My Christmas mornings start with an orange. It’s a tradition from long ago. When I was 3, I was staying with my mother’s mother in a little place in Appalachia with no indoor plumbing heated by the kitchen’s wood-burning stove. She retrieved from the porch a copy of the Atlanta Constitution, a morning newspaper so influential it was read in five states.
On the front page was a column by the publisher, Ralph McGill, a man who had guts in a time it took guts to have guts in the South. He stood for what’s right, often a lone voice challenged by threats of violence.As I ate an orange on which I had dumped too much salt I looked at his photo. My grandmother said, “Newspapers are the only voice the little people have.”
Fast forward 31 years and my column and photo ran in the Atlanta Constitution. Still don’t know what my grandmother was talking about but I never forgot that cold Christmas day and worked to make sure newspapers remained a voice for people without one.
I met McGill in high school when I won the Atlanta Press Club’s best editorial award.
At that time the Constitution was considered one of the Top 15 papers in the world. In 1959, McGill won the Pulitzer for his anti-segregation editorials. Shots were fired into his house, bombs were placed in his mail box. Crosses were burned on his lawn.
Eugene Patterson was editor and took a lot of heat too for his editorials, Baldy’s cartoons and Celestine Sibley’s investigative reporting. In 1963 Patterson won the Pulitzer for an editorial about the Birmingham church bombing. Walter Cronkite had him read it on the CBS Evening News.
Patterson became managing editor of The Washington Post and when Nixon blocked continuing publication of The Pentagon Papers in The New York Times Patterson put it in the Post.
He became president of the Times Publishing Co. and the editor of the paper now called The Tampa Bay Times which became one of the Top 10 papers in the country. Man of integrity, he got pulled over for a DUI and instructed staff to put it on page one, no special favors.
I met him at a journalism event in Washington when I was a Constitution columnist and told him privately he and McGill were my heroes, my role models. He led me around introducing the big wigs, saying “This is my friend Bob, he writes for my old paper, the Constitution.”
Baldy (Cliff Baldowski, a WWII vet) was in the office next to mine and Celestine Sibley who went from intrepid reporter to beloved columnist was across the hall. What a honor for a guy who first took notice of the paper at 3 on Christmas.
On Christmas 2020 I lift my orange — no salt this time — to McGill, who set a high standard for generations of journalists; Patterson, a man of integrity, and a grandmother with a fifth grade education who loved and believed in newspapers.
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