"I'm filled with golden memories of this place,"
said Jim Wooten, addressing some 725 students and
members of the Carroll County community at his alma
mater, Bethel College, on Wednesday evening, September
15.
The occasion was the inaugural James L. Potts United
States International Affairs Symposium at which Wooten
was moderator alongside former Islamic Jihad hostage
Dr. Jesse Jon Turner, a Bethel math professor, and
former UN chief negotiator Giandomenico Picco.
"I've been to McKenzie twice in the last 46 years,"
says Wooten, looking out the door of The McKenzie
Banner into the town square as if staring into
yesterday.
In 1978, he gave the commencement address and, in
1990, he again addressed the graduating class and also
accepted a doctor of humane letters degree from Bethel
in celebration of his accomplishments, which had grown
to include service as White House correspondent for
the New York Times and several positions with ABC
News. Working in 40 countries on five continents, he
eventually became the network's senior correspondent.
Wooten racked up awards including the Ernie Pyle
Memorial Medal for combat reporting during the 1973
Arab-Israeli war; Blue Pencil Award for Journalistic
Excellence from Columbia University; Overseas Press
Club Award; Robert F. Kennedy Award; and the Joe Alex
Morris Award from Harvard University for distinguished
foreign reporting.
He is also the author of "Soldier", a book about
Vietnam, "Playing Around", about baseball and the
Pittsburgh Pirates, and "Dasher: The Roots and Rising
of Jimmy Carter."
His current visit to McKenzie was made more special as
the evening before the symposium was spent in Jackson
with former college roommate Charles Mayo, now head of
the English Department at Lambuth.
"We had a great night of reminiscing," says Wooten,
who Wednesday morning addressed Mayo's American
literature class before making his way to McKenzie,
the foundation of those memories.
Fifty years ago, right about now, says Jim, who
recently attended his 50th high school reunion, he was
registering for his first classes at Bethel. It wasn't
his original plan.
Jim's father was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in
Owensville, Indiana, where Jim was raised, the eldest
of three children born to J.R. and Clara Wooten. His
sisters, Judy and Sandy, quite younger than he, were
about three and ten when he graduated from high
school.
On graduation day, Jim, just 16 years old, was driving
his father's car to a nearby town to pick up his
girlfriend for dinner before commencement when the car
skidded on slick pavement and he crashed into a
utility pole. He came away with a concussion and his
girlfriend a broken arm. Miraculously, they made it to
graduation, though Jim later had no recollection of
the ceremony.
Money he had saved from a paper route and farm work to
supplement a grant to attend Purdue University, where
he planned to study architecture, went instead toward
the purchase of the new car his father needed for his
work.
"It was just the right thing to do, I'm not saying it
was an act of heroism," Jim says.
His hopes dashed, he developed a new dream: he would
join the Navy when he turned 17 in a month, see the
world and be out the day before his 21st birthday.
His parents were not amused. They implored him instead
to attend Bethel, which was sponsored by the CP
church, where he might play basketball. It was also
arranged that he would work with Mrs. Clara Dishman
who, Jim says, was "chief cook and bottle washer" at
the college.
"With the tuition break from my father's ministry,
that seemed do-able," says Jim, who washed dishes for
two meals along with four or five other student
workers and also ran the "hot water heater" for the
gym. On his own, he established another enterprise:
starching and ironing shirts for a quarter each,
thanks to lessons on the chore from his mother. For
the next two or three years, the little business
earned enough movie for a weekly movie.
Jim Wooten as a student at Bethel
Col-lege in McKenzie, Tennessee. |
In his second year at the college, his finesse at
basketball earned a full-ride scholarship that
continued until graduation in 1958. His roommate,
Charlie, was one of the leading scorers of any small
college in the country, Jim proudly relates.
He recalls writing essays for the campus newspaper. "I
have an idea they were awful," he confesses, "But I
don't remember what they were awful about."
Several decades later, Jim is also uncertain about his
academic concentration, though he knows he had a
double major, perhaps in history and English. During
his senior year, he decided also to become a minister
like his father, a decision based on his parents'
desires.
Following graduation, he married Joanne Richardson and
attended seminary, after which he pastored Waverly
Cumberland Presbyterian Church for a time he'd just
about as soon not recall.
"I was probably one of the worst clergy in the history
of Christianity, at best in the top ten of the worst,"
he declares. "It was a mistake and done for the wrong
reasons."
He became a high school teacher in Greenville,
Kentucky while also working for the local weekly
newspaper in page layout, writing and sports
photography.
"It was all a lot of fun," he says, "and from that I
was offered a job as editor of the Weakley County
Press in Martin. I thought it was a chance to do
something important."
In the mid-1960s, he ran into an old friend, Phil
Garner, who was a reporter for the Huntsville Times.
Phil was the "beatnik type", Jim shares, who intrigued
him with the idea of going to work for the Alabama
newspaper.
Within ten days, he drove down for an interview and
was hired. He moved his family, which by then included
daughters Karen and Kris, to Alabama.
"I was 14 months in Huntsville; it was a wonderful
place to be a reporter," Jim says. Just after World
War II, the Tennessee River city of 80,000 had quickly
grown in less than 20 years to 180,000 due, Wooten
says, to the space program.
