Welcome to the Alabama Newspaper
Hall of Honor

Nov. 1, 2003
Ralph B. Draughon Library
Auburn University


Photos and Web page by Ed Williams
willik5@auburn.edu
Professor
Department of Communication and Journalism
Auburn University

Inductees
James E. (Jimmy) Mills
Editor
Birmingham Post-Herald


John B. Stevenson
 Editor
The Roanoke Leader



 


Richard Mills, son of the late Jimmy Mills, accepts plaque honoring his father.
Seated from left are Felicia Mason, APA executive director; Ann Smith of The
Eufaula Tribune, chairman of the APA Hall of Honor Committee; Jim Cox of
The Clarke County Democrat, president of the Alabama Press Association;
John Carvalho of the AU Department of Communication and Journalism;
and John Hachtel, assistant vice president, AU Communications and Marketing.

Acknowledgment

By Richard G. Mills

Backward, turn backward, O Time in your flight / make me a child again, just for tonight . . .

The poet, Elizabeth Akers Allen, seeking to recover lost memories of her mother, must have struggled with the same problem that I faced when I learned that I would have the opportunity to make these remarks.  How was I to bring back, to share with my audience, memories of my father as he was during the years when I was a child in his house?

The speakers whom you have just heard have provided eloquent descriptions of Dad as a journalist, as I was certain they would.  I have chosen to give you today a different view – just a single vignette from those early years.  I hope that in so doing I succeed in providing you with just a glimpse of Jimmy Mills as a father.

The setting is the Mills breakfast room on a morning in the late 1930s – perhaps 1938.  The Great Depression was at its deepest; the European war had not yet begun, but it loomed, imminent.  And the run up to the 1940 presidential election was getting under way.

Dad had skimmed the front page of “The Birmingham Age-Herald,” and the discussion was in full sway among the four Mills – my mother Elise, whom we all called “Mimi,” my older brother Jimmy, and Dad.  I, aged seven, or perhaps eight, mostly just listened as the comments touched a tangle of tribulations – war, bread lines, bank failures, a third term, Wilkie as a candidate . . . on and on.  It all seemed terribly messy.

But then a solution to everything occurred to me.  “Dad, why don’t you run for President?” I asked.  I knew that, whatever it was, Dad could fix it.

Dad took my question for the straight request for enlightenment that it was, and he took a few moments to try to explain things like party affiliation, National stature, name recognition, experience in Government, and so on.  But all that went past me – I knew that Dad could fix it.

Then he said, “Besides, Dick, I am very busy being Editor of “The Birmingham Post.”

“Ah!”  Something clicked, and it all came clear.  If the “Post” needed Dad, then the Nation would have to wait.

Chairman of the Selection Committee, Committee Members, members of the Alabama Press Association, I thank you for this honor that you have bestowed upon Jimmy Mills.

I might just add that I think you have made a very good choice . . . but of course that comes from a man who thought Jimmy Mills should have been President of the United States!

— November 1, 2003


Members of the audience listen to induction of James E. (Jimmy) Mills to Hall of Honor. 

Click here for news release






John W. Stevenson, editor and publisher of The Randolph Leader,
accepts plaque honoring his father, the late John B. Stevenson.




Family members of Jimmy Mills.
Back row, left to right:  William Hamilton, Sr. (grandson-in-law), William
Hamilton, Jr. (great-grandson), Dr. Ronald Snow (grandson-in-law), Georgia
(Mills) Snow (granddaughter), David G, Mills (grandson).
Front row, left to right: Demaris Mills (daughter-in-law), Richard G. Mills
(son), Katherine (Mills) Hamilton (granddaughter).


Family members of John B. Stevenson.


John B. Stevenson is second generation family member to be inducted to
the Alabama Newspaper Hall of Honor.  John W. Stevenson and his brother,
David Stevenson, look at plaque honoring their grandfather, Olin H. Stevenson.
Olin Stevenson was inducted to the Hall of Honor in 1964.


