George weighed only ninety-eight pounds then, but he thrummed like a hummingbird. He made all the revival meetings and dances. He learned to play the guitar, tutored by an old Negro named Cazz Welch, the two of them sitting through long afternoons under a tree in nearby Ozark. They began playing together at square dances over the county. “Yeah, ole Cazz, I can see him right now,” says Wallace. “He'd be going with his fiddle with that cigar in his mouth, and I'd be tagging along after him on that three-dollar guitar.” An old friend of Wallace's recollects, “Dances, anywhere there'd be women and music, that's where you'd find George. He was always around the women. I mean, once he found out what they were, and what they were for, you couldn't beat him off with a stick.”
About twenty miles from Clio was an isolated nightspot perched on a hill close to the highway in vast lonely countryside. It is still there, Jimmie Ballard's Tavern. Ballard himself abruptly expired not long ago-“He got killed” is the only explanation- but his wife maintains the place, and it has changed little in the past thirty years: a long, low, dim room like a cave, with bar, jukebox, booths, and a scattering of formica-top tables and kitchenette chairs with nickel-plated legs; out back, only a short scamper across a bare rutted patch of yard shaded by a china-berry tree, there still sits a row of dumpy little wooden cabins not much larger than outhouses, nestling discreetly behind dwarf spruce trees. “We used to slip off down there in the summertime,” remembers an old companion. “These country gals from all around would come there and stay in those cabins for two or three days to have them a good time and then go back home. Whenever a bunch of 'em blew in, we'd get the word and go down there jukin'. Sometimes when we heard about a new crop that'd just come in, George'd have to borrow a quarter off somebody in town before we could take off. He managed not to miss many of those windfalls. Anyway, he didn't drink whiskey, he didn't waste his time and money on that. He was all business. We'd go down there and dance with 'em, and you really danced together back then-they didn't do no frug or watusi. And them was the kind of gals that you could get close to, them knowin' that in only a few short days they would have to go back to their farmhouses and belt-wavin' daddies or waitress jobs or maybe even belt-wavin' husbands or wherever it was they came from.”
When George was sixteen his father took him to Montgomery to run for page in the state Senate. “Daddy just dumped him out in front of the capitol and told him to go to it,” says Jack. “He hit the ground running and on his own, you might say. He had to go shake hands with all the senators and tell them, 'Hello, my name's George Wallace, I'm from Barbour County, and I sure would appreciate your vote for page.'” While conducting this first campaign of his career, he stayed in a room in the Exchange Hotel, a slightly dowdy hive for the state politicians in town. After one particularly gratifying day of shaking hands at the capitol, he retired to a grubby tavern near the hotel, planted his foot on the bar rail, and piped, “Gimme a drink…” He was shooed out. But he won his pageship by a vote of twenty-one to five, and he began taking typing lessons at night after finishing his day's duties in the Senate. It was on a hot September night while he was in his typing class-bent intently over the slow and labored and dogged tacking of his machine-that some miles away, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a bespectacled doctor stepped from the shadows of a corridor in that state's capitol as a group of men approached him, pistol shots suddenly clangored, and Huey Long trotted off squealing, mortally struck.
3
In the autumn of 1937 he arrived on the campus of the University of Alabama-a small, quick, wiry youth, as thin as a ferret, with a cardboard suitcase and a quality of impatient, exuberant, ferocious hunger. All he had brought from Clio was a single pair of baggy pants, a baggy sports coat, and two thin rusty white shirts. But he had already acquired a bulky cigar, and he chewed and flourished it with what seemed an easy and long-accustomed casualness.
He worked at varied fleeting jobs: driving a taxi, waiting on tables at student boardinghouses. “He ain't too tall, you know,” says an associate from those days. “The aprons they had in those boardinghouses were for average-size people, and George was so short, he was always steppin' on the end of his apron-he'd be runnin' around, and all of a sudden he'd of trompled that apron right down to his knees.”
