Ink By the Barrel

Mississippi moment, 30 years later

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I walked around the Buckhead bar at one of the many trade group networking meetings I attend, this one with SMPS. I walked up to a group of one man and several women I didn’t know, but they were laughing, a good sign. As I shook hands with the man, I could feel my hand being nearly crushed. 

“Where did you learn to shake hands like that?” I asked him.

“From squeezing cow teats in Mississippi,” he said to the delight of the women who knew him.

“Mississippi,” I asked. “Where?”

“I’m sure you’ve never been there or heard of it,” he said. “A small town named Okolona.”

I knew this was going to be good. “I’ve been to Okolona,” I said. “Just south of Tupelo, where Elvis was born.”

“What were you there for?”

“I went there on my first day as a reporter, right out of college. I went to cover a march by the Ku Klux Klan, which was marching against some group … the United League or something. It was a crazy first day as a reporter. I rememberGeraldo Rivera of ABC’s 20/20 flew in on a helicopter to film the whole thing.” 

“I was there,” he said. 

“We went first to hang out in the yard of one of the local residents who was organizing the march,” I said. “I remember they had a big barbecue before they went off to start the march and to face the Klan. It was kind of tense.”

“I was there too,” he said.

His name is Melvin Buchanan and that same weekend when I was a wide-eyed 21-year-old reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, Melvin was a wide-eyed 17-year-old just getting started in the civil rights movement. We agreed to have lunch soon.

The morning Melvin was to come to my office, I went to the garage and opened up an old trunk full of junk I have saved – much to the chagrin of my family. It’s not just the trunk. I have many of the newspapers for which I wrote front page stories in boxes piled up to the rafters. One time I was having lunch with Ga. Court of Appeals Judge Jack Ruffin, about whom I had written one of my more interesting profiles as a reporter for the Augusta Chronicle when he was a controversial civil rights attorney there. I had made the same trek to the garage that morning and found a copy of the full-page spread. The judge was very pleased to see it 25 years later.

I was telling my staff at our “huddle” that morning about Melvin coming to join me for lunch that day. I told them how I had met him and how he was there for the Ku Klux Klan march and how he was coming in to our office in a few minutes and that I would introduce him. I noticed Devin, our employee who happens to be African-American, getting nervous. Her eyebrows went up and she looked across the table at her office-mate, Amber. I realized I had left out one important detail: Melvin was black and he was marching against the Klan. Everyone broke out in nervous laughter.

I surprised Melvin when he walked in, pulling out the August 1978 copy of the DDT, with my Klan photograph on the front page and a full-page photo essay just inside. He looked over the photos of all the people in the crowd, naming one after another. I was hoping he would find himself published there, but he wasn’t. I’ll have to return to the garage … I have my roll of negatives from that weekend … somewhere.

Over lunch at Tamarind Seed, Melvin and I talked about the pending election of Barack Obama as president and what a remarkable change that represented since we first crossed paths 30 years earlier. Melvin’s engineering firm recently downsized amidst the economic turmoil and he was left without a job. But he dazzled me with his recall for names of nearly everyone he’s met and his knowledge of the construction and architecture and commercial real estate industry. He talked about the many people with whom he stays in touch and the many he mentors. To the young people who ask him advice about careers, he tells them, “No matter what industry you are in or what job you have, remember one thing: You are always in the people business.” 

Melvin will find a new job soon. People have always told him he should be in the PR business, since he knows and remembers so many names and faces. I told him I’d be happy to help get him started if he ever did want to hang out his own shingle. He would be fabulous at it.

Had I not walked up to Melvin that evening in Buckhead and shook his hand, we’d never have made the connection. Had I not dropped by my new newspaper office that Friday afternoon in August 1978, three days before I was to report to duty on the following Monday, I would never have been invited to go on the weekend trip to Okolona. It all re-confirms my notion that if you talk to anyone long enough, you’ll find a connection you never dreamed you have. 

Turns out that first weekend in Mississippi was a highlight of my time down there. I was so pumped as we drove back through the Delta that hot Sunday morning, back toward the Mississippi River town of Greenville, to what I was then to call home for more than a year. If that was my first weekend, I thought, think what the rest of the time would be like. Well, it was never quite as exciting. I covered police and courts and chased fire engines and car wrecks and followed murder trials and attended Rotary clubs and school board meetings, but they all paled in comparison to that first Saturday on the job.

