Millard Berry Grimes Jr., of Athens, died May 3, 2022, at the age of 92, at his home, of natural causes related to his age. Mr. Grimes had a long career as a newspaper columnist, entrepreneur, and author.
Arrangements were made through Leaf Cremation of Georgia. A memorial service will be announced at a later date.
Grimes
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Camp Kudzu – a Camp for Children with Type 1 Diabetes and their Families at https://www.campkudzu.org/donate-2/ or to the Georgia Press Educational Foundation, 140 Locust St., Avondale Estates, Ga. 30002, ATTN Millard Grimes Fund.
Mr. Grimes is survived by his wife of 67 years, Charlotte Sheridan Grimes; his son, James Grimes of Athens; his daughter, Kathryn Grimes Garrett (David) of Peachtree Corners; his daughter, Laura Grimes Griner (Chris) of Brunswick; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He was preceded in death by his father, Millard Berry Grimes Sr.; his mother, Margaret Millians Grimes; and his aunts, who played large roles in his early life, Ethel Millians and Frances Millians Haines (Enoch).
Mr. Grimes was born March 8, 1930 in Newnan, but his family moved to LaGrange, shortly after he was born, where he spent most of childhood. The family moved to Columbus, after the beginning of World War II, and the death of his father, where he and his mother lived with aunts and an uncle. He attended Columbus High School, graduating in 1946.
While in high school, he played varsity baseball and junior varsity basketball. He also had a newspaper route for the local afternoon newspaper, the Columbus Ledger, and went on to work for the Ledger as a copy boy, then a proofreader, then a sports correspondent while still in high school.
After high school, he attended the University of Georgia, where he was a member of the Chi Psi fraternity. He worked on the staff of the student newspaper, The Red and Black, and was appointed editor during his senior year. He most fondly remembered his tenure as the Red and Black’s pseudonymous gossip columnist, Roddy Ratcliff. He was also a member of the Gridiron Secret Society.
He graduated from Georgia in 1951 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and returned to Columbus to work for the Ledger again as a copy editor. He was a member of the staff that won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the clean-up of corruption in Phenix City, the then-notorious Alabama town that was just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus.
He also tried his hand at writing science fiction and had one short story, “Mimsy’s Joke,” published in the classic science fiction pulp magazine Planet Stories.
In the meantime, he had met Charlotte Sheridan, a Cataula girl, at a Baptist Training Union Halloween party, and they were married in 1954.
In 1955, Grimes had become restless and, on the very day the Pulitzer Prize was announced, he resigned from the Ledger to become the editor of the Phenix Citizen, a new weekly newspaper in Phenix City that he founded with financial backing from a local banker. He left the Citizen after a few years, but it continued to be published after he left, and he came to buy it and sell it twice more over his career. The Citizen still exists as the Citizen of East Alabama.
After working a few jobs in West Georgia, he returned to the Ledger and began writing editorials and later a weekly editorial column. In 1963, he was promoted to editor of the Ledger’s companion morning paper, the Columbus Enquirer. He continued to gain notoriety as an opinion columnist. He deeply admired Franklin Roosevelt and steadfastly supported the New Deal principles, but at the same time, he distrusted extremism in any form, and gained a reputation as an astute observer of political trends. In the 1960s, he supported the rise of the Republican Party in Georgia as a more moderate alternative to the segregationists who dominated the state Democratic Party at the time.
He often described himself as a “radical middle-of-the-roader.”
He also continued to explore other opportunities. In1965, he was instrumental in organizing the Athens Daily News, a morning newspaper in Athens. Grimes never actually worked for the Daily News, but helped hire the original staff, including his friend and colleague Glenn Vaughn as editor and teenaged sportswriter Lewis Gizzard, who would later become a famous humorist.
In 1969, Grimes finally got another chance to run a newspaper his way when he persuaded a group of investors to buy the Opelika Daily News, a small newspaper in Opelika, Ala. Grimes took over the paper and moved with his family to Opelika. He soon changed the name to the Opelika-Auburn News, added a Sunday morning edition and vastly increased the circulation of the paper. In 1977, the newspaper sold to the Thomson Newspaper Group for eight times the original investment.
The staff at the Opelika-Auburn News at one point included Rheta Grimsley Johnson, who went on to become a syndicated columnist and author, and her then-husband Jimmy Johnson, who created the long-running comic strip Arlo and Janis.
From that point, Grimes continued to acquire small-town newspapers, improve them and then eventually resell them. Between 1973 and 2013, he published, owned or partly owned more than 40 newspapers in Georgia and Alabama, including, but not limited to, The Clayton New/Daily, The Henry Herald, The Rockdale Citizen, The Enterprise Ledger, The Athens Observer, the Manchester Star-Mercury and The Meriwether Vindicator.
He also was chief writer and editor of “The Last Linotype: the Story of Georgia and its Newspapers Since World War II,” a book published by Mercer University Press in 1985. He also served as the president of the Georgia Press Association in 1986 and the Alabama Press Association in the early 1970s.
After acquiring the Athens Observer in 1986, Grimes and his wife Charlotte moved to Athens in 1989, building the house he lived in until his death.
In 1990, he acquired two statewide magazines, Georgia Journal, which focused on history and culture, and the statewide business magazine, Georgia Trend. Trend had launched in 1985 under the leadership of former Atlanta Constitution editor Gene Patterson and was much admired in the industry but was in financial trouble. Grimes, operating out of his office on Milledge Avenue, put the magazine on a sound financial footing. Trend has changed hands several times since then but is still being published. Mr. Grimes continued to contribute occasional columns until 2015.
In 1999, Grimes provided funding for the Millard B. Grimes Laboratory for Excellence in Print Journalism at UGA’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. During the Grady School’s 100th Anniversary, he was named one of its top 50 graduates.
He was involved in many other good works over his long career, serving on the board of the Opelika Public Library, the Board of Deacons of the First Baptist Church of Opelika, the Board of the Directors of The Red and Black when it became independent of the University, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Warm Springs Memorial advisory board among others.
While living in Opelika, Ala., he served on the advisory board for the Auburn Plainsman, the Auburn University student newspaper.
He was an avid college football fan, regularly attending and writing stories covering games at UGA and Auburn University.
He was a member of the Kiwanis Club, the Opelika Touchdown Club, the Alabama Press Association and the Georgia Press Association. He donated generously to institutions he admired, including Auburn University and the University of Georgia.
In 2011, he sold the last of his regular newspaper holdings, the Star-Mercury based in Manchester, , and seemed bound for retirement at the age of 81, but a few months later, he embarked on another adventure, founding Buford Weekly Illustrated, a newspaper to serve the Atlanta suburban town of Buford. It was his first attempt to start a newspaper from scratch since the Phenix Citizen in 1955, although it did not long survive in the new economy of the 2010s.
He then set himself to write a novel, completing “The Last New Dealer,” a political fantasy set during the 1992 presidential primaries, just after his 88th birthday. The Last New Dealer was published by Page Publishing company in 2020.
–Published by The Opelika-Auburn News on May 8, 2022.
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