He kept his expenses down with an instinctive nimble resourcefulness. “George stayed wherever the hell he could,” a classmate remembers. “I don't think he was ever a paying guest anywhere, and wherever he was eating at the time, they had to ration the ketchup. Back then, if you brought ten students to a boardinghouse to eat, they'd let you eat free. George always had a big crew with him anyway, so he'd never have to pay, and if they didn't treat him right about the food, he'd threaten to pick up his crew and leave.”
He also availed himself of whatever other provisions were at hand. “If he ever owned a book in law school, I never saw it,” says another old companion. “He'd borrow my books or he'd study with someone who had the books or, most of the time, he wouldn't study at all and go into classes unprepared. Back in those days, you know, we had those old-fashioned double desks where two people had to sit together, and those desks were just one more natural blessing for him. He always picked out somebody to sit with who had the books, and while class was going on, he'd read ahead and catch up on his lessons. But the thing was, he could remember stuff we had in September when midterm exams came-he could recite cases, give you the minority opinion, the judge's name, and might-near be able to tell you what page in the book the case was on. Before an exam, he'd come by and say, 'Hell, I could never learn all that stuff in one night, I guess I'll just fail,' and take off somewhere on a date. But he'd manage. He never would buy them little blue exam books, he'd just borrow paper from the dean's secretary, and set himself down at her typewriter, and come out of it with a B, while I'd get a C after staying up all night.”
Before long he had struck alliances with other cheerful and enterprising country boys like himself-all of whom, it seemed, happened to be in charge of rooming houses around Tuscaloosa. Most of the boys who arrived on campus from farms and small towns, though they looked as if they had just spit out alfalfa straws from between their teeth, instantly seemed to start quietly prospering. Two of his closest friends were Glenn Curlee, a short burly youth with a placid disposition who is now a lawyer in Montgomery, and Ralph Adams, also a mild and genial soul, since appointed by Wallace president of a state college, who at the time had borrowed some money from relatives as a down payment on one of the larger boardinghouses in town.
Sitting in his office one dim winter afternoon recently, as compact and hefty as an owl, with crisply curling ash-gray hair, Curlee reminisced as he chewed steadily on a modest plug of tobacco. “Adams had to go into the service, and he told George he could run his boardinghouse if he wanted to and keep everything above expenses. Well, George managed to fill up the place all right, but he never got around to askin' anybody for the rent. He just never got around to them kind of details. Finally the power folks came out there and cut off the lights. George and the other boys simply got up some money and bought some candles. The first of the month came around again, and some other folks came out and shut the water off. So I told George he could stay at my house until they got the lights and water back in Adams' house. He showed up at my front door with all his things in a paper sack. I had a screened sleepin' porch at my place, and I offered him a bed out there, but he said he'd settle for just a pallet on the porch floor, that'd suit him fine. This was the last of September. Well, came November, it got damn cold, and he'd wake up on those frosty mornings lookin' like a droopy chicken. Finally one morning he came in and said, If yawl don't git me a bed and bedclothes, I'm leavin'.' Just announced that if we couldn't do better by him, we weren't gonna have the pleasure of his company anymore.”
Whether consciously or unconsciously, George seems to have elicited a special affection and solicitude from those around him. They delighted in him. “Hell, I don't know,” says one old friend, “
everybody just liked him, he was so full of life, and nothing could get him down-couldn't catch up with him long enough to get him down. We'd do anything we could to help him.” When, in the course of his hasty, preoccupied scurrying over the campus, his sports coat became worn beyond all hope of restoration, they found another for him. They lent him money-fifty dollars once to buy a suit for an upcoming football game. “Those two old shirts of his wore out after a while,” says Curlee, “so he started borrowing shirts from Adams. When one got dirty, he'd take it back to Adams and come back with a clean one. We even lent him ties, but he was so short they came down to his knees.”