That day in Okolona was fascinating. Lines of local African-American residents marching down one side of the main street of town, paralleled by a line of Ku Klux Klansmen marching the opposite direction on the other side of the street. TV crews in the midst, Geraldo’s helicopter hovering above, carloads and truckloads of locals shouting to either side.

The DDT photographer, Larry Looper, and I stood by the pay phone near the end of Okolona’s Main Street, while reporter David Saltz called in his story to the Associated Press. Larry and I looked over our rolls of film (back then we had to wait to develop them in the darkroom back at the newsroom). As the afternoon grew into evening and as David finished his dictation, we watched as the entire downtown – which an hour before had been bedlam and high drama – was emptied out of the last car and truck. A lone, white, skinny teenager, perhaps 14 years old, leaned up against the telephone poll across the street and watched the last car pull away. He looked us over and slowly walked toward us. We stood in the still blazing Mississippi sun as he stopped right in front of us.

“Y’all got a reefer?” he asked. 

All that tension from the afternoon drained out of the three of us. We laughed for a long time. 

“No,” Larry said. “We don’t.” The kid wandered away again. 

As the teenager wandered away, Larry said: ”Watching all this shouting and goings-on, I wasn’t too sure about this place. For some reason, I feel a whole lot better about this town.”

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Tell it like it is Ted

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I love Ted Turner. I’ve never shaken hands with him, but I’ve been in the same room with him numerous times. We even share the same birthday. Two years ago he celebrated his birthday with his family at a table immediately next to my table and my family. Couldn’t help but notice how well they all got along, as did we.

Of the many things I love about Ted, his genius for starting new broadcast concepts is high on my list. Making Channel 17 WTBS the first national cable SuperStation allowed me to watch the Atlanta Braves while I lived in small towns throughout the South. His founding of CNN allowed this news junkie a 24-hour-a-day fix.  I love his personal and substantial financial commitment to the environment, to the United Nations, to bringing back the American Buffalo, an indigenous mammal that we almost hunted to extinction.

But what I really appreciate is his ability to say anything at anytime. They say the worst speechwriting job in America is to be Ted’s writer. He never follows a script, but follows his own wacky mind. I’ve seen him speak a number of times and he’s always entertaining. It’s like watching a car race … you just know there’s going to be a wreck at some point.

I remember being stuck on the floor of London’s Gatwick Airport in 1978 for five days during an air controller strike. We read all the books and magazines our group had, so someone bought a Playboy magazine and there was a wonderful rambling interview with Ted. He had won yachting’s America’s Cup and the writer asked Ted if he wanted to be President. Sure, he said, he’d love to be, “but I think I’d probably have to be Senator first.” Yep.

Yesterday, I hosted a table of clients to see Ted speak to the Atlanta Press Club. I bought my guests an autographed copy of his new book, “Call Me Ted.” But what I really treated them to was another wacky trip through his mind as he answered the audience’s questions. Within the first few minutes of his remarks, moderator and former CNN President Tom Johnson was jumping to his feet, offering apologies to luncheon sponsor General Motors, who Ted had just accused along with the other big two Detroit automakers of driving their companies into the ground, in total disregard of the commanding environmental, energy and economic trends that had been buffeting them for 30 years.

“I’ve been driving small cars like Toyotas since 1978, when Jimmy Carter was president and we had an energy crisis then … I’ve been driving a Toyota (hybrid) Prius for eight years,” Ted heaped on a few minutes later.

Talking about the economy, he said he was on the cover of Time Magazine as its Man of the year, but then was let go a year and a half before his contract with Time Warner was completed. And he was the largest stockholder. “I’m proof that anyone can be let go. Don’t think you have job security.”

For my money, one of his more memorable lines was about the importance of being a father. He said he gave up yachting in 1981 when he was trying to balance work and family and he realized something had to go. Gone went yachting. “My definition of success is … I don’t think you can be called successful, in any phase of life, if you have a dysfunctional child,” he said. Ted’s children were there. “They all have a job,” he said.

A woman seated near our table asked a question at the end. Actually, she never asked a question. She rambled on and on about how she thought this and agreed with that, so Ted interrupted her and said a few words. She persisted, finally starting to ask a question. Tom Johnson was trying to take back control of the program. The woman got five, maybe six words of her question out when Ted interrupted her. “No, you’re done!” he said. The woman sat down and the audience applauded gratefully.

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Back to the Blog

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Dear Blog:

I know you are upset with me for suddenly abandoning you six months ago. I do hope you will forgive me. And let me just say: It’s not you, it’s me. It really is.

