The McHam Experience Changed Journalism And the Lives of Countless Journalists
David McHam in the office of the Waco Tribune-Herald in the late 1960s. Photo by Sue Jones.
The reason why. Don’t write that. It’s redundant. Take the word why away and the meaning doesn’t change.
Across America and in a few places abroad, thousands of journalists and other writers have the legendary professor David McHam to thank for cringing when they read or hear such abuse of the English language by people who should know better. For 54 years at four Texas universities, McHam, an unassuming son of the Depression, World War II, Carolina mill towns and the Marine Corps, hammered into students’ heads lessons in succeeding in journalism. His teaching created a cult-like following among his students and gave them a head start on a career, primarily in print journalism. The advantages they gained lasted a lifetime: the importance of thinking strategically, of accuracy and precision in writing, of getting details right, of fairness, of always being prepared to jump on a story, of appreciation for great writing and the beauty of words.
When McHam began teaching at Baylor University, his alma mater, in 1961, he was 28 yet had been a practicing journalist, a newsman in every sense of the word, for a dozen years. While a childhood accident thwarted his dream of playing Major League baseball, his high school coaches and a kindly typing teacher provided an alternative: Call in the results of the games to the daily and weekly newspapers in and around his hometown of Spindale, N.C. By the time he graduated in 1951, he was writing the stories himself on a typewriter and had found his calling in life.
In a scenario not uncommon in academia, McHam taught, mentored and befriended an untold number of award-winning journalists while clashing with bone-headed administrators at his first two colleges. At Baylor, his staunch support for giving student publications editorial freedom and the administration bypassing highly qualified faculty for promotion were aggravating factors when he gave up his tenured position in 1974. At Southern Methodist University, the most disagreeable and hidebound administrators he had ever encountered pressured him into retiring at 64.
With the help of fellow journalism legend Molly Ivins, he taught another two decades after SMU, at the University of Texas-Arlington and the University of Houston. During his time at Baylor and SMU he was among a handful of fulltime professors nationwide who simultaneously were working journalists. But he was the only one in that esteemed company to win a first-place award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, given for spot news reporting of a 1968 Braniff Airways crash near Dawson, Texas, when he was working on the news desk of the Waco Tribune-Herald.
Born in Trying Times
David Oliver McHam was born in Inman, S.C., in the depths of the Depression, on July 27, 1933. His parents, Clarence and Lois Robbins McHam, had not finished high school, dropping out to help their families by going to work in textile mills. Although they technically lived in the town of Inman, his father always identified their home as Inman Mills, the unincorporated “mill village” of four-room employees’ houses without running water.
Growing up, McHam did not live in a house with an indoor bathroom until he was 9 years old. He was surrounded as a child by members of the extended McHam and Robbins families, Southern Baptists who had lived in the Carolinas border region for generations.
During the last two years of World War II, David, his mother and sister lived on a farm just over the North Carolina border with his maternal grandparents while his father and uncles were ln the Navy in the South Pacific. He has vivid memories of life on the farm, where the family raised or grew much of their own food. He recalls gathering around the radio after supper, listening to war news delivered by H.V. Kaltenborn or Lowell Thomas. His grandparents received a local daily newspaper, The Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald, that would later play an important part in his life.
After the war, his parents found jobs in mills in Spindale, where he started the seventh grade. Several years before, he had fallen from a swing and severely fractured his left arm. Over the years ahead he reinjured the arm and it never fully healed. By the time he entered Rutherfordton-Spindale Central High School, he was a good outfielder on the baseball diamond, but his weak left arm made him a mediocre hitter. His baseball coach asked him to be the team manager, a job that included calling in reports on games to the weekly papers in Rutherfordton and Spindale.
“At one point, R.E. Price, the editor of the Rutherford County News, suggested I could write up the accounts of the games on my own,” McHam wrote in a memoir about his early life. “So, sometime as I was turning 16, I did that for him and for Glenn James, the editor of The Spindale Sun. They put my name on the stories. I didn’t know what they called it then, but later I learned I was getting my first bylines. I was intrigued by the fact that people cut out the stories and kept them in scrapbooks.
“My involvement deepened when I entered the 11th grade. Except now, daily papers in the area wanted accounts, too. So, I began calling in stories to The Charlotte Observer, the Asheville Citizen and The Spartanburg Herald. In addition to the bylines, the papers began sending me checks. Thus, my journalism career was underway.”
By his last semester in high school in 1951, McHam was the lone sports staff member at The Herald on Sundays. In addition to covering stock car races and skeet-shooting competitions, he was in the slot on the sports desk, laying out the Monday sports section.
