Southern Bookman

Farewell, Cokie Roberts and Sander Vanocur

Cokie Roberts and Sander Vanocur represented different eras of Washington TV journalism.

Roberts died Tuesday in Washington at age 75 and Vanocur Monday night in California at 91.

Vanocur, best known for reporting on the Kennedy administration for NBC News, personified the male-dominated news business of the 1960s. Roberts was among a generation of women journalists who demolished those gender barriers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Roberts, like Vanocur, was a Washington insider. Her father, Hale Boggs, for years represented New Orleans in the U.S. House and was House speaker when he died in a plane crash in Alaska. Her mother, Lindy Boggs, took her husband's place after his death and served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. Roberts grew up breathing politics, giving her an empathy for politicians unusual for a journalist.

A glamorous correspondent in the days when TV overcame newspapers as Americans' dominant news source, Vanocur was a prominent persona during John F. Kennedy's ground-breaking administration. He was the last of a four-member panel of reporters who questioned Kennedy and Richard Nixon in their 1960 debate, which changed the course of news and politics.

Reporting on Kennedy's witty and sophisticated news conferences and his trips and speeches. Vanocur with his haughty air and polished sentences was the TV counterpart of the "Best and Brightest" who served in Kennedy's cabinet. One of my most vivid childhood memories is watching a choked-up Vanocur report on Kennedy's assassination. He was one of the last journalists who interviewed Robert F. Kennedy.

A solid, insightful reporter, Roberts excelled as one of the first of a new era of TV pundits, giving insider commentary about Washington. During her career, opinion grew as prevalent as objective news reporting.

Sophisticated and knowledgeable, she presented a folksy yet informed personality. Her gossipy, gently humorous commentaries brought comfort as partisan politics grew more hostile.

Starting out at NPR before a superstar career at ABC, Roberts was also a noted author of books detailing women's contributions to American history. While at ABC, she continued to do commentaries for NPR, and wrote a newspaper column.

Vanocur thrived when the three TV networks dominated the airwaves. Roberts rose to prominence during the last years of that dominance. She witnessed the rise of cable news and the Internet and the decline of network news.

They spanned a time when Americans' trust in the news and government receded. Roberts flourished as a believable voice as Americans' political unity frayed. Now, the country is fractured into political tribes believing their own realities.

 

 

 

 

Historic Atlanta landmark threatened as Rock Spring Presbyterian disbands

The Tudor Revival Rock Spring Presbyterian Church rises above the commercial clutter of Piedmont Road, a vision from a vanishing culture.

After years of declining membership and finances, the church founded in the 1870s by some of Atlanta's most illustrious pioneer families has decided to disband, according to a report by Channel 11's Jeff Hullinger, himself an Atlanta institution.

The fate of the church designed by Welsh architect Charles  H. Hobson and completed in 1923 remains unclear. A developer bought surrounding acres from the church for $1.9 million in 2018 to build nine high-end houses, as reported by The AJC's all-time great freelance writer, H.M. Cauley.

Lovers of the old church and its historic cemetery fear the building will be torn down for commercial uses. The landmark was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990, which might save it.

The church's demise will end its many community services, as well as the live Nativity scenes that marked the Christmas season for generations of Atlanta families. Those programs didn't bring in money as the church's membership aged and young families moved to more dynamic congregations.

Following the campaign to save the historic 152 Nassau Building downtown, where Fiddling John Carson recorded the first national country and western hit record in the 1923, Atlanta risks losing another essential landmark. Rock Spring, named like nearby Rock Springs Road for a spring that once flowed in the area, could be purchased by a more thriving congregation, or converted into an arts center or concert hall.

I've never visited the church, but its commanding presence as I drove down Piedmont Road gave the comfort of faith and tradition. The church on the hill was one of those places that defined my conception of Atlanta as a true city. The building's destruction would take away another piece of Atlanta's soul.

