SIMEON BOOKER, PIONEERING REPORTER ON RACE ISSUES
Simeon S. Booker Jr., an award-winning journalist and author who provided pioneering coverage of racial injustice and the civil rights struggle for readers of Jet and Ebony magazines and was The Washington Post’s first black reporter, died on Sunday in Solomons, Md. He was 99.
His wife, Carol, confirmed his death to The Post.
As the escalating battle between civil rights activists and die-hard segregationists became the nation’s most gripping domestic story in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Booker traveled dangerous roads with Freedom Riders, marched with protesters and covered the major racial crises and personalities of the era.
Frankly pursuing journalism to fight racism, he began in the 1940s with black newspapers in Baltimore and Cleveland, and was The Post’s first full-time black reporter from 1952 to 1954, covering general news. But he quit to be Jet’s chief columnist and the Washington bureau chief of its parent, Johnson Publishing, for access to corridors of power and the freedom to write about civil rights with an analytical voice.
In 1955, his articles on the murder and mutilation of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the acquittal of two white killers in Mississippi, and on the Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat — major events that catalyzed the civil rights movement — were among the era’s most notable journalistic works.
In 1961, he was the only journalist with the first Freedom Riders, who protested transportation segregation in the South by busing from Atlanta to Birmingham. A 150-mile gantlet of mob violence peaked in Alabama with a firebombing and attacks by police officers with nightsticks and snarling dogs.
And in 1965, he joined the march from Selma to Montgomery that became the movement’s political and emotional climax, as televised attacks by Alabama state troopers shocked Americans and dramatically shifted public opinion against segregationists.
For the millions of readers of the weekly Jet and the monthly Ebony, he was more than a front-line reporter. He also covered Washington policies, interviewing presidents and members of Congress, and analyzed the tactics and strategies of civil rights movement leaders, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer.
Mr. Booker, who retired in 2007 after 65 years in journalism, had also chronicled the wider black experience — political and economic trends, the achievements of celebrities, the changing lives of ordinary people — for readers who often saw themselves reflected in the mainstream media in stereotypical ways.
“I always found myself opening Jet and looking first at what he had to say,” Dorothy Height, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, recalled at a retirement party for Mr. Booker at the National Press Club in Washington. “It was like getting the gospel according to Simeon.”
Simeon Saunders Booker Jr. was born in Baltimore on Aug. 27, 1918, the second of four children of Simeon Saunders Booker and Roberta Waring Booker. The family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, when Simeon was 5. He became interested in journalism through a family friend who owned The Baltimore Afro-American, and he joined the paper as a reporter in 1942 after earning a degree in English from Virginia Union University, a historically black school in Richmond.
In 1945, he returned to Ohio and joined another black newspaper, The Call & Post, in Cleveland. Besides his news reporting, he took graduate courses in journalism and radio at Cleveland College, and began writing for Ebony. On a cross-country car trip, he wrote profiles of black people, including a cowboy in Wyoming and a Mormon in Utah. In 1950, he won a Nieman fellowship to study for a year at Harvard.
His ensuing two years at The Washington Post were unsatisfying, in part because segregation limited his assignments. But he found the range he wanted with Johnson Publishing, and soon came to national attention with his articles about the lynching of Emmett Till and the sham trial of his killers, who, after their acquittal, admitted murdering the boy.
Mr. Booker’s first marriage, to Thelma Cunningham, ended in divorce. In 1973, he married the former Carol McCabe. Survivors include two sons, Simeon III and Theodore; a daughter, Theresa; and several grandchildren. His son James died in 1992.
From 1959 to 1978, Mr. Booker was a syndicated radio commentator for Westinghouse Broadcasting. His first book, “Black Man’s America” (1964), surveyed the history, causes and leadership of the civil rights movement. He also wrote “Susie King Taylor: Civil War Nurse” (1969). His memoir, “Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement,” written with his wife, Carol, was published in 2013.
Mr. Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2016, he received the George Polk career award given by Long Island University for lifetime achievement. He was nominated by 17 members of Congress this year for the Congressional Gold Medal; along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it is the nation’s highest civilian honor.
“I had a compelling ambition to fight segregation on the front line,” he told the National Press Club in 1982 when he received its Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement. “I stayed on the road covering civil rights day and night. We ducked into funeral homes at night to photograph the battered bodies of civil rights victims. The names, the places and the events became history.”
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JIM NABORS, TV’S GOMER PYLE
Jim Nabors, a comic actor who found fame in the role of the amiable bumpkin Gomer Pyle in two hit television shows of the 1960s while pursuing a second career as a popular singer with a booming baritone voice, died on Thursday at his home in Honolulu. He was 87.
His husband, Stan Cadwallader, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Nabors’s health had been declining for a year and that his immune system had been suppressed since he underwent a liver transplant in 1994.
At the time, Mr. Nabors announced that he had contracted hepatitis B in India several years earlier when he cut himself shaving with a contaminated straight razor, which he had bought there.
Gomer Pyle, the character that so indelibly stamped Mr. Nabors’s career, originated in 1962 as a supporting role on “The Andy Griffith Show,” a bucolic CBS comedy that had been running since 1960. Gomer was a guileless, sweet-natured gas-station attendant in Mayberry, N.C., a sleepy fictional town where Mr. Griffith played the widower sheriff, Don Knotts his deputy, Ron Howard his son and Frances Bavier his matronly Aunt Bee.