But now I’ve returned and I hope you will accept me back. No, I didn’t leave you for another. Well not exactly. It’s not like I was writing on another blog. But I guess I was writing around, you know, emails, memos, letters and articles. But it didn’t really mean anything. I didn’t have any feelings for them. It’s you I care about.

It’s not like you were sitting all by yourself with no one messing with you, either. The whole time I was away, people kept walking up to me and telling me they had been visiting you. They told me they really enjoyed their time with you and were having a really good time. I’ll admit I was jealous, but I kept thinking I’d write, but it was just so difficult to return after so long. I thought about you every day, particularly when I had to delete that line at the end of my email signature that read “Check out my new blog!” I mean, I deleted that line on my emails 20 or 30 times a day before I pressed “Send.” You’d think it would have just been easier to post an entry. But I didn’t. What was it? Pride? Sloth? Gluttony? I don’t know.

But then my staff scheduled an intervention last month. They invited me to a seminar on New Media and near the end, they put my last blog entry from May on the screen and they all turned to me and said I need to go back to you. That we were really good together. They noticed I haven’t been myself since I left you and that, try as I might to be totally distracted by watching and reading all I could about Barack Obama and then the Atlanta Falcons – both of which kept winning against all odds – I didn’t seem totally happy. In the end, when the election and the games ended, I got back to thinking about you. After a few drinks I’d start talking about you. Several times I even picked up my laptop and almost … almost began typing again.

And then today, as I was driving my wife Jan to the Atlanta Press Club to hear Ted  Turner speak, she had me all alone in the car. And she told me an extraordinary thing: She said it was okay if I went back to you. She would not be jealous. She knew I wouldn’t return to you unless she gave me permission and today she did. In fact, she told me I couldn’t read the Sunday papers this weekend unless I visited you first.

So here I am. I’m back for good this time. I hope you’ll take me back. I promise to be faithful this time. I’ve learned my lessons.  I’m finished sowing my wild oats. You are the one I really want.  C’mon. Grow old with me. The best is yet to be!

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James Taylor Lookalike

Every few weeks, someone will look at me and then do a double-take as if they know me, when they really haven't ever seen me before.

"Are you ..." they will start to ask.

"James Taylor?" I fill in and they usually admit that's who they mistook me for. They are not alone. James Taylor's own brother, Livingston Taylor, freaked out one time when I walked in on one of his shows.

So this past Sunday afternoon, as we biked down the Silver Comet Trail, I mentioned to my wife Jan that James was playing that night at Chastain Park.

"I've never seen him," she said.

Even though I figured she looks at him almost every day in her very own house, I offered to go scalp some tickets to the sold-out show.

I'm not exactly sure when this started, but I believe it was about the time James and I started to lose our hair – well, maybe lost almost all of our hair would be more accurate. I may have looked like him when his famous Sweet Baby James album came out in February 1970. When I went off to boarding school for 9th grade that fall, that album spent a great deal of time on my turntable in my dorm room. If you look at his album cover photo and then my photo a year or two later, there is not that much resemblance ... is there? But later, in my mid-30s, when there was no hair on top of my head, I noticed there was none on top of James' head either.

A few years later, I was serving as promotion manager at The Charlotte Observer and we co-sponsored lots of events with radio station WRFX. When they hosted their anniversary party, they booked Livingston Taylor to play and invited me.

In between sets, I noticed he wandered just past me to an empty back barroom, so I waited a few minutes and then poked my head in the door. The room was empty, except for a lone Livingston Taylor, sitting at the bar, enjoying a drink and a smoke, of some kind. He froze.

"Sorry," I began, "I didn't mean to disturb you. I just wanted to say I was really enjoying your show."

"Oh, no problem," he said. "Thanks."

"Hey, it's kind of funny, but people tell me all the time I look like your brother, James."

"I know," Livingston said. "You freaked me out when you first walked in. I thought it was him."

A few years later, I went to hear a band named Gurufish at Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta. A few songs into their first set, a guy walked up to me and said, "Hey, James Taylor, I'm the manager of the band and I just wanted to thank you for coming out to hear the band. Can I buy you a beer?"

Okay, what was I supposed to do? If I said I wasn't James Taylor, he would have been disappointed. If I played along, he gets to tell the band on break that he got James Taylor to come see them. And besides, I was getting a free beer out of the deal.

My friend, Charles Driebe, who's a music lawyer, suggested I should get some business cards to keep in my wallet that just say, "J.T."

