Kirby: Vinnie Williams wrote about life

"All sorrows can be bourne if you put them into a story."

— Isak Dinesen

Vinnie Williams is an angel who did not fear to tread.

She died last week at her home near Athens six months shy of a century at age 99.

As her colleague and later her editor at The Augusta Chronicle 40 years ago, I can tell you of her ability to confront irascible Southern sheriffs and reluctant rural politicians and get them to reveal their secrets.

It wasn't because they liked her, although I am sure many did. It was because they could not resist her. She didn't take “no’’ for an answer – more as an introductory greeting.

Vinnie Williams was The Chronicle correspondent through much of the 1970s, She lived in Thomson and covered a region that included the counties of McDuffie, Warren, Glascock, Hancock and, frankly, anywhere else she wanted to go. She would write about old houses and young people and interesting places and animals. She loved animals.

She would type up these stories and mail them to The Chronicle, and we would put them in the paper. Other times, she would cover night meetings or politics or breaking news and these reports would be called in, taken over the phone and rushed into print.

Vinnie was pretty much The Chronicle's star correspondent because she was not only talented, and very gracious, she was famous. She had written books. We knew she had been profiled in Time magazine along with Truman Capote. She had worked for other, larger newspapers. She knew what was interesting and she knew what was news, and news in east central Georgia back then was not always easy to get.

It often meant you had to drive down those rural two-lane roads heading to towns looking for people who didn't want to talk to you on the phone. They often wore badges, had guns and nurtured surliness like they were tending a backyard blackberry patch.

It was like going into the woods with a stick and poking bears.

Vinnie did this with a stylish grace and consistent good humor with few remembered complaints.

I know.

One of the best parts of being The Chronicle's state editor back then was I had an excuse to drive to Vinnie's house in Thomson and discuss news coverage, usually over lunch at her home.

We could also talk about writing and life – stories yet to come.

We were once commiserating about a particularly ugly and mean-spirited official who ran his little outhouse of an operation with jurisdictional threats that he could possibly make good on.

"How do you do it?" I asked her, personally. “How do you face up to people like that?

"Courage doesn't know gender," she said quietly. It didn't know age, or talent or fame, either.

But it did know Vinnie.

She was a reporter, a writer, a social worker. a newspaper publisher, an activist and an animal lover, She was a mother, a wife a hostess.

And she was and still is, an inspiration.