By Mark Shavin, Senior Executive Producer

 

 

Jim Axel worked in Atlanta television for 34 years, and like many of you I grew up watching him. I had the privilege of working with him for eight years and remained friends with him for another thirteen after he retired.

 

I had the honor of visiting Jim and his wife Millie this summer and producing a story about his battle with cancer. Jim’s story struck a nerve with viewers, many of whom commented on the piece when it was posted on the TV station’s website.

 

Your thoughts and prayers touched Jim deeply and he even reconnected with some old friends who had fallen by the wayside. Jim died of complications from lung cancer, but he died knowing his story had meaning for others who were fighting cancer or had lost a loved one to this terrible foe.
 

When I arrived at WAGA-TV in 1988, I was dealing with a profound loss of my own. My father, a writer, died of bladder cancer just days before I was to start my new job. It was a tough time to undertake a new challenge, a tough time to do anything but stare out a window and contemplate the unfairness of life. Dad was 61. When I reported for work Jim was among the first to approach me and offer condolences. He told me how much he admired my father and he welcomed me aboard. And then he got back to work, and I figured I might as well get to work, too. My wound was still raw, but in acknowledging it, Jim gave me permission to grieve and move forward.

 

Jim was something of a Renaissance man in those years. He once had a business chopping and selling firewood—and anchoring the 5pm newscast—but when I met him he had moved on to building and selling computers. This was in the nascent age of PC’s, and it was still unusual to find one in everyday use in everyone’s home. Jim invited me over to his house and gave me a tour of his cluttered workshop, a basement full of everyday carpentry tools, but also a half dozen computer monitors and keyboards.

 

If the Flintstones were to cross paths with the Jetsons it would no doubt happen here. By the end of the day Jim had sold me an XT 286, a dinosaur by today’s standards, but at the time it was a glowing marvel, a kind of futuristic totem like that humming monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only smaller. Jim brought the computer to my house and installed it himself, and this made a big impression on my wife and me until the first time we ran into a problem. I walked over to Jim at his cubicle and asked for help.

 

“You’re on your own,” he said, barely looking up. “I don’t know a thing about fixing them.”

 

That might sound off-putting, but it was so typically Jim. He could be funny and solicitous one moment and gruff and short-tempered the next. He was of an age when news anchors were hard charging and larger than life. Jim took his role seriously. The news mattered. The trust of his audience mattered. His reputation mattered. If you were his producer, you developed a thick skin. If you stood your ground with Jim, he respected you, but you had to earn your stripes every day. I can remember countless times asking him to write a minute and a half piece on the big national or international story of the day, only to be met with a sharp rebuke.

 

“Are you kidding? There’s no video for this story? Am I supposed to make it out of thin air?”

 

He’d storm back to his desk, and I wouldn’t hear another word until he returned, glasses perched on his nose, asking me to read his copy.

 

“It’s too long,” I’d say.

 

“I couldn’t tell half a story!”

 

“You said you had no video.”

 

Somehow it always came together, and we’d both end up reasonably satisfied, our mutual if grudging respect intact—at least until the next fight.

 

Part of my job when I got to the station was to write the teases that Jim read in the early afternoon. He liked my writing well enough, but it was also one less chore for him. I’d bang them out in the early afternoon, and he would sit to my right and deliver them from the newsroom. As a result I got a lot of face time, or at least my profile did. Once I was at Service Merchandise on Cheshire Bridge Road, standing by the counter waiting for help, and another customer started shouting at me in recognition.

 

“Channel 5! Channel 5! You sit behind Jim Axel!”

 

That was my dubious claim to fame.

 

A word about those afternoon teases. I viewed them as a challenge. How do you entice people to watch with just 15 or 20 seconds of copy and some video? In the world according to Jim, you didn’t do it by asking the viewer a question.

 

“Asking a question in a tease is a crutch,” Jim told me countless times. “Is it going to be sunny tomorrow? If the viewer knew the answer to that he wouldn’t watch. It’s our job to answer their questions.”

 

“Then why don’t you write the teases since you know everything?

 

“See, that’s a question.”

 

This is how it went between us, back and forth, day after day, the same arguments and pitched battles and at the end of it all—a newscast that revealed none of our angst or conflict.

 

Back in May of this year Jim’s closest friend at the station, a studio technician named Rodney Barber told me Jim was in failing health. Jim was like a father to Rodney, and Rodney’s anguish began to weigh on me as well. Jim and I had traded emails in the years since his retirement. I knew, of course, that he had been fighting lung cancer for years. It seemed like the doctors had used everything in their arsenal and that included cutting out half of his right lung. Jim insisted he would beat cancer and since he was known around the station as “the big guy,” we took him at his word. But now the news wasn’t so good. I reached out to Jim and asked about visiting him in Florida and doing a piece on him.

