‘A gift to Columbus.’ Retired Ledger-Enquirer reporter, editor Billy Winn dies. Funeral set
Retired Ledger-Enquirer editorial page editor Billy Winn has died.
Winn died Tuesday morning from natural causes in Columbus Hospice House, retired colleague Mike Owen told the L-E. He was 87.
The funeral is scheduled for 2 p.m. March 24 at Striffler-Hamby Mortuary, 4071 Macon Road, in Columbus, according to Winn’s daughter Tscharner Dickerson. His obituary is pending.
“He was a gift to Columbus,” said Owen, who was city editor when Winn returned to his hometown in 1986 as a senior writer after writing for newspapers and magazines in Atlanta, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. “I don’t know that the city has ever had a journalist of his stature. We were fortunate to have him come home to work here.”
Columbus native returned to hometown
Winn, a graduate of Columbus High School, retired in 2000. His journalism career involved covering a variety of topics, including the civil rights movement, and he became a respected historian. He authored several books about Native Americans, including “The Old Beloved Path: Daily Life Among the Indians of the Chattahoochee River Valley.”
Owen recalled Winn being a stickler for accuracy.
“He started out at the (Atlanta) Journal-Constitution in the 60s working with Ralph McGill, so his teachers were some of the best in the business,” Owen said. “Of course, you want to be first to report news, but the bottom line for Billy was that you just didn’t put something in the paper that wasn’t right.”
Owen remarked how well Winn pivoted from being a reporter to an editorial writer, changing his focus from keeping his opinion silent to expressing it sharply yet gracefully.
For example, when city officials planned to cut down approximately one-third of the trees in Lakebottom to build more ball fields, Winn led the L-E’s series of editorials that helped change that plan and save trees.
“He wasn’t afraid to call Columbus out,” Owen said, “but he loved Columbus.”
Billy Winn was Ledger-Enquirer’s ‘wise man’
Retired L-E publisher John Greenman considered Winn to be “the paper’s wise man.”
“When he wrote his daily columns, and when he wrote his editorials, he was always thinking of, what’s the humanity in it? What’s the politics in it? Where is the sort of higher purpose? And I think everyone admired him for that,” Greenman told the L-E.
Greenman described Winn as “a distinctly Southern gentleman” who wasn’t afraid to question tradition.
“He was someone with a lot of courage, and where that showed up was when he wrote columns and when he wrote editorials and when he wrote books that challenged a lot of the thinking and the heritage of people who were close to him...” Greenman said. “He was willing to challenge them and ask them to think about their behavior and the behavior of their ancestors. And that was especially true with his last book about how land was acquired.”
That book is “Triumph of the Ecunnau-Nuxulgee: Land Speculators, George M. Troup, and the Removal of the Creek Indians from Alabama and Georgia, 1825-1838.”
In an email to the Ledger-Enquirer, former L-E reporter and editor Jim Lynn called Winn a “wonderful journalist and a wonderful person. Both brains and heart, always wanted his community to be better. I recall in his early days here him conducting a writing class for the staff. Had us buy all manner of used-book classics — a dozen or more — from Dashiell Hammett to Flannery O’Connor.
“The best way to be a great writer is to read a lot of great writing, he would say. He was right. Not sure how many of us actually read all those books at the time, but most have gotten read over the decades since that class. Great guy.”
Owen noted Winn also had a keen sense of humor. Owen, who was associate editorial page editor when Winn was the page’s chief editor, recalled Winn telling Owen and an L-E visitor he was going into his adjacent office to write Owen’s evaluation.
A few minutes later, Winn hollered, “Hey, Mike. How do you spell incompetent?”
The way it was written
Here are excerpts from the article retired L-E reporter and columnist Richard Hyatt wrote about Winn’s retirement in September 2000:
One of his ancestors laid out the streets of Columbus and his father was the city physician, so Billy Winn‘s passion for his hometown is understandable.
For nearly four decades he has written about Columbus and the Deep South, putting its history and its people into clear, decisive words. Since 1990, he has been editorial page editor of the Ledger-Enquirer, sharing views and opinions of the town where he was born and educated.
Come the end of the month, Winn is retiring, leaving more time to teach others to write, to share his love of music, to tinker with his old wooden boat and to write about Columbus.
“You’d have to be a nit-wit not to want to have that job,” he said. “It is a privilege and honor to be editorial page editor of your hometown newspaper. I didn’t deserve it or expect it, but it has been a great experience.”
After a hodge-podge of jobs — from bartender to skin diver to garbage truck driver — Winn broke into journalism as a reporter in 1963. Walking into a newsroom for the first time, he became a reporter at the Atlanta Journal.
“And I couldn’t even type,” he laughs.
Drawing off his personal interests, Winn began traveling around the state writing about what he saw. Some of the things he saw were not so pleasant. The civil rights movement was peaking, and Winn drew the assignment. “It was the best of times to be a reporter,” he said.
In the years that followed, Winn held a number of journalism-related jobs in the South, including the top editorial positions at Atlanta Magazine and Good Life Magazine. He came home in 1986.
“But wherever I was, I had never stopped researching and writing about Columbus,” he said.
It was the tragedy of the Stocking Strangler case that lured him. Many people were moving in with elderly relatives, and he moved in with his Aunt Sis Clason, who lived in the neighborhood where the attacks on women were occurring. Then he began taking a closer look at his hometown, walking familiar streets and talking to people he had known all his life, gauging the effects of the killings on the community.
He joined the Ledger-Enquirer in the fall of 1986, bringing with him an unusual background of talents and skills.
Winn said he has followed the path laid out for him at Wynnton School and Columbus High.
“Those teachers at Wynnton gave me a foundation for education and a love of reading,” he said.
Beginning this semester, Winn is sharing those gifts with students at Columbus State University, joining the faculty as an adjunct professor. He is also a volunteer guitar teacher to young people at the Youth Detention Center when he is not working on his aging Cris-Craft, aptly named the “Beyond Repair.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2026 at 10:48 AM.
