I was remiss when I did not make note of the death last month of Jack Nelson, one of the toughest, gutsiest reporters who ever pounded out a story on deadline and a man who had a real impact on Georgia politics during his 12-year stint with the Atlanta Constitution in the 1950s and 1960s.
Nelson, who died of cancer Oct. 21, won a Pulitzer Prize for the Constitution in 1960 when he produced a hard-hitting series of articles that exposed brutally inhumane practices at the state’s mental hospital in Milledgeville. Nelson’s expose stirred up demands that Georgia clean up its act in treating the mentally ill, demands that are still being made to this day, alas.
If Nelson were still alive, he could win another Pulitzer by reporting another series on the deaths of dozens of patients in Georgia’s mental hospitals that have occurred during the Sonny Perdue administration. Some things never change.
Jeff Nesmith, a retired reporter who worked with Nelson at the Constitution back in the day, passed along some memories of Jack in an email:
He was the best I ever knew.
They used him and [Ralph] McGill to recruit when I hired on. I had heard of McGill, of course, but I didn’t know who Nelson was. I remember Calvin Cox telling me, over lunch at Herron’s, that Jack would “have to be included on any list of the ten best reporters in the country.”
They hired me in 1964 and I had been there only a few months when he left, three or four years after he did the Milledgeville series. He did a couple of his projects during the time I was there. One was a thing on the “marriage mills” in south Georgia, places kids from Florida would go to get married when they eloped. Rotten operations. I was sitting over there, pecking away on my obits, when the Three Star came up. I started reading that stuff and it damn near took my breath away. How could he have dug up facts like that and gotten people to reveal such things? “In an affidavit given to The Constitution” was a phrase that appeared many times under Jack’s byline back then.
Another series was on waste and outright corruption in the Stone Mountain authority. The damn mountain nearly ’bout re-melted the day he wrote about all the money they had spent on bidets for the rooms in the state-owned hotel out there. People were pissed, you might say. I had been fired for incompetence from a job in public relations in Orlando and had intended to stay in newspapering just long enough to pay some bills. As I look back, Jack’s stories were more than anything else what caused me to change my mind. I knew I wanted to do stuff like that. Thanks a lot, Jack.
A couple of other things. He had the damnedest way of typing. I’ve noticed that people had typing characteristics, sort of like accents or gaits, on those old manual typewriters. Bill Shipp patted his foot while he typed. I’m pretty sure that if you nailed his foot to the floor he couldn’t have written a word, and Bill has written a lot of words. My former bureau chief here, Andy Alexander, was the fastest and neatest typist I ever saw — by far. Two fingers. My old buddy Remer Tyson would sit there with his left leg hooked over the typewriter shelf that came out of the desk, as if he was kind of trying to keep the typewriter from slipping off the shelf. With his head cocked back so a little bit of the smoke from that cigarette would go somewhere besides into his eye, he’d peer down at the paper while he typed.
Jack almost attacked the damned typewriter. He lunged at it. Of course, I was in such awe of him that seeing him do that the first time left me kind of speechless. There were different kinds of typewriters scattered all over that old newsroom on Forsyth Street, as if the paper had been buying them at yard sales, which wouldn’t actually surprise me too much. There were even one or two of the old Underwoods with the carriage return lever on the right side. Achsah, the reporter I met on the Constitution and have now been married to for 40-something years, had one of those. I don’t remember what kind I had. Jack’s was a Remington.
Calvin, Harold Martin and some of the others got up a press club in Atlanta back then. It lasted only a year or two. But one of the things they did was give out an award they called the Joree Award. A joree is a pretty little black, white and tan bird, known as a towhee everywhere but in Florida and a few south Georgia counties, where they call tortoises gophers and wiregrass grass. It’s a ground bird, usually seen pecking around in a thicket or under bushes and stuff. Former Gov. Marvin Griffin, when he was in office and was weary of Jack’s working out on him, once called Jack a joree, which the governor pronounced “jo-ray.” “Just like a damn jo-ray, always a scratchin’ around in the mud and the muck,” he said.
Well, when they instituted this short-lived journalism award, former Gov. Griffin, himself the publisher of the Bainbridge Post-Searchlight, came up for the dinner. Afterwards, a group of us sat around, sort of getting drunk. I was on the outside of the crowd, listening, but I could see and hear what was happening. At one point, Griffin turned to Jack and said, “Jack? You know what I used to think to myself evuh time I had a press conference in the govnuh’s office and I’d see you coming through th’ door with that damn notebook in ya’ hand?”
Jack said, “No, Governor, what was that?”
“I’d think, ‘I wonder what that beady-eyed son-of-a-bitch has got on me this week.’”
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