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Weekly 150: James T. Wooten

Bethel’s Star Journalist

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It’s not often, a small private school in rural America can claim an award-winning journalist and television correspondent as an alumnus. Yet, Bethel University has that distinction with James Terrell Wooten.

Since graduating from Bethel College in 1958, Wooten received numerous awards for his portfolio of work including the Ernie Pyle Memorial Medal, Overseas Press Club Award, the Joe Alex Morris Award from Harvard University, the Blue Pencil Award from Columbia University, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Outside the awards, he had an impressive career as a journalist, including serving as a White House correspondent for the New York Times and holding several positions with ABC News.

It was not the original plan for Wooten to attend Bethel. He was set to attend Purdue University and study architecture after graduating from high school in Owensville, Indiana. On the day of graduation, he and his girlfriend were in a serious wreck that totaled his father’s vehicle. Feeling responsible for the accident, Wooten purchased a replacement vehicle from the money he had saved for his tuition at Purdue.

Just sixteen years old at the time, Wooten made an alternative plan to join the Navy when he would turn seventeen. His parents, not wanting to see him start a military career, persuaded him to enroll at Bethel College. His father, J.R., was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister and through his affiliation with the church, the school offered discounted tuition.

It was arranged for Wooten to work for Clara Dishman. His job was washing dishes for two meals and running the “hot water heater” for the gym.

“With the tuition break from my father’s ministry, that seemed doable,” Wooten said in a 2004 interview. He also starched and ironed shirts for a quarter each, something he learned from his mother, Clara.

In his second year at Bethel, he earned a full-ride scholarship to play basketball. With a double major in history and English, he graduated in 1958. During his senior year, he decided to become a minister based on his father’s desires. Following graduation, he married Joanne Richardson and attended the seminary.

After seminary school in Memphis, he had a short stint as the pastor of a church in Waverly. Realizing his calling was not with the church. He became a high school teacher in Greenville, Kentucky. While in Greenville, he worked for the newspapers in page layout, writing and sports photography. His work led to an offer to become an editor for the Weakley County Press in Martin.

By the mid-1960s, the Wootens and their two daughters, Karen and Kris, were moving to Huntsville, Alabama. Working as a reporter, Wooten was in the deep south watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold.

“We were not the only paper in Alabama not in chains to George Wallace,” he said, describing his paper as “an activist newspaper, which is the best king.”

“We were young reporters; we thought we were changing the world and we were having an adventure called journalism.”

Looking back he said, “that was the oven in which my journalism bread was baked; without that kind of experience, which was rich in terms of stories, rich in terms of real history being made with George Wallace’s politics and Martin Luther King, Jr. … without that, I don’t think I would have had any skills other than ordinary skills.”

From Alabama, his career took off with stops at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer. He and Joanne had two more daughters, Katie and Elizabeth, before her death in 1978.

By 1979, he moved to television with ABC News, where he remained for over 25 years.

“It took about a year before the light bulb went on how to write for TV; everything has to be compressed into a minute 40 or two minutes long. You learn to compress information into small chunks and let pictures do at least half of the work. And you learn to live with the unfortunate fact that you can never tell the entire story. It’s frustrating, but you get better.”

“I’ve covered a lot of wars, everything from the revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua to Grenada… the October War of 1973, Israel, Syria and Egypt… Bosnia and Kosovo, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Ethiopia.. and I’ve covered presidential campaigns in national politics since 1968.”

He remarried in the mid-1980s to Patience O’Connor, and they had a daughter, Lacie.

In 1990, Bethel honored Wooten win an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

In 2005, he retired from ABC News. Now in the twilight of his years, Wooten still has not fully retired as he focused on writing books.

“And I plan to spend more time with my grandchildren, my children and my wife. I’ll always be writing books ‘til they put me under the ground.”