Prizes: Just Doing the Job

Before John Hammer was thrown out of office as chairman of the Florida Turnpike Authority, he sent a complaining letter to Governor Farris Bryant. It concerned a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, Martin Oliver Waldron, 39, who, said Hammer, had been “rude, discourteous, ungentlemanly, and roared at my employees.” No one from the governor on down could challenge the accuracy of that description—or wonder why Hammer should be so annoyed. For it was the rude, discourteous, ungentlemanly and roaring reporter from the Times who cost John Hammer his job.

Drawing Flies. Anything less than a roar would sound inadequate coming from a man who stands six feet tall, scales 240 lbs. and sometimes has to go sideways through a door. Waldron roars at everybody. Once, when Leroy Collins was still governor, Collins stamped up and down the cabinet room for four hours demanding that Reporter Waldron disclose his source for a certain story. For four hours, Waldron stamped right along with the governor, roaring refusal. Then the governor gave up trying.

His reportorial behavior goes over big with statehouse tipsters. Sooner or later, they all visit Waldron, and the tales they tell are music to a man who defines his job as a daily search for crooked politicians. In due time, Waldron’s questing eye turned on Florida’s Sunshine State Parkway, a four-lane asphalt ribbon winding the 211 miles between Miami and Orlando. If ever a state project might draw flies, thought Waldron, that was it.

While Waldron was working on this suspicion, a tipster called from Tampa —collect—and invited him down. There he learned something about the extravagant tastes of John Hammer, Governor Bryant’s appointee as Turnpike Authority chairman. While on the job, Hammer stayed at a $65-a-day hotel room, paid as much as $30 a day to eat, and put corsages for his secretary on the tab. He chartered a plane, and charged taxpayers for more hours aloft than the plane was actually flown. Under Hammer’s loose hand, headlined the Times, a $100 million road had stretched to $400 million.

Plugging the Leaks. Unraveling this skein of questionable public arithmetic took 4,500 inches in the Times: about 150,000 words. It was worth the effort. Out went the high-living John Hammer, and in went five new state laws that plugged the holes through which millions of tax dollars had leaked. It was a prime example of the kind of investigative reporting that a good reporter on a crusading newspaper ought to do. So it should have been no surprise last week when the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service went to the St. Petersburg Times. Martin Waldron was not mentioned in the award—an omission that did not bother him one bit. “I don’t get any money out of the prize,” said he, “so it isn’t like being paid for doing your duty.”

Among the other Pulitzer prizewinners in journalism:

> The United Press International’s Merriman Smith, 51, known to millions of televiewers as the slim, mustached man who ends presidential press conferences with the words, “Thank you, Mr. President.” On the day John Kennedy was shot, Smith, who was riding in the motorcade three cars behind the President, grabbed the car phone and got out a U.P.I, bulletin six minutes ahead of the competition. Smith’s later eyewitness story won him the prize for national reporting.

> The New York Times’s David Halberstam, 30, and the A.P.’s Malcolm W. Browne, 32, shared the international reporting prize for their coverage of Viet Nam, up to and including the coup that deposed the Diem regime. Bad luck probably eliminated Neil Sheehan, 27, the U.P.I, man in Saigon, from consideration. Although his reportage matched Halberstam’s and Browne’s, often with remarkable fidelity, Sheehan flew out to Tokyo for a week’s rest—and thus missed the coup.

> Mrs. Hazel Brannon Smith, 49, editor and publisher of the Lexington, Miss., Advertiser and three other weeklies (TIME, Nov. 21, 1955), Mrs. Smith couldn’t be more unpopular in Mississippi if she were an integrationist, which she isn’t. But she is the next best thing. Her papers and her editorials have fearlessly called for reason on the race issue, whether she is challenging the white Citizens Councils (“If they have their way, the free press in Mississippi will be destroyed, and with it the liberty and freedom of all Mississippians”), or reporting a concert by Metropolitan Opera Star Leontyne Price in Laurel, where Miss Price was born (“Leontyne does not need Mississippi, but Mississippi needs Leontyne”). She won the prize for editorial writing.