Sunday Interview with Billy Winn: 'I have read almost every edition of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer printed'

Winn, who came out of Columbus High in the mid-'50s, wrote for newspapers and magazines in Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, before coming home to stay in 1987 to finish his distinguished career in his hometown.

Reporter Chuck Williams sat down with Winn last week in his home on Front Avenue across from the Chattahoochee River and talked about Columbus, journalism, history and the Ledger-Enquirer.

Seventeen West 12th Street. What does that mean to you?

It is the life of all of those people who worked there over the years. It brings back so many memories and I am just overwhelmed when I think about the place. All of the stuff that we have been through in what is a relatively short period of time -- 30 years, let's say, for most of us. So many things have happened. Columbus has changed so much. The newspaper business has changed more than Columbus has changed -- all of the effort that goes into putting out a daily newspaper.

Certain people just leap out at me when I think about it. Certainly Mary Margaret Byrne is one person that I think of. Then, of course, Jack Swift. But there were so many others. But I grew up here. I remember way back into the '50s and even have some memory of the '40s because I am a child of World War II. I remember stopping reading the Ledger and Enquirer when they took Red Ryder and Little Beaver out. That was just an outrage. I have never forgiven the paper. I haven't read the comics since 1951 -- and I don't intend to ever read them until they put them back in there.

Why are newspapers so important to people in a community like this?

Oh, Lord. I would rather have a good newspaper than a good police department. Newspapers are absolutely essential everywhere, but they do several things that no other news outlet does. We are almost the sole source of daily information on the community. This is especially brought home to me since I grew up with radio news -- and that is all but a thing of the past. And radio news is largely local. I remember in Atlanta when I worked for the Journal-Constitution, WSB was essential for reporters to follow because Aubrey Morris, who was a great reporter, beat us on a lot of stories. That was true here in Columbus for years and years. WDAK, WRBL, all these local stations, provided citizens with another take on local news and supplemented what we did. But if you wanted to live an informed life, your first resource of information was the daily newspaper. It still is. And I think it always will be.When you talk about the paper, it may be electronic one day, right?

That worries me. I am old school. I am wedded to the printed page, I am afraid. I have never read the paper online, never intend to. I never read the New York Times online, never intend to. I always go get the paper and sit down and read it.

You do realize you are a dinosaur?

I am a dinosaur in many ways. It is too important a part of my personal culture to make a complete change to video, for example. I think there is something distinctive and elemental about the printed page. It is permanent -- in any sense that anything we do is permanent. You can carry it around with you, stick it in your back pocket, fold it up and stick it in your briefcase. It gives another degree of physical continuity to the news. Since I do a lot of research, I am tremendously dependent on newspapers. And I have read almost every edition of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer printed. I have read a lot of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the New York Times. I have been reading papers all my life.

You are a noted historian. How difficult is it to write the first draft of history?

I am really not a historian. I am a journalist. And I am proud to be a former newspaper journalist. I have an undergraduate degree in history. So, I am not qualified to be a historian.

John Lupold is a historian, right?

Yes, and he is rightfully recognized for that. He did all the academic work you have to do to earn that. So did Virginia Causey. I had an opportunity to be a historian. I was in graduate school. I was covering the civil rights movement and I made a deliberate decision that covering the civil rights movement was more important than becoming a historian. So, I dropped out of graduate school and devoted my whole life to journalism. And I am not sorry that I did.

How did covering the civil rights movement for the AJC shape your career?

The civil rights movement changed my life in more ways than one. First, I was a small frog in a big pond. That really helped me. I was able to get into places and cover things without having such name recognition that I interfered with my own stories.

It was also the moral impact it had on my life. Dr. King changed my life. So did the whole experience of being on the scene of so many incidents that I covered -- not only the civil rights movement in Atlanta, which was a boiling pot for the whole civil rights effort in the '60s. We covered SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). We covered John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael. We covered the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). ...

It was not just Dr. King and the SCLC, but it was a place where the philosophy of the movement was developed. All of that had an impact on me.

