The Press: Home to the Hills

"During 30 years as a newspaperman," said Reporter Don Whitehead, "home had been wherever I happened to hang my hat." In World War II he hung his hat in hundreds of huts and tents, covered the front wherever war burned hottest: in Africa, Sicily, Italy, Belgium, France and Germany. He hung it in Korea in 1950, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage, won another in 1953 for his stories on President-elect Eisenhower's trip to the Korean front. His byline, as a top Associated Press reporter, was for years among the most widely known in the U.S. Last week globetrotting, leg-weary Newsman Don Whitehead, 51, hung his hat to stay. Its peg: Knoxville, Tenn.—the same city he had left as a rising young journalist 24 years ago to make the world his beat. His new assignment: columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel (circ. 100,267).

Whitehead's decision to get out of the world race was dictated partly by an arterial condition in his legs that makes it painful for him to move, partly by success —his 1956 book, The FBI Story, was a bestseller. But more important was a desire to go back home. He left the A.P. in 1956 to become the New York Herald Tribune's Washington bureau chief, quit in 1957 and toured the world gathering material for a book on international crime, finally realized that where he really wanted to be was back in Knoxville.

On the News-Sentinel, Whitehead will produce three columns a week on anything that comes to mind, while continuing to work on his next book. This week his first column began: "A wise man once said that home is where the heart is, and that's what I've decided after years of knocking around this troubled, exciting old world. No one was more surprised than I when the realization finally came that 'home' was back here in these ancient and beautiful hills that seem to bound a little world of their own."