 

“You mean an obituary?”

 

“Not exactly,” I said, but we both knew otherwise.

 

Jim was ambivalent and put me off a few times, but eventually agreed to let me come down. I was up most of the night before, compiling questions and thumbing through a book called “Listening Is an Act of Love.” It was created by National Public Radio and it’s full of suggestions, which I jotted down, suggestions like interview your subject in a “quiet carpeted room…. phones off… no TV, no radio… move away from noisy appliances.” If you’ve ever contemplated interviewing a loved one to compile a life story, I strongly recommend this book as a jumping off point.

 

My flight down to see Jim was pleasant enough. I picked up my rental car, plugged in my GPS and punched in Jim’s address. I called Jim to tell him I would be there within an hour and also called the photographer who was on loan from one of our sister stations. It was about 11am, bright and sunny and hot. Shredded tires littered the shoulders of the highway, and when I arrived at Jim’s neighborhood I was 30 minutes early and nervous about what I would find. I also had a tension headache. Instead of driving into Jim’s subdivision I drove off. I found a McDonalds and ate some chicken strips and drank a Coke. I drove to a nearby CVS and bought some Aleve. I also bought an inexpensive tape recorder in case the camera malfunctioned. I would at least have Jim’s voice.

 

When I returned to Jim’s neighborhood, the photographer was waiting for me, large decals covering the side of his van, trumpeting his station’s commitment to news and community. It seemed garish for such a quiet story. I approached Jim’s front door by myself and saw his large shadow looming behind a glass pane on one side. The door swung open and there he was, six feet tall with piercing blue eyes and a floral shirt. He was painfully thin, but hardly bedridden. His voice was strong, and I hugged him and I hugged Millie, too. She was a warm and gracious hostess, showing me around the house while the photographer set up his camera.

 

Just past the living room an enclosed swimming pool overlooked a small pond, and geckos darted merrily across the mesh screens. Jim’s office was cluttered with plaques, awards and photographs. Jim with Richard Nixon. Jim with Hubert Humphrey. Jim with Walter Cronkite. Jim’s shelf of Emmys. His Silver Circle Award, marking 25 years in broadcasting. Hats and mugs and other souvenirs of a life lived in front of the camera. Millie showed me her office, which she shared with a washer and dryer and innumerable bowling trophies. In retirement, she and Jim had enjoyed bowling and golf and then cancer struck.

 

Millie put out a plate of shrimp, cheese, crackers and fruit and insisted we eat before beginning. She knew innately that this interview wasn’t something to rush into, and so we had a few minutes of casual conversation.

 

“What kind of day are you having?” I asked Jim.

 

“Today is a little better than average. Some days I have some problems I have to deal with. Today is not as bad as some. Anyone coming from Channel 5 makes it a wonderful day.”

 

We moved on to the living room, and as the interview began in earnest, Millie retreated to her office. I had a slew of questions—painful questions about Jim’s looming death—but paradoxically it was his childhood that he was most uncomfortable talking about, the beginning of his life rather than the end.

 

“I never knew my father,” he said. “He died when I was two. It made it tough on me growing up. I didn’t have a father to take me fishing, to ballgames. You grow up a little bitter, but determined to be the best you can with the life you’re given.”

 

“Do you have any happy memories, any funny stories about growing up?”

 

“I don’t have any good childhood memories. I had a strong mother who worked all the time. She was a cook. She worked in stores. She was a telephone operator.”

 

Jim had mentioned earlier that he had an older sister—her picture was hanging in a hallway with other family photos—but I got the feeling he spent a lot of his childhood by himself. I don’t know for sure because he would not elaborate on those early days, except for one telling detail. He started smoking when he was 14 and kept at it until he was 60.

 

“Way back then no one knew it was that harmful. I remember my football coach in high school used to say, ‘Don’t smoke. It’ll stunt your growth.’ I was already over 200 pounds playing a linebacker.”

 

Jim enlisted in the Navy when he was 17 and became a corpsman at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When he turned 18 he made a rash decision he would regret the rest of his life. He got two large tattoos, dark angry tattoos. One was an anchor. The other was a knife. Those of us who worked with Jim rarely saw them because he kept them covered. The day I interviewed him they were more prominent than ever because he was wearing short sleeves and his arms were so pitifully thin. An anchor and a knife seemed a fitting motif for a man who lived his life sitting under hot studio lights and whose final story would chronicle the cancer that slowly, inexorably whittled him away.

