Wednesday, December 18, my father, the late Col. Harry Mell Ayers, would have celebrated his 100th birthday.His memory belongs equally to his daughter, my sister, Elise Ayers Sanguinetti, but I do not have the miraculous powers of a novelist who can understand a man as his daughter might. I know him only as a son. Unfortunately, I could not know him as a peer, as one of his buddies from the Baraca Class at Parker Memorial Baptist Church with whom he shared coffee and conversation at the Sanitary Café between Sunday School and church.
A father, my father, is many memories: the smell of pipe smoke, his red leather chair in the library, an invitation to join the men at the Alabama game in Legion field which was a secular confirmation service to a boy, the spontane-ous hug he gave a grown boy arriving during Christmas dinner on leave from the Navy and, finally, the fondness of an old man for a beagle pup whose teeth marks can still be seen on his desk, the desk which now supports my pro-fessional clutter.
Those memories are exclusive; they belong only to a very few. What matters to the people who work here now and, more importantly, to all the people whom this newspaper serves is the legacy he left to the institution he founded.
His times were radically different from our own. In 1885 when he was born, the Civil War was the immediate past; the war ended only 20 years before. He was born in the antebellum town of Jacksonville when the New South in-dustrial city of Anniston was only two years old. As a teen-ager in 1901 he journeyed with his father, the medical missionary, Dr. Thomas Wilburn Ayers, to the village of Hwangshien, China. The American South to which he re-turned wasn’t much different from China then or now. They were both what we would call today Third World na-tions. As late as 1900, only 3.6 percent of the workforce of South Carolina was employed in manufacturing and 69 percent remained in agriculture.
The China experience must have helped shape the character of the man and the institution. What a profound impres-sion it must have made on a boy to see his father ministering to the souls and bodies of people whom westerners of his time regarded as inferior, “the Yellow Race.” He was daringly ahead of his time as an advocate of more equita-ble race relations. He was an internationalist whom I can hear now at dinner saying, for the umpteenth time, “He who fails to take heed of events far away will soon find trouble near at hand.”
Above all he was a man who could handle the intoxicating stuff of power. He used power lightly, not as an offensive weapon but more as a shield. He gave this newspaper its philosophy when he wrote for a professional journal, “A newspaper must be the attorney for the most defenseless among its subscribers.”
What does that mean? This, I believe: that people who are cushioned by powerful unions or trade associations or any other organization with batteries of lawyers and lobbyists can take care of themselves. A newspaper should pick a fight only with someone its own size or larger — a mayor, a governor, a president — but never with the weak or friendless.
One thing more. Mother used to say with fond tolerance, “Harry likes to tip with the big.” True, he did. He found the company of the great and powerful stimulating. Their larger universe put the rivalries of local factions and the spir-ited, sometimes mean-spirited loyalties of neighboring communities and counties in better perspective. But he was more affected by the people and place where he fundamentally belonged, by the births, baptisms, weddings and fu-nerals here at home.
He put out a local paper. Until our time runs out and even after we’re gone — for as long as the law and fate will allow — we want The Anniston Star to be a locally owned paper. That’s a promise, Dad.
Sunday, December 22, 1985
