Southern Bookman

Farewell, Dick Williams

I can't recall how Dick Williams and I became friends.

We never worked together at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yet he knew my name and always greeted me warmly when we ran into each other waiting for the elevator or walking down a hallway.

Williams, a longtime Atlanta media dynamo, died Thursday at age 77 of congestive heart failure. His late wife, Rebecca Chase, a former national correspondent for ABC News and the founding mayor of the city of Brookhaven, died in 2020 in the early days of the Covid pandemic.

While Williams excelled as the former news director of Channel 11, The Atlanta Journal's metro editor, an influential Atlanta Journal columnist, host of the lauded "Capital Gang" political talk show and the publisher of the suburban Dunwoody Crier, Williams was a genial man who reached out to people of all backgrounds.

In the all too often sullen environment of the AJC, he welcomed all as colleagues. He could brighten a hard day with his radiant smile and words of cheer. Along with his conservatism - he knew how to wear a jacket and bowtie - he had an anarchist streak: in a memorable column he confessed his love for John Belushi and "Animal House."

Williams was one of The Atlanta Journal's stable of conservative columnists in the days when the Journal and Constitution ran separate, vibrant editorial pages. While I disagreed with Williams politically, his columns were  always readable, along with those of Jim Wooten and Durwood "Mac" McAlister. The Constitution offered the alternative voices of writers such as Carol Ashkinaze, Jay Bookman and Cynthia Tucker.

A proud Georgetown grad who gloried in John Thompson's powerhouse teams, Williams stood out among the AJC's small cadre of basketball junkies.

For a couple of years, I was among the chosen few who participated in a March Madness pool in which participants bid on the teams, requiring enhanced knowledge of the game. Participants included Williams, late Journal metro editor and true-blue Kentucky fan Herb Steely, sportswriter Mike Tierney and a few others. Williams always knew the complete rosters, stats and mascot names of the most obscure teams. He was never outbid on the Hoyas.

His columns expressed the viewpoint of growing suburban Republicanism, often referring to black-controlled Atlanta as "the incredible shrinking city” in its lingering white flight era.

After his AJC career, Williams was a champion of suburban consolidation, leading the formation of the cities of Dunwoody and Brookhaven. Rebecca Chase, his late wife, gave Brookhaven an enduring foundation.

Georgia political junkies, especially members of the rising Republican wave, revered Williams as the host of the "Georgia Gang.” While deeply conservative, Willliams was an amiable and objective host, whose guests represented a variety of views.

He built the Dunwoody Crier from a neighborhood shopper into a respected news source. In declining health, he at last gave up his beloved Crier, ravaged like too many other local papers by the Internet.

Another pursuit of his was refereeing high school basketball games. I saw him once at Westminster, elegant in his referee stripes, keeping up with the kids running up and down the court, blowing his whistle and forcefully calling out infractions.

He lived to the fullest.

 

Rex Reed's profile of Lester Maddox a classic of Southern political journalism

Rex Reed's "Do You Sleep in the Nude" is justly celebrated for its profiles of an all-star cast of 1960s movie and theater celebrities.

The 1968 collection, recently republished by Devault Graves Books in Memphis, finishes on a different beat: a portrait of Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox and his wife, Virginia.

A classic of Southern political journalism rivaling New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling's warm portrait of Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long, Reed's article published in Esquire in 1967 reveals how little has changed in the underlying racial dynamics of Georgia politics.

The vote-suppressing Republican Party has replaced the old white supremacist Democrats who chose the arch segregationist Maddox as the state's chief executive. Today's GOP would warmly welcome Maddox.

Known for his witty pricking of outsized Hollywood egos, Reed was thrust early into the cauldron of Southern politics, witnessing Long's battles against Louisiana's hard-core segregationists, which Liebling depicted in his book "The Earl of Louisiana." Reed drew the ire of state leaders as a student at LSU, writing an editorial in the Reveille student newspaper supporting integration.