 

I was interested in how Jim got into broadcasting, and he told me he had started out scrubbing floors at KANO radio in Anoka, Minnesota. He eventually became an announcer. His next stop was WCHK in Canton, Georgia where he worked as an announcer and chief engineer. He joined WSB radio in 1959 and became night news editor. He eventually made the leap to television and spent most of his career at WAGA-TV. Along the way he and Millie raised three boys, and Jim steadily built his career.

 

It’s important to note that Jim didn’t just sit behind an anchor desk at this station. He went out in the field and met people and brought back their stories. He felt a special kinship with military families left bereft when their husbands and sons were deemed Missing in Action. Perhaps this was because he felt his own father’s absence so keenly. In the waning days of the Carter Presidency, Jim traveled to Washington and then to Wiesbaden as the Americans held hostage in Iran were set free.

 

Jim’s constant companion whether at home or on the road was a cigarette.

 

“I found out I had cancer on my 71st birthday,” he said ruefully. “Quite a birthday present.”

 

Over the next few years he endured radiation and chemotherapy, and in January of 2006 the doctors carved up his right lung. He had still more chemo after that, and then the cancer spread to his liver. It was a seesaw battle and Millie, he told me, was always at his side.

 

“I can’t tell you enough what it has meant to have her. She’s supportive. She’s demanding. She’ll tell me what I need to have done whether I want to do it or not.”

 

I asked Jim if he was prepared to die.

 

“We’re all gonna die,” he said. “I think there is a benefit in knowing it’s coming. Having the opportunity to prepare is important. I’m grateful that the cancer is giving me the opportunity to prepare. You’re leaving a family and you want to make sure you’ve done everything you can before you go. But you never run out of things that have to be done, and you never seem to find time. You have to make sure you have the proper wills, the proper medical papers in case you go into a hospital and you want extra lifesaving care and so on. You have to have Powers of Attorney handled the right way.”

 

Jim and I talked for a long time that Saturday afternoon in June. I had compiled a list of 75 questions and managed to get through all of them, but I was surprised, frankly, by the questions that elicited little if any response at all.

 

“Favorite song?”

 

“Don’t have one.”

 

“Favorite book?”

 

“Don’t have one.”

 

“Favorite movie?”

 

“Terminator, but I didn’t like the new one at all.”

 

This last answer should not have surprised me. Jim was a big X-Files fan, and he was fully invested in the show’s tagline, “the truth is out there.”

 

Jim’s truth was to face down his cancer unflinchingly and to make sure those he cared about were kept in the loop. In his emails to friends and family he shared the good news and the bad. There was never a hint of self-pity.

 

“You play the cards you’re dealt,” he told me. “I had a wonderful career.”

 

The interview ended, and I closed my notebook. The photographer picked up some additional shots for the story, and Jim and I spent a few minutes looking over a box of tapes he had saved of his best work. We made arrangements to meet up later that night for dinner, but before I could return to his house, he called me on my cell phone. He had found a misplaced tape, a three-part series called “Battling Cancer.” He suggested I come back to his house a little earlier than planned so we could watch the tape together before dinner. We did, and I wondered about the people in his stories, children and adults. I wondered if they had good outcomes and if they were still alive today. I asked to borrow a handful of Jim’s tapes, including some treasured home movies, and he entrusted them to me. Parts of those tapes made their way into the piece that eventually aired on Fox 5 News.

 

My visit with Jim ended with an early dinner, which turned out to be a lovely respite from the cancer. We went to an Outback Steakhouse, Jim and I in my rental car, Millie following behind in her car. That way they could return home together, and I could go directly to my hotel near the airport. While we waited for our food Jim mentioned that the doctor had predicted he would be dead by now. Millie immediately corrected him and said that was not what the doctor had told him at all. The doctor said he might have another six months.

 

“Well, that’s good news,” said Jim.

 

Our food arrived, and I was encouraged to see that Jim ate rather well. He had lost a lot of weight that spring due to serious complications involving his stomach, but on this particular night you would not have guessed he was even ill. He had pumpernickel bread, salad, pasta and shrimp. And he had a bourbon and Coke.

 

“I don’t drink much anymore,” he said. “Maybe four times a week.”

 

I was surprised he could drink at all, but I was glad he did, considering all that he had been through. Jim refused to give any ground to his illness. My old anchor was his old stubborn self.

 

A long time ago when Jim and I worked in the newsroom together, we spent a lot of our days worrying about time, staring down the clock and arguing over how long a given story could run and how to pack more content into our newscasts. It occurs to me now that I never really understood the true value of time, but I think Jim ultimately did. In the final months of his life Jim seemed to know that he couldn’t master time, but he refused to let time become his master.