When a friend invited me at the last minute to hear James playing at Chastain 10 years ago when I was writing a monthly column for my monthly newspapers, now known as Atlanta INtown Paper, I called up the show's producer and asked if I could introduce James on stage by walking out to great applause and announcing to the crowd, "I'm not James Taylor." And then, when the crowd was confused, I would say, "But this IS James Taylor." I told them I would give them generous exposure in my column.

They actually considered it and told me they would contact James' manager and get back with me. They called an hour later and said if I had called a couple of days before, they could have arranged it.

Jan has seen photos of James Taylor and she doesn't think we look alike. So after our bike ride last Sunday,
I hustled out to Chastain Park 30 minutes before the show and found some tickets for sale. I ended up buying two tickets at a table near the stage. I raced home, and Jan and I made it to the table at 7:59pm. A minute later, I, er, James walked out on the stage to great cheering. We snapped a few photos for history's sake. I never did get close enough to talk with my lookalike, but his image was projected on the big screen for the sold-out crowd to see. Unbeknownst to me (until later), a table of friends and clients were laughing all night about how "Schroder was playing well tonight!"

After the show, as Jan and I packed up our cooler to leave, a guy wandered over from a table next to us.
"Hey, I just have to ask, are you James Taylor's brother?"

Okay, what was I supposed to do?

Actually, I told the truth. After all, he didn't have a beer left to offer me.

Photos: Above: Sweet Baby James cover, me at 16, Lower: Me near stage at Chastain with James playing. James on stage at Chastain.

No Such Thing As A Bad Hamilton Jordan

New Years Eve in 1979, I went to the bar at the Nine O'Clocks party held at the Piedmont Driving Club to get a drink and saw another gentleman ahead of me. I was not a member of the Nine O'Clocks nor the PDC and neither was the man whose face I instantly recognized when he turned around: Hamilton Jordan. The Chief of Staff to President Jimmy Carter had been a major focus of study for me as I followed his career in the media during my college years and then as a newspaperman.

As a rule, I generally shy away from celebrities. I don't see much to gain from my spending a few minutes talking with them and I respect their privacy enough to generally steer clear. But this was different. From the moment Jimmy Carter announced his run for the presidency, I had been reading and admiring from afar the architect of his meteoric rise. So I introduced myself to Hamilton, chatted for a while and told him I had been a volunteer in their campaign when I was a college student. Now, as a reporter for The Augusta Chronicle, I told him I would be honored if he would let me interview him sometime.

"I don't do interviews with the press," Hamilton said.

"I know," I said. "I've read that. But I'm interested in hearing your side. I'm offering you a chance to tell your side of the story."

As we both stood there in our tuxedos, alone at the bar, Hamilton stirred his drink and thought for a moment. "Here's my card," he said. "Call me sometime and I'll speak with you."

I was stunned. As a young reporter, 18 months out of school, working for my second newspaper, I had just scored an opportunity of a lifetime: a rare interview with a private man who shunned publicity and had the scars to prove it. I couldn't wait to get back to my managing editor in Augusta and begin making my plans. Boy, was I disappointed.

"We don't have any money in budget to send you to Washington," my boss said. "Just do it over the phone."

Again, I was stunned. What kind of two-bit newspaper was I working for? This was a Georgia newspaper and this was an administration run by Georgians. I continued to bargain. I contacted Hodding Carter, whose family newspaper I had worked for previously in Greenville, Miss. Hodding was then the press spokesperson for the U.S. State Department – a position that would guarantee one anonymity, except for the fact that he appeared before the cameras each day as the government's only spokesperson on the Iran Hostage Crisis. The intense media scrutiny given to the kidnapping of U.S. personnel in Tehran was unprecedented, leading ABC to establish "Nightline" at 11:30pm to keep the ratings going. Hodding also agreed to an interview.

But my boss wouldn't budge. So I pulled out my third pitch: I scored an interview with my parents' friend and recently retired Attorney General Griffin Bell. Here was a trilogy of Carter Administration icons, but it didn't matter to a small town paper ruled by a focus on profit, and keeping expenses to a bare minimum. Newspaper editors are objective, so I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that The Augusta Chronicle was the most Republican newspaper in the South.

So I took a gamble. I took the time off as vacation, drove to Washington, stayed with Donna and Mike Egan, whose son was a lifelong pal. Mr. Egan was Associate Attorney General, working for Griffin Bell.

