Many of the fresh-faced, newly hired reporters who come to work at The Anniston Star obtain the kind of experience that serves as a master's degree in journalism.Look at the careers and accomplishments of some former Star staffers, and their time looks more like a doctorate in success.
Many alumni of The Star newsroom have gone on to make sterling contributions in the field of journalism. They’ve written books, started newspapers, traveled around the world, won the Pulitzer Prize and authored syndicated col-umns.
Three of the largest and most important newspapers in the country — The New York Times, The Wall Street Jour-nal and USA Today — employ writers or editors whose resumés include The Anniston Star.
“The beauty of The Star is that for a small paper it had big eyes and is willing to take on important stories,” said former Executive Editor Joe Distelheim, now retired from The Huntsville Times. “There has been a tradition of big, hard projects and hiring young, ambitious, bright people to go after them, which is not to say there’s some older people that are good, too.”
No matter where they came from or where they went, lots of successful careers contained, if for a short time, a by-line in The Anniston Star.
He was the home boy
Of all The Star’s success stories, it is perhaps Rick Bragg who shines brightest. Bragg, who grew up in rural Calhoun County, worked in two stints at The Star in the 1980s. He started off at The Jacksonville News and eventually made it to The New York Times as a national correspondent and is currently based in New Orleans.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for a collection of feature stories, Bragg has written two best-selling books, All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man. He’s also published a collection of his news stories called Somebody Told Me.
For Bragg, it all traces back to Anniston and The Star.
“How lucky can you be to grow up and decide you want to be a reporter and then one of the country’s best small newspapers is in the same county seat where you get your driver’s license and where you go to get your tuxedo for the prom,” Bragg said, now out on tour promoting the paper-back edition of Ava’s Man. “I tell people that sometimes getting ahead is blind stumbling luck. What are the chances that one of the best small papers in the coun-try would be so close to home?”
After The Star, Bragg went to The Birmingham News, The St. Petersburg Times and The Los Angeles Times.
He’s traveled around the world on assignment, including such far off places as Pakistan, Haiti and Cuba, and won numerous other awards for his writing. He’ll quickly remind you that his career began in Anniston.
“The Star is one of those places that just appreciates a good story and wants to get the most out of it,” he said. “There are some newsrooms around the world that seem to lose sight of that.”
Bragg has many memories of his years at The Star and made many close friends.
He even got engaged at the old building on 10th Street.
“They used to park the riding lawnmower near the sports department,” Bragg said. “I even got engaged near that damn lawnmower, I couldn’t get the night off. I proposed right there in the sports department.”
‘A bulldog in lipstick’
Jena Heath has made a career out of covering politics, and it started by covering Oxford and Talladega County for The Star in 1992.Heath, now at the Austin American-Statesman in Texas, covered the George Bush presidential campaign in 2000, and until recently, the executive branch.
“I covered the county commission and went all the way to The White House,” Heath said.
A native of Long Island, N.Y., Heath came to Anniston as a young reporter just out of college and to gain a better understanding of her family, part of which is from Georgia.
She said she became a better journalist while at The Star, and her experiences have helped her throughout her career.
“I remember it as a nice, very growing, fun three years,” Heath said. “I think, in a lot of ways, it’s the most fun I’ve had after 13 years in journalism.”
A tenacious reporter as described by a few of the present editors at The Star, Heath remembers covering stories ranging from a Sylacauga doctor who prescribed medications addicts were using to get high to the opening of a Red Lobster in Oxford.
It was Oxford Mayor Leon Smith who dubbed Heath “a bulldog in lipstick.”
After The Star, Heath went on to The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer before arriving in Austin.
Sidewalk sweeper
Perhaps the dean of Alabama sports writers, Clyde Bolton was a sports writer for The Birmingham News for the last 40 years and authored one of the most widely read sports columns in the state.What most people don’t know, however, is that Bolton started out in the circulation room of The Anniston Star. That circulation room was in The Star’s old old building on 11th Street. He also wrote three- and four-paragraph stories about church league softball.
Bolton, a native of Wellington, remembered his time at The Star for what it taught him about journalism.
“I had a damn hard nasty job, one that I was going to get out of as soon as I could,” Bolton said.
He remembered taking papers off the presses and counting them out for the carriers. Each day resulted in a new suit of ink, he said, so you could read the front page off of his chest.
Bolton remembers the day when The Star’s founder, Col. Harry M. Ayers, asked him to sweep the street out in front of the building on 11th Street. Bolton started to tell Ayers that sweeping was not a part of his job, but ended up with brush in hand.
“I was the best street sweeper The Star ever had,” he said.
While working one Labor Day at The Star, Bolton purchased a copy of The Atlanta Journal and saw a want ad for a sports editor in La Grange, Ga.
