Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  The campus of the University of Alabama is like a farm club for the future politicians of the state, or a meadow where yearlings are put out to frisk and test their mettle. Personal coalitions are formed there which last for decades afterward. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, many an Alabama governor and senator has been born in the dorms and dining halls and sidewalks of Tuscaloosa.

  Inside the university's artificial and microcosmic political structure-a feverish competition between the fraternity bloc and the nonfraternity students-Wallace's style began emerging. He refused to join a fraternity, says a classmate, “because he said it wouldn't look good on his record, and besides, anything he was in he had to run, or he wasn't interested in belonging to it.”

  As a freshman he defeated the fraternity candidate for class president. “He came on the campus running,” declares a former student who was a fraternity member, “and in less than a month he had amassed a large enough following to beat the fraternity machine right off, before they could reorganize and realize what they had on their hands. He wouldn't wear a tie, and his manner, his affiliates, everything about him indicated the part of a poor country boy working his way through college. He was viewed as a real liberal by everybody, especially by the fraternity and sorority people; they were suspicious of him. There was a debate one time. I was on the fraternity team, and George was on the independent team, and before we got very far along, it became apparent that George had brought his own rooting squad with him. He had practically filled up that auditorium with his men. Thank goodness, the decision wasn't up to the audience. When the judges announced that we had won, they let out a boo that nearly lifted the roof off the place. He did things like that, you know…”

  But somehow, it seems, he had already discovered the peculiar alchemistic values of losing, the efficacy of defeat. Despite his initial success against the fraternity bloc, they managed to frustrate him twice when he ran for president of the Cotillion Club, an office which actually carried more prestige than president of the student body. After his second setback, he was able to read in the student newspaper, “The only good politician we ever met in four years was George Wallace, and maybe we say that because he usually lost.” And another staff member wrote in a 1937 edition of the paper, “My personal nomination for best sport on campus … George Wallace, who was still able to smile, chew on his cigar and shake hands all around after the votes were counted election night.” Defeat did not seem to leave him dispirited, but exhilarated.

  He graduated in 1942 and was handed a blank sheet of paper instead of a diploma on commencement night because he was still unable to pay some old student fees. One year had passed since Pearl Harbor, and Wallace, now twenty-three years old, enlisted in the Army Air Corps. “He knew he had to go in,” says one old acquaintance, “but he didn't want to be no officer. He had it figgered out that when he got back to the county, there would be a heap more enlisted men voting than officers.” He lingered in Tuscaloosa while he waited for induction, collecting coat hangers and selling them for food. Finally he paid someone fifty cents to teach him how to drive a dump truck and got a job with the state highway department.

  Lurleen Burns at the time was working as a clerk behind the cosmetics counter in Kresge's dime store. She was sixteen, a slight and vaguely pretty girl with smoky, drowsing eyes, the daughter of a shipyard worker and the only child in the family still living at home. She had just graduated from high school and a short business course. Her upbringing, in the quiet dreaming little town of Northport, near Tuscaloosa, had been correct, churchly, and comfortable, leaving her with modest and specific domestic expectations. She was the kind of girl most generously described, perhaps, as “a good student”-earnest, moderately industrious, sufficiently bright. She was also an eminently private person, without a glimmer of interest in politics. “Politics,” she said, “was something Daddy discussed at our house with other people, not with me.”

  On a warm August afternoon, Wallace, his dump truck parked at the curb outside, strolled up to Lurleen's counter- the still air filled with a sleepy whir of fans, the scent of popcorn heavy and delicious-and asked for a bottle of hair oil. He had about him then a kind of thin, dark, vivid glamour. “I remember liking him from the start,” says Lurleen. “He had the prettiest dark eyes, and the way he'd cut up!” Their courtship was quiet and perfunctory-bus rides in the drab light of buses into town to the Bama Theatre for a picture show, chill autumn nights on her front porch with the slow and intimate and regular creak of the swing chains, Sunday afternoon dinners with her family. He was living in a Tuscaloosa boardinghouse-a skinny youth in old droopy pants and a borrowed coat, ravenously ambitious, impatient-and Lurleen remembered, “He ate quite a lot when he came over to our house.” She also remembered, “Even then, he was talking about politics all the time. That's what seemed to be really occupying his mind. He was already talking about running for governor. While we were dating, people wanted to know why he wasn't already in the service, and this bothered him. He was nervous about that. It worried him a lot.”