Mr. Nabors’s character, a village innocent who tended to make a mess of things, became a favorite, and his sheepish “gawwwleee” and wide-eyed “shazam!” became popular catchphrases.
In 1964, the character was spun off into his own series, “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” in which Gomer, still bumbling but well meaning, joined the Marines and, on a weekly basis, tried the patience of his loudmouthed drill sergeant, Vince Carter (Frank Sutton).
Remember Jim Nabors by Streaming These Five ‘Andy Griffith Show’ Episodes
The comic actor and singer was best known for playing Gomer Pyle on the classic TV comedy.
Gomer was a recognizable kind of American hero: a good-hearted, gentle, unsophisticated sort (not unlike Forrest Gump of a later era) who encounters a harder, more cynical modern world — in this case embodied by Southern California — and helps redeem it.
“Sheldon Leonard and his co-creators astutely chose a Southern California Marine base for their hero,” Gerard Jones wrote in his 1992 history of the American sitcom, “Honey, I’m Home!”
He added: “In various episodes Gomer connected with the movie and TV industries, the music business, the surf scene, the Beverly Hills rich — all the easy symbols of modernity. Everywhere he went he left a trail of fond smiles and innocence — at least temporarily — restored.”
But “one thing Gomer never, ever connected with,” Mr. Jones added, “was the Vietnam War,” which was raging at the time, just as he and his neighbors in Mayberry had remained isolated from the civil rights movement in the South. “He somehow existed in the peacetime military when there was no peace.”
Mr. Nabors first showed off his booming singing voice for a national TV audience in a guest appearance on “The Danny Kaye Show” in 1964. To fans who knew him only as Gomer, his full-throated, almost operatic baritone was surprisingly striking, if strangely incongruous.
“Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” lasted five seasons, ending in 1969, when Mr. Nabors was given his own CBS variety show and with it more opportunities to sing. “The Jim Nabors Hour” lasted until 1971. In 1975 and 1976, he and Ruth Buzzi starred as a pair of androids in the ABC children’s show “The Lost Saucer.” He was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show.”
He also made dozens of albums, recording ballads, show tunes, gospel and sacred music, country songs and Christmas carols, and performed regularly in Las Vegas showrooms and in concert. He regularly sang “Back Home Again in Indiana” at the Indianapolis 500 auto race, first in 1972 and most recently in 2014.
Mr. Nabors played supporting roles in three movies starring his friend Burt Reynolds: “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982), “Stroker Ace” (1983) and “Cannonball Run II” (1984).
James Thurston Nabors was born on June 12, 1930, in Sylacauga, Ala., the third child and only son of Fred and Mavis Nabors. His father was a police officer. Jim sang in his school glee club and church choir and played the clarinet in the school band.
After earning a degree in business from the University of Alabama, he moved to New York, where he worked as a typist at the United Nations while harboring hopes for a stage career. Those hopes went unfulfilled.
He then moved to Tennessee, where he worked as a film cutter for a Chattanooga television station. By the end of the 1950s he had moved to Los Angeles, partly to relieve his chronic asthma.
Taking a job as a film cutter at NBC, he started to perform, for no pay, at the Horn, a cabaret in Santa Monica, where his hillbilly monologues and operatic arias caught the notice of the comic actor Bill Dana, a regular performer on “The Steve Allen Show.” Invited by Mr. Dana to audition, Mr. Nabors was soon making frequent appearances on the Allen show as it neared the end of its long run. (It was canceled in 1961.)
Mr. Griffith also caught his act and decided that Mr. Nabors’s nasal twang and down-home ways made him a natural for “The Andy Griffith Show.”
“Andy saw me, and he said, ‘I don’t know what you do, but you do it very well,’ ” Mr. Nabors once recalled.
He spent much of his later years in Hawaii, where he had a home in Honolulu and a 500-acre farm in Hana, on the island of Maui, growing macadamia nuts and tropical flowers. He also had a home in Montana.
Mr. Nabors married Mr. Cadwallader, his companion of 38 years, in January 2013 at a hotel in Seattle, a few weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in Washington State. Although he was quoted at the time as saying that he had “never made a huge secret” of his homosexuality, and that people in the entertainment industry had long known he was gay, he had not publicly acknowledged it until his marriage.
Mr. Nabors told the television news operation Hawaii News Now at the time that before the marriage it had been been “pretty obvious that we had no rights as a couple.”
“Yet when you’ve been together 38 years, I think something’s got to happen there, you’ve got to solidify something,” he said. “And at my age, it’s probably the best thing to do.”
Mr. Nabors was 82 at the time and Mr. Cadwallader was “in his 60s,” he said. They met in 1975 when Mr. Cadwallader was a Honolulu fire fighter. He later went to work for Mr. Nabors, and they began a relationship, Mr. Nabors said. A niece and a nephew also survive him.
The Gomer Pyle persona never left Mr. Nabors, but he was comfortable with that.
“I’ve never found doing Gomer to be that limiting to me,” Mr. Nabors said in 1990. “I’ve always enjoyed the character, and I see no reason to change it.”
The Marines have recognized the character, calling Mr. Nabors “a great American.” In 2001, in a whimsical ceremony in Honolulu presided over by Gen. James L. Jones Jr., commandant of the Marine Corps, Pfc. Gomer Pyle — Mr. Nabors, in character — was promoted to lance corporal.
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 