Reed gives an amusing explanation about why he decided to end the collection with the Maddox profile after those of stars like Warren Beatty, Ava Gardner, Lucille Ball, Angela Lansbury, James Mason and Peter Fonda.

"Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia is the only subject in this collection who is not a celebrity in the Klieg-light sense of the word. But because he is one of the most controversial, colorful, interesting and infamous characters who ever rose to power in the American political arena, he creates his own aura of celebrity that follows him around like a stray dog after a hot biscuit. That's why he's included here."

Following Reed's article, Maddox's fame rose, marked by appearances on the Dick Cavett show that drew national ridicule, cited on Randy Newman's "Good Ole Boys" album. Newman's chorus, "We're keeping the niggers down," is now the GOP platform.

First known for fighting integration at his Pickrick Restaurant near Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he threatened blacks seeking to enter with ax-handles that he handed out to patrons, the little educated Maddox surprised critics by leading an effective administration, during which he appointed more blacks to state positions than any previous governor.

Held to one term by Georgia law at the time, Maddox subsequently served as lieutenant governor under Jimmy Carter, who emulated Maddox by running a notoriously racist campaign against former Gov. Carl Sanders.

Reed sketches Maddox as keeping an open door at the governor's office at the Georgia State Capitol. The stream of visitors includes black schoolchildren whom Maddox avuncularly greets. The writer skewers Maddox's folksy, common-sense appeal by recording Maddox's egregious racist views.

An interview with black leader Leroy Johnson indicates that the GOP's efforts to suppress black votes are deeply rooted. The racist Democratic-controlled Georgia Legislature chose Maddox as governor over GOP candidate Bo Callaway after a contested election in which Democratic front-runner and former Gov. Ellis Arnall surprisingly finished third in a runoff. In the general election, a write-in campaign for Arnall fell short.

Johnson claims to Reed that Democratic leaders threw out thousands of black ballots because the voters spelled Arnall's name as Arnold. That sounds like then Secretary of State Brian Kemp's tossing out black voters' registrations because of minor errors, cementing his victory over Stacey Abrams.

The black leader's disgust over Georgia's rural areas resisting segregation shows the historical foundations of the current GOP's power outside of Georgia's cities and increasingly diverse suburbs.

I usually dislike the use of dialect in literary dialogue, but Reed's rendition of Virginia Maddox's uncultured speech reveals her as a memorable Southern character. Her account of the Maddoxs' rise from their meager start running a sidewalk hot dog stand is an admirable testament to hard work and perseverance. She attains nobility in Reed's portrayal.

The Maddox-Callaway-Arnall controversy echoed that of the 1948 "three governors" crisis that also involved Arnall, along with Herman Talmadge and Lt. Gov. Melvin Thompson. The state legislature declared Talmadge the winner of the election on contrived write-in ballots after the death of his father, Gov. Eugene Talmadge. But a court ruling installed Thompson, before Herman Talmadge won a special election.

Could such a crisis emerge again in the governor's race between the incumbent Kemp, Trump-backed GOP challenger David Perdue and Democratic leader Abrams?

With the Georgia Legislature seeking more control over elections, the possibility is not so far-fetched. Imagine the court fights and political controversy that would arise if the Georgia Legislature chooses Georgia's next governor.

 

W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" still speaks to world

"For poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden claimed in his 1939 poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats."

Yet, I reread Auden's elegy each January, believing against all odds that his message can change the world.

Yeats, who wrote "The Second Coming," which again resonates in our apocalyptic times, died on Jan. 28, 1939. Later that year, at the start of World War II, Auden wrote a companion poem pleading for human compassion, "Sept. 1, 1939."

The close of "In Memory of W.H. Auden" eerily describes the world's current situation, so similar to other times of looming crisis throughout history. Putin's troops on the Ukraine border. Rising totalitarianism. Pandemics and economic uncertainty. The corruption of political language.

