
          Popham: "Avoiding the Hit and Run Press"
          By Cooper, Eleanor MccallieEleanor Mccallie Cooper
          Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 19-22
          
          "Just call it as you see it, John, anything that you can see in the
South, the enormous changes that are about to take place. We don't
know, nobody knows how it's going to be this time. We know it's a
different world, and we intend to report it in depth."
          The voice was that of Turner Catledge, the assistant managing
editor of the New York Times and a Mississippian
himself. The year was 1947. He was sending out a young reporter from
the Times, John N. Popham, to be the first regional
correspondent in the Southeast, to cover the South from DC to the
Delta, fifteen states that made up what John later termed "a hundred
Souths."
          Leaving behind New York's multi cultural diversity, the young
reporter found himself with a new beat of well over fifty-thousand
miles a year, covering such divergent regions as the Mountain South,
the Piedmont, the Delta, the Black Belt and the coasts. With
Chattanooga as its headquarters, he made it home only five days a
month for the next eleven years.
          The reasoning behind this assignment, Popham explains, was that the
New York Times was going to try to "stamp the country
on a regional basis." As the largest news 

enterprise in the nation,
its managers decided to tap the news from across the land: "'Let's
put a man in Boston who will take all the New England states; put a
man in Detroit to take the heavy industry, automobile and steel; put
two men in Chicago to take the great wheat world and mid-America; put
a man in L.A. to take Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and a
man in San Francisco to take Northern California, Oregon and
Washington, because they go together.' And then I got the whole
South."
          The Southeast bureau was stationed in Chattanooga, because of the
family connection between the Chattanooga Times and the
New York Times. Adolph S. Ochs, a native of Tennessee,
had owned and operated the Chattanooga Times twenty
years prior to acquiring the New York Times in
1896. Because both papers had remained in the Ochs family, Chattanooga
was the natural choice for Popham's headquarters.
          When Popham became managing editor of the Chattanooga
Times in 1958, the Southeast bureau moved to
Atlanta. But in those early days, Popham said, "It didn't make any
difference where it was. The South had not grown that much, and
Atlanta wasn't much different than Chattanooga at that particular
time. No sir, not a whole lot different, just a couple of hotels
downtown and the governor's office."
          A Tidewater Virginian himself, John was no greenhorn to the
South. The Popham family had been in Virginia since the colony was
founded, and his father, like other military officers from Virginia,
had bought a house in Fredericksburg, close to his native
Culpepper. Young John grew up well rooted in the life of the small
town South, the history of the area, and the heritage of his
great-grandfather who was publisher and editor of the Richmond
newspaper, the Southern Intelligencer, and later of
tine' Washington Intelligencer. His sense of history
and his understanding of small town politics served as assets in his
new assignment, as did his forever undimished Tidewater accent.
          After finishing college at Fordham, he had landed in New York in
1930 as a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union,
covering all the beats, the courts, the police, the criminal world:
"Here I was with this family background and schooling from a small
town in Virginia, and then suddenly, I end up in New York, thrown into
the midst of the greatest multi-cultural city on the face of the
earth. And it's my job to report it, with all the cultures."
          He learned that world so well that when he returned from service in
the Marine Corps at the end of World War II, he was asked by three
successive New York mayors to be the director of public
relations. Having spent the war in the Pacific, and many summers of
his youth traveling with his father to Latin America and Asia,
intercultural exchange was nothing new to young "Pop": "I was in a
position to make judgments, to see things as I would never have seen
them if I had stayed in the South all of my life, or if I had come
from the North only. I was able to bridge that gap a little better
than the average person would have thought of."
          But he never accepted the offers of Mayors O'Dwyer, Walker or
LaGuardia. Instead, he stayed in the old world of newspaper reporting
where he accumulated no credits, few by-lines and not much salary to
speak of.
          Popham describes the state of the South as he found it in the late
1940's:
          
            In the face of efforts which were under way to broaden the
scope of civil rights for blacks in this country, Southern political
leaders were making their usual response: "We'll handle that, "and "We
have our way of life, "and "We will not adjust or change except on our
terms. " That had been the winning hand for generations and there
wasn't any reason for anybody in high office at that time to see that
there would be anything different.
          
          
            The thinking was that the South was going to be more
industrial, that it had an opportunity to have a larger slice of the
economic pie of the country. Air conditioning had come. It was
pleasant and comfortable.
          
          
            The war had brought literally millions of people into the
South--military people and their families. Many stayed here; some
married Southerners.
          
          
            Our universities were getting larger; they were going from
thirty-five hundred students in the state university to ten-thousand,
and young people from the rest of the country were coming here to
attend classes.
          
          
            There was an excitement, a feeling that the South would
overcome its poverty. It had lived right through the war as the
poorest section of America. Now there was an excitement that the South
could become a much more viable part of the country."
          
          In tapping the stories of fifteen states on the verge of economic
and social upheaval, Johnny Popham was helped by his background, by
his personal drive and by the enormous empathy which made him trust
and be trusted. In conversations lasting long after an event had been
covered and a story had been written, he came to know Southerner's
thoughts, feelings, fears and ambitions. He based his stories on these
insights rather than on the latest opinion polls.
          If, for instance, he were assigned to a conference in New Orleans,
he would get the story then stay around to make contacts:
          
            I would stay the whole week that it lasted, sitting up way
into the nights talking to scores and scores of these people from the
small towns and cities of the South. After that, I would go out of my
way on an assignment, or stop at a town and look that person up and
talk to them, recall that friendship, or maybe find there was a story
in that town, what they were trying to do to make the community a
better place to live. And I might do a little Sunday piece about some
particular effort, get them some local and national attention for
their efforts. I built up a large network like that, and consequently,
I always had an opportunity to know where something was going to take
place.
          
