Ink By the Barrel

James Taylor Lookalike

Every few weeks, someone will look at me and then do a double-take as if they know me, when they really haven't ever seen me before.

"Are you ..." they will start to ask.

"James Taylor?" I fill in and they usually admit that's who they mistook me for. They are not alone. James Taylor's own brother, Livingston Taylor, freaked out one time when I walked in on one of his shows.

So this past Sunday afternoon, as we biked down the Silver Comet Trail, I mentioned to my wife Jan that James was playing that night at Chastain Park.

"I've never seen him," she said.

Even though I figured she looks at him almost every day in her very own house, I offered to go scalp some tickets to the sold-out show.

I'm not exactly sure when this started, but I believe it was about the time James and I started to lose our hair – well, maybe lost almost all of our hair would be more accurate. I may have looked like him when his famous Sweet Baby James album came out in February 1970. When I went off to boarding school for 9th grade that fall, that album spent a great deal of time on my turntable in my dorm room. If you look at his album cover photo and then my photo a year or two later, there is not that much resemblance ... is there? But later, in my mid-30s, when there was no hair on top of my head, I noticed there was none on top of James' head either.

A few years later, I was serving as promotion manager at The Charlotte Observer and we co-sponsored lots of events with radio station WRFX. When they hosted their anniversary party, they booked Livingston Taylor to play and invited me.

In between sets, I noticed he wandered just past me to an empty back barroom, so I waited a few minutes and then poked my head in the door. The room was empty, except for a lone Livingston Taylor, sitting at the bar, enjoying a drink and a smoke, of some kind. He froze.

"Sorry," I began, "I didn't mean to disturb you. I just wanted to say I was really enjoying your show."

"Oh, no problem," he said. "Thanks."

"Hey, it's kind of funny, but people tell me all the time I look like your brother, James."

"I know," Livingston said. "You freaked me out when you first walked in. I thought it was him."

A few years later, I went to hear a band named Gurufish at Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta. A few songs into their first set, a guy walked up to me and said, "Hey, James Taylor, I'm the manager of the band and I just wanted to thank you for coming out to hear the band. Can I buy you a beer?"

Okay, what was I supposed to do? If I said I wasn't James Taylor, he would have been disappointed. If I played along, he gets to tell the band on break that he got James Taylor to come see them. And besides, I was getting a free beer out of the deal.

My friend, Charles Driebe, who's a music lawyer, suggested I should get some business cards to keep in my wallet that just say, "J.T."

When a friend invited me at the last minute to hear James playing at Chastain 10 years ago when I was writing a monthly column for my monthly newspapers, now known as Atlanta INtown Paper, I called up the show's producer and asked if I could introduce James on stage by walking out to great applause and announcing to the crowd, "I'm not James Taylor." And then, when the crowd was confused, I would say, "But this IS James Taylor." I told them I would give them generous exposure in my column.

They actually considered it and told me they would contact James' manager and get back with me. They called an hour later and said if I had called a couple of days before, they could have arranged it.

Jan has seen photos of James Taylor and she doesn't think we look alike. So after our bike ride last Sunday,
I hustled out to Chastain Park 30 minutes before the show and found some tickets for sale. I ended up buying two tickets at a table near the stage. I raced home, and Jan and I made it to the table at 7:59pm. A minute later, I, er, James walked out on the stage to great cheering. We snapped a few photos for history's sake. I never did get close enough to talk with my lookalike, but his image was projected on the big screen for the sold-out crowd to see. Unbeknownst to me (until later), a table of friends and clients were laughing all night about how "Schroder was playing well tonight!"

After the show, as Jan and I packed up our cooler to leave, a guy wandered over from a table next to us.
"Hey, I just have to ask, are you James Taylor's brother?"

Okay, what was I supposed to do?

Actually, I told the truth. After all, he didn't have a beer left to offer me.

Photos: Above: Sweet Baby James cover, me at 16, Lower: Me near stage at Chastain with James playing. James on stage at Chastain.

No Such Thing As A Bad Hamilton Jordan

New Years Eve in 1979, I went to the bar at the Nine O'Clocks party held at the Piedmont Driving Club to get a drink and saw another gentleman ahead of me. I was not a member of the Nine O'Clocks nor the PDC and neither was the man whose face I instantly recognized when he turned around: Hamilton Jordan. The Chief of Staff to President Jimmy Carter had been a major focus of study for me as I followed his career in the media during my college years and then as a newspaperman.

As a rule, I generally shy away from celebrities. I don't see much to gain from my spending a few minutes talking with them and I respect their privacy enough to generally steer clear. But this was different. From the moment Jimmy Carter announced his run for the presidency, I had been reading and admiring from afar the architect of his meteoric rise. So I introduced myself to Hamilton, chatted for a while and told him I had been a volunteer in their campaign when I was a college student. Now, as a reporter for The Augusta Chronicle, I told him I would be honored if he would let me interview him sometime.

