In Memoriam

Last week, she wrote the last of her life’s story, dying at age 97 on March 13 at her home in Jefferson (her obituary is elsewhere in this issue.)

I say “dying” rather than “passing on” or “meeting her maker” because she was a stickler for clarity and a traditionalist when it came to being a wordsmith. She hated euphemisms, perhaps dating to her early days in the newspaper business. Back then, when someone died, they, well, died. It was verboten in newspapers to phrase death in an abstract way (she loved the word “verboten.”)

Long retired, many in the community today didn’t know her or see her work. She was a remarkable woman who wrote thousands of stories about other people, but didn’t write too much in public about herself.

Indulge me a few minutes to tell her story.

•••

Mom, as Scott and I called her, was far ahead of her time as a professional woman working in a male-dominated industry. Most women who worked at newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s were limited to social news, what was then called the “women’s pages.”

Mom was different, working as a news reporter, a position usually reserved for hard-drinking, chain-smoking males, not a well-mannered Southern woman who had grown up amid rural poverty in the Depression.

Mom’s full-time newspaper career began in 1946. Just out of college — her beloved Young Harris — she landed her dream job as a reporter at the daily Rome News-Tribune in Northwest Georgia, the largest town near where she had grown up.

She had previously worked at the Marietta Daily Journal one summer while in college (and in the waning days of WWII, also worked as a secretary at the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta) and had been a stringer for The Atlanta Journal.

A few months after landing the Rome reporting job, she covered one of the nation’s worst hotel fires, the burning of the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta on Dec. 7, 1946. That fire took 119 lives, including four members of Rome High School’s Hi-Y club, which was in Atlanta for a conference.

Later, in the mid-1950s, she was featured on a television series called “The Big Story” which showcased unique stories reporters had done around the country. Mom’s story revolved around her reuniting two sisters who had long been separated.

An actress played her part in the show, but at the end they did an interview with Mom sitting in the Rome News-Tribune’s newsroom. At the time, she still had her flat, native Appalachian twang and we kidded her mercilessly about it for many years after we watched a film copy of the episode Dad had found.

•••

About a year after I was born, Mom took a job with The Summerville News and we moved up the road from Rome to Summerville in 1960. The deal was that they would hire mom, but Dad would work only on commission selling advertising.

That suited them because Dad had tired of his job with Goodyear Tire and wanted to get into the newspaper business, influenced by having been around Mom’s colleagues at the Rome News-Tribune. Getting practical experience in Summerville was his plan.

For her part, Mom wanted to work for a weekly newspaper since she had a newborn to tend to and the deadlines would be a little more flexible.

But their larger goal was to own their own weekly newspaper. After moving to Summerville, they began looking at various opportunities. That eventually led them to Jefferson where they purchased The Jackson Herald in 1965.

Although The Herald had a distinguished history, it had been struggling after its longtime owner died in the early 1960s. But they managed to turn it around, partly by better financial control and by working 80-hour weeks, but also because as editor, Mom elevated the paper’s news quality and content.

She was a grammar guru and had a flair for editing copy into concise and precise prose. She believed in short, pithy headlines and hated bloviated verbiage (she would hate this article, too, saying it is too long).

And she became a crusader on the editorial page. While she didn’t often write a personal column at The Herald — that level of intimacy with readers wasn’t much her style — she could churn out traditional editorials on a wide range of subjects.

Three issues in particular stand out: She crusaded against drunk driving after having lost her sister to a drunk driver in 1954; she crusaded against Jackson County’s lousy and corrupt law enforcement and widespread lawlessness in the 1960s, something that became high-profile following the bombing murder of solicitor Floyd Hoard in 1967; and she crusaded against that era’s proliferation of secret government meetings.

Mom was thrown out of several government meetings in the 1960s and early 1970s when local officials (always men) didn’t want some silly little woman reporting about their discussions. To say they were often condescending towards her would be an understatement.

