Mr. Graves Takes a Walk

The exits of most hired newsrooms hands are quiet and quick. The exit of John Temple Graves II from the staff of the Birmingham Age-Herald last week was a five-day rowdydow.

For 17 years, Graves's column, "This Morning," had the Age-Herald's Page One, Column One spot. He was stoutly in favor of Southern chivalry, Birmingham-made steel, free enterprise, John Temple Graves II and segregation of Negroes. A round-faced, goggle-eyed Georgian of 53, Graves was editor of the Jacksonville (Fla.) Journal when in 1929 the Age-Herald's late Publisher Victor Hanson hired him away, for $75 a week, and made him a columnist.

In Birmingham, Columnist Graves lived gently on the far side of Red Mountain, away from the city's valleyful of smoke & soot, and became, in his own words, "a Southerner who is willing to make it a profession." He mailed his column to about a half dozen other Southern newspapers, who printed it because they liked Graves's ability to tout the South.

Columnist Graves was prone to quote such back-pats from admirers as this one: "Silver has its Bryan, the League of Nations its Wilson, the sensible free speech has you. ... All hail to the champion of freedom." To which Columnist Graves generously responded, in print: "All hail to you, too, Mr. Purdy."

A fortnight ago, Graves, who had not had a raise in all his Age-Herald years, was informed by General Manager James E. Chappell that "This Morning" would be booted off Page One forthwith and deposited inside the paper. Graves promptly wrote to Chappell: "My column has . . . become easily the most widely read and popular thing in the papers as well as in the South from a Southern writer. . . . The reading public will interpret [this shift] as another example of what happens to columnists when they don't follow your editorial policy. . . . My column's policies, as you know, are much more popular now than your editorial ones. . . ."

Next day Columnist Graves followed this letter with another: he was going on a two-week lecture tour and if the column was really to be moved, he would "hand you my resignation before I do go. . . . If I am relegated to an obscure position . . . I shall be so lost to view that gradually I shall lose my present hold. ... It will be far better from my point of view to leave . . . when my leaving will create the biggest protest and be most widely noted. . . ."

Chappell had the last word: "I shall not attempt to argue with you. ... It would be impossible for either you or me to be longer happy in any sort of employment relationship. . . ."

Three days later Graves's "This Morning," retitled "This Afternoon," popped up on Page One of the Age-Herald's opposition, Scripps-Howard's Birmingham Post.

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