"I don't do interviews with the press," Hamilton said.

"I know," I said. "I've read that. But I'm interested in hearing your side. I'm offering you a chance to tell your side of the story."

As we both stood there in our tuxedos, alone at the bar, Hamilton stirred his drink and thought for a moment. "Here's my card," he said. "Call me sometime and I'll speak with you."

I was stunned. As a young reporter, 18 months out of school, working for my second newspaper, I had just scored an opportunity of a lifetime: a rare interview with a private man who shunned publicity and had the scars to prove it. I couldn't wait to get back to my managing editor in Augusta and begin making my plans. Boy, was I disappointed.

"We don't have any money in budget to send you to Washington," my boss said. "Just do it over the phone."

Again, I was stunned. What kind of two-bit newspaper was I working for? This was a Georgia newspaper and this was an administration run by Georgians. I continued to bargain. I contacted Hodding Carter, whose family newspaper I had worked for previously in Greenville, Miss. Hodding was then the press spokesperson for the U.S. State Department – a position that would guarantee one anonymity, except for the fact that he appeared before the cameras each day as the government's only spokesperson on the Iran Hostage Crisis. The intense media scrutiny given to the kidnapping of U.S. personnel in Tehran was unprecedented, leading ABC to establish "Nightline" at 11:30pm to keep the ratings going. Hodding also agreed to an interview.

But my boss wouldn't budge. So I pulled out my third pitch: I scored an interview with my parents' friend and recently retired Attorney General Griffin Bell. Here was a trilogy of Carter Administration icons, but it didn't matter to a small town paper ruled by a focus on profit, and keeping expenses to a bare minimum. Newspaper editors are objective, so I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that The Augusta Chronicle was the most Republican newspaper in the South.

So I took a gamble. I took the time off as vacation, drove to Washington, stayed with Donna and Mike Egan, whose son was a lifelong pal. Mr. Egan was Associate Attorney General, working for Griffin Bell.

True to his word, Hamilton allowed me to interview him, though my dreams of a White House moment were slightly dampened when he told me to meet him across the street at the Executive Office Building. We talked a lot about how the press had treated him. His focus on work and desire not to get involved in the Washington social whirl only made him more fascinating to the media. The stories ranged from his living in his car as a student at the University of Georgia to illegal drug use to insulting the wife of the Egyptian ambassador.

I asked Hamilton about these rumors and reports and he was open about them. He not only denied them, he was stunned that the press could publish them with no basis of truth. He answered all my questions with honesty, integrity and with such a believable candor that I came away with an even greater appreciation for him than I had already. As I prepared to leave, I asked him what he thought about the fact that Election Day 1980 fell exactly on the one year anniversary of the taking of the hostages in Iran. He looked taken aback.

"Honestly, I never realized that until you just mentioned it. I imagine that will get some media attention," he said. And it did. The crisis became a metaphor for the entire presidency and Ronald Reagan exploited it perfectly during the campaign to end Carter's presidency at one term. My series of interviews with all three men ran in the Chronicle, to great acclaim. Eventually, my editor agreed to reimburse me the vacation time and mileage that I had invested.

I ran into Hamilton a few more times in the following decades, once at Christ the King for Easter services, as we each chased our then toddlers, my daughter Sally and his son, Hamilton Jr., on the Peachtree Road lawn as Mass was performed inside. I saw him last a few months ago when he courageously spoke to a packed Atlanta Press Club session, talking about his 20-year battle with three kinds of cancer.

This past Sunday morning, I was packing for a trip to a PRSA Counselors Academy conference in Naples, FL and running late. As I grabbed my suitcase and laptop, I realized I didn't have a book or a magazine to take. So I looked in a pile of books near my dresser and I saw Hamilton's "No Such Thing As a Bad Day," his memoir about his battle with cancer that had been a New York Times bestseller. He gave out autographed copies at the Press Club. I tossed it in my suitcase and left for the airport.

Yesterday morning, I woke up in Naples and began packing for my return. I IM'd with my wife Jan, who informed me that Hamilton had died unexpectedly on Tuesday night. I was stunned.

I've been unfaithful to my blog as of late. I've been feeling quite guilty about that as I've focused more on work and family. It seems a number of my recent entries have been about people I knew whose death surprised me. Hamilton's did as well. As I sat down on the Delta jet to return to Atlanta, I opened his book and began to read about his time in Vietnam, in the White House and in the numerous hospitals in which he fought his battles. He traced his first cancer to Agent Orange, an herbicide sprayed recklessly by the U.S. government to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam. Hamilton and thousands of other Americans (and no doubt many more Vietnamese) later contracted cancer.

