Here's a 4/21/02 column by Montgomery Advertiser reporter Al Benn, former Unipresser who organized the Montgomery/Selma reunion:
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TICKING BOMBS KEEP UPI REPORTERS BUSY
Sharon and I were looking forward to a relaxing Sunday at our little fourth-floor walkup apartment on Highland Avenue in Birmingham.
Lox and cream cheese were cooling in the refrigerator. The coffee was perking, and bagels were ready to be popped into the oven.
Lonnie and Audrey Falk arrived just before 10 a.m., and we were about to sit down when the phone rang.
"They found a bomb up on Dynamite Hill," said the voice on the other end of the line. "You better get up there."
I had been working for United Press International all of nine months and Lonnie was just as green -- a reporter who hadnšt been at the Birmingham Post-Herald very long.
We told our wives that we'd be back as soon.
By the time I got home the next morning, the bagels had turned into doorstops.
It had been an unforgettable 18-hour assignment for an inexperienced kid who had been told to stay in Birmingham to hold down the fort while the pros did their job in Selma.
It was March 21, 1965, and the world was watching the little town 100 miles south of Birmingham. Two weeks before, Alabama state troopers and Dallas County deputies had charged into a group of black citizens attempting to march to Montgomery to see Gov. George C. Wallace.
It became known as "Bloody Sunday." By March 21, thousands of people from around the country had converged on Selma and were preparing to complete the march to Montgomery.
Somebody in Birmingham apparently thought he could draw some of the attention away from Selma by stuffing 50 sticks of dynamite into green military-type locker boxes and then planting them in black neighborhoods.
Lonnie was scheduled to work that Sunday afternoon, so we went in separate cars, winding up near Western High School where two kids playing marbles discovered the first box.
Several reporters had arrived before the Army demolition team from Fort McClellan. Police hadn't cordoned off the area, so we all got a pretty close look -- and heard the menacing ticking of a clock that had been wired to the dynamite.
The clock was set for noon, but the wires weren't snipped until about 12:10 p.m. Bomb experts already had determined that the timing device was too weak to ignite the blasting cap.
We didnšt know that, of course, and nobody bothered to tell us. We should have been hiding behind a house in the neighborhood, waiting for the big boom. Instead, we just stood there and listened to the ticking.
Not long after the bomb had been rendered harmless, we got word of a second locker box in another part of town. Off we went, trying to beat each other to the scene at a time when wire service competition was much keener than it is today.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led his marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, we raced from one neighborhood to another where boxes of dynamite kept turning up.
One box was discovered outside Our Lady Queen of the Universe Church. A few minutes later, lawyer Arthur Shores found one near his house.
On and on it went, into the night and early the next morning. I hadn't eaten all day and was pooped. But each time a new report came in, the adrenaline started pumping, and off I'd go again.
A lot has happened since that time. I think I'm the last of the "Old Breed" of civil rights reporters still at it. The others have died, retired or gone on to jobs with a lot less stress.
Lonnie eventually left journalism, became a college spokesman, launched his own computer magazine and then went into politics. Today he's mayor of Prospect, Ky., a small town near Louisville.
Me? I'm still chasing firetrucks and reporting on civil rights issues nearly four decades after Lonnie and I stood over that ticking locker box in Birmingham.