Auden. Yeats. Orwell. Their voices ring with clarity and truth beyond today's babble of words.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

 

Blowouts, horrible officiating: The NFL marches onward

The expanded NFL playoffs following an exhausting 17-game season resulted in blowouts and two sloppy close games decided by the league's persistent referee controversies as much as football.

Injuries, shockingly bad play, dumb decisions by the increasingly all-white coaches. Inadvertent whistles, and a referee making the most thrilling run of the weekend.

But unlike baseball, the NFL is immune from criticism, and fan displeasure, as New York Times columnist Kurt Streeter lamented in Tuesday's edition.

The weekend brought shocking reversals of fortune. Goodbye, Kyler Murray. Perhaps he should have stuck with baseball, although that goal line pick six wouldn't have traveled from second base to first.

Farewell, Bill Belichick, the genius. So long, Ben Roethlisberger, accused rapist glorified by sports announcers as he headed for a long-overdue retirement with an embarrassing loss.

Goodbye, Jerry Jones, after another collapse by the Cowboys and the wails of former Dallas QB Tony Romo.

After the clearing of the forest in the playoffs' opening weekend, game quality should improve in the next round. Or perhaps not: The blowout factor runs high for 49ers at Green Bay and Rams at Tampa Bay.

Compelling story lines will keep the interest raging. Can Tom Brady will the Buccaneers to another championship after Antonio Brown's diva exit? Will Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers reprise their State Farm commercials in a Super Bowl showdown? Will Matthew Stafford, Joe Burrow or Jimmy Garoppolo make the Super Bowl and the chance to appear on endless ads? Will omicron be a 3-point favorite?

Even if the next round brings more bad football, the NFL's virulent fans will keep watching.

 

 

 

Buckhead annexation made Atlanta a major city

New Year's Day marked the 70th anniversary of Atlanta's annexation of Buckhead.

"On Jan. 1, 1952, the city of Atlanta officially annexed Buckhead, formerly a community in unincorporated Fulton County. Overnight, the city tripled in size and added 100,000 residents," Thornton Kennedy noted in his always interesting column on Buckhead history, which appears in the Northside Neighbor each week.

A Buckhead native with deep family roots in the community, Kennedy writes with rare understanding of the city's past.

Mayor William B. Hartsfield's plan to incorporate Buckhead into the city was appproved by Buckhead residents after two previous elections failed, Kennedy notes. The longtime Atlanta mayor believed that the addition of predominantly white Buckhead would blunt the political strength of the city's increasing black population.

The 1952 annexation would be reversed by the Buckhead City campaign, which might even take some of Atlanta's original territory. The campaign is shadowed by the same racial dynamics that led to Buckhead joining what was then a small Southern city.

Hartsfield's successful campaign didn't stop blacks from gaining a majority of the city's population, leading to the perennial election of black mayors beginning with Maynard Jackson.

But fueled by Buckhead's renowned shopping areas, first-class hotels and vital business district, Atlanta grew in national stature as a major city, adding professional sports teams and Fortune 500 companies.

Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is justifiably cited as the main driver of Atlanta's rise, but the addition of Buckhead put the city ahead of former Southern rivals like New Orleans and Birmingham.

Opponents of the Buckhead city movement cite devastation of the city's school system, high startup costs and increased taxes, the loss of the homestead exemption, municipal bond defaults and devastated city services.

Beyond these disasters, Buckhead’s loss after 70 years would be a major blow to Atlanta’s international reputation as a world-class City.

 

Ocean warming sets another record

The world was a bit cooler last year: 2021 was the sixth warmest on record, breaking a streak of all-time annual highs.

Don't cheer too loudly: Ocean temperatures again reached all-time highs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If extreme ocean warming isn't somehow reversed, seafood will boil without needing to be caught. Even creatures in the darkest depths will die. A few jellyfish will keep floating on dead waters.