That didn’t stop or discourage her. She would just pen an editorial calling them out for their lack of transparency, often embarrassing them in the public arena as only a Southern woman could, using genteel words that masked a deeper dig. She accused one local school board of living in “an ivory tower,” a stinging rebuke that they hated.

Eventually, things changed and local governments stopped barring her and other reporters from their meetings. In the end, she won.

•••

Over the years, she also traversed the immense changes in newspaper technology, transitioning from the old “hot type” production to “cold type” and eventually, into today’s digital world.

I say she “traversed” those changes because her personal writing habits really didn’t change. Until the end of her career, she typed on an old manual typewriter and edited copy with a pencil, scissors and a glue pot, preferring that old-timey system of cut and paste over electric typewriters or computers. (She did eventually learn to use computers; she wasn’t a Luddite, she just preferred to do things the same way she’d always done them in the newsroom.)

Mom was also known as a prolific writer of notes to employees and her children. She had notepads printed that said at the top, “Write it, don’t say it.”

She was taciturn about idle chit-chat and wanted to communicate in writing because it saved time and nobody could make excuses about having forgotten to do something. She lived by her notes and was a prolific note-taker all her life. Even at church on Sunday mornings, she would make notes on the bulletins about the sermon, as if she were covering another meeting.

•••

We’re not sure when becoming a newspaper reporter became Mom’s career ambition. As a child in rural Alabama in the 1930s, she dreamed of traveling the world, perhaps as an “airline hostess.” But that idea was dashed when she learned that she’d have to get a nursing degree before she’d be qualified. “I had no interest in nursing,” she recalled in some of her writings, noting that she had never been a good science or math student.

Some people had encouraged her to go into teaching, but while in college, she took a “practice teaching” class and later said, “That was not my cup of tea!”

She was always glad she chose newspapers as a profession. And despite not becoming an airline “hostess,” she did get to travel the world with Dad and write articles about their adventures. (She loved learning French in high school, but was keenly interested in Great Britain and British customs, humor and linguistic idioms.)

•••

Mom was a child of the Depression and that greatly shaped who she became later in life. Like a lot of her generation, she was thrifty and practical. She was so practical that when she and Dad built their house in Jefferson, she designed the tiny kitchen so that she could stand in one spot and reach everything. Efficiency, not popular trends, was a cornerstone of how she lived.

At the same time, she personally exuded an aura of grace, of being a “lady” in its traditional Southern meaning. She was tough, but mild-mannered. Her silence was often louder than her words.

As a child, Mom wrote that she always wore dresses, most made by her mother, except when she went with her father or grandfather on a wagon to deliver cotton to the gin; then, she wore overalls to sit on the cotton bales.

She never dressed too fancy, but always wanted to present a professional image wherever she went. “I’m not flamboyant,” she wrote of her personal style. Appearance mattered, but she wasn’t vain.

Having grown up on a farm in the Depression, she wasn’t too keen about the hardscrabble farm life. She wrote that she had a lot of farm chores as a child — leading the cow from one pasture to another, feeding the hogs and chickens, picking cotton and strawberries, and collecting eggs from the coop, a chore she hated. “It was nasty,” she once told me.

When Alex and I bought our farmstead a few years ago, she was more than a little bemused that her son had chosen a pursuit that she had longed to escape. When I stopped by once to see her while wearing overalls, she was incredulous to the point of laughter.

She also grew up amid an unstable homelife. Her father, our grandfather, had mental health issues that dogged her family for decades. Maybe because of that, she was sensitive to people with mental health problems. It was also perhaps the genesis of a series of award-winning articles she wrote in the 1950s about mental health concerns in Rome.

Despite that instability, her grandparents and aunts and uncles provided a lot of care, something that comes through in her writings about her childhood. It was an era where extended families took care of one another, and she was forever grateful for that support.

