by Barbara Nevins Taylor

A couple of weeks I got a Facebook message from Lewis Bailey. Lewis found the Segal’s Eagles “press pass” and it brought back a flood of memories. It also brought back plenty of Father’s Day memories for me. 

When our dad Zeke Segal died of a heart attack in 1996, we started going through his things. We found a lot about him we knew, and a lot we didn’t. For example, although he was married to Theo, his childhood dancing school sweetheart, not our mother, he liked women and they like him. So it was only mildly shocking when going over the credit card bills, we found that someone had returned a green print caftan to a fancy ladies’ lingerie shop in Atlanta. We never learned who.

We also found many other things that convinced me I knew very little about my father, although I thought I knew it all. He remained in part a mystery to me, one that after his death I could never solve.

So when Lewis sent his message, I perked up. It reminded me of the best things about Zeke Segal and I reached out to Lewis for his recollection.

Zeke hired Lewis as a photographer for the CBS Bureau in Atlanta where he was, according The New York Times, “the dean of Atlanta’s media corps when what has been called the New South was emerging.”

He headed the bureau from 1973 to 1983 and worked with an outstanding group of journalists covering everything south of the Mason-Dixon line through Texas, down through Latin America and Tierra del Fuego.

Lewis is from North Georgia and might have been an outlier for another news boss. But Zeke liked underdogs. He hired Phillip Ghee, the bureau’s first African-American photographer. He hired women and pushed CBS to give them good assignments. 

But back to Lewis. He said that he, as part of what the team called the Segal’s Eagles’ flying squad, worked on special events for CBS, setting up live shots and remote broadcasts in places like Plains, Georgia, the home of candidate and then President Jimmy Carter.

On these special events he worked with the legendary producers Bernard Birnbaum and Shad (Robert J.) Northshield, who started the great CBS program “Sunday Morning.” 

Lewis said, “Zeke punished Shad by assigning me to do anything ‘Sunday Morning’ had to do that Zeke could assign a crew to.” On one assignment, Lewis had an equipment problem, very common, and when Northshield pushed him to hurry up, Lewis said, “God damn it. Shut up, or help.” Northshield apparently reported him to Zeke. Lewis said, “I called Zeke and Zeke had my back.”

Lewis has plenty of stories, but here’s the one that really got me. He said, “Zeke helped to make me rich enough to send my wife to college, allowed me to pay off my college and send all my children to college. I have three doctors, one accountant and my oldest daughter is a child welfare worker. I owe it all to Zeke.”

That salute to my dad and the way he practiced journalism came out of nowhere, and it adds up to a pretty good bunch of Father’s Day memories for me.