  His orders finally arrived. Shortly before he was to report for induction, on a cold night on Lurleen's front porch, he asked her to marry him. A few days later he left Tuscaloosa to begin cadet training. Then, while he was in pilot school in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, he contracted spinal meningitis.

  “I liked to died from the stuff,” he reverently reports. It was a treacherous ambush by fate, and he scrabbled furiously. “They had me in isolation, and I didn't respond to sulfa, and I can remember fightin' to get up, with them fellas leanin' over me with their masks on-I was thinkin' that if I didn't get up, I was gonna die. It took six orderlies to hold me down. I fought so hard, there were bruises and scabs all over me. After I got a little better, I saw them wheelin' folks past my door with sheets over 'em, and I'd ask what the fella died from, and they'd tell me, spinal meningitis. That touches anybody, man.” He survived and returned to Tuscaloosa-thinner than ever, pale, quiet- on a fifteen-day furlough.

  He and Lurleen were married by a justice of the peace in a musty office in a downtown Tuscaloosa office building, the windows open to the bright May noon outside. Afterward, with Lurleen's mother, they went downstairs to the H. & W. Drug Store on the street level, had Cokes and chicken-salad sandwiches, and then walked over to the train depot and bought two tickets to Montgomery. When they got there, they visited with Wallace's mother for a few hours. They spent their wedding night in a Montgomery boardinghouse-a bleak room with a linoleum floor, a large iron frame bed, and a naked light bulb dangling from a cord in the center of the ceiling. The next day they caught a bus down to Clio, Wallace still in his uniform and carrying his flight bag, the two of them riding through the spring afternoon. They stayed, during their short honeymoon, with a friend of Wallace's, who had rented the Wallace house after George's mother sold it and moved to Montgomery. “It wasn't much of a honeymoon, I guess,” recalls the friend. “George'd go into town every morning, and when he'd come back to the house for lunch, she'd be at the door waitin'. Then, after lunch, he'd go right back uptown. He spent most of his honeymoon just hangin' around town talkin' to people. I wouldn't say he was cold, exactly; he just wasn't overly affectionate. He had already moved his mind to other things. He wasn't really happy unless he was talkin' to the boys and shakin' somebody's hand, that's all.”

  Before Wallace went overseas, they passed through a succession of brief and shabby tenancies in large, alien cities. Lurleen gave birth to their first child, a girl they named Bobbie Jo, in Mobile, where her parents had resettled, and then she journeyed by train with the baby back to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to join Wallace again, riding in a muggy coach through the day and a long sleepless night. Their first night together with the baby, they had to sleep on a stranger's front porch in numbing cold, keeping the baby warm between them. Not long after that, they found a chickenhouse with plank walls and a concrete floor and a small heater and hot plate. “We were in hog heaven,” sa
ys Wallace. “There were folks all around us sleepin' in tents and cars. We really felt lucky.”

  But there still remained the matter of surviving the war. Wallace was shipped overseas as a flight engineer on a B-29 called The Sentimental Journey and immediately began flying missions from the Mariana Islands through wasp swarms of Zeros to bomb the coast of Japan. “Man, I want to tell you,” he says, “You'd see all them other planes gettin' shot down all around you, you'd get nicked, and gas'd spew out on them hot engines, flak all over the place, shakin' you around in the air”- one suddenly has visions of him crouching in the belly of his bomber, nearly smothered in his flight gear, a lonely, scrawny, lost little country boy from Barbour County, Alabama, wanting nothing in the world at that moment so much as just to be back home in the bed under the familiar, heavy, musty quilts in his grandparents' bedroom-“and them tracer bullets at night look-in' like they was comin' right at you and Jap planes zoomin' all around tryin' to get aholt of you in the dark up there… Man, it liked to scared me to death. My hands'd be all sweaty, my heart just athumpin' and all.”

  On his first mission he was assigned to empty out dribbles of shredded tinfoil to confuse Japanese radar. “It didn't take but a little bit,” he says, “but I unloaded every box on the plane- at least enough for twenty missions. My earphone was out when the pilot told me to quit, so I just kept thro win' it out, really gettin' it out there, man, to get that Jap radar sho nuff messed up. I wasn't takin' any chances.” When they returned to the base, someone asked him how the mission had gone, and he reported, “Well, we didn't get shot at.”