He applied and got the job in La Grange, but his fire for journalism was lit in Anniston.
“I really fell in love with the newsgathering operation and discovered that’s what I wanted to be,” Bolton said. “I’ve always believed that I was supposed to be a writer.”
Remembering Amzy
As publisher and owner of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky has a big job ahead of him to stay afloat in the competitive maelstrom of New York. A new paper in an already crowded newspaper market, The New York Sun has a circulation of 20,000 after just a few months of publication.
But years before the pressures of getting a new enterprise off the ground, Lipsky worked at The Star and covered the 1968 presidential election.
While here, he was drafted into the Army and worked at several military papers and eventually joined the Wall Street Journal, where he worked as an editorial page editor of various editions in Europe to Asia. He also started the English edition of The Jewish Forward.
Lipsky said he loved every minute of his time at The Star.
“I think the great thing about The Star is it was a newspaper that fought for principles its proprietor and staff be-lieved in,” Lipsky said. “It covered the news with an eye to the larger purpose of newspapering, which is a fun way to jump into the newspaper business. It’s a sense of newspapering that’s never left.”
Lipsky met many important figures of the time, including Judge Frank Johnson, Gov. George Wallace and Judge Robert Vance.
But it was a not-so-high-profile Star employee that Lipsky still remembers to this day.
“Her name was Amzy Lee, and she was the operator,” Lipsky said. “I remember I was the first to learn who was going to be George Wallace’s running mate in the (presidential) election that fall, and I said to Amzy, I need to talk to Gen. (Curtis) LeMay as soon as possible. Fifteen minutes later, Amzy calls me and tells me to hold for Gen. LeMay. I picked up the phone and said, ‘Gen. LeMay, I’ve just learned that you’ll be on the ticket with George Wallace in November. Is it true?’ And he said, ‘You woke me up for that?’ He slammed down the phone and hung up. Amzy had found him in his hotel room in Hawaii.”
A Life in Crime
Robin McDonald has made a career out of covering crime, courts, police and the legal profession, and it all started in Anniston.McDonald distinguished herself at The Star from 1980 to 1985 with coverage of the well-known Marie Hilley mur-der trial.
Known to most Anniston police officers for her cowboy boots, McDonald became so ensconced in crime coverage that she was permitted to keep a key to the back door of the police department.
“I really enjoyed the time I spent there, of all the papers I’ve worked at, in retrospect, it was the best,” McDonald said. “Because it was writer-driven. I’m a go-get ’em reporter, and I spend a lot of time on my beats.”
McDonald worked for several publications after leaving The Star, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Wichita Eagle and Atlanta Magazine. It was during her time at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she covered an-other high-profile murder trial, that of Atlanta businessman Fred Tokars.
She now writes for the Fulton County Daily Report in Atlanta, covering the legal system and law profession.
McDonald also published two books about Hilley and Tokars called: Black Widow: The True Story Behind the Hilley Poisonings and Secrets Never Lie: The Death of Sara Tokars — A Southern Tragedy of Money, Mur-der and Innocence Betrayed.
McDonald also was at the center of a national journalism ethics debate over a story she covered about Cecil An-drews, the Jacksonville man who lit himself on fire for television cameras.
McDonald left Anniston with many great stories and good friends. The lessons she learned in Anniston have stayed with her throughout her career.
“I developed an interest if not passion for the police beat and the courts,” McDonald said. “I have always found it to have the best and most fascinating and most poignant stories.”
Her time at The Star and The Journal Constitution created at least one coincidence. Once, while covering the Tokars trial, she found that former Talladega Mayor Larry Barton was being tried in the courtroom above. She covered Barton while at The Star.
But for all the bars and benches and bailiffs McDonald has encountered in her career, she remembers the liberty of The Star.
“I had a lot of freedom to write,” McDonald said. “There was an amazing amount of freedom.”
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Jim Yardley came to The Star in 1988 from a weekly newspaper in North Carolina he said was literally tossed in people’s yards. Trained as a lawyer, Yardley wanted to try journalism after becoming disillusioned with his former profession while working in Washington, D.C.
Now stationed in the Houston bureau of the New York Times, Yardley has covered such national stories as Enron and then Texas Gov. George Bush.
“I had never worked for a daily, and northeastern Alabama is an interesting place to write about,” Yardley said. “The good thing about The Star is they gave a good amount of latitude to young reporters. If you wanted to write a project you could in my day. It was just a great place for me to get trained.”
Yardley said he was proud to work in a town where so many people owned The Star’s brightly colored newspaper boxes after working for a publication that got little respect.
He covered many notable stories while in Anniston, including the 1990 congressional election between Johnny Ford, John Rice and Glen Browder.