True to his word, Hamilton allowed me to interview him, though my dreams of a White House moment were slightly dampened when he told me to meet him across the street at the Executive Office Building. We talked a lot about how the press had treated him. His focus on work and desire not to get involved in the Washington social whirl only made him more fascinating to the media. The stories ranged from his living in his car as a student at the University of Georgia to illegal drug use to insulting the wife of the Egyptian ambassador.

I asked Hamilton about these rumors and reports and he was open about them. He not only denied them, he was stunned that the press could publish them with no basis of truth. He answered all my questions with honesty, integrity and with such a believable candor that I came away with an even greater appreciation for him than I had already. As I prepared to leave, I asked him what he thought about the fact that Election Day 1980 fell exactly on the one year anniversary of the taking of the hostages in Iran. He looked taken aback.

"Honestly, I never realized that until you just mentioned it. I imagine that will get some media attention," he said. And it did. The crisis became a metaphor for the entire presidency and Ronald Reagan exploited it perfectly during the campaign to end Carter's presidency at one term. My series of interviews with all three men ran in the Chronicle, to great acclaim. Eventually, my editor agreed to reimburse me the vacation time and mileage that I had invested.

I ran into Hamilton a few more times in the following decades, once at Christ the King for Easter services, as we each chased our then toddlers, my daughter Sally and his son, Hamilton Jr., on the Peachtree Road lawn as Mass was performed inside. I saw him last a few months ago when he courageously spoke to a packed Atlanta Press Club session, talking about his 20-year battle with three kinds of cancer.

This past Sunday morning, I was packing for a trip to a PRSA Counselors Academy conference in Naples, FL and running late. As I grabbed my suitcase and laptop, I realized I didn't have a book or a magazine to take. So I looked in a pile of books near my dresser and I saw Hamilton's "No Such Thing As a Bad Day," his memoir about his battle with cancer that had been a New York Times bestseller. He gave out autographed copies at the Press Club. I tossed it in my suitcase and left for the airport.

Yesterday morning, I woke up in Naples and began packing for my return. I IM'd with my wife Jan, who informed me that Hamilton had died unexpectedly on Tuesday night. I was stunned.

I've been unfaithful to my blog as of late. I've been feeling quite guilty about that as I've focused more on work and family. It seems a number of my recent entries have been about people I knew whose death surprised me. Hamilton's did as well. As I sat down on the Delta jet to return to Atlanta, I opened his book and began to read about his time in Vietnam, in the White House and in the numerous hospitals in which he fought his battles. He traced his first cancer to Agent Orange, an herbicide sprayed recklessly by the U.S. government to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam. Hamilton and thousands of other Americans (and no doubt many more Vietnamese) later contracted cancer.

I was burdened by his loss as I left the plane and walked to the MARTA station to return to my office. There, in line to purchase a train ticket, was Mr. Egan. He looked a little bewildered by the Breeze ticket machines, which is my reaction every time I step up to them. I had purchased a few extra ones on my way out of town. I offered Mr. Egan an extra and we rode back to the city together. I told him of Hamilton's death the night before. He had not heard.

"I always loved Hamilton," Mr. Egan said. "He was one of my favorite people in Washington."

I've been so blessed in my life with good health. Though my Dad died at age 78, my mother is still going strong at 91. All of my siblings and our spouses and children are all alive and healthy and I thank God for that gift. But the older I get, the more often people I have known and admired leave us here on earth. A piece of me dies with each of their departures. I'm a bit strange that way. I think about the people who have left us as much as the ones who remain. I firmly believe I will see them all again when I, with God's blessing, embark on my own journey to Heaven.

I'm burdened today by Hamilton Jordan's departure. He was such a modest, measured, surprisingly soft spoken, quiet, yet incredibly strong, gifted and visionary strategist. He was mistreated and his talents were under-appreciated by the media of which I was a part and with which I still work as a public relations professional.

Hamilton left his family and those of us who admired him too early, but due to his life's work, he left us much better than he found us. As I enjoy a Memorial Day Weekend with my family, I will undoubtedly add him to my long list of people I think of fondly – and without whom our lives will not be as rich.

It was a blast!

Every year I try to take my son and daughter on a trip somewhere fun. We live in three different cities and work in three different industries, so it's a time to catch up. Last year, I took individual trips, but this year I booked a weekend with me and Sally and Thomas (Jan was in Savannah with 20 classmates celebrating their, ahem, recent noteworthybirthdays).