  Wallace now reflects, “I'm glad I didn't have to see what those bombs did. It's awful that folks have to drop bombs on other folks. You know, Japan's a great little country, they a great little people. But to see all those planes, thousands of bombers, rendezvousing in the morning sun over the coast of a hostile country, glintin' in the sun as far as you could look in any direction-it was the most colossal, tremendous sight I ever seen in my life, and I been on top of the Empire State Building.” After returning from one mission, as he was walking toward the debriefing shed and unzipping his flight jacket, he noticed small huddles of men all over the airfield talking with a peculiar tense animation; a few moments later he heard that the first atomic bomb had been dropped. “Hell, I didn't know anything about it, except it was just a big bomb, and they'd just put the first one on Hiroshima.” He left for home shortly afterward, and while he was in the air between Hawaii and California, the second one was dropped-the second quick, astonishing glare of light which mankind had never seen before: two rapid illuminations, after which nothing would ever be the same again.

  He was discharged with a ten-percent nervous disability, a fact rather unsportingly invoked once by Senator Wayne Morse, to which Wallace replied, “Well, I have a government report that says I'm ninety percent all right. I wonder what grade Morse would make. Any problems I have come from my war service. I wonder to what Morse attributes his. I understand he was kicked in the head by a horse sometime ago.” He arrived back in Mobile on the thirteenth of August, one day before V-J day. He abstained from the celebrations in the streets, sitting it out in the home of his parents-in-law. “Hell, I was too glad to be back,” he says. “I wadn't about to get run over by a car downtown celebratin the victory. I'd already come through too much for that to happen to me now.” As soon as the festivities had safely subsided, he hitchhiked to Montgomery to see the governor, himself a native of Barbour County, and got a 175-dollar-a-month job as one of the state's assistant attorneys general.

  That attended to, he caught a bus on down to Clio, arriving there just before dusk, stepping down once again into the familiar clutter of small stores and plain houses, the solitary water tower, the cut lumber stacked, weathered, and seemingly forgotten in the weeds along the railroad tracks. The bus wheezed away, having deposited him there-a slight dark youth, not much larger than a thirteen-year-old, wearing what looked like hastily acquired cast-off clothing several sizes too large for him, his flight bag clutched in his hand. Only a few minutes later he was standing on a street corner telling a local political elder that he figured he might run for the legislature now, or he might run for probate judge, he hadn't quite decided which one yet. “Maybe you ought to make it the legislature,” he was advised; “probate judge would be just a little high for right off …” and he replied cheerfully, “Yeah, that's the one I was thinkin' I might go for first.”

  He returned to Montgomery and passed the fall and winter temporarily occupying an office in the attorney general's building, waiting for spring and the political season to come, eating for his Christmas dinner a can of tomatoes and a box of crackers.

  A farmer in Barbour County remembers, “all through the war, people around here had been gettin' these Christmas cards from all kinda places-Denver one year, then the next year it'd be Guam or someplace like that-and openin' them up, they'd read, 'Merry Christmas, George C. Wallace.' I got 'em too, and I couldn't quite figger them out. I thought it was real nice of this young fella, so far away and all and yet bein' so thoughtful, but I wasn't quite sure I knew who this George C. Wallace was, and why he was writin' me. It seemed kinda strange. Anyway, when the war was over with and the local political races had done got started over the county, I was out in my field one fine spring afternoon plowin', and I happen to look up and see this young fella comin' across the plowed field from the road, like he had just popped out of nowhere, steppin' real smart and lively across those furrows, already grinnin' and his hand already stretched out, and all of a sudden I knew why I'd been gettin' them nice cards every Christmas…”

  I

  During that spring in 1946 he was seen everywhere in the county, trudging along the side of a road in a pair of chartreuse trousers and a vivid sports shirt and sometimes a tan gabardine jacket with a huge lurid tie haphazardly knotted around his neck. He had no car, so he would hitch rides with other local candidates. Or he would flag down school buses, cheerfully clambering aboard and walking up and down the lurching aisle hectically grabbing children's hands, and whenever the bus stopped to discharge passengers, yelling from the window, “Now, yawl tell yo mommas and poppas I said hello, heunh?” Brisk and ubiquitous, he would materialize at barbecues, church suppers, and dinners-on-the-ground on Sunday afternoons. At country sings he would inevitably wind up leading the songs himself, his hands pumping ecstatically, a wide and cozily nose wrinkling grin on his face. '“Course,” says one old Barbour County politician, “he couldn't sing a note. Never could. All he does when he tries to sing is just make noise.”