A member of their pack was a tall, raw, bony youth named Frank Johnson, from a mountain county in northern Alabama, who now, as a federal district court judge in Montgomery, is one of Wallace's most persistent and implacable antagonists. “A bunch of us decided we'd have some fun on George and give him an exploding cigar,” says Curlee, “and Frank was one of those in on it. We all gathered around to watch him light it, but it kept goin' out. I had to leave for a ballgame in Birmingham, and I told Frank to call me at a number over there when the cigar went off. Well, I finally got a call from Frank, and he tells me, 'Glenn, that cigar knocked out one eye, and the ambulance is comin' for him.' I was in a state of shock. I don't even remember drivin' back. But when I walked in the house, there was a batch of women there and everybody was havin' a good time, and he was right there in the middle of it. I wanted to hug his neck, I was so relieved.”
Wallace while he was in college drank sparingly, parsimoniously, sipping only what was necessary to share the company of other people. (He does not drink at all now, more than anything else out of a lingering country boy's wariness that it will cause him to lose control of himself, cause him to lose that necessary edge of alertness and caution in the company of strangers, and something bad will happen. He once confessed to a friend, “I used to try it a little, but whenever I got a few drinks in me, I'd just go like this”-he ducked his head and threw wild blind punches in the air-“I'd rare around and holler, 'By God, when I get to be guvnuh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna-' Besides that, the taste makes me gag.”) He was once invited by some other students to bring a bottle of whiskey to a party, and he amiably presented himself with a half-pint of something called “Green River.” One teaspoonful promptly made him sick. On dewy Saturday nights he would sometimes accompany a carload of boys on expeditions to a honky-tonk in another county, a tiny wooden shack set back in trees, which they reached by plunging off the highway and down a gullied dirt road running through a wide moonlit pasture. Wallace, turned sideways in the front seat, would be steadily chattering without ever quite noticing where they were, and he would keep chattering, ebullient and tireless and animated, as they dusted over the country roads under a brimming autumn moon, the others drinking without dilution or ceremony or measurement from the labelless bottles of sloe gin and whiskey, the car becoming uproarious, but Wallace himself, as one veteran of those ragged Saturday-night rides remembers, “just takin' a little taste every now and then, just for the sake of form. He was already high anyway.”
He calculated most of his other indulgences with the same deliberate care. According to his brother Gerald, “He got to playin' a little poker while he was up there in Tuscaloosa- never for serious money, just penny poker. But even at that, he suddenly thought one night about the political implications, and he just up and stopped, and he hasn't played since.”
But whatever appetite he lacked for drinking and gambling, he made up for it in his amorous gusto. He soon established himself as something of a rooster among the young ladies of Tuscaloosa. Curlee declares, with some wonder, “He'd get meat when we couldn't even get conversation. He'd tell us he had a date and he wanted the apartment by himself for a while-after a while, it got to where we had to ask him when we could come to our own house.” Curlee, his feet propped on the desk in his Montgomery office, running his fingers down his tie, sent another spurt of tobacco juice into his wastebasket. “Later, about wartime it was, they opened up this school in Tuscaloosa for a bunch of country gals from North Carolina who they'd shipped down to teach 'em how to be aircraft mechanics. They were all away from home for the first time, you know, so George goes out there and gets him a job as a tool checker. That's right. Checkin' the tools the women used out there, makin' sure they didn't steal any. It was like a weasel in a chickenhouse. But there were too many even for him, so he started up a kind of datin' bureau- you'd put in an order for what you wanted, and he'd get it for you. I told him once, just jokin', I wanted me a fine virtuous amiable Christian girl and could he get me one of them kind. He goes out there and tells this gal he has a friend who's a preacher that he wants her to date. He brought me over to meet her and introduced me as 'Brother Curlee.' Yeah. I'd like for you to meet Brother Curlee here.' But that was all right. It didn't take her long to find out different. I remember her raisin' up and sayin', 'Why, I didn't think preachers acted like this!'”
