in case you missed it, another gem from jim...

wooten of the atlanta journal-constitution.

Publisher loved to help others succeed

By Jim Wooten
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/25/07
Family-owned newspapers, this one among them, are the love of my professional life.

It is an affection seeded in happenstance —- and, indirectly at least, in the promise of a West Macon boy whose potential opened a door to others. I was among them.

It is the season for gifts and thanksgiving, for remembering those whose presence in our lives made a lasting difference.

For me, and for the boy of promise who preceded me at our hometown newspaper, the man was Peyton T. Anderson Jr., owner of The Macon Telegraph and News. Almost two decades after his 1988 death at the age of 80, Peyton Anderson's gifts continue to make a difference to the communities that his paper served.

"Jim: You should consider doing a column one day on what Peyton did for you, me and others. Just a thought. Tom"

"Remember 'It's a Wonderful Life'?" I asked. "How would we have been different had he not been born —- or disposed to help Macon's children?"

"Had Peyton not provided me with financial aid, I could not have attended college," replies Tom Johnson. And without that, none of the other opportunities that came his way, says Johnson, an assistant in LBJ's White House who later became president of The Los Angeles Times and chairman and CEO of CNN before retiring in 2001.

Had Johnson, who started at the morning Telegraph as a ninth grader reporting on his school's sports teams, not succeeded early, Anderson might not have been inspired to continue funding the college educations of those who passed through his newsroom.

In 1963, I graduated from high school and Johnson graduated from the University of Georgia. "Tommy, what is it you want to do with your life?" Anderson is quoted as asking in Jaclyn Weldon White's "Bestest: The Life of Peyton Tooke Anderson Jr." Replied Johnson: "I want to be a publisher, just like you."

Anderson offered to pay his way through Harvard Business School if he could gain entrance. He did, afterwards applying for a White House Fellowship.

As a Mercer University freshman, my summer's cotton mill earnings were exhausted when I heard of a weekend opening at the afternoon News. I got it. Out of money again the next quarter at school, I took a full-time job assembling school buses at Blue Bird Body Co. in Fort Valley, while continuing to work weekends at the paper.

At the end of the summer, I too met Peyton Anderson. If I'd continue at the paper, he'd pay the bulk of my college expenses.

I had seen life in public housing. I had tasted the fiber-filled air of a cotton mill spinning room. I had bucked rivets with an old man proud to show me his unfinished Jim Walter Home, the first he'd ever owned.

And I had felt the awesome power of a free press to make the world a better place, starting from our front door.

It was an easy decision.

Maybe it was Johnson's early success, maybe just Anderson's devotion to the community. Whatever it was, he made the same offer every year to a high school or college student working at his newspaper.

Had he not sold the paper to Knight-Ridder while I was away in Vietnam, there was no question that I'd return to his service. It wasn't a contract. It wasn't a condition of his gift.

But there's never been a day of my life that I dreaded coming to work, or failed to marvel at a newspaper's potential to uplift the communities, and the state, it serves. For that gift, I am always in his debt.

At his death, Peyton Anderson left the bulk of his estate, $26.6 million, to a foundation ably led by Juanita T. Jordan, an aide he helped teach how to manage his post-sale investments. That foundation now contains $101 million and has given $58 million to the good works of Macon and Middle Georgia. "Throughout his life," the book jacket reads, "he performed numerous private acts of kindness, but it wasn't until his death that his hometown learned the full extent of his generosity."

Tom Johnson, a poor boy from West Macon whose father was disabled and whose mother worked long days at Foy Grocery Store, well knew of those private acts of kindness. And so, too, did a lad from the projects of South Macon.