"A Good Start"

As reporter and later city editor for the Atlanta Journal (circ. 250,095), Bob Collins was a crusading young newsman who never let go of a story until he got official action. Example: after the war, he wrote two long series exposing Army waste in Georgia that resulted in two congressional investigations, got the practices stopped. Six months ago, Journalist Collins, 34, got a new job as Journal editorial writer and columnist. Instead of retiring into an ivory tower, he went right on crusading, though often in such minor--and popular --causes as the lack of courtesy among bus drivers. This spring, Bob Collins turned his fire on a bigger target.

In a series of columns, he wrote that the local policy racket, long known as the "bug," was flourishing more than ever. Its headquarters, wrote Collins, had shifted from Atlanta to nearby Clayton County, where residents complained of "prostitution, bootlegging . . . brawling in the roadhouses and occasional slayings." Said Collins: the local cops are doing nothing about it. In high dudgeon, Clayton County's Sheriff W. L. Dickson wrote the editors challenging Collins to prove that there was anything wrong in the county. Said Collins: "That made me mad."

Collins enlisted Baptist Minister Hoyt Farr and Methodist Minister Roland Walker as witnesses, set forth one night for the Hunt and Lido Clubs, in dry Clayton County. Collins talked his way past burly bouncers and a front door with iron bars, got a minister ("my buddy") into each club with him. In his column, he reported what they had seen: "The Hunt Club [has] a well-stocked bar ... big stacks of gambling chips and the biggest crap or gaming table you are likely to see in these parts ... At the Lido Club there is a gambling room with a bar . . ." Last week, only three days after Bob Collins' expose, Clayton County's grand jury called him and his "buddies" to testify, indicted eight operators of the Lido and the Hunt for gambling and selling liquor illegally. Said the Atlanta Constitution, sister paper of the Journal: "We hope that yesterday's indictments are but a first step in a wholesale cleanup . . . A good start has already been made . . ."

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