My Forty Years at University Presses

In the early fall of 1959 I moved with my wife and our young son to Baton Rouge to take the job of sales and promotion manager at the Louisiana State University Press. My memories of the next ten years, very happy ones for the most part, are very much with me still.

Before I had settled comfortably in my new job, I was off to Atlanta to exhibit the press's books at the meeting of the Southern Historical Association at which T. Harry Williams of LSU gave the banquet address on Huey Long, admitting that Huey was indeed a demagogue but was nevertheless a damned good governor. There was no way then that I could have imagined that I would be immersed in the history of the South for the next forty years or that T. Harry Williams (never just Harry) would become a friend and benefactor.

I got the job at LSU because I had completed a twelve-month fellowship at the University of Oklahoma Press. I went to that university after four years in the Air Force with the goal of becoming a sportswriter, but along the way I realized that I wasn't cut out to be a reporter, because I couldn't do what reporters must do: sit down and turn out a coherent story in a hurry. This was most evident when I had a summer internship on the Oklahoma City Times and the city editor had me telephone a prominent local family to get information about an out-of-town son who had committed suicide. He stood over me as I labored, close to deadline, to finish three paragraphs for the front page.

Fortunately for me there was a happy alternative. I learned about the fellowship program at Oklahoma's university press when I was assigned as a beginning reporter to write about the program—a happenstance that led to my forty-year career in scholarly publishing. Donald Ellegood, the director of the LSU Press, was a graduate of the fellowship program, and he had kept the notice of new graduates sent out in 1958 when I completed the program. He didn't have an opening at that time, but offered me a job a year later when I was a copyeditor at the University of Wisconsin Press. The University of Oklahoma Press had the only internship in scholarly publishing, a twelve-month program providing experience in promotion as well as copyediting for two persons a year, and it was a fortunate happenstance that I attended that university instead of Syracuse University, my first choice. When my wife and I went to Syracuse to enroll we drove around the city for an hour and didn't find the university. We decided there would be too many distractions in a city that size and headed for Oklahoma. (New Englanders were not much inclined to answer questions from strangers!)

In my job as sales and promotion manager at LSU I sent catalogs and other information to the four or five commissioned salesmen who showed our books to bookstores in their regions, but I spent most of my time spreading the word about our books to the media. In promoting Generals in Gray, Ezra Warner's biographical sketches of all 425 Confederate generals, I wrote hometown stories for a half dozen cities about the generals from their locales. The Charleston News and Courier gave two pages in the Sunday feature section to my article on the city's nine generals. When the press published Atlantic Hurricanes by Banner Miller and Gordon Dunn, the head of the Hurricane Center in Miami, I sent the section on preparing for hurricanes to newspapers in the Gulf area and on the Atlantic Coast, several of which published it. By a stroke of good luck—for the book, that is—a hurricane sent a large ship onto the parking lot of a major department store in Miami that had just received the initial shipment of the book.

How did I progress from fledgling sales manager to director in less than four years? Happenstances...