JACKSON - Of all the bright journalists who cut their teeth covering Mississippi during the 1950s, Keith Fuller, a laid-back ex-Texan with John Wayne good looks sent here by the Associated Press, seemed one of the most unlikely prospects to go a long way in the profession.
Just shows you, however, you can't judge how people will turn out from a snapshot view from their early days.
Fuller, while never noted as a news writer, capitalized on his likable, Reaganesque "aw shucks" manner to climb the professional ladder to the highest level through the administrative side of the news business.
He used his uncanny gift to disarm higher authority with a choir boy grin as he rose to become top gun in management of the Associated Press, the world's largest news-gathering organization.
After being made president and chief executive of the far-flung news co-operative in 1976, he was credited with bringing the AP and its 219 bureaus and services worldwide into the age of high-tech before his retirement in 1985.
News came last week that Fuller died at his home in Bethesda, Md., at age 79. Alzheimer's the cause.
For a guy who, when he joined the Capitol press corps here in the early 1950s, couldn't manage his own finances, constantly bumming money off less-paid news reporters, Fuller's rise to the top of the management pinnacle seems a highly unlikely leap.
Almost universally we reporters in those days didn't make very much money. The AP, however, because of Union scale, paid better. Consequently, Fuller's paycheck was more than most of us on the Jackson capital beat.
Somehow, Fuller never seemed to have any money in his pocket. Often he eased up to one of us to lend him a few bucks. And, invariably, he was bumming cigarettes from anyone around, even opposition United Press guys.
We had a small but close-knit Capitol Press corps in those days. I headed the one-man bureau of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a post that dated back to the 1890s. Ken Toler manned the Memphis Commercial Appeal bureau and was, with his already long tenure, the "dean" of the corps. Whoever The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News assigned to the Capitol beat accounted for two more, and the AP and UP guys made up the remainder of the regulars.
Since I was one of the very few reporters in those days who didn't smoke (and still don't), I was not one of Fuller's favorite targets. But occasionally when we had lunch together, or even a cup of coffee at a downtown cafe, you could depend on Fuller never picking up the check.
As his best friend, Hugh Mulligan, the inimitable AP humor writer, puts it in his stuttering Irish brogue: "Only the Venus De Milo picked up fewer checks than did Keith Fuller." Mulligan, who still does some special pieces for the AP, lives in Ridgeford, Conn.
Fuller, an ex-POW from WWII, whose B-17 bomber was shot down over Nazi-held French territory, arrived here in 1951. Then the AP had only a one-man bureau ("correspondent" as they called it) who operated out of a tiny cubby-hole furnished by The Clarion-Ledger in the paper's building. The Mississippi capital bureau was an appendage of the AP bureau in New Orleans.
Admittedly, not a heck of a lot of big news was breaking around the state back then. The Legislature was the biggest thing on the Capitol beat. Emmett Till came a few years later, and the civil rights movement was still a decade away. But if you went out and dug, or traveled out in the state, you could find some pretty good stories.
Tail-busting AP reporters in later years, especially those who covered the explosive 1960s, still are amazed over the "Fuller stories" we would tell. Especially the one that it was not uncommon to find Keith spending the afternoon in a downtown Jackson movie theater back then.
Of course the AP was then, and still is, a tax-exempt co-operative news-gathering organization made up of member newspapers.
Mississippi members could call news stories directly into the New Orleans bureau rather than through Jackson. That didn't bother Fuller, as long as the AP didn't get beat on a story by "Brand X" - the nickname for the United Press.
Some papers would have both wires, the UP as well as AP, and their news desks would start beefing to the New Orleans AP bureau about getting beat by the opposition. Then Fuller would get in hot water with the Mississippi member paper, but he was always a master at talking his way out of it.
Nothing in the above, however, is meant to detract from how Keith Fuller had come among us down here in Mississippi - actually on two different stints between 1951 and 1956 - then later became one of the nation's top news executives.
His assignment as Little Rock bureau chief in 1957 gave Fuller the break that vaulted him up AP's chain of command. Not long after arriving in the Arkansas capital, Fuller found himself directing coverage of the nation's first school desegregation crisis at Central High School.
The AP sent in some of its top national writers, among them special correspondent Relman Morin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Central High coverage.
From Little Rock, Fuller was on his way. After a brief assignment in Denver, he was brought to AP headquarters in New York as a general executive.