 

Harper Lee loved Bear Bryant's Alabama Crimson Tide

"To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee had catapulted to fame when the Saturday Evening Post in March 1963 published an article alleging that Georgia athletics director Wally Butts and Alabama football coach Bear Bryant had fixed a game.

A  friend of Bryant and a rabid Alabama football fan, the author of the 1960 best-selling novel was consumed by the charges, along with football followers around the Southeast.

Lee in a letter to her agent, Maurice Crain, wrote a detailed account of the scandal, according to reporter Ben Cohen's fascinating article in Friday's Wall Street Journal. "A wonderful letter from Nellie Harper Lee," Crain scribbled on the envelope. The letter is at Columbia University, Cohen said.

The Saturday Evening Post's article was based on Atlanta businessman George Burnett's claims that he had overheard a telephone conversation in which Butts disclosed Georgia Bulldog plays and formations to Bryant before a 1962 game won 35-0 by the Crimson Tide. Burnett said that while trying to make a long-distance call, he had somehow gotten connected to the former Georgia football coach and Bryant.

Butts won a $3.06 million judgment in a libel suit against the Post, while Bryant reached an eventual settlement of $460,000. The case, which advanced to the Supreme Court, reportedly played a role in the Saturday Evening Post's demise.

While the controversy transfixed the South, as reported in this 1963 article by famed Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins, Lee's had received greater fame from a 1962 movie based on the now-classic novel. Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for his portrayal of lawyer Atticus Finch and his heroic defense of a black man accused of rape in a segregated small town in Alabama.

Cohen's article says that Lee followed college football all of her life, even listening to Paul Finebaum's Alabama-biased college football talk show. Along with her allegiance to Alabama, Lee rooted for Auburn when the Tigers weren't battling the Crimson Tide in the annual Iron Bowl.

Lee was also a close friend of former Auburn coach Pat Dye, to whom she wrote a number of letters. Dye, who once called her book "To Kill a Blackbird," refused to disclose the letters' contents to Cohen.

Other famous names of Alabama football lore rise in the article. Lee believed in Bryant's innocence because scrappy All-American linebacker Lee Roy Jordan supported his coach. Jordan came from a town near Lee's Monroeville, and Lee believed in Jordan's honesty.

Lee remained a prolific letter writer, while not publishing another novel during her lifetime. The posthumous "Go Set a Watchman" was an early version of "To Kill a Mockingbid." A recent book says that Lee never finished a planned nonfiction book about an Alabama minister accused of several murders.

The new revelations enhance Lee's renown as a writer of letters. Her gifts in the genre were revealed several years ago in retired Auburn professor Wayne Flynt's collection of letters between him and Lee. Giving an endearing portrait of the author, the collection presents her views on religion, politics, Hollywood, the South, writing and fame.

Perhaps Cohen's piece will lead to the publication of a collection of Lee's college football letters. The writer of a masterpiece that inspires new generations of readers, she's also worthy of a complete letters collection.

A woman who during her life counted as friends Truman Capote, Maurice Crain, Bear Bryant, Gregory Peck, Pat Dye and Lee Roy Jordan had an expansive, intellectually adventuresome personality that such a collection would honor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carl A. Weiss Jr. convinced many that his father was innocent of Huey Long's death

The brilliant young doctor Carl A. Weiss Sr. fired the shot at the Louisiana State Capitol on Sept. 8, 1935, that led to Huey P. Long's death, according to the long-established official story.

After the encounter between Weiss and Long in the tumultous hallway between the Louisiana House and Senate chambers, the dictatorial Kingfish's bodyguards opened fire, killing Weiss with a fusillade of bullets. The 29-year-old suffered 62 wounds, according to reports. Receiving a single gunshot wound, Long lingered for 32 hours, dying at age 42.

Carl A. Weiss Jr. was an infant on the night when Long was wounded and his father killed. The younger Weiss, who died Aug 1 at age 84 at his Florida home, devoted his life to seeking to prove that his father was not Long's assassin, as recounted in a New York Times obituary Thursday. Like his father, and grandfather, Carl Weiss Jr. was a physician. He based his successful medical practice on Long Island.

