I love any occasion that calls for a fancy cake. Weddings, birthdays, baby showers, what have you, a fancy cake makes a fancy occasion even fancier.
Last week, I got to go to my first fancy gathering (complete with cake) in quite some time, got my cocktail dress out of the back closet and everything. It was great fun even if I was officially “at work” with the Atlanta Press Club.
The Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame is a who’s who of Georgia journalists. If you’re from Georgia, you’d recognize most of the names of the journalists in the Hall of Fame. Many of them have left their mark on our state in very obvious ways. Henry W. Grady (1850-1889) was an influential journalist and managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the period after the Civil War. He has a Georgia county, Grady Hospital, and Grady School of Journalism at UGA named after him. Xernona Clayton from Turner Broadcasting and Ralph McGill from the Atlanta Constitution have downtown streets named after them. (Ralph McGill was also instrumental in getting the work of my distant cousin Byron Herbert Reece, whom I wrote about last year, out to the public.)
While we are on the subject of Turner Broadcasting, Ted Turner is, of course, a member of the Hall of Fame. Several journalists who worked in Georgia and went on to national fame, like Tom Brokaw, Jim Cantore, and Christian Amanpour, are members. Beloved local columnists like Celestine Sibley and Louis Grizzard are members of the Hall of Fame as well. Go over to the Atlanta Press Club website and take a peek at all the Hall of Fame members. You’ll see lots of faces you know and love.
This year the Atlanta Press Club inducted five journalists into the Hall of Fame. I had such a great time getting to know them and getting to know their families and friends that I want to introduce you to them and their work.
The first is Billye Aaron. Yes, THAT Billye Aaron, also known as Mrs. Hank Aaron. Back in the day, she was a successful journalist and teacher and the first Black woman in the South to co-host a television talk show. In fact, that’s how she met Henry Aaron—she interviewed him on her show. When they moved to Milwaukee, she had her own talk show, Billye, where she interviewed interesting people of the day. We got to interview her in her home for the Hall of Fame video the day after the Braves won the World Series, and it was so much fun. She is a very lovely and gracious person.
Rebecca Burns is a writer I’ve enjoyed getting to know. She is currently the executive director of The Red and Black student newspaper at the University of Georgia. I loved that paper when I was a student there and read every issue. She was the editor of Atlanta magazine and helped usher it into the digital age, and she is still very active in teaching and mentoring the next generation of journalists. I’m most fascinated by a book she wrote, Burial for a King, a chronicle of the week between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death and his funeral in Atlanta. It just arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I can’t wait to dig into it.
If you follow politics in Georgia, you already know that Jim Galloway is a national treasure. He just retired in January from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and I miss his reporting already. He was a fixture at the Capitol, and everyone knew him and trusted him, so his reporting was always well sourced and fair. He is such a good writer, and I hope he will continue writing even though he is retired from the newspaper business. I will buy any books he writes.
The APC had two posthumous honorees this year, and it was so nice meeting their families and learning about them. The first one, Marshall Latimore, was very young when he died last March—just 36—but he left a huge legacy at the Atlanta Voice and in Atlanta journalism. He was not only very good at his job, he also focused a lot of time and energy in mentoring and encouraging younger journalists. One of his colleagues, who was an intern at the Atlanta Voice, had us all in tears during her interview talking about a recommendation he wrote for her shortly before he died and how much his words meant to her. His life, though short, is a testament to how much influence one can have when you focus on encouraging and mentoring others.
Finally, there is Paul Hemphill. I became obsessed with Hemphill while we were researching information on him for our video production. He was an old school journalist, got his start as a sportswriter, bounced from newspaper to newspaper for a bit before joining the Atlanta Journal as a columnist in the 1960’s. He left the Journal a few years later and settled in to a life writing books, one of which, Long Gone, was made into a movie. He wrote about the stuff that interested him—minor league baseball, NASCAR, country music, and Hank Williams—and I love that he was able to make a living doing that.
His writing is so good it draws you in, and as I was researching facts about his life, I kept getting distracted by his writing. My favorite is a piece called “Quitting the Paper” about the day he up and quit his job at the Atlanta Journal to become a freelancer. It’s a treatise on the newspaper business and why it’s a good place to learn how to write but you need to be careful not to stay too long. In response to his induction in the Hall of Fame, his friend Richard Eldredge wrote a lovely piece on Hemphill’s influence on journalism, and you can read it here. Auburn University, his alma mater, has his papers in their collection and loves him so much they helped sponsor the Hall of Fame last week. Fittingly, his last book was a history of Auburn football. I’m waiting for Amazon to send me his biography of Hank Williams, Lovesick Blues, which is considered a must-read by Georgia Center for the Book along with his memoir, Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son.
I’m always inspired by people whose hard work makes them the best at what they do. Some, like Billye Aaron, had to blaze their own trail to get there. Some, like Marshall Latimore, leave a deep impression on those who work with them. And some, like Rebecca Burns, Jim Galloway, and Paul Hemphill put their shoulders to the wheel and produced excellent work day in and day out telling the stories of Atlanta, Georgia, and the South. Their work ethic is to be emulated for sure, but each of them is known for their commitment to helping others succeed in the business, and that is truly what makes them superstars in the world of journalism.
How is it almost Thanksgiving already?? We are well into November, and I haven’t talked enough about food and Thanksgiving preparations. I’ll try to remedy that next week. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and safe travels to wherever it is you might be going.
Until next time,
Karla