I was burdened by his loss as I left the plane and walked to the MARTA station to return to my office. There, in line to purchase a train ticket, was Mr. Egan. He looked a little bewildered by the Breeze ticket machines, which is my reaction every time I step up to them. I had purchased a few extra ones on my way out of town. I offered Mr. Egan an extra and we rode back to the city together. I told him of Hamilton's death the night before. He had not heard.

"I always loved Hamilton," Mr. Egan said. "He was one of my favorite people in Washington."

I've been so blessed in my life with good health. Though my Dad died at age 78, my mother is still going strong at 91. All of my siblings and our spouses and children are all alive and healthy and I thank God for that gift. But the older I get, the more often people I have known and admired leave us here on earth. A piece of me dies with each of their departures. I'm a bit strange that way. I think about the people who have left us as much as the ones who remain. I firmly believe I will see them all again when I, with God's blessing, embark on my own journey to Heaven.

I'm burdened today by Hamilton Jordan's departure. He was such a modest, measured, surprisingly soft spoken, quiet, yet incredibly strong, gifted and visionary strategist. He was mistreated and his talents were under-appreciated by the media of which I was a part and with which I still work as a public relations professional.

Hamilton left his family and those of us who admired him too early, but due to his life's work, he left us much better than he found us. As I enjoy a Memorial Day Weekend with my family, I will undoubtedly add him to my long list of people I think of fondly – and without whom our lives will not be as rich.

Memorial for Doug Marlette

Last summer, I was shocked to read the news that Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette was killed in a one-car accident in which he was a passenger near Oxford, Mississippi. I had worked with Doug at the Charlotte Observer in the 1980s and later visited with him when I was interviewing for a position I later took at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In today's world of instant Internet news delivery, I quickly navigated to the Observer website and read a touching tribute to Doug posted by his longtime friend and one-time boss, Ed Williams, who manages the editorial page. Doug's creative personality was both endearing and, at times, challengingly provocative, and Ed summed it up well and quickly. Reading about Doug's life brought back a flood of memories of my own and I wrote Ed and traveled to Charlotte on August 8 for a memorial service. Ed's latest column on Doug published just two days ago.

I first met Doug in the first few weeks of what turned out to be a very stressful job. You'd think being the manager of 28 creative writers and designers and event-planning employees would be a fun job and, at times, it was. But it was also difficult to please my clients, who were the paper's editor, circulation manager and advertising director. They each fought for control of my department and our resources. I felt a kinship with Teddy Kollek, then the mayor of Jerusalem who was featured on 60 Minutes as a peacemaker in a city claimed for and whose control was aggressively sought by three major religions: Christians, Jews and Muslims. Teddy did a much better job managing Jerusalem than I did with the Observer promotion department, but I was only 29 when I took the job and I was soon locked in a battle with seasoned veterans.

After one of my early squabbles with all three "religions" at the paper, I wandered back to my office and found Doug Marlette sitting in a chair, a pile of books in his hand. He quickly straightened me out. My main job at the Observer, I soon learned, was to promote Doug! Soon my department was designing and publishing promotional ads in our paper that highlighted Doug's talents and offered his books for sale. A few weeks later in January 1986, when the Challenger exploded, Doug drove back to the office and penned a cartoon that published the next day.

The morning it ran, our phone started ringing. Readers wanted to order copies of the cartoon. We ran an ad the next day offering them to readers for the cost of postage. We were flooded with their responses. People who might have canceled their subscriptions because of their ire over one of Doug's previous controversial cartoons were now seeking five or 10 copies for their friends and families. My secretary tried to keep up, to no avail. Soon carts of mail were being hauled into our offices and all of our employees were having to fill the orders. Doug was very happy. In all, we fulfilled 70,000 orders for reprints.

Later, when my parents were celebrating their 50th anniversary, I produced a special commemorative newspaper and asked Doug for a cartoon. He adapted one for the occasion, with Popeye and Olive Oil in a marriage counselor's office, with Popeye saying, "I suppose I am who I am and you am who you am too!" It was a big hit with my family.

Eventually Doug left the Observer for bigger markets, including Atlanta and New York. When I visited him in his office at the AJC shortly after he joined that staff, he was already restless and, he felt, under-appreciated. He was extremely talented, as soon proven by the Pulitzer Prize he won for his work at both the Observer and the AJC. Later, he wrote novels and this past summer, when he was in Mississippi, he was working with a high school drama class that was going to perform a musical in Edinburgh Fringe Festival based on his popular comic strip, Kudzu.

The evening of his memorial, several hundred Doug-lovers gathered at a church in Charlotte and told the old stories, read passages from his work and showed a slide show of his more controversial cartoons. We were all saddened to know his voice had been stilled, but all were richer for having known this creative genius of a man.

Photos: Doug Marlette and the Challenger cartoon that was reprinted 70,000 times in 1986 and again today, on websites all over cyberspace.

