MANY reporters have found that covering the current news in the U.S. South often calls for faster-thanusual footwork. Among them is one of TIME'S Atlanta correspondents, Calvin ("Bud") Trillin, 25, who has become a familiar figure to leaders on both sides of integration skirmishes.
With University of Georgia Dean of Men Bill Tate, Trillin choked on tear gas and dodged cannon crackers during campus integration riots, and was roughed up by demonstrating students. He was with Charlayne Hunter, first Negro woman admitted to Georgia U., when anti-integration demonstrators rushed the car in which they were riding.
At times his reception has taken a more subtle turn. Last March, digging into sit-ins at the Jackson, Miss., public library, Trillin arranged an interview with Mayor Allen Thompson. "When I arrived," Trillin recalls, "many of the local press were in the mayor's office. So were the chief of police, the chief of detectives, the city attorney, a city councilman, and the mayor's secretary to take down a transcript. Then the mayor began to interview me. How would I run the town?
How would my editors in New York do things differently? The stories in the next day's newspapers started, 'The mayor told a TIME Magazine reporter yesterday . . .' "
Last week, while in Nashville, Tenn., to report on that city's considerable advances in race relations, Trillin got word of new trouble in Birmingham, Ala., and hurried off to cover the story. First stop: the Birmingham city jail, to ask about the captive white and Negro "Freedom Riders." As soon as Trillin left the jail, a patrol car began to tail him. Five blocks farther on, police hailed down Trillin's rented car, said he had run a stop sign. They asked questions. What was his profession? Whom did he work for? What was he doing in Birmingham? When he said he was there to cover the race-relations story, a policeman asked, as if incredulous: "You mean you haven't any other reason for being here?" After 30 minutes, word came from a higher-up police official that Trillin could get off with only a $10 fine. He paid, and then moved on to another trouble spot. Montgomery, where he was roughed up by that city's race rioters. Kansas City-.born Bud Trillin came to TIME by way of Yale, where he was chairman of the Yale Daily News and magna cum laude in English in 1957. Among his early assignments were short stints in our London and Paris bureaus, where his most memorable assignment was the 1958 Algerian generals' revolt, during which a rifle-bearing Arab shot at him. He now regards that experience as casual.
WITH this week's issue, TIME'S subscribers will note the appearance of a new white address label on their copies. This is a small outward sign that a new electronic-tape subscription processing system, developed at TIME'S subscription-service division in Chicago, has gone into operation. The tape is geared in with a new highspeed label printer (131,000 an hour) that provides greater legibility and also shows readers when their sub scriptions expire. Month and year of expiration are now printed on the first line of the strip.