Chuck Williams: Claybrook was old-school newspaperman

Clint Claybrook was as crusty as two-week-old bread. He put the mudgeon in curmudgeon.

He was a newspaperman, old school, of course.

He could be ill of temper, had no tolerance for fools and simple-minded editors. He could bark with the best of them, but rarely did he bite.

He looked like the crazy chemistry professor you had in college. And when someone was feeding him a line of public relations garbage, he would call them on it. And, I can assure you he did it in a less than diplomatic way.

That was just Claybrook.

Decades ago, newsrooms were full of guys like Clint Claybrook. Today, not so much. Claybrook, who spent several years at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer primarily covering military affairs in the 1980s and '90s, died last week. He left the area several years ago and word of his passing reached the newsroom via an email from his daughter Sharon Powell.

Claybrook was 77 and died of lung cancer.

Let me just say, I loved Clint Claybrook. And that was not an easy thing to do some days.

Claybrook and I went back -- way back. In the mid-1980s, we found ourselves in the same newsroom, Wiregrass Today in Dothan, Ala. The first time I met Claybrook, I can remember exactly what I thought: "Now, that's a different kind of cat."

And he was.

Wiregrass Today published for about a year. It was what happens when a talented and smart weekly newspaper editor and a couple of trucking magnates ante up $5 million and try and take on an established newspaper company. You do good journalism and end up going out of business.

A few years later, I was hired by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, and I found Claybrook. I am pretty sure he put in a good word for me before I was hired.

He was four or five years older, a little more salty and covering Fort Benning. Claybrook was what happened when you told an old Marine he had to cover the Army and Fort Benning. At times, it was all-out war.

He was truly a reporter who was seasoned by his assignments. He covered the Civil Rights Movement for the Meridian (Miss.) Star. He had a front-row seat for the 1968 murder trial of seven Klansmen convicted of killing a Civil Rights worker in Philadelphia, Miss. His reaction story to the verdict that portrayed local residents sympathetic to the Klansmen made a lot of folks really angry. The truth has a way doing that.

He covered Alabama politics, including former Gov. George Wallace. I would have loved to listened to Claybrook interview the governor.

He went to Iraq and Somalia for the Ledger-Enquirer, embedded with Fort Benning troops. You could tell those assignments had an impact. He was as cynical as they get.

During the mid-1990s the Ledger-Enquirer newsroom was under what some would call mismanagement instead of management. It drove Claybrook crazy.

One day, we learned that Claybrook had put himself on probation. Read that sentence again: Claybrook had put himself on probation. I asked him what he was thinking.

He told me they were going to put him on probation, so he just did it himself. He didn't want the bosses to get the satisfaction of doing it. That was Claybrook. That was his logic and that was the way he looked at the world.

I loved the guy -- absolutely loved him. He was my kind of people.

Some folks didn't think he was that smart because he didn't throw it in your face. They didn't know he attended Vanderbilt and George Washington University. He was plenty smart.

He left the Ledger-Enquirer not long after he put himself on probation, working for smaller newspapers, including the Phenix Citizen then for a group of weekly papers based in Manchester, Ga., that Millard Grimes owned.

Over the years, I lost track of Claybrook. About three or four years ago, I saw him. He was older and a little more mellow and had survived heart bypass surgery.

There are many Claybrook stories. But I want to leave you with just one. When Sharon asked if anyone had any stories about her dad, this is what I sent her.

We were in the final weeks of Wiregrass Today. The paper was going belly up, and we knew it. I was in the managing editor's job, though I was not qualified to do it. Claybrook was reporting out in the areas around Dothan, fertile Wiregrass soil.

We got a call from an elderly black woman who had lost some livestock -- chickens and pigs. Claybrook said he was going to go out to Geneva County and talk to her. And he did. Turns out something was killing the livestock and ripping their heads off and sucking the blood out of them. The sheriff told us it was no big deal. He was worried we might fuel rumors of a Satanic cult in the deep woods of south Alabama.

Claybrook figured out it was probably a Florida panther, not a bunch of devil worshipers.

The next day the Dothan Eagle -- our competition that was not going out of business -- ran a short brief buried deep in the paper about the dead livestock. We ran a screaming front-page headline that read something like: "Pig eating beast terrorizes Geneva County."

The sheriff of Geneva County was beyond angry. He told Claybrook to never come back or he would arrest him.

And he meant it.

For years, Claybrook and I had an inside joke about the pig eating beast of Geneva County. We would see a good story, and say something like, "Yeah, but it's no pig eating beast." We shared many a laugh over that day we "practiced" journalism in the face of our own economic disaster.

The last week I have laughed -- and cried -- thinking about that story. Claybrook, you were one of a kind, brother -- one of a damn kind. And I am richer for you having come my way.

Contact Chuck Williams, senior reporter, at chwilliams@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published September 7, 2015 at 5:30 PM with the headline "Chuck Williams: Claybrook was old-school newspaperman ."