The Reluctant Speaker

A few weeks back, when I read the email from the Atlanta Press Club that John Huey, editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., was coming to speak today, I immediately signed up for three tickets. Not just because John oversees 140 different magazines and has one of the most interesting media jobs in the world, but because he grew up on East Wesley Road next door to Tom Murphy.

Tom is an old friend whose family I knew back in the old elementary school days at Christ the King. Many years later, when I started a neighborhood newspaper called Atlanta 30306 in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood (later renamed Atlanta Intown), Tom was one of the first people I visited to try to convince to advertise in the start-up. He did, for many years. In the process, we renewed our friendship and became best buddies.

A few years ago, I was having a beer with Tom when he was discussing the upcoming 25th anniversary of his restaurant. I suggested he publish a book, recounting his many entrepreneurial adventures, but he was reluctant, wanting instead to print a book of recipes. I kept pushing him. "This will brand you in ways you'll never predict," I said. "The very fact that you have a book about your restaurant will elevate your brand, but it will be a great book because you have so many great stories. Besides, I know the perfect writer."

So thus began the long journey of Tom and my former editor and later bride, Jan Butsch Schroder, of compiling the book now known as Murphy's, 25 Years of Recipes and Memories. The book published to great acclaim and a large, front-page story on the front of the AJC Living section. It is full of great recipes, photos and, most of all, stories ... stories about being embezzled, robbed, about having to fire his wife after she threw a wet towel at him when a patron kissed Tom on the cheek, about the many great chefs who got their start at Murphy's.

Tom, like Jan, is a private person, whose nature is not to step in the spotlight. And he hates public speaking. Once, when he had to introduce Hank Payne, president of Woodward Academy, Tom was too intimidated by the thought of standing in front of fellow classmates at Leadership Midtown and introducing the former college president. So when I suggested producing a video instead, Tom jumped at the chance.

As a child, Tom also had the distinction of growing up next door to John Huey in Garden Hills in Atlanta. As Tom tells the story, John grew up in a nice Southern Baptist household, but next door were the wild and crazy New York/Irish Catholic Murphys, with five children. Not only that, Tom's parents also housed unwed mothers and, later, when Castro took over Cuba, dozens of Cuban refugee families. People were coming and going at all hours of the night at the Murphy household. John would look out his window and just shake his head at all the activity.

So when Jan began to assemble the book, getting quotes from celebrities who once ate there was one of her many tasks. Katie Couric, a frequent visitor to Murphy's when she worked in Atlanta, was a non-starter. Her office said she was contractually obligated not to endorse restaurants. John Huey, after a number of emails, wrote back a wonderful quote that we included on page 10 of the book: "I grew up next door to the Murphy family. They were an exotic family, to say the least. Dad ran a cheese business out of the back yard and did a lot of ministering to the poor. Mom was a nurse and there were lots and lots of kids. Tom, or Tommy, as we knew him, was always my favorite because of that personality he still has today. My most vivid memory of him is as a young child, standing down by the curb of East Wesley Road, selling hot dogs from a little stand he had cobbled together. As you might expect, they were good. And they sold. So maybe Murphy's is really a lot older than 25."

One thing Jan tried to secure was a photo of John. But she couldn't find one on the Internet and his assistant said, "There are no photos of John." So we published the book without one, one of many loose ends we were never able to tie up before printing.

So, two years later, when I saw John was to speak to the press club, I bought tickets to the luncheon and VIP reception for me, Jan and Tom.

When the big day arrived, today, we drove down to the Commerce Club and took the elevator to the 18th floor reception. I brought along a copy of the book. We had sent one to John's office, but we were always unsure if he ever received it. When he recognized "Tommy" and shook his hand and started telling old stories, we asked if he had ever seen his quote in the book. He said he didn't. I said we weren't able to get his photo to publish and John said in his dry humor, "No, there are no photos of me." So we showed the book to him, gave him the autographed copy and walked away. I then saw Spark St. Jude, a photographer snapping away at the reception, so I went over and asked her to shoot a photo of the two boyhood neighbors, holding the book. She was able to take one or two, when an alarm went off.

The fire alarms went off in the Commerce Club, so we all had to walk down 18 flights of old dirty stairs to the street. A crowd of people stood on Broad Street downtown until the firemen came and inspected each floor. We were finally later able to get back to the 16th floor for the luncheon and the speech by John Huey, which was hilarious.

"Normally that fire drill trick works so I don't have to give a speech," John dead-panned. "In New York, if people walk down that many flights of stairs, they just go on back to work and the speech never happens. It didn't work here.