From Anniston, Yardley went to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for several years.
“If you want to work in a small town, it’s a great place to work,” Yardley said. “Brandy [Ayers]and Elise [San-guinetti] don’t run from anything. They’ve made that a more enlightened place to live; there’s no question about that.”
Settling up with Phil
The wall near the sports department at the old Star building on 10th Street was cov-ered with plaques that tout the achievements of the sports staff. It was a reputation and a tradition that Mark McCarter recognized within the first days of his tenure at The Star as sports editor.
Now the sports columnist with The Huntsville Times, McCarter remembers the pressure he felt to continue the vaunted tradition.
He also remembers the pressure of Friday nights.
Known for blanket coverage of northeastern Alabama’s high school football teams, The Star sports page on Friday nights can be hectic for writers and editors as they scramble to get all the final scores and statistics from large num-bers of contests that come in close to deadline.
One night, McCarter got caught up in the rush to meet deadline. Things weren’t going right, and McCarter, out of frustration, kicked the wall just outside the sports department, leaving a hole and a somewhat perplexed Phil San-guinetti, president of Consolidated Publishing Co.
McCarter replaced the panel and ended up in sports department lore.
“You come in, and they’ve got all those plaques on the wall,” McCarter said. “… that very quickly let me know the standard of excellence, you couldn’t help but see.”
McCarter left The Star to work as a public relations representative for NASCAR driver Michael Waltrip, then went to the Huntsville Times.
Though an assistant editor with the Chattanooga Free-Press before coming here, McCarter had to get used to over-seeing an entire department.
“I had always laid out the paper in Chattanooga, and I thought it couldn’t be any different,” McCarter said. “We were an hour and 45 minutes late one night. It was my first week on the job, and that was Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were SEC media days, and Friday was (the race at) Talladega. It was 10 days before I knew there was a restroom behind the sports department.”
In the bleachers
Two former sports columnists for The Star have gone on to distinguish themselves at two of the larger Southeastern newspapers. Geoff Calkins, who worked at The Star from 1992 to 1994 is the sports columnist for The Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and Pete St. Onge, who worked from 1994 to 1995, now reports for The Charlotte Observer.
St. Onge followed Calkins down the left side of the sports page, but both have distinguished themselves in life after The Star.
For Calkins, who gave up a career as a lawyer, said working at The Star gave him an opportunity to get started in sports journalism.
“I’m grateful to the people at The Star for taking a chance on me,” Calkins said. “I was 30, I was a lawyer, I went to Harvard Law School. Most people thought that when I wrote cover letters that I was a weird practical joke.”
While here, Calkins covered Pat Dye’s last year at Auburn and then Terry Bowden before writing the column. After The Star, Calkins went to the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel to cover Major League Baseball.
Pete St. Onge left sports writing after his time with The Star.
He went to work at The Huntsville Times and moved over to the news department. In Charlotte, he does a little bit of everything, from features, to news stories and occasionally sports stories.
At The Star, St. Onge found he could take risks with his writing and reporting.
“I got the sense right away that it was a good paper because people expected it to be that way,” St. Onge said. “This is not a place to coast; this was a place to excel.”
VROOM …
Ken Patterson rose from copy editor at The Star all the way to managing editor, one of the highest positions in the paper.Along the way, he covered Jacksonville State University’s two baseball championships, lots of NASCAR and be-came sports editor.
Many former sports writers credit Patterson with continuing the tradition of excellence at The Star.
Now the director of public relations for Talladega Superspeedway, Patterson actually came to The Star from a larger paper — The Birmingham News — and never regretted the move.
“A lot of people questioned when I left because I left the biggest newspaper in the state for a small newspaper; it was mostly friends and family,” Patterson said. “But I went, trying to find my place, and I wanted desperately to have my handprints on the paper. I wanted to pick it up and see what I had done.”
Patterson had many good experiences at The Star, and even shagged fly balls and pitched batting practice with the Jacksonville State University baseball team while covering them.
Diamond in the rough
He started out as a part-time reporter in the sports department at The Star, some-times covering a team he would eventually lead to more than 1,000 victories as baseball coach. Rudy Abbott also won two NCAA Division II national championships while coach of the Jacksonville State Univer-sity baseball team and also scouted talent for The Pittsburgh Pirates.
But Abbott may be one of the few sports writers in the nation to have left journalism and made a mark in sports.
Some of his players made it to the big leagues, most recently Todd Jones, a reliever with The Colorado Rockies.
For all of Abbott’s success outside the field of journalism, he looks back at his time at The Star and credits his expe-rience as having a major role in his life.
