Legendary DeKalb newspaper editor Britt Fayssoux ignored political pressure

It had published continuously since its founding on the courthouse square in the late 1800s, and for most of its life was a force in DeKalb County politics, as well as a chronicler of community goings-on.

Famous Georgia writer complimented his reporting

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Fresh out of the Navy in the summer of 1972, I rolled up to the New Era — jobless, aimless — in the most random of circumstances.

My college roommate’s girlfriend, Fay Smulevitz, had been hired by Fayssoux as the part-time sports editor. When he replaced the editor of the paper with Smulevitz, the rest of the staff quit in protest of being passed over for such a callow choice. Desperate, Smulevitz called me and asked if I could come help “put the paper to bed.”

With no experience whatsoever, I showed up. I wrote a bunch of headlines, conducted interviews, and helped with laying out the paper in the composing room

Having done this “work” for free for a couple of weeks, she arranged for me to interview with Fayssoux for the paper’s lone position as a reporter.

When I entered his disheveled office, Fayssoux hadn’t arrived so I took a look around. The contents of an overstuffed antique rolltop desk spilled onto the floor. The requisite battered manual typewriter was poised front and center. And on the wall, hanging askew, was a framed letter and an envelope, postmarked Conyers, Feb. 18, 1962. It read:

“Dear Mr. Fayssoux,

Fr. William at the monastery has been sending your reports on the Rockdale County trials that have just taken place. It is mighty good reporting and I just thought I would like to tell you so. You have convinced Fr. William that the grotesque in Southern writing has some basis in reality.

Sincerely,

Flannery O’Connor”

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

When Fayssoux finally bounded into the office, he was sweaty in his tennis togs, fresh from a match at the Druid Hills Country Club, where he was a legend on the courts (and in the bar).

The interview went like this:

I didn’t have a resume. He didn’t care. I hadn’t been to journalism school. No problem. He’d been in the Navy, too. We swapped sea stories. Then he offered me $135 a week plus health insurance and told me he just had one rule: “We don’t kiss anybody’s ass.”

This, I learned later, was a bit of an understatement. Legend had it that Fayssoux had once thrown an angry county commission candidate through the plate glass door of our building and out into the parking lot. Politicians and other self-important types sometimes arrived for meetings with him to find they had been stood up.

A change in The New Era’s direction

A staunch believer in First Amendment rights, Fayssoux hired out his Goss Community offset press to any and all comers who paid their bills. Thus, our office visitors might include J.B. Stoner, the notorious white supremacist later convicted of perpetrating the bombing of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church, who published a scurrilous racist rag on our presses. On another day it might be Hosea Williams, the former Martin Luther King Jr. firebrand who published a civil rights tabloid paper called The People’s Crusader.

Although the paper did sell advertising, the most important source of revenue for the New Era derived from its designation as the county’s legal organ. All public notices filed in connection with legal proceedings — civil suits, divorce, zoning applications — were required by law to be published in its pages, at very profitable lineage rates. The designation as legal organ was determined by a triumvirate of elected county officials: the clerk of Superior Court, the county ordinary and the sheriff.

In the wake of President Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection victory in 1972, DeKalb County elected its first Republican sheriff. County politics swung right. For the New Era, the handwriting was on the wall: We would lose the legal advertising.

Some months after the election, Fayssoux invited the staff to a Friday night barbecue at his house in Clarkston. He was from South Carolina and took great pride in his ability to smoke a pork butt and sauce it just so. He poured us an ocean of whiskey, passed out Cuban cigars, and introduced us to his ancient collection of jazz artist Sidney Bechet’s records. There was no talk of work. The next day we all woke up to see the news in The Atlanta Constitution that The New Era had officially lost its designation as legal organ to our rival paper.

From that point on, Fayssoux decided that we should emulate the feature writing approach of The National Observer, a weekly paper then published by Dow Jones. We roamed the county far and wide, reporting and writing with utter freedom, little discipline and sometimes surprisingly good results. It was not only the most fun journalism school you could imagine, but we also actually learned most of what you needed to know to be a reporter in that era.

A year or so after that fateful election, Smulevitz (since deceased) and I both moved on to The Constitution, Characteristically, Fayssoux sent us along with the strongest encouragement. Eventually, the New Era couldn’t survive without the legal advertising, and he was forced to bow out and sell to the competition.

In the decades since I have seen newspapers and magazines come, and I’ve seen them go. I’ve seen many of the publications I worked for go out of print, and entire giant companies that published them vanish. I’ve worked for good editors and bad. As for Fayssoux, all I can say is everybody should be so lucky as to have a first boss like him. Unfortunately, I really don’t think they make them anymore.

John Huey worked as a journalist for 40 years, including stints at The Atlanta Constitution, the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine, where he was editor. He retired as editor-in-chief of Time Inc. in 2012.