According to the Times, Carl Austin Weiss Jr. discovered the details of his father's death at age 10 when he saw John McGrady's illustration in Life magazine of that wild Sunday night. The senior Weiss, a brilliant young Baton Rouge surgeon, shot Long with his .32 pistol, according to official reports.

But the younger Weiss believed that his father had not even been carrying a gun when he encountered Long for the third time that evening. He believed that Long's fatal wound came from a bullet that ricocheted from a bodyguard's gun.

Speculation about the Long assassination has spawned a number of investigations and books. LSU historian T. Harry Williams in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Long concluded that Weiss was the assassin, firing a single bullet.

Baton Rouge political consultant Ed Reed in "Requiem for a Kingfish: The Strange and Unexplained Death of Huey Long" sided with Weiss Jr.'s belief that his father was unarmed, and only sought to speak to Long. Weiss Sr. punched Long when the senator insulted him, according to Reed, and the bodyguards opened fire, inadvertently striking Long.

Reed and others believed that the bodyguards retrieved Weiss' .32 from his car, parked near the Capitol, and planted the gun near his body.

Baton Rouge journalist Lamar White in an in-depth article for the Pelican Brief web site supports Carl Weiss Jr.'s conclusion that his father was innocent.

Journalist David Zinman in the recently re-released 1962 book "The Day Huey Long Was Shot" gives a thorough account, without reaching a definite conclusion.

Long's assassination led to conspiracy theories from the beginning, including that President Franklin Roosevelt engineered the slaying. Reed and others say Carl Weiss Sr. was upset with Long because of legislation that would have removed his father-in-law from a judgeship in St. Landry Parish. But others discount that theory. Another belief is that the doctor was upset because Long claimed the family of Weiss' wife had Negro blood.

Carl Weiss Jr. met Long's son, Sen. Russell Long, at a cordial lunch, both men distinguished elderly gentlemen. Russell Long reportedly came to believe that Carl Weiss Sr. was innocent, although he backed the official account in public.

The truth will remain unknown, but Carl A. Weiss Jr. made a persuasive case for his father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

J.D. Salinger's books enter the digital age

J.D. Salinger's books will be published digitally for the first time, according to a front page article in Monday's New York Times.

Salinger's works are the last major literary estate to enter the digital world, according to the Times. Although the reclusive Salinger hated technology, the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust decided that his work is being forgotten by a new generation geared to reading on smartphones and computer screens.

"The Catcher in the Rye," "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction," will be converted into e-books, but not audio recordings, Salinger's son, Matt, announced. The estate also will continue its ban on movie versions of the books.

Matt Salinger also told the Times that more of Salinger's writing will be published in the next few years. As rumored, Salinger, who died at age 91, kept writing until the end of his life and produced a voluminous amount of new material.

A lot of the unpublished work concerns Salinger's mystical Glass family, his son said. Unable to find reliable software to convert Salinger's handwritten work into print, Matt Salinger is painstakingly typing the manuscripts.

Long a favorite of middle-school and high school classes, "The Catcher in the Rye" is seen as outdated by young readers today. Girls especially find the book unrelated to their concerns. Black readers also don't find the book relevant.

Yet, Salinger's Holden Caulfield and his memorable portrait of New York City surely will draw younger fans attuned to the beauty of language and Holden's quest for meaning.

I'll be happy to have an e-book copy of "Nine Stories" available for convenient reading. "For Esme in Love and Squalor" is one of those stories I must reread, along with "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and "Just Before the War With The Eskimos."

Along with many other male Salinger fans, I fell in love with Franny Glass, imagining myself also dating her on a crisp Ivy League football weekend. But when I reread the novella a few years ago, it seemed overwrought and treacly.

I consumed "Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters," and "Seymour: An Introduction," but they show a decline in Salinger's writing, with too much exposition at the expense of artistry. Still, narrator Buddy Glass, Salinger's alter-ego, is a good companion.