•••

Mom’s political persuasions were complex and sometimes contradictory. She always described herself as a conservative and generally supported Republican presidential candidates (including Richard Nixon whom dad didn’t like. He would get under her skin by referring to Nixon with his infamous nickname, “Tricky Dick”). She adored Ronald Reagan who she had interviewed in the 1950s when he was still just a Hollywood actor.

In The Herald, she ran conservative syndicated columns and often wrote conservative editorials on fiscal policy, or about anti-communism. Early on, she supported the Vietnam War, but I think she later had second thoughts about that.

Despite all that, she was surprisingly progressive. As a woman, she broke glass ceilings in her profession, but declared that she was not a “feminist.” She was aware of sexist views and of how some attempted to keep women away from participating in public life. She told me once that in her hometown, crusty old men would gather at the courthouse on election day, in part to force any woman who wanted to vote to have to push through a crowd of men, something ladies were understandably loath to do.

On racial issues, she was more liberal than many of her generation. When we were kids riding in the car with her, she would comment bitterly when she saw that a policeman had pulled over a vehicle of black people, knowing that blacks were often targeted just for “driving black.”

Some years ago, she traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a group, including my dad and grandmother. It was a trip to see Holy Land landmarks, but she apparently also saw the complex suffering in that chaotic part of the world.

Later, just before I traveled to Israel and the West Bank to research and write a series of stories, she told me to tell Palestinians I met that “Not everyone hates them.”

•••

Mom’s life was one of seeking intellectual stimulation. Among her many sayings was that “Small minds talk about other people, great minds talk about ideas.” Although she was a reporter, she hated gossip. She found people who gossiped dull.

From childhood, she loved books, especially biographies and history. She loved reading newspapers and meeting other newspaper people. She loved watching the nightly news on television; current events were always discussed at the dinner table, in the car and wherever we went. Some people discuss sports or pop culture, Mom (and Dad) discussed the news.

Every night, they watched television news while working on a pile of papers that always sat on small tables next to their chairs. News and newspapers were their all-consuming passion.

When we traveled as a family growing up, it was usually to some historic place — Jamestown, Washington D.C., New York among others. Her interests, and knowledge, were vast. You wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit against her.

•••

Over her long life and career, she became the matriarch of our family and of the newspapers she helped published. Even after she retired and passed the editor’s mantle to me, she continued to proof my articles after the paper was printed, marking errors and typos I’d made with a red pen. The ink in her blood was sometimes black, sometimes red.

After retirement, she stayed in touch with many current and former employees. Although a strict taskmaster in the office — killing time grated on her sense of responsibility — she had a genuine interest in her co-workers and their families. Most referred to her as “Mrs. B” in the office. To many others in the community, she was “Mrs. Helen,” a Southern colloquialism reserved for respected, genteel older women. I think she liked both nicknames for their sense of informality and genuine affection.

In some of her writings, she was asked to describe why she liked her best friend growing up. “Because she was real,” she answered.

Being “real” was important to her. It was a sign that someone was genuine, a character trait that she believed was important. She didn’t trust those who were pompous or self-important, finding them to be shallow.

Mom herself was “real.” She didn’t like bringing attention to herself, although as a newspaper editor she was sometimes in the spotlight. But she preferred to be low-key and demure personally and to speak with her writing more than her voice. She once said that her fingers spoke at the typewriter, the words flowing through them onto the page.

In tough times, she believed in keeping her head down and moving forward. In good times, she believed in celebrating the moment and to cherish it as a gift from God.

In good times or bad, her religious convictions were strong and important to her, but she didn’t proselytize or wear her beliefs on a sleeve. Her faith was quiet and reserved just like she was.

•••

All stories, even life stories, must someday end.

In Mom’s early years, the practice was for a reporter or editor to put a -30- at the end of a typed-up story to show the linotype operator that was all to be written, that it was the end of the story. It was a tradition she continued long after linotypes were put away in museums.

Helen Buffington — Mom —

-30-

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald and co-publisher and owner with his brother, Scott, of Mainstreet Newspapers. They followed their parents into the family newspaper business.