The Superman I know doesn’t wear red briefs, blue leotards and fly around with a cape flapping in the wind.
No, no.
That’s in the comic books and in Hollywood.
I know the real Superman.
Really.
He was once my next-door neighbor.
Like Clark Kent, he’s a reporter and a good one. When he drops by my office, he’s usually wearing a sports coat, sans tie. In our 40 years of friendship, I’ve never seen him in a skin-tight red and blue getup. And if he has x-ray vision, he disguises that super power by propping bifocals on his nose.
How do I know he’s Superman?
Trust me.
He’s the man.
Here’s the proof.
As editor of his college newspaper, The Red & Black, he crafted his writing skills. With a crisp University of Georgia diploma, he went home to begin his career. He joined the feisty staff of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, the one that won a Pulitzer Prize by beaming sunshine into the shady side of Phenix City, Ala., also known back then as “the most corrupt city in America.” (I recommend you read The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama by Margaret Anne Barnes.)
If he or any of the other reporters could fly, they didn’t know it. Instead, they treaded across the Chattahoochee River Bridge in their Hush Puppies, toting note pads and cameras. The late Claude McBride was among those award-winning journalists.
During that 1950s era, a crime-busting prosecutor was assassinated, as the gambling, prostitution and whiskey toughs fought back. Once, I asked Claude, then the chaplain of the Georgia Bulldog football team, why he became a minister. “One night,” he said, “I stepped out the back door of the newspaper, and I felt a gun in my back. The thug said I better never write another word about Phenix City. Right then, I heard the Lord calling.”
In a daring plunge, my friend, Superman, quit his assistant editor’s job on the big city daily for another reason. He launched a weekly newspaper, The Phenix Citizen, inside the enemy lines. He survived, physically and financially, but that’s not the heroics that proved my once-upon-a-time neighbor is Superman.
