Inauspicious Beginnings

Nunnally (first row, second from right), selling the Saturday Evening Post, to which he would later sell over seventy stories of his own in the 1920s and 30s.

His first route as a paperboy was to East Highlands, a suburb uphill from the pickup spot. "I was worn to a wraith before I reached the first house. I returned every morning like Stanley out of Africa, tired and haggard and exhausted, with less than a drop of water in my canteen. Who in East Highlands read those papers I have never been able to make out, for every house on the route was obviously haunted."

Nunnally served as Junior Class poet and editor of Columbus High literary magazine

After playing baseball (below, left, Johnson is second from left in the middle row), basketball (left, Johnson is second from right in the back row), and football at Columbus High School, Nunnally aspired to become either a professional baseball player (first base) or a foreign correspondent like Richard Harding Davis.