"During 2021, the oceans absorbed about 14 zeta Joules of additional heat energy — the equivalent of 440 billion toasters running 24 hours a day, every day of the year," John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, told Forbes magazine. Another analogy is seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, all year, the magazine said.

The ocean's surface has grown hotter every year since the 1950s. That burns away more polar ice, increasing sea levels and dramatically changing weather patterns.

Such depressing news no longer makes the front page, or the TV news. It's part of the numbing onslaught of climate change alarms. 

Yet action must be taken to stop emissions. The oceans are the crisis point of global warming. When the oceans are gone, all hope will be lost.

A worthy history of the Washington Evening Star, which dominated Washington Post for decades

The Washington Evening Star reigned as the capital's dominant newspaper for decades before the Washington Post's rise.

Succumbing to disastrous management decisions and demographic changes that destroyed afternoon newspapers, the paper known as the Star in its later years died in 1981, ending a distinguished 129-year publishing history.

Faye Haskins, a former archivist and photo editor for the D.C. public library system, delivers a comprehensive history of the newspaper in "The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper." She matches the Star's story to the drama of American history and gives fascinating portraits of the Star's many famous journalists.

After purchasing the Star in 1857, the Noyes, Kauffmann and Adams families jointly ran the newspaper until 1975. Haskins cites the families' complacency and poor management for instigating the newspaper's slide. Through the 1960s, the Evening Star had healthy leads over the Post in circulation and advertising lineage.

But a population shift to the suburbs, the rise of TV news and technical problems in delivering afternoon papers on time undermined the Star. The family perilously decided to build a new headquarters outside of the capital's traditional newspaper row on Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead of rising in population and prosperity as expected, the new building's neighborhood declined so badly that newspaper employees ran to their cars in the parking lot to avoid muggings, which sometimes occurred. An expected expressway that would speed home deliveries was never built.

Haskins compellingly details the Post's decisive victories over the Star in publishing the Pentagon Papers after a court order against The New York Times and on Watergate coverage. Under publisher Phil Graham, his widow, Katharine Graham, and flamboyant editor Ben Bradlee, the Post overwhelmed the conservative and increasingly financially strapped Evening Star.

Yet the Star kept going with the brilliant columnist Mary McGrory and innovations like the gossip column "The Ear," later stolen by the Post. Sold by the Noyes and Kauffman families to Texas businessman Joe Albritton in 1975, the newspaper stood out for its sparkling writing under editor Jim Bellows, who renamed the paper the Star. 

But Bellows after clashing with Albritton left for another Quixotic effort to revive the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and Albritton grew weary of spending millions to keep the newspaper going, especially after the FCC ruled he couldn't continue to own the newspaper's profitable TV station. Albritton sold the Star in 1978 to Time magazine, whose haughty mandarins alienated the newspaper's staff and couldn't stem the Star's losses with costly and ineffective strategies like zoned suburban editions. After investing $83 million, Time extinguished the Star on Aug. 7, 1981.

Haskins excels at discussing the Star's coverage of political events after World War II, especially in her account of the newspaper's coverage of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Unlike with many books, "The Evening Star" gets better in its final chapters. Haskins' early chapters on the newspaper's sports and cultural coverage don't reach the same level.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by factual, typographical and spelling errors, like too many others these days. Computer spell check has been a bane for the publishing industry, along with the demise of proof-readers and fact-checkers.

Despite the errors, Haskins gives the Star the in-depth history it deserves. While exploring the newspaper's editorial and management faults, Haskins extols the newspaper's impressive journalism over the years. She laments the newspaper's loss to Washington and the nation, a cry of alarm as more newspapers across the country head toward the Star's fate.

 

The 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and James Joyce's "Ulysses"

James Joyce's "The Ulysses" and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" appeared in 1922, shaking English literature's foundations.

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the English publication of Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way," the first volume of his monumental "In Search of Lost Time." The second volume of the novel was first published in France in 1922, with others to follow.

E.E. Cummings' "The Enormous Room," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and the Damned" and "Tales of the Jazz Age," Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha," Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" and Wittgenstein's  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus were also published in 1922.