While I welcome the e-book publication of Salinger's classics, I can't wait to see what he was working on all of those years hiding away in New Hampshire. Perhaps brilliant new masterpieces will arrive, or disappointing, unrealized work. Either way, Salinger fans will greet them in a frenzy.

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Will Jimmy Buffett demolish Fiddlin' John Carson?

Jimmy Buffett's company wants to build a monstrous Margaritaville development in downtown Atlanta, destroying the building where Fiddlin' John Carson in 1923 recorded the first national country hit.

The Margaritaville plan sounds like the kind of high-concept debacle that has plagued the city for years. Remember Planet Hollywood and the ESPN Zone? These urban pleasure palaces sizzle for a few years, then fizzle out, leaving a hole in the urban fabric.

Buffett's development across the street from Centennial Olympic Park would bring the destruction of a small building at 152 Nassau Street where Carson recorded "That Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" in 1923, along with "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow."

Famed New York talent scout Ralph Peer recorded country singer and fiddler Carson and several local black performers at the building for Okeh Records. Despite Carson's wavering voice and the recording's scratchiness, "The Little Old Log Cabin" caught fire. The song's success led to a flourishing Atlanta recording industry, which eventually faded away as country music found a permanent home in Nashville.

Unless architect and downtown resident Kyle Kessler can succeed with a last-ditch effort to save the 152 Nassau building, the original site of Atlanta's recording industry will disappear, according to an excellent article Tuesday by the AJC's Jeremy Turley. Despite Kessler's online petition that has received 8,000 signatures, the Buffett company is preparing for the imminent demolition of the 152 Nassau building, Turley reported.

A deal with former Mayor Kasim Reed led to the Margaritaville developers receiving building permits for a 21-story Wyndham Hotel and time-share condos above an amusement park, according to the article. The city planning department sought to stop the project, but the developers threatened to sue. Reed then told the company he would support the plan if the luxury hotel were included, the newspaper reported.

Designed to draw aging affluent Parrotheads, the development will be near the giant downtown Ferris wheel, State Farm Arena, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the College Football Hall of Fame, the World of Coca-Cola and the Civil Rights Museum.

Despite these attractions, someone would have to be pretty wasted in Margaritaville to buy a time-share in downtown Atlanta. The Buffet company's plan contains all the signs of those Atlanta developments that have crashed in the past.

Ace AJC columnist Bill Torpy sounded the alarm in May about the threat to the Nassau Street building. The preservationists don't want to prevent Buffett fans from having their fun. They only ask that the Margaritaville plan incorporate the building in some way.

But the developers say they need to destroy the building to install a garbage facility, or a restaurant "grease trap," according to the AJC.

The preservationists point out the irony of a Buffett enterprise removing a major landmark of Atlanta's music history. Buffett began his career performing in small Atlanta clubs, according to Torpy and others.

The building on Nassau street isn't that distinctive, and has housed many businesses over the years, including a "Gone With the Wind Museum."

The Buffet corporation could easily find a way to preserve the place, perhaps as a museum of Atlanta's musical history, including Buffett's career.

The country pioneer Carson has a darker tie to Atlanta's history. He stirred anti-Semitic fervor by performing on the street during the Leo Frank murder trial in 1913. Frank, whose innocence has been established by historians, was convicted for the slaying of Mary Phagan and subsequently lynched by a mob in Cobb County.

Along with its place in music history, the 152 Nassau Building should be preserved as one of the last downtown sites dating back to that turbulent era of Atlanta's past.

 

 

 

 

 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Letters Trace Enduring Love

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald never stopped loving each other, their granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan believes.

Lanahan, in a warm introduction to a new collection of Scott and Zelda's letters, affirms her grandparents' enduring love through their final tragic years.

"Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald" collects 333 of their letters, three-fourths of them never published before. Edited by Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, the book includes extensive photos.

In her introduction, reprinted on the Literary Hub Web site, Lanahan looks at her grandparents as wayward romantics, crushed by life's harsh realities.

Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness were the ugly aftermath of their Jazz Age glamour. With their longing for wealth and grandeur, they struggled with money. Their wasteful extravagance forced Scott to constantly churn out short stories to keep the family solvent, even after his best-selling first novel "This Side of Paradise" cast them into the international spotlight.

The letters trace the arc of their rise and fall, from when Scott met the 18-year-old debutante in Montgomery, Ala, through their courtship and doomed marriage, to their sad last chapters. Even when Zelda was locked away in a series of institutions and Scott struggling in Hollywood, they continued to write each other, their love undiminished.

Lanahan never met her famous grandparents. She was two months old when Zelda died in 1948 in a fire at her sanitarium in Asheville, N.C. Scott died of a heart attack at his shabby Hollywood home eight years previously.

Zelda in her final letter to Lanahan's mother, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, expressed how much she wanted to meet the new baby. Lanahan in her introduction says that her mother, known as Scottie, was largely unaffected by Scott and Zelda's turmoil. Scottie also believed their love endured, Lanahan says.

Zelda's literary talent shines brighter than Scott's in the letters, according to a review Wednesday by New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal. Scott's letters are more perfunctory, Sehgal asserts, while Zelda's are jeweled with brilliant metaphors and expressions of love.

The collection again reveals that Scott used passages from Zelda's letters and diaries in his novels. He also made her remove portions of her novel "Save Me the Waltz" that resembled passages in "Tender Is The Night."

As Lanahan acknowledges, Zelda's literary talent was thwarted by the era's repression of women. The new collection fully reveals her gifts.

The Fitzgeralds' dual legacies of waste and accomplishment, luxury and squalor, have been told countless times, beginning with Scott's novels. The new collection gives a deeper intimate portrait.

Lanahan is right to see her grandparents as heroic.

Developer Jamestown Properties hopes to match Ponce City Market success at Shops of Buckhead

The struggling Shops at Buckhead will be purchased by Jamestown Properties, the developer that's made a huge success of Ponce City Market and the White Provisions District in Atlanta.

Curiously, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran this major business story inside its metro section, under the Atlanta portion of its neighborhood news report at the bottom of the page. Even with all of its layoffs, the AJC should have someone around who knows that the deal is more than a neighborhood story.

Obviously just rewriting the company's press release, our fine local newspaper also failed to mention Jamestown's booming Atlanta properties.

Jamestown, which also redeveloped Chelsea Market in New York City and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, is purchasing the six-block site in the heart of Buckhead from OliverMcMillan, a West Coast company that acquired the property in 2012 to much fanfare, promising to create a luxury environment rivaling Los Angeles' Rodeo Drive.

Despite landing the headquarters of Spanx, and drawing luxury stores like Hermes and trendy restaurants like Shake Shack, the fortress-like development at the corner of West Paces Ferry and Peachtree Road has fizzled in Atlanta's finicky market. With sparse traffic, the development has lagged behind the well-established Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza, a few blocks north.

Jamestown didn't disclose the purchase price, but the Atlanta Business Chronicle, with more extensive coverage than the AJC, reported that OliverMcMillan had sought around $200 million. Near the traditional site of Buckhead's founding, the development has 370 luxury apartments, 60 store sites and an office complex that includes the Spanx home.

Now Jamestown will seek to work its magic at the site where developer Ben Carter's "Streets of Buckhead" plans collapsed in the 2008 recession and OliverMcMillan's dreams flamed out. Jamestown, with its local expertise, will hold a series of meetings to gather public input.

Meanwhile, construction continues on high-rise apartments and new developments adjacent to Jamestown's property. The Loudermilk family, with a long presence in the area, has just completed high-rise apartments near the renovated Buckhead Theater.

If Jamestown can make the Shops of Buckhead more welcoming and less forbidding, the development can anchor an exciting residential, shopping, entertainment and business corridor. The Buckhead Triangle might even make visitors think of Times Square. Let's just hope those annoying costumed  cartoon characters never arrive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who will sound the alarm as daily newspapers die?