"When the Atlanta Press Club invited me to speak, I said 'no.' (pause) I still feel that way," he said to great laughter. He went on to tell many great stories of growing up in Atlanta, working for The Atlanta Constitution, and working with Alexis Scott, now publisher of the Atlanta Daily World. John claimed he had been duped into giving the speech after turning it down, when Alexis called to ask him to give a toast at the 10th anniversary of her being named publisher. Next thing he knew, he said, he was being promoted as giving the press club speech. So he proceeded to give Alexis her well-deserved toast, as well as talk about other aspects of journalism and Atlanta today.

At the end of his speech, John reached down and grabbed the Murphy's book and told the crowd to buy it, as it contained "many great stories about Tom's excellent restaurant in Virginia-Highland ... and a quote from me on page 10."

And there, many years later, I felt my prediction had been reinforced in spades, that Tom's book would help brand him and his restaurant. For here Tom was being endorsed from the podium to a sell-out crowd at the Atlanta Press Club by the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.

Now, if I can just get that photograph ...

Photos: The book and the co-authors at earlier Atlanta Press Club Author's Party, Jan and Tom

PR Prayer Breakfast

This morning my staff attended the first annual Atlanta Public Relations Interfaith Breakfast at Twelve at Atlantic Station. Organized by a committee of several PR firms, the vision for the breakfast came from Glen Jackson, a partner in Jackson Spalding, one of the largest independent firms in town. Glen's partner is my third cousin, Bo Spalding.

Atlanta has a number of annual interfaith breakfasts and the tradition goes back decades to our city's legacy as a beacon of civility during the turmoil of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s. One of the most successful of these is the Atlanta Rotary Club's Prayer Breakfast, which I attended for the second year in a row this year. The speakers are always inspirational, but I especially look forward to the dramatic presentation by Tom Key of the Theatrical Outfit, one of the great treasures of this city. Glen happened to chair this year's Rotary breakfast and I congratulated him afterwards. He told me about the planned PR breakfast, so I quickly bought a table.

Another successful industry prayer breakfast is the Real Estate Prayer Breakfast, which we also support with the purchase of a table. This one was originally started in honor of the life of Mark Christopher, an amazing man of faith who battled cancer in 1996 and whose optimism and daily recorded inspirational messages of hope through the last months of his life touched many lives. He was scheduled to speak at the first RE prayer breakfast in May 1998, but he died that month. I knew Mark from my Friday Morning Men's Fellowship and we visited him in the hospital once. We all went to support him, but he, instead, supported those of us crowded in his room.

This year's PR Prayer Breakfast was highlighted by wonderful music by Third Day, several members of which flew the red eye from LA to participate. The most touching moment, though, was when Brenda Wood, a local TV anchor for 11 Alive, gave a very transparent testimony of the value of faith and prayer in her life. Interviewed by Beth Bragg of the DeMoss Group, she had the sold-out room riveted silently listening to her having been "broken" several times and how God and her faith saved her. Her facial expressions and body language were amazingly mesmerizing, as much as actress of stage or screen. Yet she's a TV anchor here in Atlanta, and a great one – and a jewel of a role model of faith for the rest of us.

In addition to my staff, I invited Jae Stephenson of Resource Real Estate Marketing, and Sharon Goldmacher of Communications 21, who have recently referred business and offered advice to our five-year-old firm.

Jennifer Sheran, our general manager, my wife Jan and I were excited to invite our staff to the table. For many of our young team members, this event broke the ice of discussing faith at work. It's always a delicate balance, knowing when to profess your faith and when to run a "strictly professional" firm. Thanks to Glen and the organizing committee for this and other breakfasts in Atlanta, who have set the table for those discussions to continue into the day, well after the warmth of the breakfasts have begun to wane.

Photo of our staff at the PR Interfaith Prayer Breakfast, from left: Evelyn Anne Johnston, Devin Releford, Reid Childers, Jan Butsch Schroder, Mary Martin, Lila Campbell, Jennifer Sheran and me, Chris Schroder.

Ink By the Barrel

Mark Twain coined the original phrase, I named this blog after it, but the first time I heard the words, "Ink By the Barrel," I had just finished a plate of warmed-over baked chicken, mashed potatoes and green peas at the Kiwanis Club of Augusta, Georgia.

Then-Richmond County Sheriff J.B. Dykes was addressing the civic club and I was in the audience, sipping very sweet iced tea, along with lots of other radio and newspaper reporters. As J.B. said to start his speech that day in 1980: "My daddy always told me, 'Never pick a fight with lawyers, doctors or men who buy ink by the barrel.' " In case we didn't catch his drift, J.B. went on to say, "I see there are a lot of reporters, so I better watch what I say here."

The Kiwanians loved it and we in the media squirmed. J.B. seemed like a nice guy, but I certainly never wanted to pick a fight with him. Well, as it turns out, he had good reason to keep reporters at arms' length. A few years later, he was charged with taking bribes to fix warrants for driving under the influence of alcohol. He eventually pleaded guilty to two federal charges of obstructing justiice for firing a secretary and threatening to kill a deputy – both of whom were cooperating with federal agents. The sheriff was sentenced to four years in prison.