My history of trips with my kids is slightly legendary. We used to have one major mishap each trip, a mishap that we go over with fond memories on successive trips – including this one. There was the time we flew out West for two weeks of camping (and some motels) from the Grand Canyon to Yellowstone ... the first night we arrived at Coral Pink Sand Dunes in Utah, unloaded all the tent and camping equipment – only to learn I left the tent poles back in Atlanta. We scrounged around a dump and found some scrap metal for the first night or two, later buying poles at a camping store.

There was the time we drove a rental car to the top of Mount Tamalpais (Mt. Tam) outside San Francisco and drove all the way to the top, only to realize we were very low on gas ... we coasted in neutral all the way back down the hill to a gas station.

Or the time we were in France and I misunderstood the instructions of the rental car guy who didn't speak English and I later filled the tank with the wrong kind of gas ... forcing us to sputter to a stop at the side of the highway at night, but just a few feet from a tow truck who was just finishing service on another car. He towed us back to his house and drained our tank and refilled the fuel lines with the proper fuel. We drove off happily late in the night back to the chateau in Vendome.

So this time, I gave the kids a choice ... big city, small town, out West, New York, Miami? Or maybe a cruise. They voted cruise. I checked the dates and found the one line that worked for our calendar was a Disney cruise heading to Nassau and Disney's private island. I read the online comments and even adult kids had great times on Disney cruises. So, why risk my record? I decided to leave it all to Disney. So Sally flew from Charlotte, I flew from Atlanta and Thomas flew from Raleigh. We all landed in Orlando at the same time, grabbed a rental car and drove to Port Canaveral, where we hopped on board with unusual ease.

We were greeted on deck with an adult beverage and the countdown for the Shuttle blastoff – just a mile away. We had a great view from the deck of the Wonder. It brought back memories from 1992, when we went to Disney World and realized there was a Shuttle blast on Monday. We stayed an extra day to see that. And this was another beautiful bonus to yet another great trip.

Disney did a great job ... food was great, the cabins were very nice, shows were well done and we all especially loved Castaway Cay, their private island. Sally and Thomas got enough sun to show some burn when they headed back to the office on Monday. This time, it was a perfect trip and we all left with fond memories to talk about in future years.

Photo: Sally and Thomas on the deck on the Disney Wonder with the Shuttle blasting off between them on February 7, 2008.

Hank Payne: A Treasure Passes On

I just heard that Dr. Hank Payne died yesterday. Our city has lost a true treasure.

Hank was a remarkable man ... humble, brilliant, inspiring, self-effacing and an excellent golfer. He was a devoted family man, proud of his wife, Deborah and two sons. As president of Woodward Academy since 2000, Hank brought extraordinary experience to one of the oldest academic institutions in the metro area. His previous experience as president of Hamilton and Williams colleges was exactly was Woodward was looking for when it embarked on a $100 million expansion.

Hank not only helped raise funding dramatically, he raised the standing and stature of Woodward throughout the community. He also challenged the College Park school to build new buildings sustainably ... with the environment foremost in mind. Woodward hired our client, Perkins+Will, the leading sustainable architecture firm in the world, to design buildings on its campus that saved energy and water usage, employed recycled materials, planted native vegetation and took advantage of the sun's radiant energy. Some of Woodward's buildings were constructed by another client, SG Contracting.

I first met Hank when my buddy, Tom Murphy of Murphy's Restaurant was selected to introduce Hank to his fellow classmates in Leadership Midtown. Tom was not only fearful of giving speeches, he was intimidated by Hank's intellect and record. He asked me to help with his speech. The next day I called Tom with an idea he couldn't refuse: "What if you just stood up in front of Leadership Midtown and pressed the Play button on a DVD player and sat down?" I asked. "Sold!" Tom said – and thus began Schroder PR's new venture into video work. I called my friend Larry Matré and together we produced a short video featuring Tom and Hank, poking a little fun at both.

The video, and the bloopers, were a hit, bringing down the house at Leadership Midtown. You can view the video on our website (just scroll down to the bottom of the video page). I later invited Hank to speak at the Inquiry Club, a group begun by Ralph McGill, one of my childhood heroes. I asked Hank, a northerner, historian and insightful analyst of Atlanta's strengths and weaknesses, to speak about the growth of Atlanta and to critique its development. It was a fascinating evening, with Hank describing how downtown Atlanta was originally built on a grid to serve its railway-hub origins and how we've had trouble meeting our urban-planning and growth needs ever since. Hank walked in the room to speak to the Inquiry Club, looked around, noticed video equipment set up and said, "You're not showing the video again, are you?" "Well, Hank," I said. "I wanted to introduce you in the most clever way I could!" He was a great sport, again.