"A great influx of northeastern Yankees came into this
traditional Southern river town where people chopped
cotton and shipped cotton; all of a sudden it was a
totally different place, densely populated by a
different type of people."
He described the city as a Petri dish in which society
grew, bubbling and fermenting in a time rife with
questions regarding civil rights.
"We were the only paper in Alabama not in chains to
(Governor) George Wallace," he says, calling the paper
"an activist newspaper, which is the best kind."
Wooten as White House
correspondent for the New York Times. |
"We were young reporters; we all thought we were
changing the world and we were having an adventure
called journalism."
Looking back, he says, "that was the oven in which my
journalism bread was baked; without that kind of
experience, which was rich in terms of stories, rich
in terms of real history being made with George
Wallace's politics and Martin King... without that, I
don't think I would have had any skills other than
ordinary skills."
His work in civil rights issues gained the attention
of the New York Times and he left Alabama for the Big
Apple in 1965 or '66, where he worked until, in 1973,
he left for a year to write a column for the
Philadelphia Enquirer. He then returned to the Times
but stayed in Philadelphia as national correspondent.
In 1979, he moved to television with ABC News, where
he has remained for the past 25 years.
The difference in salary between television and
newspaper reporting is shameful, Jim declares. Salary
was important to him at the time due to medical bills
incurred prior to Joanne's death the year before. He
and Joanne had added two more daughters, Katie, and
Elizabeth, to their family over the years.
For the past twenty years, Jim has been married to
Patience O'Connor, an urban planner he met at an art
gallery while writing for the Philadelphia Enquirer,
with whom he has a daughter, Lacie. He's also the
grandfather of three girls and three boys.
The transition from print to TV was "serious
business," says Wooten. Aside from his cardinal rule
of "get it first if you can, and if not, at least get
it right," other factors came into the mix.
"It took about a year before the light bulb went on
how to write for TV; everything has to be compressed
into a minute 40 or two minutes long. You learn to
compress information into small chunks and let
pictures do at least half of the work. And you learn
to live with the unfortunate fact that you can never
tell the entire story. It's frustrating, but you get
better."
All the more reason, he continues, that a TV reporter
must have as much knowledge as a print reporter,
because the first decision he must make is what
information the story can do without.
Jim uses an analogy to explain the process: "If a
story was a dollar bill, you go in knowing you can
only give a dime, but you have to know the other 90
cents so you can make intelligent decisions as to what
you can leave out."
Wooten returned to Bethel in 1990
to accept an honorary doctor of humane letters
degree at which time he also addressed the
graduating class on the concept of time. |
As summer gives way to fall, Jim shares he now finds
himself at the end of an "idle summer", spent at his
Cape Cod retreat, for the first time in his life.
"I've never had the summer off," he muses.
It's a trend that will continue in some measure. He
begins Monday, following the symposium, covering the
2004 presidential campaign and expects to work five or
six months a year for Nightline with Ted Koppel.
"I've covered a lot of wars," Jim says in reverie,
"everything from the revolutions in El Salvador and
Nicaragua to Grenada... the October War of 1973,
Israel, Syria and Eqypt... Bosnia and Kosovo, Desert
Storm, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Sierra Leon, Somalia and
Ethiopia... and I covered presidential campaigns in
national politics every year from 1968 through 2000."
But the fruit of his idle summer bears witness that a
hammock was not his refuge. Next month, his latest
book, "We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy's Courage
and a Mother's Love" is due for release and is already
available for pre-orders in online bookstores.
The book chronicles AIDS in Africa, telling in
particular the story of one extraordinary boy, Nkosi,
who, stricken with the disease from birth and growing
up in the awareness of his youthful mortality, was
nevertheless determined to make a difference in the
world.
"He was the smartest child and more courageous than
any soldier I've ever met, and kinder than any
priest," Jim marvels. "He was determined to make his
life count for something.... He was always full of
laughter and always willing to reach out to people."
Rejected from public school due to fear and ignorance,
Wooten says Nkosi changed the law in South Africa so
that no child can be denied an education on the basis
of AIDS. Nkosi died when he was 12 years old.
Wooten also has a soft spot for veterans and has
attended the 40th, 50th and 60th anniversaries of
D-Day in Normandy.
"They're always moving and poignant," he says of the
events.
Yet he differs with Tom Brokaw who insists the
generation that weathered the Great Depression and
World War II was America's "greatest generation."
"We do what we do in our generations," Jim says,
"We're responsible for what we're doing and what we
learn."
He acknowledges, however, the full commitment of
society in that era that was "not like anything you or
I have ever lived through."
"The president keeps saying we're at war," he says,
"But nobody is making any sacrifices: gas is not
rationed, nylons aren't rationed... The only people
making sacrifices are the ones in Iraq and their
families. Everybody else is getting tax cuts and
living as though nothing had happened."
Still, he says, "a hero in World War II is no more a
hero than a hero in Vietnam, Korea, or Iraq."
While insisting he will never retire, Jim smiles in
contemplation of more free time for golfing and
fishing as his schedule winds down to five months or
so per year of working with Nightline.
"And I plan to spend more time with my grandchildren,
my children and my wife," he says. "I'll always be
writing books 'til they put me under the ground. And I
do plan to play a lot more golf than I have in the
last 41 years."