“There’s no question about the influence that Mr. Ayers, George Smith, Taylor Smith and Cody Hall had on me,” Abbott said. “They had everything to do with the things that happened to me in my lifetime. The lessons I learned at The Star, I’ll take with me to the grave.”
Abbott remembered The Star’s last extra before Sept. 11, 2001. He helped put together the extra for the assassina-tion of John F. Kennedy. He said he even took it down to the corner to sell it.
Abbott retired from JSU earlier this year to focus on a bid for the Calhoun County Commission as a Democrat. His opponent is Libertarian Carol Hagan.
Recently in the news
Several of the more recent Star employees already have embarked on their own in-teresting career paths. Former Star education reporter Pooja Bhatia is a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal.
Bhatia spoke of the role she found The Star to play in the community.
“Anniston’s residents and the people who live in Calhoun County don’t share a lot of things,” Bhatia said. “Every-body sends their kids to different schools, and they go to different churches. But they share that routine of reading The Star and how The Star represented things.”
Former metro editor Richard Coe has become city editor at the Bend Bulletin in Oregon.
He has been working on a novel for the last year.
Mark Baker, who wrote features and general assignment stories for The Star, now covers a rural beat for the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon. Previously, he worked for The Eastside Journal in suburban Seattle.
Baker enjoyed working with present Star editors Chris Waddle, Cathi Downing and Anthony Cook.
“The freedom was the best part of it,” Baker said. When I went out to the Eastside Journal, it was this dark world where editors would just hack your stories. I would pick up the paper the next day and wonder who wrote that story, but my byline would be on it.”
Baker wondered if it was still 312 degrees in Anniston.
Darv Johnson, former business reporter, is an assistant professor of journalism at The University of New Orleans.
Stay a little while
Of course, some staffers stayed here in Calhoun County and put in a great number of years at The Star. Longtime photographer Ken Elkins retired in 2000 and said he sits around the house most days. But, he fishes as much as he can.
Elkins gained a reputation for taking pictures that evoked the hardscrabble life of people in rural northeastern Ala-bama. He worked at The Star for 30 years.
“I really enjoyed being there and getting out to meet the people and find those good feature stories,” Elkins said.
Basil Penny retired from The Star in 2000 after 43 years of service.
After starting out as a carrier, Penny worked in the circulation department and then went on to become a reporter, an editor and finally associate editor, a fancy title for flunky, he said.
“It’s the fond memories of the people I met, people whose story I was allowed to tell,” Penny said of his time here. “People constitute the whole ball of wax. If you don’t have them, you don’t have a newspaper. My philosophy has always been that someone shouldn’t have to die to get their name in the paper.”
Penny had a hand in hiring many of The Star’s brightest talents, or, he managed them as their editor.
He said it was a privilege training the young reporters, though tough at times.
“I’ve got acquaintances and friends all over the country,” Penny said. “And I’m sure I’m a better person because of the contact I have had with people of varied backgrounds.”
James Pendergrass covered prep sports in Calhoun County for many years. He also worked in advertising.
He retired in 1999 after 39 years at The Star but contributes to The Jacksonville News.
Deemed “The Professor” for picking high school football games, Pendergrass also covered Auburn, Alabama and Jacksonville State.
“I enjoyed every minute of it,” Pendergrass said. ‘I still have a lot of friends down there.”
From 1986 until 2000, Genoa Boykins was the face of the newsroom at The Star. Boykins did everything from typ-ing obituaries to writing stories to helping other reporters with research.
Boykins now works at the Army’s Infantry School Library in Fort Benning, Ga., and is in the process of completing her degree in computer programming.
“It was fun, it was interesting and it was a challenge,” Boykins said about working at The Star. “I had my hands in a little bit of everything.”
Getting around
The Star’s influence on the newsrooms around the region and the state is evident. Report-ers have gone to The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, The Lexington Herald-Leader, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger, The Chattanooga Free-Press, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and The Memphis Commecial-Appeal. Former Star reporters and editors have made their presence known here in Alabama at The Birmingham News, The Mobile Press-Register, The Huntsville Times, The Montgomery Advertiser and The Decatur Daily.
As long as The Star publishes a daily newspaper, there will be young journalists looking for a break into the busi-ness. Especially when so many of them have gone on to great things. Perhaps another Susan Eggering, who went on from The Star and worked with a team of reporters who won The Pulitzer will walk through the door tomorrow.
For Mike Dorning, a Washington correspondent for The Chicago Tribune who worked at The Star from 1987 to 1990, working at a small paper like The Star is something he recommends to young reporters.
“I often tell people that a great way to start is to go to a small paper that actually wants to do a good job and puts in the resources and has editors that want to do a good job,” Dorning said. “I have often counseled students to go to a small paper like The Star.”
