My favorite Republican—ever

I met him doing what reporters do—covering a meeting for the newspaper.

It was in the mid-1990s at a Chamber of Commerce function with the standard lineup—guest speaker, hearty breakfast, plenty of giddy economic-boom small talk.

The thing is, as a business reporter, I knew what I was doing there at 7:30 in the morning. But I wondered about the older man with the camera slung around his neck and the notebook in his hand. He looked like someone’s grandfather—make that great-grandfather.

What was he doing in a room full of suits so early in the morning, I asked him.

He introduced himself in a velvet-deep voice that Morgan Freeman’s won’t achieve for another couple of decades yet. He said his name was Willis Vergious Reed.

He was 85 years old and he, too, was on the job.

His pictures and story would appear in the following week’s edition of the Baton Rouge Post, the weekly community paper of which he was also publisher, editor, ad director and deliveryman.

“I’m Republican,” he offered—although originally not by choice. He once told me that he first registered to vote when pretty much every politician was a Democrat, and Baton Rouge officials only let blacks register as Republicans then so they couldn’t impact election outcomes.

Still, over the course of his life Reed embraced traditional Republican principles, and became well-known among top local and state elected officials; not bad for a man born into a family so poor that the Great Depression didn’t even alter his standard of living.

Few thirty-somethings think they know more about life than a reporter on the beat for a few years, but my worldview suddenly shrank to a peephole as I learned about Reed’s decades of work: he remembered hawking papers on Government Street as a young fella the day Gov. Henry Fuqua died in office. I looked it up: Oct. 11, 1926.

Reed went on to become general manager of the Baton Rouge Post, then in the 1940s he shipped off to World War II where he earned three battle stars in the U.S. Army.

After various jobs in business, he resurrected the Post in 1982.

His newspaper may not have met New York Times professional standards, but it was reliable and it served the black community well. Reed didn’t shy away from writing about corruption or abuses of the public trust.

He finally stopped publishing the paper when his health began to decline in 2007. Before he was done, Reed made one last public move: He ran for state Senate at the age of 93.

He died in October, just a few days short of his 96th birthday.

Reed’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are scattered from here to California. Among them are attorneys, doctors and other professionals who continue a tradition of work that Willis Reed lived every day.