What was it like to cover the South for the wire service during the era of Civil Rights?
In those days, I ran the night desk in Atlanta. I took calls from reporters in the field and turned those notes into national stories. I rarely went out to cover anything, so I haven’t any wonderful first-hand stories to tell. There was certainly a feeling of doing something important, beyond the mere coverage of daily events. Willie B., Atlanta Zoo’s famous gorilla, spent many years in a small room with a tire swing before the current zoo was designed. With your love of animals and nature, how did Willie B. touch you? The socialization of Willie B. was a wonderful thing to see. The people engineering it, from Terry Maple down to Charles Horton, were fairly apprehensive. These are, after all, powerful creatures. I attended the physical examination of another silverback at the zoo. While he was under anesthetic, I lifted his arm. It took both my hands, like lifting a very large log. At any rate, there was the potential for disaster at every step of the way. But Willie took every change,
