Pitching excerpts from his new book, Bylines, interspersed with yarns told in rich Southern voice, white-haired former journalist, Joe Cumming, entertained Friends of the Pickens County Library Thursday, May 20, at their final author's presentation of the season.
For 22 years, Cumming wrote for Newsweek magazine, covering the South from Newsweek's Atlanta bureau during the Civil Rights Movement and the social overhaul that followed. For most of those years, Cumming served as bureau chief. It comes as something of a shock to learn he came to the job with no training in journalism.
He aspired to be a writer, studied literature and history at the University of the South, and landed in a mundane job back home in Augusta before his writing break occurred. He was laboring in "a dying building supply business," Cumming recalled, "selling cement, flue lining, and sewer pipe for my Uncle Harry."
"I dropped the right name to the right person at the right time, and that name was Bill Emerson," he said. A friend of Cumming, Emerson worked for Collier's magazine before opening Newsweek's Atlanta bureau as a one-man operation in the early 1950s. At Collier's, Emerson once rejected a Cumming short story, light-heartedly returning the ashes of the manuscript to its author.
But when the civil rights struggle provided Newsweek's Atlanta bureau with more news than one man could write, Emerson tapped Cumming to join the office as a news writer. It was 1957, and Cumming often scribed for Newsweek without a byline, his untagged writing sliced and diced, even casseroled with text from other writers before his words went to press.
Proper recognition of his talent arrived in 1963 when Esquire published Cummings freelance story, "The Art of Not Being 37" in its November issue. A writer of national consequence, Cumming had achieved an Esquire byline to prove it.
"Well there you are," he told his Friends audience. "I really was somewhere that I wanted to be."
He grew prolific with freelance articles afterward. These are the stories now compiled in Cumming's book, Bylines. Many of his stories reprinted in Bylines were originally edited by Jim Townsend at Atlanta years ago, Cumming said. This was not the same journalist Jimmy Townsend who grew up in Pickens County, Cumming explained. He described his editor and friend, Townsend:
"He was bright, and he was fun, and he was a big liar, and he was an alcoholic, but he was a good editor," Cumming said.
As an Atlanta journalist, Cumming socialized with other famed practitioners in the trade, such writers as Celestine Sibley and Anne Rivers Siddons. Reared in a family of Augusta socialites, Cumming dispensed old Southern grace among Atlanta peers, gathering with the tribe of scribes for weekly lunches before such commitment to recess got gone with the wind.
Cumming left Newsweek in 1979 and spent the remainder of his work life as an educator, teaching in the department of mass communications and theater at West Georgia College in Carrollton.
With a long-time connection to Pickens County through Tate Mountain Estates, Cumming figured large at the founding of local theater troupe, The Tater Patch Players. And he speaks with the projection of an actor.
Even his writer's voice is larger than the conventionally crimped prose of textbook journalism. To read Cumming is to hear a journalist occasionally launch into lyricism, lofting lines toward the stars like an actor sounding a soliloquy.
They say Hemingway took terse, spartan, discipline acquired as a journalist and applied it to his fiction. Conversely, Cumming colored his journalism with flourishes that soar like phrases from literature. Results reveal some Hemingway novel dialogue that reads like a tax form, while you see and hear, even feel, what Cumming saw and reported.
But he came by it naturally, Cumming did. Being a Southerner, he was born to tell a story. |
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| Joe Cumming at the Pickens library discussing his work, Bylines. |
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