A Stop Along The Way From '62 To 62
Memories of Murder and The Cherokee Tribune on my Birthday
“The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.” — Madeleine L'Engle
“The older you get, the better you get. Unless you’re a banana.” — Betty White
🎂 🎂 🎂 🎂 🎂 🎂
Today’s my birthday, tra-la-la and whoop-dee-doo. Maybe this is self-indulgent, but try to see it through. Or don’t.
Sixty-two years ago today, Friday the 13th, April, 1962, I was born at 4:13am, in Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, quite large and very late, ten pounds after ten months of pregnancy, and during the ten minutes that elapsed between my dad dropping my mom off at the Emergency Room and him parking the car.
Been a lot of smooth and troubled waters under the bridge since. I’m pushing my way into my sixties, signed up for Social Security yesterday to get my money, dammit, and it feels weird. Except for my bum hip, the result of either running too hard during the lockdown or wrestling an angel in my dreams, I mostly don’t feel my age and daresay everybody tells me I don’t look it, but numbers are numbers and numbers don’t lie (only statistics!).
Most times on my birthday, I’ve gone to the movies, always one of my greatest escapist entertainment pleasures, a transformative ticket to "another world, a world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret,” at least when all the talents involved are firing on all cylinders. Yet a glance across this weekend’s multiplex shows me a bunch of worlds I don’t want to be transported to, ones that are either going to leave me feeling sour or stupid or supportive of people who hate me. Initiate JOMO!
Wait, wait! There must be better joys to discuss than the Joy Of Missing Out, or maybe I just need more coffee. Either way, a well-rounded and full life is loaded with joys and miseries, so let’s turn towards joy, or at least fulfillment, with a side dish of hopefully mildly wise advice from one of the best moments of my life, or at least the most gratifying, one based in a collaborative feeling of shared success and satisfaction at a job well done and a life well-lived.
In the late 1990s, I worked for about a year — 13 months actually — at a small town newspaper in Cherokee County, Georgia, The Cherokee Tribune. I had finally had enough of the family’s fresh cut flower wholesale business after leaving The Discovery Channel, and had to get out; the industry was changing, the middle man was getting cut out, all the big florists in the ATL were going directly to the growers, Delta Airlines’ shipping parameters and rules were getting increasingly suffocating and unfair, etc., etc.
Through a series of events that felt highly unlikely back then and even more odd today, I ended up getting a job at the Tribune, which was a subsidiary of the twice-its-circulation Marietta Daily Journal, which was owned by Otis Brumby, Jr., a wealthy good ol’ Cobb County boy whose family had owned the paper forever, since its launch in 1866. They needed an education writer at the Tribune and I had been a high school teacher for a couple years down around Savannah in the late 1980s, and was already a part-time film and music critic for a couple local rags and a growing online entertainment platform, Well-Rounded Entertainment (R.I.P.).
So not only did I get the Education reporter gig, they tossed me half-control of the Arts & Leisure section (at no extra pay, ofc), where I built an impressive team of movie reviewers and other critics. Cherokee County was growing fast, and The Cherokee Tribune went from a twice-weekly to five-days weekly newspaper; they hired a new publisher who had a gung-ho “go get ‘em” mentality, and he hired a few young reporters with gusto — the Sports editor and I were by far the oldest people in the newsroom — and for maybe eight months the Tribune was the greatest place in the world to be.
Cherokee County was going through all the growing pains of an exurb becoming a suburb, from sleepy rural farmland hamlet to another long-drive white flight extension of the ATL, and there was suddenly much news to break about residential development, incoming businesses, education system growing pains, and hotshot political consultants coming to town to advise mayoral and other candidates. The big city Atlanta Journal-Constitution put a bureau there, and the brash young publisher told us our goal was to beat these city slickers like a drum.
We did, and it was glorious. During the year I was at the Tribune, all kinds of crazy stuff happened, including two stories that went national: A high school teacher/basketball coach who got fired for playing profane rap music at a b-ball practice; and a teen-on-teen bullying murder.
Beyond those two coast-to-coast Mediagasms, there were all kinds of local stories to be chased: Political corruption, right out in the open; power-crazed school board members with an enemies list; developers pushing around pretty much everybody. At one point, I attended a meeting of a local developer with his employees where a mayoral candidate spoke and the developer openly told employees that their next paycheck would include a list of who they were supposed to vote for, and if they didn’t, they didn’t need to bother coming back to work (how would he know?). That’s how arrogant and entrenched the political system was in Cherokee County. They thought they were untouchable. But the Tribune proved they weren’t (until we discovered we were touchable too).
It was a great time and place to be a journalist, and we were lucky in that the locals were rooting for the local paper over the city slickers, so we got a lot of tips that the AJC did not. We were indeed “beating them like a drum,” to the point where one asshole who worked for the Atlanta paper was literally stealing my work nearly word-for-word for his Friday coverage of a story I broke on Thursday. I complained. Nobody cared.
The camaraderie at the Tribune was phenomenal; I liked everybody in the newsroom except the dumb and self-righteous Mormon guy, who didn’t last. The Editor-in-Chief was a woman who actually became a friend of my (now ex-) wife and I; and there were two young male reporters covering the cops and the politicians who were raw talent but not amateurs and had a nose for news.
