Last week, following the death of President-Editor John Sanford ("Jack") Cohen (TIME, May 27), the brisk, breezy Atlanta Journal ("Covers Dixie Like the Dew"—with 86,600 circulation) was formally taken in charge by the family which has really owned it for the last 40 years—the House of Gray. The late lawyer-politician James Richard ("Jim") Gray, who married Mary Inman of the rich, aristocratic Inman clan, acquired the Journal in 1896 from Hoke Smith, twice Governor of Georgia, twice U. S. Senator, Secretary of the Interior under Cleveland. When President Gray died in 1917 John Cohen, a Journal newshawk since 1890, was put into the front office as active head of the paper but Widow Gray, as majority stockholder, remained chairman of the board and her two sons sat with her.
The dual position held by John Cohen was split last week. To Son Inman Gray, 49, went the presidency; to Son James Richard Jr., 45, the editorship. Inman worked up through the engraving department to one vice presidency. James Richard got his start in the circulation department, served as assistant general manager, vice president. Both men attended University of Georgia where they were aristocratic Chi Phi's. Both were brought up in a professional tradition which demands despisal of Clark Howell and his stodgy old Constitution (circulation: 99,000) and, of late years, hatred of Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge. Editor James, short, pudgy, bulbous-jawed, is as much of a cameraphobe as President Inman who last week suppressed all available newspictures of himself and brother.
For years the Howells and the Grays have battled fiercely. In 1924 Editor Cohen marched boldly into a Klan-dominated State Democratic Convention, marched out with Publisher Howell's job as national committeeman. The election of Howell-backed Talmadge to the governorship forced the Journal into a political back seat, widened the No Man's Land between the publishers. So savagely did the Journal attack Governor Talmadge last summer that that "cracker" politician angrily referred to Editor Cohen as "Jake the Jew,"* urged his supporters to cancel their Journal subscriptions, switch to the Constitution. Crowning outrage to the Grays last week was Governor Talmadge's rude seizure of the Democratic National Committeemanship left vacant by Editor Cohen's death.
Governor Talmadge has only one thing that might interest the Grays—the power to end the life imprisonment of Richard Gray Gallogly, whose mother Frances is a sister of the Brothers Inman and James Richard Jr.† In 1928, while a student at Oglethorpe, drunken Richard Gray Gallogly held up an Atlanta drugstore, killed the cashier, shot out the face of an Oglethorpe campus clock. The Grays never refer to their black sheep but no wise Atlantan thought for a minute last week that they would ever trade political peace for family whitewash.
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*Descended from a Jewish family resident in the South since before the Revolution, Editor Cohen and his family long were members of Atlanta's North Avenue Presbyterian Church.
†Divorced from Arthur J. Gallogly, she is now married to Dr. Worth E. Yankee.