SPECIAL REPORT: 'E&P' Article Written by David Halberstam -- As a Young Reporter

By: Shawn Moynihan (and reprint of David Halberstam article) Researching the "50 Years Ago" section for each issue, I often come across some amazing stories from E&P's rich history. This time, I discovered one written especially for us by David Halberstam, then a little-known reporter for The Nashville Tennessean, titled, "One Picture Arouses Nation to Give Succor to Poor Family."

Appearing in our Jan. 4, 1958 issue, it's the story behind a newspaper report -- and a gripping image captured by staff photographer Eldred Reaney --that drew wide attention to the plight of the Ledbetter family, and the outpouring of help they received after the story ran in December 1957. We reprint it in its entirety below.

Halberstam, of course, went on to win fame -- and a Pulitzer Prize -- at The New York Times and became a bestselling author. He died last April. Reaney remained at the Nashville paper for more than a decade, went on to become chief photographer for the state, and died in 1995. One footnote: About a year before the Ledbetter episode, Reaney snapped one of the most beloved photos of young Elvis Presley on stage in Tupelo, Miss., at the Mississippi- Alabama State Fair.
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by David Halberstam, for E&P

Eldred Reaney is the photographer who looked back. It was not a new assignment -- and it was not a pleasant one. No one likes poverty -- and the occasion was a picture to help the annual campaign of a charity group (Big Brothers, sponsored by The Nashville Tennessean) which distributes Christmas baskets to the poor.

This is the way Reaney described the assignment at the beginning: "Well," he said to me, "you couldn't get out of it either."

And so we drove out. We had a list of 10 of poverty's foremost constituents in Nashville. We chose the family of Lonnie Ledbetter simply because it happened to be in the area where we had just covered two other human-interest stories.

The Ledbetters lived in a shack, a dirty shack. We didn't rush right out of the car to save the Ledbetters; in fact we sat in the car for two or three minutes, stalling and listening to the radio. Then we went in.

Poverty lives like this: the house was cold; some of the broken windows were stuffed with cardboard, but there had not been enough cardboard to go around; there were sick children; there were two children who hadn't gone to school because they didn't have shoes; for 10 children there was a one toy, a rabbit with only one ear; most of all there wasn't any food.

"There are times," Mrs. Ledbetter said, "when we ain't got nothin' to buy nothin' with."

I spent a few minutes talking with Mrs. Ledbetter and then Reaney got the art. He lined the family up and shot one of the whole group. It was a good one -- 10 gaunt faces tell an impressive story. Then I motioned to the bed, where a little boy slept peacefully, badly dressed, dirty faced, surrounded by junk and rags, but somehow looking peaceful. Reaney took it; he also took a picture of the mother with a sick little boy in her arms.

Then we left; he had plenty of art, front-page art.

We got in the car and Reaney started to back around. Just then he looked back at the Ledbetter shack and stopped.

"Look at that," he said, pointing to the house. There at the corner window was a little boy staring out.

"Think I ought to go back there and take a try at that?" he asked.

"You might," I said, obviously not caring since we had good art -- including a picture that I had suggested.

"I think I'll go back," he said. And he did.

This is what Reaney had seen during the split second that the face flashed in the window:

"I saw all the things that I never wanted my own children to be," he said afterward, "the sadness, the lack of hope, the fear and the hunger. It was the kind of thing you saw in Europe during World War II and you hope to keep out of your own house and your own country.

"And then this was a Christmas assignment as here was a face that was everything that Christmas is not supposed to be -- I was touched."

So Reaney went back. The Ledbetters tried to help. But they only managed to panic the child -- who ran screaming from the window.

But the commotion had awakened little Charles Ledbetter, the dirty child sleeping on the bed. And thus Charles became the face in the window.

Slightly misty-eyed from the sleep, slightly frightened from the excitement, and very dirty from his environment, he looked through the window -- and Reaney shot ...

This is the picture that grew and grew; this is the little boy that thousands of people all over the country recognized.

The response started early. At 11:45 -- 30 short minutes after the state edition rolled off -- a cab driver stopped by and said he was starting a fund among the drivers. At 3:15 a.m. two men called at the Ledbetter shack, woke Mrs. Ledbetter, gave her $35 and asked to look at the little boy. Six hours later Wallace Westfeldt on the city desk woke me up and told me I better get down to work.

For four hours I did absolutely nothing but answer telephone calls about the family -- and finally another reporter helped me.

These were people from all parts of Nashville, businessmen, country music singers, just about every occupation and age. They asked just one thing in common:

"How can I help?"

The answer wasn't difficult, because the family had nothing.

We told the callers: food, clothing, coal, anything.

Finally I had to leave the telephone to do the follow story only to find that the people who phoned represented just a fraction of those who visited the Ledbetters that day. More than 100 people had called; more than 300 had already visited, leaving gifts.

Then the national reaction set in.

"I'm calling from Minneapolis," a man said that same afternoon, "My name is Edward Rouser and I saw that picture in the Tribune and I wanted to call you to say I'm wiring $15 as soon as I put down the phone.

"I had hoped that we didn't have little boys who looked like that any more."

The telegrams: Mrs. Frank Muckerman of Kirkwood, Mo., said, "Saw picture in the Post-Dispatch. Please help them to have a happy Christmas and let me know their names and addresses so I may help them after Christmas."

And letters piled in, all of them with donations and Christmas cards, many of them bearing the photo pasted to an envelope.

The response continues. Even as this is written, approximately $100 a day arrives at the Tennessean -- and more than $800 has been received -- most of it in $1 and $5 and $10 amounts.

What makes this so striking is that most of these people never saw any story -- or any tangible appeal at all. All they saw was a picture of a boy looking through a window at Christmas time.

"All this proves once again," said Bill Churchill, the Tennessean's managing editor, "is the fact that people are essentially good. If they know what a situation is and they understand what it means, then they'll always help."

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Postscript by Shawn Moynihan: In addition to clothing, toys, and food, the Ledbetter family received more than $1,000 in cash donations. Some families even offered to adopt little Charlie, but the family wouldn't consider it. Years later, in 1976, Myrtle Ledbetter, the child's mother, told the Tennessean that some of her neighbors were so jealous of the support the family received that some of her neighbors refused to speak to her "for a long time."

By then the family had still not been able to pull itself out of poverty. Charlie Ledbetter had moved to Kentucky, where he worked in a hosiery mill. He told the paper he could hardly remember that magic Christmas, except for a toy friction car he received that quickly became his favorite. The family home had burned down when he was still a child -- and all the family's copies of the Tennessean's article were destroyed in the blaze.