          
            If it was evident from the way things were taking place that
there was going to be a confrontation in a certain city, most of the
newspaper men would respond like a bucket brigade--they'd come in when
the trouble began to break. But I would always call someone, for
example, the governor in that state, and say, "Well, Governor, this is
Popham. Who's a friend of yours in that town? Who do you know?" With
politics it was going to be a feed merchant or a druggist or somebody
down there that handled the patronage for the governor, and he'd say,
"I'll call him, Pop, and tell him you 're coming in. " I'd go in two
or three days in advance; this man would take me out to the country
club for dinner or introduce me to people on the main
street. Consequently, I always knew just about where to stand, where
to be, what place to go to, and later when the press might be the
target of bitterness and anger, I would be excused 
            
            for several
days. People would say, "Oh, that is Mr. Jones' buddy, he's all
right--until they read the New York Times `and then decided that I had
to go too. But it took them a long time to get the
Times in there.
          
          In a car with little, or no, air conditioning, over roads with
little, or no, pavement, usually alone and often at night, Popham
covered fifty, sixty, seventy thousand miles a year. His salvation
was, as he said. "I don't bore myself." In fact, the long hours on the
road served to his advantage in a way that jet age telecommunications
do not allow:
          
            If I had to come back to Chattanooga from New Orleans or
from Jacksonville or Dallas, I'd drive three or four days, stopping
off at different places. What I wanted to write would be filtering
though my mind. I'd be pretty well prepared to sit down and knock out
the Sunday piece or the interpretive piece that this event called for
a few days later. I think that some of the success that I had in that
period resulted from the fact that I could contemplate what I wanted
to do and put it in a good frame. I didn't think about that at the
time, but as I look back, I think it helped a lot.
          
          The first task for Popham was to find the sages, the vital and
vibrant figures who had some wisdom about what was happening around
them, the people who "could envision the future and worked behind the
scenes to solve a great many problems." Once he found them, he
cultivated them, respected them, and took time to build trust.
          These people were all over the South. He found them as governors,
workers, newsmen, lawyers, sociologists and teachers. People such as
Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, Charles
Johnson. A. T. Walden, Gerald Johnson, George Mitchell, Harold
Fleming, Virginius Dabney, and Alf Minders became his sources of
knowledge and wisdom. But more than just the leaders, he found endless
numbers of people throughout the South who cared and worked
quietly:
          
            They were all over the South. There were many wonderful
people who had been silenced in many ways, and they accepted that, but
they didn't stop working! There was an enormous number of people that
were doing good things in the South, but if you came from outside,
they were not going to show their hand.
          
          
            If you just came pouring in from out of the region and stuck
a mike in somebody's face and said, "Well, how do you feel about
desegregation?" the first thing that was on his mind was his family
and his job, and he'd say, "Well, I can 't see it. " He was protecting
himself. You might find if you sat down and talked to him about
yourself that he felt there was a trustworthiness and he's begin to
open up too. But he was not about to disclose that world to an
outsider who asked in a manner dangerous to him at that
time.
          
          This Southerner that Popham's late night divulgences uncovered was
not the Southerner publicized across the 

country. As Popham says, "We
lived so long with our own myths. There were hundreds and hundreds of
Southerners who didn't think that way but who were trapped at the
moment." Later, they were able to "come out and declare themselves."
Today, Popham observes, "there's no such thing as a serious candidate
running for statewide office in the entire South on a racial
ticket. It's gone."
          The other Southerner that the "hit and run" press missed was the
black leader, often quiet, also trapped by circumstances, but just as
silently laying the foundations. Popham sought out these leaders and
found them in the black universities and churches.
          If a black university, for example, invited a speaker, the local
press would arrive, cover the speech and leave. However, Popham stayed
on, lingered around the punch bowl long after the microphones and
cameras had left and learned a great deal more:
          
            You'd have a story about what the man said; he had come to
the South to bring a message and you'd write that story. And yet there
were scores of things that were going to take place, and all of the
leads were available that evening at the party; going to somebody's
house afterwards, a group of professors would come and maybe one or
two bright students and sit and talk until midnight. By ten o'clock at
night, he'd open up his heart about what he really thought and
felt. That makes for better reporting. Then I'd go back to my motel. I
could always call on him afterward.
          
          In 1948, John married Frances Evans of Nashville who settled in
Chattanooga and raised John IV and Hillary while John traveled in the
family's only car. After a decade on the road, John, in 1958, chose to
stay closer to his family and accepted the position of managing editor
of the Chattanooga Times. John's third career in the
newspaper world came to a close nineteen years later. Only in looking
back over the entire spectrum could he see the preparation he had had
and the role that he had played in the South.
          
            You have to leave the South to see it. If you stay here, you
think it is this way everywhere. I owe so much to those trips overseas
with my father, to my years as a Marine--you can 't underestimate the
influence of military experience upon the South--and to the
multicultural experience of New York. Those were golden years of
print, before television, when all of these critics went through the
press. We were prepared to respond to eruptions, to converse with
people and to cover many, many issues. Other people did it better than
I in New York; I was a junior reporter. But it prepared me for my role
in the South. Only later could I see what I had done.
          
          
            Eleanor McCallie Cooper lives in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Thanks to the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library for
permission to excerpt the interview with John Popham conducted on
August24, 1983, by Norman Bradley for the Chattanooga Oral History
Project.
          
        