The police charged Joyce's stream-of-consciousness epic with obscenity soon after its publication by Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Co. Legal battles over the book raged for years until a judicial ruling in favor of imaginative freedom.

Eliot's "The Wasteland" expresses European culture's exhaustion after World War I. But the poem also pulses with a vitality of language comparable to Joyce's. Jeremy Irons' recording of "The Wasteland" several years ago brings out its full power.

Irish author Anne Enright in the current New York Review of Books discusses her deep attachment to Joyce's work. A longtime resident of Dublin, Enright uncovers Joyce's local references, including tracking down the real people Joyce mentioned in the book, and where they lived. She says Joyce makes his readers co-authors, and that the book rewards lifelong reading.

Like Shakespeare, Dante, Proust and Chaucer, Joyce expresses the soul of his native country. Eliot's "The Wasteland" defines a historical and cultural era. Yet, both works remain fresh and new.

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to Georgia Bulldogs

Congrats to all of my Georgia Bulldog friends and colleagues.

As a non-Bulldog who's grown fond of the beautiful UGA campus and Athens over the years, I was happy at the Dawgs winning the National Championship Monday over the long-dominant Crimson Tide.

The UGA faithful will not have to wait 40 years for another championship, as they did for this one. Kirby Smart's built a perennial powerhouse on the same model as Nick Saban's Alabama. Smart's program will prosper in college football's new era.

All of the Dawgs' frustration over losses to Alabama disappeared in the arc of Stetson Bennett's fourth-quarter touchdown pass to Adoni Mitchell. Then Kellee Ringo picked off Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young's errant missile, and was streaking down the sideline with time running out. Soon, the confetti fell like blessed rain upon UGA players Brock Bowers, Nolan Smith, Nakobe Dean, Jordan Davis and the other Bulldogs.

After the win, legendary coach Vince Dooley walked down to the field with a distinguished-looking man I didn't recognize for a moment: Billy Payne, the former UGA player who brought the Olympics to Atlanta and led Augusta National and the Masters. Every dog has its day, and it had come around for Athens legends. I thought of how happy World War II vet and 1940s All-American half-back Charley Trippi must be, weeks after marking his 100th birthday.

A new generation of heroes had brought glory to old Georgia.

 

 

Alan Bennett gives annual new year's chronicle in London Review of Books

The arrival of Alan Bennett's diary in the London Review of Books brightens my new year each January.

Bennett's annual chronicle of the year before is like a letter from an old friend, filled with London literary gossip, accounts of his quiet dilettante's life in Yorkshire, political commentary and vignettes about his growing up in World War II-era Britain.

With the departure of longtime LRB editor Mary Kay Wilmers, the 87-year-old Bennett this year looks back on the publication's early days and his battles with former editor Karl Miller, whom Bennett says tried to remove his jokes. Bennett laments that Miller and other founding editors withheld praise from writers. His score-settling after so many years seems more quaint and plainitive than vindictive, a glimpse into a vanished literary world.

Also of interest to followers of British journalism is Bennett's oblique account of his partner, Rupert Thomas, leaving the editorship of the Conde Nast magazine World of Interiors, which runs features on lavish British country homes. After more than 20 years running the upscale magazine, Thomas was the latest victim of the digital devastation of print publications.

Bennett also gives an amusing critique of Blake Bailey's troubled biography of Philip Roth, grumbling about the book's size rather than engaging with the sexual abuse allegations against Bailey that led to W.W. Norton canceling the book.

The famed British playwright, comic and movie writer notes his delight at the book's mentioning a dinner party he attended with Roth at the home of theater director Jonathan Miller. Bennett expresses unqualified admiration for Roth as a writer.

Each year, Bennett's diary records travails of his aging, and his continued delight at life's simple daily pleasures. His mind, and writing are a sharp as ever.  Best wishes to Mr. Bennett for another year.