I've spent more than 25 years in the newspaper business, from editing my high school and college papers, to working for six daily newspapers in the South, to starting my own neighborhood papers in Atlanta in 1994. I eventually sold the papers to Atlanta developer Tom Cousins in 2001 and moved on to the Public Relations business. I've run Schroder PR for five years now and a month hasn't gone by when someone didn't stop me and mention how much they miss my newspaper and my monthly column. I always say I miss it too and maybe I'll write a book someday. Of course, I'm too busy with PR client work and not disciplined enough to write that book. The latest was a lawyer in Austin, Texas, named Hamp Skelton, a high school classmate, who wrote me last month: "I miss your column. You should do it as a blog."

Here I am in PR, urging and selling my clients on writing a blog and I don't have one. The cobbler's son has no shoes ...

So here it is, the start of my blog, named after what I would have named my book. I knew the minute J.B. Dykes said those words that "Ink By the Barrel" would be the name of my memoir. I'm not sure my life has been that interesting to write a memoir – at least not one people would pay to read. But it certainly rates the name of my blog – and it's free to you and your friends.

All of my columns from my seven years of publishing neighborhood newspapers are housed here for your – and Hamp's and all the other fine folks' who have encouraged me through the years – enjoyment. Today, the phrase still applies ... I don't print a newspaper, buying ink by the barrel to print on newsprint, but my professional team tries each day to get my clients all the "ink" they can.

Today begins my new path of writing – not a book, not a newspaper, not a press release, but a blog. Enjoy, visit often and post your own comments.

And thanks to my lovely bride, Jan Butsch Schroder, a published author who got tired of me complaining about me not following my bliss and engaging my passion – writing. She started this blog, posted my old columns and said, "Here, now start writing."

Thanks to J.B. Dykes (Sheriff, wherever you are, I hope you're well) and Mark Twain, too, for the title. Thanks for reading. Stay in touch.

Photo: My lovely bride, Jan Butsch Schroder, a published author in her own right, who inspired me to re-publish my columns and start my blog.

Boys on the Beach

At least twice a year, I led a large crew of teenagers to Myrtle Beach or St. Simons Island for a week’s vacation. I’ve often taken my two kids and their two buddies. Other times I’ve taken four 14-year-old girls or three 15-year-old boys. In April, I rented a large van equipped with a TV/VCR/CD, picked up five16-year-old boys and drove them around the coast a week.

When my children were younger, our vacations were a very important bonding time for us. When they moved with their mom to Charlotte seven years ago, this time became even more sacred. I knew while I could not be involved in their daily lives as much as I would’ve preferred, I had to make the most of the time we were given. When I had the opportunity, I made a point to clear my work and personal schedule and spend my energies focused on Sally and Thomas. I would usually plan elaborate vacations to keep them interested. But as they became teenagers and friend-focused, I reluctantly accepted that our family vacations must include their buddies.

At first this past month’s trip seemed to be going similarly. Sally was finishing a particularly tumultuous year: moving to Atlanta, then back to Charlotte to finish her senior year, back to Atlanta in March and then back to Charlotte to take a final summer school course. Her graduation ceremony was scheduled for the day before our vacation. We had all hoped friends could go to the beach with us, but it didn’t seem to be working out. At the last minute, Sally decided to stay home and celebrate with friends.

Thomas surprised me with his decision. “I’ve seen my friends a lot this summer and I have a lot of summer reading to finish,” he said. “I think I will just go with you.” We rented movies, went to movies, cooked dinner, went out to dinner and just hung out all week. Each day, we wandered to the beach with our chairs, books, frisbee, football, cooler, CD player and his choice of music.

Somewhere near the fourth day, I had to laugh at how much my life had changed and yet, how much it had not. Thomas is 16. When I was 16, I was at the beach with my buddies, listening to much of the same music Thomas had selected, throwing a frisbee amidst the waves, sand and sun. Bob Dylan’s strange 35-year-old lyric kept ringing in my head and suddenly it made more sense to me: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

As the tide washed around our chairs, we had great talks about girlfriends, high school, college and family. He asked a lot of questions about the future of my business and I discussed how sometimes it is hard for an entrepreneur to work in a corporate environment. He admitted he hoped he could work for these newspapers one day.

When our week was coming to a close, I noticed sadness was beginning to emerge. I felt as if I had met a new best friend and he was going to leave soon.

“Thomas, I know it wasn’t planned this way, but I’ve really had a wonderful time just hanging out with you this week,” I said.

