Chuck Searcy has been back in Athens, and probably won’t be here much longer. It’s strange, considering what an impact he had here, that he is practically incognito, except for old friends, who have been happy to see him. Sic transit gloria mundi, or words to that effect.
Chuck came to UGA after graduating from high school in Thomson, and he happily pursued a degree in music, until he led a rebellion against his major professor, who threw Chuck’s trombone into the trash and kicked him out of school and into Vietnam.
Chuck arrived “in country” as a Goldwater conservative just as the Tet Offensive hit South Vietnam. After his year in military intelligence in Saigon, Chuck left disillusioned with our war and appreciative of the Vietnamese people.
He finished his service after a year in Germany and returned to Athens a committed member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, became an activist for student rights, co-founded the popular Athens Observer weekly newspaper, left to work in the Carter administration, came back to Athens and started Observer Television, left to become Sen. Wyche Fowler’s press secretary, and later was nominated for a high-ranking job in the Veterans Administration, which was vetoed by a rightwing senator.
Chuck then accepted a veterans foundation job in Vietnam, heading up a program providing orthotics to injured people, of which there were many following the war. Then he segued into heading up Project RENEW, which has for a couple of decades worked to remove the thousands of unexploded bombs embedded in Quang Tri Province, which during the war we knew as the Demilitarized Zone. He lives in Hanoi and is one of the subjects of a new book by the respected author, George Black—The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam, which I hope to review soon in these pages.
Meanwhile, when we are together, we frequently lapse into remembering the early days of the Athens Observer and all the (now) funny stories involved in starting a newspaper from scratch with little money and less knowledge of what we were doing, but lots of determination and help from our friends. In these days of many more newspaper failures than startups, there are no doubt lessons to be learned from our early ordeals, but chief among them is probably the fact that we had been deeply immersed in the political life of Athens, and by the time we started the newspaper, we knew who was who, and they knew us. Another thing is that we set out to publish a newspaper that would be respectful of all viewpoints, even if they differed from our own strongly held opinions.
Here’s a snapshot of how it started out. Chuck had a friend in Atlanta who ran a printing shop. He let Chuck come over and set type at night on his new photo-composition typesetting machine, meaning that Chuck drove back early the next morning with the interior of his Volkswagen swathed in strips of type as he struggled to stay awake. Back at the office, I was composing headlines in Presstype, also nodding off and mixing sizes in the same headline, so that the result looked like a ransom note. We borrowed the money to buy our own composition machines. When they were delivered, I asked the driver if he delivered a lot of them. “Yep,” he said. “Pick up a lot, too.” Gulp.
A woman came in and convinced us she could sell ads, and she did, until we sent out our first monthly billings and began to get irate calls from “advertisers” saying they never heard of the Observer, and we realized she had fabricated all the ads; she had already collected her commissions, and our expected income evaporated.
So many stories: The first two years without paying any withholding or income taxes, and then the day of reckoning when Chuck had to deal with the IRS woman who demanded the whole $12,000 immediately and could not accept Chuck’s $200 installment, which he left, anyway, and continued to do, while she looked the other way, until we were finally paid up. Charlie Burch at the bank saw something in us besides collateral, and Ralph Maxwell, Sr. at Greater Georgia Printers kept us going by letting our payments ride longer than most printers would have.
We keep on saying we’ve got to write it all down, but at our backs we hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Here’s hoping there’ll be more later.
Chuck is full of stories from a full life, and he is an engaging raconteur with a wry sense of humor laced with self-deprecation. Above all, Chuck is what that other newspaperman, Lewis Grizzard, would have called a Great American.
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