During his first summer vacation he toured the Depression-blasted back stretches of Kentucky, Virginia, and North and South Carolina with a gang of other youths, selling magazine subscriptions. They slept in cars and seldom had enough money to buy a full meal, and Wallace-who had won the Alabama bantamweight boxing championship in 1936 and 1937 and was a member of the university boxing team-fought occasional bouts in smoky, dimly lit basements and back rooms in Kentucky and North Carolina, merely stripping off his shirt and fighting in his trousers with a wild, furious haste, yells clamoring around him, and then, bloodied and wobbly, collecting his money and quickly vanishing before anyone could waylay him with a blackjack or baseball bat to get the money back. He once pawned a companion's razor to buy supper. It wasn't that he didn't manage to hustle his share of subscriptions. “George was the best salesman they had,” says one of the old crew, “and you either sold or you didn't eat. But he never made more than enough to live on. He was the biggest bullshooter ever born with those magazines. He'd go up and tell those pore nigguhs in these little shacks, 'The federal government has passed a new law says you gotta have readin' material, and we're here to see what you'd like to pick out.' They'd tell him they had the Bible, and he'd say, 'That ain't any good, this new law says you gotta have periodicals.' They'd tell him they didn't have any money for periodicals, and he'd say, 'Well, now, let's see, maybe we can work out something else-' and kind of crane his neck around like he was tryin' to look into their back yards, and then mention, 'I speck you got some chickens or something.' So they'd give him a chicken or two, and he'd give them their subscription to The Saturday Evening Post or that woman's magazine, Delineator, with them But'rick patterns, and take off. He was travelin' with another fella in a Model A, and they finally put them a chicken coop on the top. One lady said she'd swap him a subscription for a rooster she had if he could catch it, so he chased that durn rooster all around her house for about half an hour, and when he finally managed to grab it by the neck, the lady said she'd changed her mind-so he turned the rooster loose again. Him and his buddy traveled all over Kentucky and North Carolina in that Model A with that chicken coop on the top, and when they got them a penful of chickens, they'd drive up and sell 'em in Chicago and then spend a little time up there lookin' around.”
Later, when the state passed an antirabies law, Wallace got a summer job in Barbour County inoculating dogs. He traveled the back roads with his brother in his Model A, a dog pen in the rumble seat. The pen stayed empty most of the time. “He wasn't about to take anybody's dog away from them,” says Jack. “We'd treat a lot of dogs on credit, knowing we'd never get the money, or we'd take chickens or vegetables or whatever the folks had. George didn't take that job for the money anyway. He took it to get to know folks.” Wallace says, “When I got the dog job, of course, I met a lot of folks, and bein' interested in politics, I remembered 'em all.”
Then, each fall, he would return to the university. It is the odd recollection of many who were there with him that they never heard
him talk about home. “It was like he didn't have one. It struck us as kind of peculiar, you know-at bull sessions, parties, riding to football games, we never heard him mention his father or brothers or any other member of his family. He could have been an orphan. It was probably just that inordinate ambition of his.” It soon became obvious, as one of his former boxing coaches puts it, that “he would like to keep getting up in the world.”
A politician who was a student with Wallace declares, “We all knew of his ambition to be governor. Everybody knew he was planning to be governor, even back then.” Ralph Adams remembers, “I used to walk down the street in Tuscaloosa with him. It'd take him an hour to go a block. He wanted to stop and talk to everybody. Everywhere he went, he had a crowd following him. At football games they used George at the gate to take up student tickets because he'd know every face that passed in front of him. What they didn't know was that he was usin' that damn gate just like he used everything else to advantage that came his way-he'd let anybody in the game who wanted in, ticket or not.” Another state politician who was on the campus with Wallace recalls, “Actually, nobody took him too seriously at first. He was always kind of like a pet or mascot type. He was always very friendly-in fact, he was so humble, it got to the point where it was embarrassing. He always gave the impression of injecting himself into every possible crowd, like he was never there for the main purpose, but for purposes of his own. He seemed to be a misfit who was always scrambling, scratching, trying to find a place. He wanted to run for everything.”
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