  A politician who sometimes gave him rides to crossroads over the countryside recalls, “He went seven days a week, all day long. Seems like everywhere I went, folks would tell me, 'George C. was here a little while ago.' I passed him one afternoon in my car walking along the side of an old dirt road down here in this little community called Texasville, all covered with dust. He had on that pair of floppy outlandish green trousers, with a streaked or a brown checked shirt, I forget which, and a pair of ole beat-up brown loafers. There wasn't hardly a house in sight, he was all by himself out there, but he was walking like he had to get someplace fast, and he just flipped up his hand and grinned as I went by. And if you told him to meet you back at a place at six or seven in the evening, he just wouldn't be there when you drove up. There wasn't any point in hunting for him, you'd of never found him, so you'd just have to sit there in the car another hour or two, waiting. It'd be ten or eleven at night before we'd get back into Clayton, and riding in, we'd talk about the folks we'd seen, and whenever I'd mention somebody, George'd always say real quick, almost before I could get the name out, 'Yeah, now, those folks, they told me they really for you, and-uh-what'd they-I mean, they say anything to you about me?”

  He managed to poll more votes than anyone else in the county. He had 618 more votes than the combined total for his two opponents, and 579 more votes than were drawn in the county by the man elected governor that
year-Big Jim Folsom.

  One of Wallace's current political cronies remembers that when he met Wallace for the first time, in the lobby of a Montgomery hotel not long after the 1946 races, “He was just a little gimlet-assed fella in a pair of britches with a buckle in the back. I said to myself, 'Good God, is that little boy actually a member of the legislature?'” He showed up for most House sessions coatless and wearing a loud sports shirt.

  He and Lurleen were living now in the same boardinghouse room where they had spent their wedding night; the other rooms around them were filled with railroad workers and drummers, with a single common bathroom down the hall, where Lurleen had to do the washing. Wallace himself was seldom there. Across the street from the boardinghouse was the Jeff Davis Hotel, where most of the other legislators roosted while in Montgomery, and, recalls an old friend, “You'd see him in that lobby all the time with that cigar of his. He didn't want folks to know he was having to live in that boardinghouse across the street, so he arranged for all his mail to be delivered at the Jeff Davis, and he'd hang around there in the lobby until everybody else had gone to bed, and then he'd slip out back across the street to Lurleen. I don't even know whether he went back to Clayton for the weekends-everybody else'd go home for the weekends, but I think he just stayed in that boardinghouse across the street waiting for them to get back. They'd pile back in on Tuesday nights, and he'd be running up and down those corridors from room to room, checking on everybody, toting that half a glass of warm Coca-Cola so he wouldn't have to drink any whiskey to talk to them.” (Lurleen, meanwhile, had become pregnant again, and returned to Barbour County, where she gave birth to another girl-again alone: Wallace made a last-minute careening ride to get there, but was late.) Despite his antipathy to alcohol, Wallace would sometimes pursue fellow legislators into the hotel bar off the lobby. He was once approached there by a stranger as he stood talking to a table of politicians and asked if he could change a dollar bill. Wallace happily gathered together the change, but the stranger then refused to give him the dollar. After persisting for several minutes with a pleasant little smile- “C'mon, now. C'mon, now, heunh?”-Wallace followed the fellow out to the sidewalk, where he just lightly touched the man's elbow, his other hand still expectantly extended. “I'm gonna ask you one more time,” he said, “I want my change back, or you give me that dollar bill.” The man snorted, “You ain't gittin' either one, you little-” and suddenly was lying flat and unconscious on the sidewalk, not even having had time to blink at the short neat crack on his chin. Wallace stooped quickly over him to rummage the dollar bill out of his wallet, and then strolled on down the sidewalk and stopped the first person he met to chirp excitedly, “Hey, somebody just fell out on the street up there, right up yonder, see him? …”