At left is Sam Harvey, editor of The Advertiser-Gleam.  Harvey's father,
Porter Harvey, was inducted to the Hall of Honor in 2000.  At right is Phil Sanquinetti,
president of The Anniston Star.  Looking on is Vanessa Sorrell Burnside, a
member of the staff of The Randolph Leader.


Retired Birmingham News editor Jim Jacobson, left, chats
with Richard Mills.


Monica Hill, left,  of the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel,
and a former intern at The Randolph Leader chats with Roanoke mayor Betty Ziglar.


Auburn journalism professor Ed Williams, left, and Richard Mills.
Williams interviewed Mills' father, Jimmy Mills, in 1995 when he was
writing "The Press of Alabama:  A History of the Alabama Press Association.

The Christmas Tree Fire

By ED WILLIAMS

If anyone asks, tell them I'd like to be remembered
 as a crusading
editor," Jimmy Mills told me in 1995.

I was writing a history of the Alabama Press Association at the time,
  and my research took me to Birmingham to interview Alabama's oldest living
newspaperman.

 James E. (Jimmy) Mills, who died March 5, 1998, at age 97, told
 me that he wanted to be remembered as a crusading editor.

As editor of the old Birmingham Post and later the Birmingham
Post-Herald from 1931 to 1966, one of Mills' legacies is a
landmark Supreme Court decision that strengthened
First Amendment rights.

He fought against loan sharking, for removal of the Alabama poll taxes,
 and for the lowering of electric rates in Birmingham. He
also established the Goodfellows Fund in 1935 to provide toys, candy,
 fruit and nuts for poor children at Christmas.

The program continues today.

 When I think of Jimmy Mills, I will remember him best for a poignant story
  he told me of a Christmas Eve fire that he covered when he was a young
assistant editor at The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City.

 It happened in the pre-Depression days, sometime in the late 1920s, on a
 cold Christmas Eve in a rural Oklahoma community.

 "It was cold as hell, blizzardy ... snow all over the ground,
and sleet," Mills recalled.

"It was at a little community at a railroad crossroads. All of the
  people ...
  most of the people in the community, were at the little church for a
 Christmas Eve program. They had the Christmas tree all
lighted with the candles on it. And the tree caught fire. And the people in
the church all rushed to get out the door, and there they pressed together
as a crowd.

"The windows had bars on them to keep people from coming into
 the little church and stealing things at night. They couldn't get
out the windows. There was no escape. Practically everybody in the
community was killed.

 "I drove down there with another reporter. We drove all night.

 "As I said, it was just cold as hell, and we slid off the road one
time. We didn't have chains, and the road was a block of ice. And we had
 to go out and find boards, anything that we could use to sort of pry under
 the wheels. I got a big board, I think it was a two-by six, and put it under another board,
and the board hit me on the head. 

"It hit me so hard, I thought my head was gone,
and I felt to see if it was still
  there.

"We got there about daylight, and we were the first newspaper people
there. We would dictate to The Daily Oklahoman, to the
rewrite desk. We didn't have time to sit down and write a story.

 "I went into one of the houses, and there were still burning
 coals in the fireplace. I saw a dog lying in front of the fireplace
waiting for his family to come home, the childrens' stocking
 hanging on
the mantel.

"And nobody there. The entire family was dead."

Mr. Mills' voice quivered, and his lips trembled. He was silent for a few
moments. Then he added, "I'll never forget what I saw. But that's what a
 newspaper reporter does, he covers the good ... and the bad."

 When I think of Jimmy Mills, it will be as a crusading editor
 who changed laws, but I'll also remember him as a gentle, kind,
 sensitive individual who cared about people and believed that a
 newspaperman could make the world a better place.

 And I'll remember the story that he told me of the Christmas
 tree fire in a little Oklahoma community nearly 70 years ago.

