didn’t know much about how to become a free-lance writer, but it is one of those occupations you can go into just by saying you are one.
The first time anybody asked me what I did, I answered, “I’m a free-lance writer.” That made me a free-lance writer. I didn’t mention I hadn’t sold anything yet or didn’t have an assignment yet, but what difference did that make?
There are a lot of occupations like that. Screenwriters fall into the same category. So do artists, poets, midnight gynecologists (otherwise known as “pickup artists”), environmentalists, adventurers, and political analysts.
I met a guy at a party one night, and he had a lot to say about a lot of things, and I was curious as to what he did. “Are you in the media?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “I’m a political analyst.”
Later, I found out he was unemployed and just went to parties and had a lot to say.
It’s sort of like Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson is the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but I don’t think he has a church. Nor does he go around with a tent, healing people. Jesse Jackson is basically a free-lance “black leader,” as in “black leader Jesse Jackson arrived in town today to address,” etc., etc.
Who pays Jesse Jackson? Somebody must. On Fridays, where does he go to get his check? Who signs it? Who buys his expensive suits? Who pays for the chartered Lear?
So here I am, the free-lance writer.
Mac tried to talk me into staying at the paper. I really didn’t get into the fact I saw no future ahead of me. I just said I’d always wanted to be a free-lance writer, and I walked out of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building six years after I had walked in as a new employee.
For about the first three months, being a free-lance writer was a lot of fun. I would get up around ten in the morning, drink coffee, eat breakfast, and read the paper. Around noon, I would ease over to the DeKalb County Tennis Center and play tennis until it got dark.
I found out something interesting during that period. If you don’t have a real job, you can save a lot of money. First, I didn’t need to buy any more shirts, slacks, ties, or suits. All I ever wore were tennis shoes and tennis shirts. I ate lunch at the tennis center. Hot dog and Coke. Dollar and a quarter. No expensive downtown lunches. I didn’t have to drive downtown anymore, so I saved a lot on gasoline money.
I continued to do the SI work, but I was yet to break in as a paid free-lance writer. I did buy one of these writers’ guides that gives you the name of every magazine on earth and tells you how much they pay for free-lance material. There was an Atlanta Falcons football player who was a big deal in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I sent off a letter to some Baptist publication suggesting I do a piece on him. I never heard back, and later I found out some out-of-town group had wanted this player to speak to a high school FCA group, and he had asked the guy who called him if he would get him a hooker while he was in town.
I was putting a lot of spin on my second serve by now, and my backhand volley, which had been very weak, was improving.
Around the fourth month, I sort of got the feeling like you do the fourth or fifth day you’re out of school sick. It’s fun to start with. You get to sleep late, and your mother feeds you in bed and brings you ginger ale. But then you start missing your friends and what’s going on at school. It’s amazing how quickly you can get well when you reach that point.
I had stayed in touch with Minter. Finally, after five months as an unpaid free-lance writer, I sort of hinted I might be interested in coming to work for him on the Constitution.
We agreed almost completely on what a newspaper should have in it and what it should look like. So Minter hired me and gave me one of the great titles—special-assignments editor. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, and neither was he. We would make it up as we went along.
Durwood McAllister, so I heard, believed my leaving the Journal had been a ploy cooked up by Minter and me, so he could get me to the Constitution. It wasn’t. Jim just said to me, “You belong back at the paper. I’ll find a way to get you back.”
The first job Minter gave me as special assignments editor was to improve the Constitution sports section. The guys over there loved that, especially the executive sports editor, my rival for so many years, Mickey McCarthy. He saw my piddling with his section as an insult, not to mention a signal that I would eventually replace him.
All I really wanted to do was clean up their layout a little, get a little more organization going, and stop veteran Charlie Roberts, a wonderful man, from writing such things as “. . . he chortled with a mock shudder,” whatever that meant. Wonderful men can still write some strange things.
There was also a famous Charlie Roberts lead.
Henry Aaron had hit
one out against Cincinnati, but outfielder Pete Rose jumped above the fence and caught the ball momentarily. But when he slammed against the fence, the ball came out of his glove and was falling back into the playing field. Rose somehow got back to his feet and leapt and caught the ball before it hit the ground, saving the game.
Charlie wrote, “Pete Rose will tell you the best defense for de fence is defense.” It’s not “somewhat marred,” but it’s close.
So I piddled here and there with the sports section, and then Minter sent me to the features section to work on it.
The veteran television writer was about to retire. He had one of the great tricks for getting out of the office early. Each day, he would wear a coat and a hat in, and he would hang them on a rack in the features department.
I could never find this guy, but I’d see his hat and coat were hanging in the office and I would figure he was around somewhere. I’d tell myself I’d catch up with him later, then I’d forget about whatever it was I wanted to ask him or get him to do.
What I found out was that he had an extra coat and hat he kept in his desk. When he wanted to leave early, he would wait until nobody was watching, then he would put the dummy coat and hat on the rack, put his other hat and coat on, and split. I would have done something about this, but Minter said, “He doesn’t have but three months to go. Might as well forget about it.”
There were two brilliant young writers in the Constitution features department. One was Gregory Jaynes, who wrote a marvelous series on the North Georgia mountains. He later moved on to The New York Times. Art Harris was on the staff, too. Art was in his early twenties, and he had some sort of condition that caused all his hair to fall out. Art didn’t have any hair on his head, nor did he have any eyebrows. In fact, he looked exactly like Telly Savalas, so everywhere he went, people called him “Kojak.” I had the feeling Art was going on to great things in journalism.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 31