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236 LISTENING TO MR. McLEAN In the early spring of 1978, Billy Crews was walking across the newly greening campus at the University of Mississippi in Oxford when one of his professors , the sociologist Vaughn Grisham, saw him and called out, “Billy, what are you going to do next year?” Crews was a senior who would graduate that May with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He waited as Grisham caught up, then walked with him for a few minutes. He said he wasn’t sure; he might work for a year, then go to law school. “Come see me,” Grisham said. Grisham knew an unusual newspaper publisher in Tupelo, about fifty miles east of Oxford, who wanted to hire someone to do community work for a year. Crews was curious. His background (he had been active in campus politics and was president of the Ole Miss student government association) and his general goals were geared toward public service of some kind—maybe even running for an elected office one day. Here, however, was a chance to get a year’s valuable experience in the private sector and to meet this unusual publisher, George McLean,a man whom Grisham admired for his civic vision and public commitment .“I hadn’t heard of Mr.McLean,really,”Crews recalled.1 “Tupelo was a fairly well kept secret.” Not long afterward,just as the Tupelo civil rights demonstrations were heating up,Grisham drove Crews to Tupelo to meet George McLean,see the Journal, and talk to him about the job. It turned out to be a one-sided conversation. “An interview with Mr. McLean primarily consisted in listening,” Crews recalled.“About the only thing he could discern about me during that hour-long interview was that I was a good listener.” But that was enough; he was offered and accepted the job, starting in August.After graduation, Crews spent the first two months of the summer in Europe with a friend. As they traveled, Crews 13 Listening to Mr. McLean 237 saw occasional copies of the International Herald Tribune, which prominently featured Tupelo’s racial conflicts. He wondered what he was getting into. In early August, Crews started to work for the Journal as a community outreach employee at a salary of about $150 a week—even then,a paltry sum.His job was to serve as the newspaper’s representative in a host of federal, local, and private programs mostly designed to help combat poverty and develop industries. Crews’s first task was getting to know the programs and people he would be involved with. One of his first meetings was with another Journal employee, Julian “Buddy” Prince Jr., the son of the Tupelo school superintendent, who briefed Crews on an unusual trial program McLean had started a year earlier that focused on improving the reading skills of first graders in the rural areas outside Tupelo. It was a novel program,born of McLean’s role as chairman of the state chamber of commerce’s education committee, where he saw statistics that appalled him. The scores of Mississippi students on standardized tests were far below national averages,as always,but within Mississippi itself an enormous gap separated the test scores of children attending the better-funded city schools and those in the poor, rural schools. The more McLean thought about it, the more sure he was that the problem was fundamental. If children did not start off well in the first two or three years of school, they would carry a disadvantage throughout their entire lives that no amount of remedial work could make up for. He saw the problem vividly in the contrast between Tupelo, where spending money on the school system was a point of city pride, and the surrounding rural Lee County, where no money was available to do much of anything in the schools. The most recent achievement test results reflected the broader state figures: Tupelo first graders scored above the national average in reading; Lee County first graders were in the bottom quartile nationally. But what exactly could be done to improve their skills? In 1976, two years before Crews started at the Journal, McLean had made a small grant to Tupelo school superintendent Julian Prince Sr. to bring the nationally known educator Benjamin S. Bloom to Tupelo for a teachers’ workshop . Bloom agreed to appear for free; the school system had only to pay for his airplane ticket and a motel...

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