The collapse of the American auto industry or Silicon Valley would bring widespread alarm. Our broken Congress might even take action to save these vital components of the U.S. economy.

But the death of the American newspaper industry brings indifference. As the Nation's Eric Alterman outlines in his latest media column, local newspapers are endangered. Reporting staffs are slashed to the bone, resulting in little oversight of local and state governments.

While the loss of local reporting and commentary are lamentable, the loss of newspaper jobs weakens local economies Alterman concentrates on news staffs, but newspapers also have ad salespeople and circulation departments. Once, newspapers employed hundreds of printers and press operators, but technology eliminated those trades. Now, the industry's white collar workers vanish. As Alterman notes, PR firm jobs proliferate as newspapers die.

While the collapse of Mad magaine drew anguished cries from aging Baby Boomers, few mourned the death of the Youngstown, Ohio, Vindicator, as Alterman points out. Now, a city with a population of half a million has no newspaper.  Not only will the residents of the declining industrial city receive no local government coverage. They won't have local stories on the Buckeyes or Cleveland Browns.

Alterman praises heroic Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown for uncovering the Florida deal in which accused sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein received a lighter sentence. But Brown's series stands out in a barren landscape; the McClatchy company, which a few years ago had a reputation for quality journalism, has carried out severe staff cuts at the Herald.

Google and Facebook's control of the Internet ad market starves newspapers in medium sized cities like Youngstown and larger ones like Denver and Miami.

With rising online subscriptions, national papers like The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal thrive. But the deaths of daily local newspapers are a code red for those newspapers as well. In a few years, as Trump-style ignorance and racism burn out of control, newspapers may no longer exist.

James Wood details Eton ties to Brexit

"The sun sets on Britain," the London Review of Books' July 4 cover proclaims.

No, the provocative headline has nothing to do with the American Revolution.

Outlined in red above the cover illustration of a darkening sky at twilight, the headline refers to literary critic James Wood's illuminating article on Brexit's connection to Eton, the English school for boys that has bred the country's establishment since its founding by Henry VI in 1440.

Running as the review's regular Diary feature, with no other headline, Wood's piece is informed by his own experience at Eton as a middle-class scholarship student. Unlike Wood, many of the school's young men came from the country's ruling class and generations of school alums, known as Old Etonians.

Etonian David Cameron when he was prime minister called for the Brexit referendum, and left office when it was unexpectedly approved. Brexit proponent Boris Johnson, now the leading Conservative candidate to replace Theresa May as prime minister, attended the school, as did Jacob Rees-Mogg and other Brexit supporters.

Wood echoes author Fintan O'Toole in finding that the Etonians' Brexit advocacy rose from "a combination of Thatcherite lust for economic deregulation and postwar nostalgia for lost imperial might."

The Etonian Brexit supporters all took a general history class at the school at age 13, reading Jan Morris's book about the rise and fall of the British empire, "Heaven's Command." For Johnson, Cameron and Rees-Mogg, Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965 marked the sunset of British glory, briefly restored by Thatcher.

Johnson's admiring biography of Churchill reflects his belief that Britain can revive its greatness apart from Europe. Rees-Mogg has expressed similar views. The Brexit supporters share a resentment that Germany, which lost World War II, leads Europe economically while Britain, a war victor, has declined.

Wood points out that Churchill's great-grandson, Etonian Hugo Dixon, is a main Brexit opponent. Yet old school ties are stronger than political beliefs: Johnson in the acknowledgements for his Churchill book thanks Dixon, at whose Greek home he wrote a chapter.

Unlike Etonians who have joined Britain's ruling class, Wood has enjoyed success in the United States writing for the New Yorker. A Harvard professor, Wood is one of the few literary critics who has achieved widespread readership. Also a novelist, Wood is married to author Claire Messud.

For Wood,  an exit from the European Union will mean "the sun sets on Britain." But he understands that the sun never sets on Old Etonians, whose wealth and power never wane.