McHam gives credit to Evaline Rasdall, his high school typing teacher, for changing his life with her sympathetic patience. Because he could barely use his left hand, he could type only 15 words a minute by the end of his sophomore year. She enabled him to take the course again, and by the end of his junior year he was up to 45 words a minute.
“Without that typing I never could have been in journalism,” McHam wrote. “I couldn’t have started at The Spartanburg Herald when I was a senior. I couldn’t have done anything without Miss Rasdall.”
McHam finished high school with a coterie of friends he stayed in touch with for the rest of his life. The youthful bonds were characteristic of McHam’s ability to develop strong friendships with likable people that endured so long he has outlived many of them.
Leaving home
With the security of his news job, McHam decided to stay in the region for college. He enrolled at Wofford, a private liberal arts college in Spartanburg, but stayed only one semester because he expected to be drafted into the military. When he wasn’t drafted, several of his friends persuaded him to join them at Gardner-Webb University in nearby Boiling Springs, N.C., which was a junior college at the time.
In the summer of 1952, he waited tables at Ridgecrest, a large Southern Baptist encampment in the North Carolina mountains, a job that proved crucial to future decisions about his education. He met fellow waiter Bill McCormick, a Baylor undergraduate, who became one of those close friends, especially after the pair hitchhiked to Canada and back together at summer’s end. McCormick suggested that if he enrolled at Baylor, he could also work in the sports department of the Waco papers while a student. That prospect wound up being postponed for more than three years.
In May 1953, expecting to be drafted, McHam considered volunteering for the Navy. He and his father went on a Saturday to a Navy recruiting office in Asheville; the office was closed but a Marine Corps office next door was open. There, a recruiter, a master sergeant named Smith, was impressed with McHam’s journalism experience. He told them he was about to take charge of the public information office at the Marine base at Parris Island, S.C., and he might find McHam a job in the office after basic training.
Master Sgt. Smith (his first name has been forgotten) kept his word. After surviving boot camp, McHam was sent to military journalists’ school at Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, where he excelled, finishing first in the class. After graduation, he was sent back to Parris Island, where he spent the next two years in an enviable job: He was a sportswriter for the base newspaper, traveling by bus with Marine baseball, basketball and football teams, playing exhibition games against college athletes from New Jersey to Florida. McHam recalled later that he had spent little of his three years of military service “being a real Marine.”
Even before he was discharged from the service in mid-1956, McHam returned to working for The Spartanburg Herald. That summer, he was admitted to Baylor as a transfer student and also thought he had secured that much-anticipated job in the sports department of the Waco Tribune-Herald. He moved to Waco, only to learn from sports editor Dave Campbell, who would grow to be a lifelong friend, that the job offer was no longer good because another staffer decided not to quit. McHam found work instead in Baylor’s public information office, and at the newspaper later, while he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He considered pursuing a master’s at Baylor, until meeting a leader of the American Baptist Convention led to a job offer at The Crusader, the denomination’s monthly magazine.
In the fall of 1958, McHam moved to New York City, where he worked as a feature writer for the magazine and took graduate courses in English and economics at New York University. In another serendipitous moment, a friend of a fellow Baylor alum at NYU told him about the graduate program at Columbia University. While Columbia was considered by many to be the nation’s most prestigious journalism school, McHam knew virtually nothing about it.
On his lunch hour a few days later, he took the subway to Columbia’s campus on the upper west side of Manhattan, where he talked to Associate Dean Richard Baker about the nine-month master’s degree program. It turned out Baker subscribed to The Crusader and had read his work. McHam not only was admitted to Columbia, but Baker arranged a scholarship that paid his tuition.
Among the lasting friendships McHam made at Columbia was with Phil Hardberger, a 1956 Baylor graduate who became a San Antonio trial lawyer and appellate court judge and who from 2007 to 2011 was the city’s mayor. When the school year began, the two had never met and hesitated to get better acquainted, fearful that sharing their alma mater might mean the other was a doctrinaire Southern Baptist. But as soon as they shook hands, Hardberger recalled, McHam put him at ease by asking, “Want to go grab a beer?” The two have maintained the friendship since, in part by celebrating their birthdays on the same day, July 27. Hardberger is one year younger.
When McHam received his degree from Columbia in 1960, he said in his memoir, everyone in his class of 90 had newspaper job offers across the country. His choice was The Houston Post, one of the larger U.S. dailies at the time and in a competitive market with the Houston Chronicle. (Only the Chronicle survives today; the Post shut down in 1995.) McHam worked for the city desk, and after just a few months he was assigned to cover the criminal courts, a coveted job for a beat reporter.
