Remembering Tom Coffin

Among the founders of “The Great Speckled Bird,” Atlanta’s weekly “underground” newspaper, Tom wrote a column entitled “What’s it all about, Ralphie?” in the paper’s first issue, March 8, 1968. Its title came from a contemporary movie starring Michael Caine as “Alfie,” a priapic chauffeur; striking a note that set the subsequent tone for The Bird.

“Ralphie” was Ralph McGill, the Atlanta Constitution’s front-page columnist who opposed the racists of the Ku Klux Klan, while sharing their anti-communism. The Bird challenged the arrogant self-assurance of McGill and local white leadership.

Atlanta in the 1960s differed from Soap Lake, Wash., where Tom’s parents moved after his Sept. 1, 1943, birth in Detroit. Tom’s father worked in construction there, at New Deal Bonneville Power Administration hydroelectric and irrigation projects.

One of the most highly mineralized lakes anywhere, Soap Lake’s water drew “health-conscious” tourists. Tom’s high school was in Spokane, and then he attended Washington State University in Pullman, across the Columbia River’s state line with Oregon. Initially majoring in chemistry, the foul odors at a lab job for Longview Fiber Company, a paper mill, prompted him to major in literature.

Moving to Reed College in Portland, Ore., Tom met his future wife, Stephanie. The works of southern writers like William Faulkner led them to move to the rapidly changing south to continue their postgraduate studies at Emory after his 1967 graduation. On the couple’s way through Idaho, where there was no waiting period, Stephanie and Tom were married.

Atlanta’s anti-Vietnam War movement soon overshadowed Tom’s graduate work. He became immersed in the political culture of a city already reeling from changes wrought by its powerful Civil Rights movement. McGill and similarly well-situated white people may have called Atlanta “the city too busy to hate” but their self-regard only diverted from popular progress.

Challenging McGill’s crowd from the left, the Bird spoke for the “New Left,” a growing force in the western world during the 1960s. Distaste for blind anti-communism became common among young Americans who grew up during the McCarthy era, but the Vietnam War, the premier anti-communist project of the United States between 1963 and 1975, resulted in a political force of overwhelming influence on the world’s rising generation.

Tom’s opposition to Vietnam was manifest in more than Bird journalism. He and Stephanie supported individual war resisters in and out of uniform. Their empathy extended to innocent victims of US policy, including Ha Nguyen, a refugee whom they adopted. Before Ha’s adoption, Tom and Stephanie had two talented sons, Zach and Simon, among the first “Bird babies” among Bird staff children.

The kids’ arrivals came as “the women’s movement” blossomed within the ranks of the Civil Rights, student and antiwar movements. What was called “gay liberation” began its long progress toward today’s Gay Pride. Much of Tom’s Bird journalism was reporting on organized labor, adding photography to his toolkit, an enduring work that left an extensive visual record of over five decades of history. Tom’s singular openness to those who peopled his photos yielded telling images of struggle.

Getting the Bird printed every week was one of the paper’s many recurrent problems. Pre-digital Atlanta had numerous printshops, but many found the radical weekly a challenge. There were some local printers, but one out-of-town shop was notable. A publishing house in Montgomery, Ala., was owned by the late Aubrey Williams, one of a handful of white southern New Dealers who were lifelong public opponents of segregation. Williams’ shop printed for the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the event that brought Dr. Martin Luther King to the nation’s attention. A radical newspaper from Atlanta was no big deal.

Birds had to be driven back from Montgomery weekly. As its page numbers and sales grew, pickup trucks were inadequate; they were replaced by an aging two-axle 2.5-ton box-body truck that had to work to pay for itself. Tom and his friends descriptively named their business: “Truck’n 2.” Backbreaking short-haul trucking kept them as busy as they could endure for several years. Nor were backs the only body parts subject to injury.

This entrepreneurship in Tom’s “real life,” alongside his continuing Bird work, set him on a path of engagement in the educational and occupational opportunities available in growing Atlanta. In their variety, all his projects were “socially useful.” This growth continued for the rest of Tom’s life.

Tom was not “afraid of work,” that jocular diagnosis for too many southern workers, blamed for the region’s frequently cited lack of progress. That shift of fault, from the blameworthy economic force, segregation, exemplifies the blind quotidian power of white racism. Unlike southerners claiming to be unafraid of work, those who could “lay down beside it and go right to sleep,” Tom embraced the physical and mental efforts his pursuits demanded. An excellent and tasty example of his love for his work showed during his years as a home brewer.

Relief from trucking came when Tom was hired for construction engineering scut work, slump testing concrete and the like. Trying to unionize his colleagues cost him that job. Those efforts were supported by Operating Engineers Local 926. They invited him to join, where he learned to operate construction cranes. That craft evolved into artwork: His sculptor son, Zach, is among the leaders of the famous “Burning Man” event in the west, and Tom erected sculptures at that desert festival.

When what became Environmentalism joined political organizing, the Bird began reporting on local problems resulting from negative human impacts on the natural world. Their actions resemble those of viruses infecting healthy organisms. Stephanie composed one memorable Bird headline: “Peachtree Creek is Full of Shit.”

Tom joined the avocation of tree climbing, one that moved past recreation into the study of trees. Those numerous inhabitants of the natural environment of Atlanta and Georgia became additional new subjects, soon joined by their forests. Tom’s hearing was impaired by construction site noise; meanwhile, the boom/bust cycle in construction made the work less secure.

Living in a pickup while he got a PhD at UGA’s School of Forestry, Tom defended a thesis affirming the sustainability of the commercial forest that occupies two-thirds of Georgia. He found that fiber production could continue at current rates for an indefinite future. History has affirmed his conclusions; indeed, today’s markets have fallen from the level of demand he investigated; petrochemical plastic products have displaced wood fiber.

His degree allowed Tom to obtain an adjunct post in sociology at Georgia State but organizing a union of other adjuncts cost him that job. That led to work for the City of Atlanta as its first Arborist, writing a Tree Ordinance when “the City in a Forest” offered a marketing advantage to developers who would then cut those same trees. He was fired for blowing the whistle on his colleagues’ looking the other way. He sued the City and won, but his lawyers advised him that returning to work would invite more harassment.

His education and experience led him to organize a Georgia chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture.

Working with Stephanie and other Bird veterans to preserve the Bird and its records. Organizing periodic reunions of the staff and friends. Tom Coffin’s political activism continued for the rest of his life, demonstrating against unwelcome federal polices at the corner of Ponce de Leon and Moreland Ave.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to WRFG, Radio Free Georgia 89.3 or to Trees Atlanta. A memorial will be held on Sunday, Dec. 21 at 2 p.m. at City Church Eastside, 798 North Highland Avenue.