He thought for a moment and then said, “Yea, I might like to bring my girlfriend next time if her parents will let her. But in the future, I think we should also plan some trips with just you and me. Sometimes when I bring buddies, I don’t get to spend enough time with you.”

I know parents can spend a lifetime working for their families and never feel as if they are appreciated. While I await a similar moment with my daughter, I knew I had just received such a gift from my son. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Photo: Thomas and me as we are preparing for a trip to the beach

Home Delivery

A friend of mine is dean of the business school at Emory University. At dinner one night a few years ago, she said she would like for me to tell the story of my newspaper start-up to her students.

Flattered, I tried to envision my audience and asked her, “Oh, you mean your graduate MBA students?”

She laughed and said, “Oh no. The graduate students would tear you apart! You didn’t have a business plan or a five-year growth strategy or start-up capital. They’d think you were nuts. I meant the undergraduate students. They love hearing stories about entrepreneurs who had an idea one day and started into it the next. They’re much more forgiving.”

When I was at the University of Virginia, I avoided math, business and science courses and instead, loaded up on English and History. Later, when I was working at the newspaper in Greenville, SC, the publisher invited me to enter “management” and suggested I pursue an MBA. I first had to take six college-level business courses.

When The Charlotte Observer recuited me, I told the general manager I was about to begin my MBA-level course work and could continue it in Charlotte. “We don’t care that much about graduate schooling here,” he said. “We learn on the job and have our own training program. Your grades will be your performance and results.” Thus ended my formal schooling career.

When I did concoct the crazy idea (seven years ago this month) to start my own newspaper, I tried to design one that could be distinguished from the other local publications. One such characteristic was mailing the paper to all the homes in the area. In so doing, we were able to build readership, foster a sense of community and guarantee an audience to the advertisers. It was a good idea, but it proved to be a very expensive one.

A month after my first issue was delivered, the post office raised its postal rates by 20 percent. But I have doggedly clung to the belief that mailing the paper was crucial. It hasn’t been easy. To encourage quick delivery, we have worked closely with the post office. If neighbors called to report they haven’t received their issue, I would flag down that carrier and ask about their delivery plans. We’ve delivered doughnuts to the post offices for what has generally been excellent service.

Over the years, business consultants have urged me to abandon the mailing costs. We spend more than $100,000 a year in postage. Last fall, we invited some advertisers to lunch to discuss our products. When I asked about mailing, many said it wasn’t as crucial as long as we could get the papers in the hands of our readers. We found a service that could deliver the papers very quickly to our 35,000 home subscribers – for a quarter of the cost of mailing. It allows us to get later news and fresher advertising to our readers.

As postal rates increased again this year, our costs have soared. We’ve also been touched a little by the slowing economy, though we are ahead of last year’s revenues. By cutting postage costs, we can keep on track to repay our business loans, expand distribution and continue bringing you a quality, positive community newspaper each month without a drastic change in our format.

All this is to say, beginning this month, the 35,000 households that normally got this newspaper inside their mailbox will now receive it outside it. As for me, I can close another book in the advanced degree I am pursuing called Successful Atlanta Newspaper Management.

Follow Your Bliss

Sometimes when I speak to a group of students, I tell them the story of when I was in high school and college and my father would urge me to follow our family tradition of becoming a lawyer. I watched as my cousins, brothers and friends entered into and prospered from the legal profession, yet I knew deep inside I was not cut out to be that organized, disciplined and steeped in research. My mind drifted toward more creative subjects, such as writing and design.

To deflect the inevitable confrontation with my dad, I began developing a track record in my areas of interest and joined my high school and college newspaper staffs. In my third year at the University of Virginia, I even wrote a column for my weekly paper entitled, “Courting the Law.”

As the time approached to register to take the law boards, I told him I was contemplating not even registering. He urged me to, saying I should “keep my options open.” I did register, but the night before the scheduled test, I intentionally stayed out too late and slept in that Saturday morning. He was not very happy.

I drifted off to be an itinerant journalist, traveling the South, making near-minimum wage. My dad feigned support as best he could, but would occasionally mention that it might not be too late to go back to law school. I told him my dream was that I would one day be publisher of the Atlanta newspapers (hope I wasn’t specific about which ones). Yet, in my heart, I wasn’t positive where I was headed. At one point, when a mentor suggested I move into the marketing and sales side of the newspaper business, I left journalism behind for nearly 10 years. Friends would ask if I missed writing and I’d say I didn’t, but inside, something was gnawing at me.

One day, the editor of my high school alumni magazine asked me to write a profile of fellow alum Clark Howard. I took the assignment, interviewed Clark in the studios of WSB-AM and went home to write a profile. Somewhere in the process of writing a feature story, I felt a passion and an energy I had not felt in nearly a decade. I discovered I did in fact miss writing very much.