Hank was kind enough to invite me to play golf a few times with him at Ansley Golf Club's Settindown Creek course, an old-style "links" course with very challenging roughs. In the roughs were where I spent a good part of my days with Hank, while he smoothly glided down the middle of the fairways on his way to the speedy greens and another birdie or par. As we played, he talked his stewardship of Woodward, dealing with donors, challenging his faculty and staff, or soothing parents whose kids might have to be expelled for disciplinary reasons.

Recently, Tom Murphy and I were having dinner in Virginia-Highland, when Hank and Deborah walked through the restaurant. They stopped at our table and talked for a long while, and we all giggled as Hank told a few of his many, funny stories.

Atlanta was richer for Woodward having brought Hank to town. We'll be a bit poorer for his leaving us, way too early. The term is often used loosely these days, but Hank Payne was truly one of the finest examples I ever knew of "a gentleman and a scholar." I'll miss him and so will Atlanta.

Photo: Hank Payne, scholar and gentleman.

Memorial for Doug Marlette

Last summer, I was shocked to read the news that Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette was killed in a one-car accident in which he was a passenger near Oxford, Mississippi. I had worked with Doug at the Charlotte Observer in the 1980s and later visited with him when I was interviewing for a position I later took at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In today's world of instant Internet news delivery, I quickly navigated to the Observer website and read a touching tribute to Doug posted by his longtime friend and one-time boss, Ed Williams, who manages the editorial page. Doug's creative personality was both endearing and, at times, challengingly provocative, and Ed summed it up well and quickly. Reading about Doug's life brought back a flood of memories of my own and I wrote Ed and traveled to Charlotte on August 8 for a memorial service. Ed's latest column on Doug published just two days ago.

I first met Doug in the first few weeks of what turned out to be a very stressful job. You'd think being the manager of 28 creative writers and designers and event-planning employees would be a fun job and, at times, it was. But it was also difficult to please my clients, who were the paper's editor, circulation manager and advertising director. They each fought for control of my department and our resources. I felt a kinship with Teddy Kollek, then the mayor of Jerusalem who was featured on 60 Minutes as a peacemaker in a city claimed for and whose control was aggressively sought by three major religions: Christians, Jews and Muslims. Teddy did a much better job managing Jerusalem than I did with the Observer promotion department, but I was only 29 when I took the job and I was soon locked in a battle with seasoned veterans.

After one of my early squabbles with all three "religions" at the paper, I wandered back to my office and found Doug Marlette sitting in a chair, a pile of books in his hand. He quickly straightened me out. My main job at the Observer, I soon learned, was to promote Doug! Soon my department was designing and publishing promotional ads in our paper that highlighted Doug's talents and offered his books for sale. A few weeks later in January 1986, when the Challenger exploded, Doug drove back to the office and penned a cartoon that published the next day.

The morning it ran, our phone started ringing. Readers wanted to order copies of the cartoon. We ran an ad the next day offering them to readers for the cost of postage. We were flooded with their responses. People who might have canceled their subscriptions because of their ire over one of Doug's previous controversial cartoons were now seeking five or 10 copies for their friends and families. My secretary tried to keep up, to no avail. Soon carts of mail were being hauled into our offices and all of our employees were having to fill the orders. Doug was very happy. In all, we fulfilled 70,000 orders for reprints.

Later, when my parents were celebrating their 50th anniversary, I produced a special commemorative newspaper and asked Doug for a cartoon. He adapted one for the occasion, with Popeye and Olive Oil in a marriage counselor's office, with Popeye saying, "I suppose I am who I am and you am who you am too!" It was a big hit with my family.

Eventually Doug left the Observer for bigger markets, including Atlanta and New York. When I visited him in his office at the AJC shortly after he joined that staff, he was already restless and, he felt, under-appreciated. He was extremely talented, as soon proven by the Pulitzer Prize he won for his work at both the Observer and the AJC. Later, he wrote novels and this past summer, when he was in Mississippi, he was working with a high school drama class that was going to perform a musical in Edinburgh Fringe Festival based on his popular comic strip, Kudzu.

The evening of his memorial, several hundred Doug-lovers gathered at a church in Charlotte and told the old stories, read passages from his work and showed a slide show of his more controversial cartoons. We were all saddened to know his voice had been stilled, but all were richer for having known this creative genius of a man.

