It’s career day at Lawndale’s William Penn elementary school, and reporter John W. Fountain arrives without a notebook. Instead he carries a bag filled with copies of his recently published memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity, and a black case containing laminated newspaper clippings.
“Why?” some students ask.
“We were so poor that my sister and I thought a ketchup sandwich was a treat.”
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“You know how they found him?” asks Fountain. The students are silent. “He was shot in the back of the head, execution style.” Fountain holds up an article he cowrote for the Chicago Tribune, where he worked from 1989 through early ’95. Pictures of Sandifer and Cragg Hardaway, one of his killers, accompany the piece. “They arrested this young man and his brother and charged them with Yummy’s murder. They killed Yummy supposedly because he had brought too much heat on the gang. And I say that to you because I want you all to know that Yummy doesn’t have to be your destiny. And what happened to this young man, going to jail and being in prison, doesn’t have to be your destiny. But it starts right now with listening in class. With listening to your parents. With listening to your Sunday school teachers. With listening to people who love you and care about you.”
Fountain watches the midwest for the Times, writing breaking news and features. His coverage of flooding in the region won a Times publisher’s award two years ago. He scooped the local press in March when Saint Sabina, a black elementary school on the south side, withdrew from a predominantly white sports league after waging a highly publicized fight to join it. “I waited until the story was sort of out of the news and kept in touch with Coach Mallette and simply did it,” he says. “It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was a story that was there. Our tendency in news is to follow those things that are breaking. Once the immediacy is gone, we tend to forget about them. I knew there would be an opportunity to follow up.”
At Saint Mel’s, Fountain played on the basketball team, made the honor roll, played chess, and dated Robin, a fellow student. During his senior year Robin became pregnant. She gave birth to their son John in August 1978. A few weeks later Fountain enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Robin and the baby stayed in Chicago with her parents.
Fountain cleaned the church and attended Sunday services, Bible classes, and revivals. He became a deacon and then a minister. “Meanwhile, some of my friends thought I had turned religious fanatic,” he writes in True Vine. “They laughed whenever they saw me on my way to church, either on Sunday mornings when we loaded into the church van, or on Sunday evenings when my family and I strolled back to church, or on the countless evenings that I emerged from my apartment building wearing a white shirt and tie and appearing bound again for church. Given the alternatives of drinking, drugging, or womanizing, I figured I was better off wailing with the little old ladies.”