The climax of my time at the Tribune was a deadline night where one of the reporters named Dan and I both stayed late to work on stories that would beat the AJC on a local murder case (not the murdered teen — there were more murders the year I worked at the Tribune than the 60+ years prior) and the latest crazy school board debacle (one of the school board members, I had been tipped, was snooping around for the cable TV activity of teachers he didn’t like to see if they were buying porn flicks). We crushed it, we put in the extra time and extra work, Dan stuck around at the courthouse late to get the skinny on whether it was going to be murder or manslaughter charges, after the AJC guy gave up and went home, and this was just the latest in a parade of shit shows from the school board.
There were a couple beers in the kitchen fridge, and I remember Dan & I sitting in the newsroom with the editor, basking in the moment, drinking the bottled brews, knowing we had done a great job and served the community well with the truth in a timely manner, and Dan, maybe 22, maybe 23, said something like “This is great. This is amazing.”
It was 1998 and I was 36 years old and not as wise as I thought I was but still wise enough to know days like this were rare and should be relished. I could literally feel the satisfaction sitting there, soaking it in, knowing deep in my soul that even though we were just a little newspaper plunking along, we had reached a pinnacle of performance, a job very well done in service to others, to the community, to bring them news and information first and before anybody else and getting it right.
I also knew it was temporary. So I said:
“Savor this feeling, man. Bask in it. Remember it. I’ve been around long enough to know this is one of life’s great moments and it’s not going to last, because they never do. But when they’re here, they need to be embraced with the full understanding of just how special this is.” Or something like that. I promise it was more than just a “Yeah.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever had a better professional moment in my life, even though I’ve accomplished things that many would say were far more influential or meaningful or impressive since, though who really gives a shit if I put some no-longer-in-existence ad agency on the map for a few years, or came up with “Shark Week,” or helped launch a trendy app that was all the rage for 8 months, or became such a Madison Avenue “name” that when I changed agencies it got covered in The New York Times (Hey, it’s my birthday — cut me some slack on the shameless ego-self-stroke front!).
None of those things matter to me anymore (well, maybe “Shark Week”), but that moment at The Cherokee Tribune does. It was real, it was the result of hard, dedicated work and the development of trustworthy sources, it was done in collaboration with others also at their best, and it served the community, not just ourselves. It was a true, rare moment of greatness, not just mine, and that’s part of what makes it so special.
Of course, it didn’t last. Shortly after the next Cherokee County election, which saw the Tribune’s investigative reporting lead to an almost entire overhaul of the political system — Mayor voted out, four of five community council members supplanted and half the school board — Otis Brumby, Jr., rolled in and cleaned house. First he fired the new young publisher, then the editor. He personally took over top editorial duties and was rewriting our stories before they went to print to suit the agenda of his pals around town. Dan got fired unfairly — he was perceived as the greatest danger to the political status quo, more than I was — and all the movie stuff got taken away from me and handed over to the film critic at the Marietta Daily Journal. That one-two punch made me impulsively quit while I was still in the interviewing process for a job at the Southeast Edition (R.I.P.) of Adweek magazine, which thank God I got because I had an infant daughter at home.
Which reminds me of how nasty some people can be, incidentally, a moment that I’ve not thought about for decades. After I quit, I had to go back to the Marietta Daily Journal to get something or sign something, I don’t recall what it was, and had to deal with the HR lady who I’d interviewed with the year prior and dealt with a couple times since while still writing for the Tribune.
She was drippingly Suthun’ nice, in that “bless your heart” but actually die-in-a-fire kind of way, like the sickeningly sweet scent of an oversized Georgia magnolia tree at the height of its bloom.
“You have a newborn at home, Tom, don’t you?” she asked me, surely knowing the answer, her voice lilting and pleasant, her eyes taunting and contemptuous, a slight smug mischievous smile. “That’s such a blessing.” And then, with just the right inflection: “Do you have a new job yet?”
I didn’t, yet, but couldn’t resist: “Yes, thank you,” I said. “I’m going to be covering the Marietta area for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.”
I don’t know if she believed me or not, but she wasn’t going to call me a liar. “Well, that’s very nice,” she said, smug lips now pursed, eyes narrowed, their amused contempt now morphed into straight-up hatred. “Bless your heart.”
Otis Brumby, Jr., became a running punch line in our house. For many years afterwards, as my (now ex-) wife and I raised our children, farts were referred to as “Brumbys.” My kids did not know what a fart was until they went off to school. “Don’t Brumby at the dinner table.” “That Brumby smells really bad.” “Phew! Who Brumbied?” Good times, good times.
There are so many wild, fun and crazy stories about my year at The Cherokee Tribune with Dan and everybody else — sadly, Dan and Otis Brumby are the only names I remember a quarter century later — that it would’ve once made a great movie, a true-to-life realistic comedy, because when a newsroom is really cooking the clever and outrageous banter is half the fun. Except that nobody sees journalists as heroes anymore (which is one of several reasons Alex Garland’s Civil War is going to fail Fail FAIL) and everybody I’m still talking to in corporate journalism tells me newsrooms are no fun at all in 2024 and everybody walks gingerly on Woke eggshells around the thin-skinned new breed of unstable hair-trigger propagandists.
So thanks for riding along today, if you made it this far. Just a couple small snapshots from the sixty-plus (+?) years of my life, a rambling self-indulgent reminiscence that nevertheless hopefully holds a couple worthy nuggets of wisdom from experience, or at least one good expulsive laugh at Otis Brumby’s expense.
Happy Birthday! I am also 62, as of March, and you brought back fun memories of my law school pal, Cecilia, who was an Assistant DA in Cherokee County for a while after our graduation. A redhead from Chicago who had a laugh like a happy drill.
Great piece, Tom. You and I are almost exactly the same age. I’ve been thinking about the “62 in 62” thing myself this year!