Then, the friendships with the reporters I got to know from Ralph McGill, who considered himself a reporter and was one, to Celestine Sibley to the whole crowd also impacted my life, gave purpose and meaning to it. I started taking not myself seriously, but what was happening seriously. I am 76 years old, and I am still writing about the civil rights movement. I will go to my grave thinking about those people. It is really interesting to me that Selma is back in the news. I grew up with Selma. One of my first memories with being conscious of the civil rights movement was when I was eating dinner at my grandmother's house over on Blandford Avenue in Overlook. Somebody brought up Rev. (James) Reeb who had been beaten to death by a mob in Selma. My grandmother said, "He got just what he deserved. Pass the chicken, please." I was in my teenage years, maybe I was 20-something. And that stuck in my mind and I have never forgotten it. "He got just what he deserved. Pass the chicken, please." I don't eat a piece of fried chicken that I don't think about that.

Really, it was the envelope of not just my life, but my generation's life. Not all of us were on the Vietnam bus. That mainly effected a generation that came along after mine.

What year did you come home?

'87.

How hard is it to be a top-flight journalist in your hometown when your family has been part of the fabric of the community for so many years?

It is one of the hardest things about it. As long as you are reporting, you have the assurance if you report accurately and your sources are good that, generally speaking, if people disagree with you, they will accord your respect. At least, you told the truth as near as you could come to it. But there is all the baggage that comes along if you happen to be writing about somebody you grew up with or who was your outfielder when you were at Columbus High or you dated, for example. All of the people who were my mother's friends and my daddy's friends who raised me, they read the paper. I used to get phone calls from two people every morning. One was Miss Sarah Bickerstaff, who was a good friend of my mother's. And the other was Norman Rothschild. They would usually tell me everything we had done wrong in the paper, Miss Sarah more kindly than Norman. Norman always wanted me to do editorials about dogs and children. He didn't like either one.

My Aunt Sis (Clason) would call right after they would call. She didn't like anything I did for the paper. And she particularly disliked the Indian stuff. She would chew me out for doing that. She said, "Billy, I have known some people to make bad career choices in my life, but this Indian stuff you are into is the worse I have ever known."

So, your day started every morning taking one for the team?

If you are in the editorial department, you get all kinds of calls. I had one guy call up and say, "Mr. Winn, if I could get away with it, I would kill you." I said, "I hope you don't." And he said, "If I can, I will. Good luck."

Race was a particular thing that got people fired up. Any kind of racial stuff you wrote about -- and if you offered an opinion about race -- then you got a reaction.

You have never been shy about offering an opinion?

I felt that was my main responsibility when I came back here was to write about race.

To many people -- especially the old Columbus people -- you became the face of the newspaper, right?

Well, I don't think of myself that way.

But others did, right?

Perhaps. For so many years I thought Mary Margaret Byrne was the face of the newspaper. For my crowd, to a large degree, she was. If for some people I was, then I am proud of it. I love the paper so. I was proud of the paper, and I still am. I told Rodney Mahone how proud I was of the paper and what it had accomplished and how much I hope y'all keep doing what you are doing because you are doing a good job.

Talk about what Jack Swift did as editor of the Ledger-Enquirer.

I wish somebody would give Jack credit for what he did for Columbus and for the paper instead of the fact that he took his own life. That was a great tragedy. But it shouldn't obscure what he did. People have forgotten that Jack was one of the people -- I don't know if he was first but he was certainly one of them -- that decided what we needed to do was develop the riverfront. Before that time down on the river it smelled bad. It was dirty. It was a place homeless people hung out. It was very negative and people had a very negative impression of it. Well, Jack began to assign reporters to travel around the state -- and I got several of those assignments to Savannah and Augusta and elsewhere -- to investigate riverfront developments in those cities.

... Jack spent the time and money to send some of us around to get the basic knowledge of it. After we had been working on it for a couple of years, we had some of the best information in the city on it. ... This was when Beyond 2000 was going on. He kept that in the forefront of the public conscience, often on the front page and in the editorial.