I then recalled a stunning series of interviews television journalist Bill conducted with mythology professor Joseph Campbell, who talked about the concept of bliss. “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living,” he said. “When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Shortly thereafter I quit my job and, with guidance from God working through other people, published my first issue of my little neighborhood newspaper. No staff, no money, but plenty of bliss. My dad kept calling to urge me to bring over the first issue. He grabbed it, sat down and read it cover to cover. He walked out to my car in his driveway, hugged me and said something he had not said in a long time: “I’m really proud of you.” A week later, he suddenly had a stroke and died.

I was then joined by writers and designers and advertisers – all of whom, by following their own bliss and investing their talents and resources, have enlarged my little idea to what it is today.

When I tell this story, inevitably a couple of students will come up after my talk and say I have inspired them to do what they were meant to do, rather than listen to their dads. I am amused to hear that, particularly when I think about how I, in turn, sometimes give my own children too much advice. I suppose I secretly hope they will defy me and do what they really want to do. What I really want is for them to be happy. If they are, I will be very, very proud.

Redemption at Breakfast

I was a little nervous approaching a breakfast meeting a few weeks ago my personal marketing guru, Al Ries. I’ve been reading books he wrote or co-authored since I discovered his classic, Positioning, about 15 years ago. His logic struck me so clearly that I have been pushing his later writings on employees and clients ever since.

But I’ve been haunted by the fear that, subject to his scrutiny, my own record as publisher of these newspapers would get a failing grade. The purpose of breakfast was to discuss story ideas about Al, but I had a secondary motive. Having been raised a Catholic, I learned at an early age the import of going to church and confessing one’s sins to the priest. In return, the priest would give absolution and God would grant forgiveness. Now as an adult, I felt a strange desire to confess my marketing sins somewhere between the coffee and French Toast.

The short version of his doctrine is: in a world in which we are bombarded by millions of messages, our brains only assign a space a couple of words long for each company or product we care to remember. Volkswagen means small. Mercedes means expensive. Maytag means washers. Xerox means copiers, etc. When products remain true to their narrow “branding,” they succeed. When they morph into other meanings, they fail. Xerox computers never made it. Neither did larger VWs or inexpensive Mercedes. In fact, these diversions hurt the image and earnings of the original brands.

Try to be all things to all people and you will fail, Al preaches. The secret of success: narrow your focus – and thus enlarge your marketing potential.

I used to work for the big daily newspapers. Then I instinctively followed his sermon when I quit and started my own neighborhood newspapers, focused on and even named after the zip code I live in, Atlanta 30306, and later, the one I grew up in, Atlanta 30305.

Everything seemed to be going fine. Then we approached a dilemma: we needed to grow the company, but didn’t want to change its focus. We began to look at the potential business beyond our zip code boundaries and wondered if we wouldn’t do better if we enlarged our coverage – and changed our names. Temptation. Greed. Envy. This fork in the road had all the makings of a morality play.

For months, my staff argued the merits and the risks of changing our original name and focus. Some thought it would show growth. Others argued it would confuse our original readers. In the end, it probably did both. Over time, we have proved that we could survive the metamorphosis, but would this youthful indiscretion forever hinder our marketing purity and potential? It has worried me ever since.

After my first cup of coffee, as our discussion drifted toward neighborhoods, I broached the subject: “You know, my Atlanta Buckhead paper used to be called Atlanta 30305.”

“Yes, I know,” he said dryly and changed the subject.

“What was that?” I wondered. Disapproval? Disdain? Disinterest? I pressed again after the waitress cleared the dishes. I needed to know if my company was continuing to harvest fruit from a poisoned tree.

“I’ve got to ask you, was it a mistake for my company to change its names as such an early age?” He paused, took a sip of tea and looked at a recent copy of my paper. “Here it comes,” I thought. “My penance is on the way. Would I spend my life in purgatory?” I suddenly noticed Al’s face reminded me of one of the priests from my grade school years. I braced for his answer. “Please, give me an answer,” I thought. “I can’t carry this burden any more.”

“No,” he said. “I think you did the right thing.”

“Come again?” I said in shock.

“I think the zip code names were novel, but they don’t a lot to people who don’t live there. They don’t know where the zip begins or where it ends. Everyone knows where Buckhead is. The name connects to a place in people’s mind. Your product has weight just for carrying that brand.”

“But what about Atlanta Intown or Atlanta North, my other papers?” I asked.

“I don’t know enough about Atlanta to know if people use those terms,” he said. “But if people say I live ‘Intown’ or live ‘North’ then it works.”

There it was: redemption. As we exchanged business cards in the parking lot, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. “Could I email you if I have future marketing dilemmas?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

As I drove away, beaming, I thanked God for email, wishing for a moment that I could email Him for guidance on life’s more important dilemmas. Or at least share a breakfast. “Maybe one day,” I thought. “Right now, I’ve got to write a column.”