James Bennett “J.B.” Collins, who covered Chattanooga City Hall and 10 mayoral administrations for the Chattanooga Free Press and briefly for the Times Free Press, died Wednesday at the age of 103.
He joined the then-Chattanooga News-Free Press in 1940 and fit the mold – favored by newspaper founder Roy McDonald – that “newspaper reporters are born, not made.”
Collins covered the sensational – snake-handling among the Pentecostal faith in Birchwood, Tennessee, in the 1940s, and the “Battle of Athens,” when returning World War II veterans organized to defeat the entrenched political machine in Athens, Tennessee, in 1946 – as well as the sometimes mundane weekly meetings of the Chattanooga City Commission and later the Chattanooga City Council.
Former Chattanooga Mayor Pat Rose said he struck up a relationship with Collins when he joined the City Commission in 1969 and had been “a good friend since.”
“I enjoyed my relationship with him as much as anybody I know in Chattanooga,” he said. “I never [saw] anything I questioned that he wrote. He was a very honest person – unbiased. He would take notes and did not misquote you. He was tops in my life.”