Look what it led to. ... I think Jack deserves some sort of brass plate down on the riverfront recognizing what he did. Because everybody else has gotten recognition and Jack has been forgotten -- overridden, because of the tragedy of his death.

You know the Phenix City story very well. Talk about the role the newspaper played.

Yes, I do. I was a teenager when all of that was going on.

Was that the proudest moment in this newspaper's history?

It was certainly a proud moment. But I think the paper has had many moments that equal that. The earlier Pulitzer that Julian Harris won for going after the Klan and standing up to the Klan. That was an extremely brave thing to do at the time. Hell, we had the Klan in the newspaper. The police department was run by the Klan.

I think that was a fine moment. But there have been others. A lot of the good things people have done at the Ledger-Enquirer have never been recognized. We are an isolated community. There are people in the New York media, Washington media and Los Angeles media who have never heard of Columbus, Ga., and don't know anything about the work we have done. Without the paper, Columbus would have been more isolated and would have remained fixated on the 1940s and 1950s when Phenix City was, quote, cleaned up, by the way.

Quote, cleaned up?

That was a real important in the future development of the Bi-Cities. Without that success -- and it was successful -- I doubt we would be where we are today. That freed Phenix City from a lot of baggage. A lot of quality people have stepped forward.

We are just about to have an academic lake in the middle of Columbus. With the development of Troy State over there and CSU in downtown Columbus -- and CVCC has been talking about building on the other side of the river -- it is a remarkable development.

Remember 20 years ago in Columbus? We used to say you could fire a shotgun anywhere on Broadway and you wouldn't hit anybody.

When you were in high school, CSU didn't exist, right?

It started and it was located in Shannon Mill. That was due to William Henry Shaw, by the way. Dr. Shaw pushed all that. He was superintendent of Columbus schools and he was pushing that idea all the time. "Let's get a university here. Let's get a college here." People thought he was crazy when he wanted to put the county and city school system together.

What is the most significant story the Ledger-Enquirer has covered in your lifetime?

Civil rights.

Over the Stocking Strangler?

For example, the murder of Dr. Thomas Brewer here in 1956, that's known around the world. The CBS documentary "Eyes on the Prize," and the book is dedicated to Dr. Brewer. People all over the world know of Dr. Brewer. That took place right in the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott. The world knows that as part of Montgomery bus boycott story and the real awakening of the civil rights movement here in Columbus.

Now, there had been efforts earlier by Dr. Brewer when he was head of the NAACP here that made it clear change was coming. People used to like to say Columbus had no civil rights movement. Well, it did. It's just the head of the civil rights movement was killed. Don't misunderstand the drift of history there. That was a world-class event and still is. People of Columbus don't realize. Not even black people seem to realize it.

Since you retired from the Ledger, you have written the histories of several Columbus institutions -- St. Luke, Columbus Regional and what others?

The museum. That was one of my strategies. One of my ideas was if people don't like to read history, I can get them to read it. One of the ways to approach it was to write about institutions they are interested in -- for example, a church or something like Synovus or Columbus Regional -- and try to work the history in not too obviously. Most people will pick up something like, say, the history of the museum, and expect it to be public relations. They don't expect to get hard history.

My whole notion was you put the good and the bad in history. That's the way history works. I was able to convince several heads of those organizations to allow me to do real histories. I must thank Rev. Hal Brady at St. Luke, who literally called me on the phone and said, "Put the bad in there with the good and fear no one." That is a direct quote. That is what I tried to do.

When you wrote about St. Luke, you were trying to do the history of the city, right?

Yes, I did. I wanted to talk about Columbus and, particularly, racial stuff that had gone on. And show how the church membership, leaders influenced the development of Columbus. And how the development of Columbus and the civic leaders influenced St. Luke. I wanted to take congregational history to another level. I still believe that the future of history is local. What immensely local institutions do we have virtually no history on? The first thing that comes to mind is the churches. And there is so much material that has never been looked at seriously in these churches. The Methodists, as you know, write everything down. There is a huge amount of research waiting out there for some enterprising reporter to dig in and come up with amazing stories.

