The return of Bo Hunter — like it or not

Long ago and far away — well, right down the street actually — after years of sports writing and spinning my wheels as the news editor of the Times-Recorder newspaper in Americus, Georgia, I decided to try my hand at writing a weekly humor column back in the mid-1990s.

However, I did not want people to read and judge it based upon their opinion of my sports writing and commentaries. At a small-town paper, you get a lot of folks mad at you when you’re not able to cover every JV baseball game or charity golf scramble. And if you have the audacity to report that a team lost just because they got outscored, you’re “biased” against them.

I can’t imagine how bad it is for journalists today in the propaganda age when politicians and pundits scream “fake news” and seek out affirmation from inside their bubbles instead of information. If folks hated me as a journalist then, I doubt they’d be too darned fond of me today.

Not wanting folks to have any preconceived notions about my humor column writing, I wrote it under the pen name “Bo Hunter,” something I came up with for no reason other than it sounded Southern. For my column mugshot, I wore a hat and dark sunglasses. For good measure, I drew a fake mustache. Yeah, it was pretty amateurish and kinda stupid, and I can’t believe the publisher let me get away with it. It also worked.

For the three years I wrote the column there as Bo Hunter, no one figured it out. A lot of folks loved it. I remember one lady coming into the office and asking my colleague Leila Barrett, a couple of desks over, if she could ask Bo Hunter to come speak to her club. I was 12 feet away.

I also remember a grumpy teacher named Jim Wolfe coming in to fuss about something, as he did on a regular basis. I often got along with such folks because they didn’t get to me, and we could have some back-and-forth fun. One day, Jim (who passed away in 2007) put his hand on my shoulder while I was sitting at my desk and said, “Chris, you’re the only one here that’s got any damn sense. But I hate that damn Bo Hunter.”

“I’ll pass it along.”

When I took a job as a copy editor at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, that meant no more column writing … at first. Copy editors just didn’t write columns, especially at such larger papers. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

But I still had the itch to pen more humor columns, and Columbus’ executive editor at the time, the brilliant Mike Burbach, allowed me to write weekly humor columns for the Citizen and Georgian newspaper back in Montezuma. Jimmy Medlin paid me a little bit to do it, even though I’d have done it for free. He drove a hard bargain, and I accepted the money.

Then, my big break. The Ledger-Enquirer’s main columnist was going on a two-week vacation. Mike came to me and asked if I wanted to fill in — on top of my regular copy editing duties, with no extra pay.

“Sure!” I said. I wanted to bring back Bo Hunter, but the editors — like all of ’em — thought that was too cheesy and unprofessional, even for me. They were right, of course, but I don’t know what that had to do with anything. Oh well. I’d just have to write as ol’ ordinary Chris Johnson. Bo Hunter was no more.

I think he figured it would shut me up about column writing, allowing me to fully focus on such exciting things as writing headlines about county commission meetings and editing the horoscope. If that was his plan, it backfired. I wrote seven columns in two weeks, and readers responded. They insisted the column keep running, and it did for 25 years — the last 12 of which on a freelance basis as I worked full-time in the nonprofit world.

By March 2023, the column had run its course in the eyes of new editors who felt it didn’t fit in with the direction they wanted to go. An editor from New York (who didn’t last long) and I had disagreements about my writing style — I was cool with it, and he wasn’t. We also differed on how much time I should spend planning, writing, and editing it. I explained I really didn’t plan my columns, and we couldn’t bridge the gap of how much effort I should put into it. He seemed to want “a lot,” and I was more in the “not a lot” camp.

So, I write on my own website, kudzukid.com, what I want, when I want. Novel writing, though, is a different beast from my humor columns, journalism, or my nonprofit communications work. And I had a novel I wanted to get out of my head. I knew who had to write it.

Bo Hunter.