(Ed Williams is a professor in the Department of  Communication and Journalism at
Auburn University)

Interviews with Alabama’s senior
newspaper men and women
Conducted by Ed Williams at Saturday luncheon
APA 125th Anniversary Convention in Montgomery
Feb. 24, 1996

From  "The Press of Alabama: A History of the Alabama Press Association," by Ed Williams

Chapter 12



James E. (Jimmy) Mills, age 95
(Retired)
Born July 28, 1900
Editor, The Birmingham Post
and the Birmingham Post-Herald,
1930-1967

    You are the senior newspaper man in the state of Alabama. You were editor of the old Birmingham Post and later the Birmingham Post-Herald from 1930 until your retirement in 1967.
    You are probably best known for a landmark Supreme Court decision in Mills vs. Alabama. Until 1966, Alabama law forbid the state’s newspapers from publishing election-day editorials. Birmingham was in the middle of a bitter change of government election in 1962, and an editorial ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald on election day urging citizens to vote for an alternative form of government. The mayor-council proposition carried, but James E. Mills was arrested and charged with violating the Alabama Corrupt Practices Act.
    “At the time you wrote that editorial, were you making a deliberate challenge to the state law of the time?
    “No, I wasn’t making a deliberate challenge at all. I was just trying to throw out the present city government so we could replace it with some decent government.”

    Were you ever actually jailed on charges of electioneering?
    “No, but I thought I might have an opportunity to have a lot of fun if I did go to jail. My predecessor as editor of the old Birmingham Post, Ed Leach who ended up as editor of The Pittsburgh Press, did turn jail time into a big party. The Alabama attorney general came up from Montgomery and demanded that he stop the press and end publication of a story. Ed told him he could just go to hell.
    “So they arrested him, and Ed went to jail for a week and he had more fun and the people of Alabama had more fun for a week than they had ever seen before or since. He really had a big time. They brought him drinks, cigarettes and delicacies seldom seen in city jails. They even brought a band down to play for him. He had a great time.
    “When the sheriff’s deputy came up with the warrant for my arrest, he said, ‘Well, you just sign your own warrant.’ I thought about going to jail like Ed Leach did and then decided it wouldn’t be worth it. I just won’t have any fun. And we let the deputy go about his way.”

    Prior to your trial date, a judge ruled the anti-electioneering law to be unconstitutional, but the  Alabama Supreme Court reinstated the charge.
    Mills. vs. Alabama reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal, and the judgment was reversed on May 23, 1966, with an Alabama native, Justice Hugo Black, writing the opinion for the high court. Will you recall where you were at the time you heard the news, and your reaction at the time?
    “You know, at my age, my chief complaint is that I don’t have a memory, but I’ll never forget where I was or what I did. Elise (my wife) and I had been up to a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal that year. The meeting was over and we decided to take a little vacation up there. We wanted to go up to Quebec on the French side of the St. Lawrence River there. As we got over there, of course, we found most of the people speaking French only. We had a time driving, but we had a lot of fun.
    “From our Quebec hotel window we could look down on the river and watch the big ocean vessels coming in.
    “We were out one morning walking around town to see what we could see of interest and returned a little after noon and the telephone’s red light was blinking and blinking, and there were several notes under our door.
    “I had calls from New York and calls from Washington, and calls from Birmingham. I said, ‘Mimi, (Elise Mills’ nickname) all hell has broken loose someplace.’
    “I had many calls and had to decide where to call first. One was from Jack Howard, calling from the New York office of Scripps Howard. I hurriedly got on the phone and and called him.
    “Jack said, ‘All is forgiven. You can come home.’
    “I said, ‘What did you say?’
    “‘All is forgiven. you can come home.’
    “I said, ‘Jack, I don’t understand.’
    “Jack said, ‘Oh hell. The Supreme Court just handed down a decision in your behalf. You can come home.’
    “Then, of course, I had all the other calls to answer, among them the Associated Press and United Press. I had to sit down then and figure out something to say that would make some sense. That’s what I did. I prepared a statement I was willing to be quoted on in papers all cross the country. It was not easy. That finished our day -- a big day never to be forgotten.”

--30--

 

Thanks for visiting my Alabama Newspaper
Hall of Honor Web page!

 The next Hall of Honor induction ceremony
 will be in fall 2004.  Details later.

Ed Williams
Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism

willik5@auburn.edu
Tichenor Hall 217
Auburn University, Ala. 36849