Will you ever write the book on Carlton Gary and the stocking stranglings?

Chuck, I am still involved in active research on it. We'll just have to see. I have other things I am doing. I have a history of the removal of the Creek Indians from here, 1825-1838, that is coming out in the spring. It is a huge book. Bigger than the St. Luke book.

I tell you what, it is hard for me to write if I am not emotionally involved in the subject. I have done too much writing to just do reportage. It has to have a point to it. When you are at the paper, it is going in the daily paper -- it might have some impact, and it might do something good.

... I have a moral quandary about the strangler book, and I have a professional quandary about it. It's like I have writer's block if I can't find some way personally to enter the flow of the narrative. Where are we going to end up if we do a book about Carlton Gary and the stranglings that we don't know already? I mean, what's the point of doing that kind of stuff?

I struggle with that, yet I know I got the stories that have never been published -- lots of them, hundreds of them. And I know there is a value to that. But I don't want to make pornography out of violence. There are too many people doing that now.

Where did the fascination with the Indians start?

(Laughter) I tell you, I am a child of World War II. I am really not a child of World War II. I really grew up mentally in 1840, 1850, 1860 down in Russell County where my grandmother Clason and Aunt Elba (Waddell) grew up. All of my childhood was filled of stories of Russell County, the river and the steamboats coming up the river. My grandmother's tales ...

Romanticized?

Romanticized. I grew up with the Civil War, almost to the point I break down in hives when anyone mentions the subject around me. I almost went nuts listening to it as a child.

You have a picture of Gen. Lee in this room?

Grandmother disliked Lee, by the way, because he was a Virginian. She would tolerate Stonewall Jackson because she liked his wife.

Something else about me -- and this embarrasses me to talk about, but since you are here to do that: I am not driven by history. My principle interest in life has always been literature. I was always influenced by the American literature of the 1930s. That is where my engine is revved.

Last week, you walked through the Ledger building. What kind of memories came back?

(Pause) Memories of Connie Johnson, Carroll Lisby and Jack Swift, of course. Memories of the reporters we had, including the crazy ones. Memories of opening the drawer of one of the reporters Jack hired and looking down and there was a loaded .357 magnum sitting there in that drawer. And we knew this guy was nuts. That was not the only pistol I dealt with in journalism, by the way. I faced a .357 magnum pointed at me. We had a guy at the Atlanta Journal who married a stripper and she left and ran off with somebody. And he walked into the building one day -- and I will never forget -- with a pistol in his hand and was going to shoot himself in the newsroom. The newsroom just cleared out.

I think of many people. I think of Harry Franklin, fondly. Of course, I think of Mary Margaret every day. She remembered people's names. I can't remember all the names of the people I grew up with. I miss her. And I miss the work. I always thought that being a reporter -- and I was an editor in several places and I never gave a rip about being an editor -- was what I wanted to do. I miss being on the street and doing the reporting. It is the most important thing you can do. If you get to be editor of the New York Times, you cannot do anything more important than what you are doing right now. It is a huge moral responsibility. And I wish the public appreciated it more. It is where the rubber meets the road in this society.

So, what are they going to call it now? They can't call it the 12th Street Rag anymore?

The Webster Building Rag doesn't sound very good.

It's the Hardaway Building.

No, that's the Webster Building. It was the courthouse when they built the 1895 courthouse that was torn down. The most infamous incident that happened in Columbus for many, many years was a double lynching that began in the Webster Building. We have a famous picture of it. I wrote a long, long story about it.

And I just say Webster Building because it irritates many people. It has been called four different things in my lifetime. It was the Schwob Building, for a while, the Hardaway Building.

Everywhere you look, there is history, right?

Yeah, true. ... Including down here (in the Historic District). Sometime when I walk around, I walk around with people from the past. I am getting a little crazy. I guess I always was.

This story was originally published January 31, 2015 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Sunday Interview with Billy Winn: 'I have read almost every edition of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer printed'."