Teaching begins
Unlike many journalists who become educators, McHam had not seriously considered teaching until Baylor needed faculty members, including an adviser for student publications. McHam didn’t think he had enough professional experience to be a teacher. Baylor’s first choice turned down a job offer for a better opportunity: The prospect was Bill Moyers, who would eventually go on to fame in TV journalism but in 1961 moved from Texas to Washington to be an aide to then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
McHam recalled that Baylor President Abner McCall, over a pancake breakfast that summer, urged him to talk to two fellow alums, Fred Hartman, a newspaper publisher in Baytown, Texas, and to Dave Cheavens, who had recently become journalism department chair. Both men enjoyed wide respect in Texas journalism. Cheavens had been the longtime Associated Press bureau chief in Austin.
McHam took the job, soon finding he had an excellent opportunity to help train eager young journalists. Most of the students came from middle-class homes across the South, where their parents had not gone to college and where attending church was standard practice. In many cases, their faith gave them an interest in professions serving others, including teaching, health care and the ministry. Journalism was a logical extension of that. Another helpful factor: McHam wasn’t much older than most of his students, making it easier to connect with them.
McHam quickly developed good working relationships with those editing student publications, particularly those leading The Lariat, the four-day-a-week newspaper. He had an informal lunch once a week with the 1961-62 Lariat editor, Bill Hartman (Fred’s son), a practice he employed with other student leaders in the years ahead. His classes were in the basics: reporting and writing the news, editing and typography. Students taking the core courses all had to do “lab work,” which usually meant afternoons helping gather news for The Lariat.
“Baylor students changed over the years, but in those first few classes, they were really good, eager to learn, because their families expected so much of them,” he recalled in one of many conversations about the early years. “We built it around The Lariat, with students teaching other students. That worked really well. If you leave them alone, they learned on their own. Nobody told them what to do.”
McHam made it a practice to not read any student journalist’s story before it was published. Almost from the start, he became an exalted figure to those he taught, with students striving to know what he thought about every aspect of their education and lives. At the same time, often without realizing it, students who thought they were making decisions to please the professor were actually learning to think for themselves.
In one memorable example, Ella Wall Prichard, editor of The Lariat in 1962, didn’t seek McHam’s advice before writing an editorial criticizing administrators for abruptly cancelling performances of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” by Baylor’s theater department because of profanity in the script. Prichard was admonished by President McCall–but not by McHam–for the editorial. In another ground-breaking editorial, Prichard declared it was time for racial integration at Baylor, despite being warned by McCall to stay away from the issue. A majority of students in surveys supported integration, and university trustees soon after adopted a nondiscrimination policy.
Baylor journalism graduates from the 1960s and early 1970s became known for needing no more training to quickly succeed in their first professional jobs. Texas newspapers and United Press International, which at the time was fully competitive with the AP, eagerly hired anyone McHam recommended. Baylor, and SMU in the late 70s and 80s, became pipelines for the wire services in particular, including hiring Baylor alum Ed DeLong, one of UPI’s two lead writers on the Apollo moon landing missions, one of the most widely covered news stories of the day.
“McHam taught by example, and he saw everything as a teaching opportunity,” said Paul Harral, another of those on UPI’s spaceflight coverage team and later a senior editor for the wire service and newspapers. “Before cell phones, he emphasized that being able to communicate with the office was central and told us we should always carry a dime–the cost of a payphone call at the time–in our wallets or purses. Occasionally, he would demand us to show him a dime. That led to students occasionally saying that they were so broke that they spent their McHam dime.”
For his first 10 years at Baylor, McHam continued to work for the Waco Tribune-Herald as an editor in the sports department, the city desk or the news desk. “I just never got it out of my system,” he recalled later. “I really loved doing that.”
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, tension between Baylor journalism students and administrators over the Vietnam War and other social issues created what McHam described at the time as “bad vibes” that eroded the positive learning atmosphere. In late 1970, department chair Cheavens died unexpectedly. Administrators passed over the most qualified and effective faculty member, Harry Marsh, a veteran professional newsman with a master’s from Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, as the new chairman. (Marsh went on to chair the journalism departments at the University of Arkansas and Kansas State University.) Also unceremoniously dismissed from the faculty were Ed Kelton and Mike Stricklin, two recent Baylor graduates who were instructors. To this day, McHam grows angry when reminded of the way the three were treated.