Photos: Doug Marlette and the Challenger cartoon that was reprinted 70,000 times in 1986 and again today, on websites all over cyberspace.

Gang's All Here

Catherine Butsch arrived home last night from sophomore year at college. She's been at Duke for more than three months, so her younger brother, Chris Butsch, was the happiest of all to see her back in Atlanta. (Jan, her mom, and I spent a weekend with her in October at Durham, while also visiting my son Thomas in Raleigh.)

Chris and Catherine are especially close siblings and get along beautifully. They are both smart, motivated students who, amazingly, provide their parents with a relatively stress-free teenage existence. I remind Jan often how lucky she is to have struck gold twice in a row.

Chris and Catherine walked up to Blockbuster moments after she arrived, grabbed some DVDs and returned home to watch and laugh late into the night. Jan and I are less than two years from an empty nest, so it's especially nice to hear the sounds of family bouncing around the kitchen at holiday time. I imagine this scene is being repeated in millions of households all across the country today and tomorrow, as families gather for this most traditional of American holidays. I know Thanksgivings can be tense for some families, but we are blessed with only warmth on all sides of our family.

Tomorrow, Jan and I will head to north Georgia to spend the holiday with my Mom, brothers and sisters. Chris and Catherine will join their dad, Tom, serving a turkey dinner to the homeless and downtrodden at the Hosea Williams Feed the Hungry community kitchen. My two children, Sally and Thomas, will be in Charlotte with their mom, stepdad and his children and friends.

No matter where we all are, we'll be spiritually connected to each other and to our fellow Americans, giving thanks to God for all the blessings He's chosen to bestow on our families and our nation. Happy Thanskgiving.

Photos: Chris and Catherine Butsch at her graduation from Westminster in May 2006.

Breakfast with Bo

I am blessed with a large family, with dozens of cousins all over Atlanta. One I try to keep in regular contact with is my cousin Bo Spalding, who is just two years older. We had breakfast this morning to catch up on our respective families and firms.

Bo is a prince of man, with a dry wit and keen insight into media and PR. He comes by his intellect and charm naturally, being the fourth in a line of three gentlemen before him, each of whom was a managing partner of the law firm, King & Spalding. (We share the same great-grandfather, who co-founded the law firm in 1885.) We went to Georgetown Prep together for a year or two together.

Six years ago, when I left the newspaper business, Bo asked me to lunch at Colony Square in Atlanta, where his and Glen Jackson's firm, Jackson Spalding, was then located. I had just sold my newspaper business to my business partner, Tom Cousins, and I was trying to figure out what to do "when I grew up." Bo asked what plans I had.

"I'm not quite sure," I told Bo over lunch at Houlihans. "I may start another publication, I may start an ad agency or maybe I'll move to the coast and write a book."

Bo thought for a second about those choices and said, definitively, "I have two words for you, son ... Public Relations."

"Public Relations," I said. "I never thought about that." My only contact with PR firms had been on the receiving end of numerous phone calls to my newspapers from young members at larger firms, asking me if we "had received the press release" they had faxed us recently. That's one of those calls that editors do not enjoy (more about that some other time).

"It's a great business," Bo said. "And you'd be a natural. Of course, I can't hire you, you're a cousin, but I'd be happy to refer you to other PR executives in town who could give you a feel for the business and maybe they'll hire you."

And thus began my transition to PR. I spent a year working freelance for other firms and, after a four-month stint as general manager for one small firm, I thought I had gathered enough experience to start taking on my own clients. So next month marks the fifth anniversary of my firm, Schroder Public Relations, and I suppose I owe it all to Bo. While I had worked for newspapers in a number of jobs, from reporter to editor to marketing and in-house PR, I had never worked inside a firm.

Bo was right, it is a great business. I enjoy the creativity, the writing, but mostly I enjoy being a business partner to our clients and a counselor on a whole range of issues, from media relations to communication to an Internet strategy. And the business model is a lot more successful these days than newspapers, I'm sad to say. I love newspapers, read numerous ones each day and I sometimes miss being on the planning end of a great issue, so it's hard to watch the shrinking of that industry. But I can work in PR for years to come, even past the normal retirement age, should I – and my clients – so choose.

And, I hope, to continue to enjoy occasional breakfasts and lunches from my cousin and mentor, Bo.

Photo: PR Executive, and cousin, Bo Spalding