Fortunately for SMU, the Dallas university needed journalism faculty and in 1974 McHam moved into a tenure-track position in the Meadows School of the Arts. There he found more students from affluent homes than he had in the ‘60s at Baylor, but he still inspired many of them to embrace his demanding lessons. For the next two decades, McHam recalled, SMU journalism students often academically outdistanced not only those majoring in the fine arts in the other divisions within Meadows but also many majors in the rest of the university. By the end of his teaching career, 13 of his undergraduate students at four universities had earned master’s degrees from Columbia’s journalism school and dozens went on to earn other post-graduate degrees.
In addition to teaching the basics of reporting, news and feature writing, editing and media ethics at SMU, courses McHam taught in the journalism honors program drew exceptionally talented students with a variety of interests that took many of them beyond news media careers. One of the honors classes included–among others–a future Ph.D. recipient at Stanford, five who earned master’s degrees, three lawyers, including one who became a state district court judge, the president of the Missouri Historical Society, an announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies and the TV critic for New York magazine. McHam also developed a course he called the Literature of Journalism, which required reading great writers of both fiction and nonfiction, for the Master of Liberal Arts program.
One of the SMU students in the late 1970s, John C. Hollar, who started at UPI before a long career in law, public television and digital media, credits McHam with taking an interest in him as a naïve freshman from a small Texas Panhandle town. “It was the kind of relationship I needed,” Hollar said. “He knew things about me I didn’t know myself. He had this gentle way of telling you …. and I wanted to shoot the lights out for him.” In addition, McHam “was a stickler for excellence, the one who showed me that mastery of the small things can lead to bigger things …. about how to sweat the details. It was a way of thinking.”
As he had done while at Baylor, McHam was also drawn again to being a working newsman, spending time editing and rewriting at The Dallas Times Herald and the Associated Press’ Dallas bureau. Ironically, one of his students in the late ‘70s, Kristen Gazlay, became one of his supervisors as the news editor in the AP bureau. Because McHam had given her a B+ when she took his editing course at SMU, “It was always such a kick to look out of my office window and see him sitting with his fellow editors,” she said. “I resisted the urge to give him a B+ on his performance review.”
In 1994 McHam again found himself a target of administrators who did not respect the journalism profession and who thought he should retire at age 64. McHam took a buyout from SMU at a time he hoped to teach at least 10 more years. In fact, his academic career lasted twice that long. His departure caught the attention of Molly Ivins, the widely admired Texas journalist who was writing a column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time. In her inimical, blunt style she called what SMU had done to McHam a “world-class bonehead move.”
“I feel quite confident in stating that there is not a newspaper editor in this state who does not know that if you get a kid who did well under McHam–whether he was teaching at Baylor, SMU or Podunk–you’ve got a lead-pipe cinch for a good reporter,” Ivins wrote. “McHam’s students are a just a breed apart; they come with a seriousness of purpose and sense of fairness that McHam somehow inculcates by means that remain mysterious.”
The column alerted the University of Texas at Arlington that McHam was available, and he was quickly hired to teach in its journalism program. Three years later, he moved to a position as a clinical professor at the University of Houston, where he stayed through 2015, teaching what he described as the most diverse array of students he had ever had, many of them Muslim. In his last decade in the classroom, fewer students were choosing journalism careers as mainstream media began cutting jobs. Yet McHam still was able to create a pipeline of student interns and staff at the Houston Chronicle.
Once again, McHam also found the life experience of many U of H students, the first of their families to go to college, helped them to be excellent students, eager to learn. The professor’s wife, Betty Lynn McHam, said that at a party celebrating McHam’s 85th birthday in Houston in 2018 she loved seeing former students from each of the schools where he taught mingling with each other. “At one point,” she said, “I looked over and there was a bunch of U of H students talking intently to a group of Baylor students, all of whom could have been their grandparents.”
As McHam approached his 90th birthday, he had been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Association for Education in Journalism with the organizations’ highest teaching awards. He was honored while on the faculty for his teaching by both Baylor and SMU. Years later he was named a distinguished alumnus of Gardner-Webb, of Baylor University by the Baylor Line Foundation, and of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. His legacy was honored again in 2022 when the McHam Fellowship was established at the Texas Observer, providing funding to support a full-time investigative reporter who exemplified his lessons in journalism and life.
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Tom Belden worked as a professional journalist for 40 years after studying under David McHam at Baylor University and earning a master’s from Columbia University. He started his career at United Press International, working in five different bureaus, including a year managing the Cape Canaveral bureau. After two years at The Dallas Morning News, he was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer for three decades, primarily as a business writer covering the transportation and travel industries. Between 1994 and 2007, he taught journalism courses as an adjunct at Temple University and Penn State University. He lives in San Antonio, where he and his wife, Janice Miller, have established a donor-advised fund that donates to nonprofits engaged in traditional fact-based journalism.
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