Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  PRAISE FOR LEWIS GRIZZARD

  “So this is what’s happened to the South since William Faulkner left! Lewis Grizzard, a great American, gives us the best collection of stories about a mother’s love, old folks, railroad trains, going home, and the No-Name Bar in Willacoochee, Georgia.”

  - The Chicago Sun-Times

  “If you’ve ever owned a truck, a good dog, or had to kiss a good woman good-bye, you need to be reading Lewis Grizzard.”

  - United Press International

  “Funny and touching ... Grizzard disperses common wisdom, common humor and common sense. Common to all of us.”

  - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “[A] TRIED AND TRUE SOURCE OF LAUGHTER...Readers will find some of his humor wry, some wistful, some sly, some indignant. But reading his comments is like having a chat with an old friend, with intervals of belly laughs.”

  - Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Grizzard can make you laugh from the belly and a moment later you will suddenly get misty ... one way or another, his writing will touch you.”

  - The San Diego Times-Union

  To Christine and H.B.

  FOREWORD

  Lewis Grizzard asked me to write the foreword to this book. I’m flattered, because Lewis is one of my favorite people.

  Also, he saved my marriage, perhaps even the roof over my head. I will explain. I will begin at the beginning, when I personally discovered Lewis Grizzard.

  It was 1968, when I was executive sport editor of the Atlanta Journal. We needed to hire a beginning sports writer, and I went about finding one in my usual scientific way.

  I went to a certain coach, whom I knew to be paranoid, ill-tempered and, on occasion, inclined to lie. “Coach,” I said, “who is the worst young sports writer you know?”

  “Lewis Grizzard,” he replied, “that jerk who works for the Athens Daily News.”

  I hired Lewis that very afternoon.

  He was an instant hit in the sports department. Being from Moreland, Georgia, he talked like people are supposed to and he understood the importance of getting the Friday night wrestling results into the Saturday paper.

  He was twenty-one years old, had a pretty blonde wife, a worn-out Volkswagen, and he did everything I told him to do.

  Lewis was on his way to becoming the best wrestling writer in Atlanta when our sports slot man quit.

  In every sports department there is an individual called the “man who does the slot.” It’s just a sexy term for the one who does all the work while the rest of us cover the World Series and the Sugar Bowl.

  The slot man comes to work at four in the morning and sometimes works until two the next morning. But he doesn’t have to worry about filling out an overtime slip because he qualifies as a supervisor.

  That’s the job I had fallen into shortly after Grizzard came aboard. My wife had not seen me fully awake in three months and my children actually thought I was deceased.

  My wife called the office one midnight and made it fairly clear: “Get somebody to do the slot or get a lawyer,” she said.

  “Lewis,” I said. “How would you like to do the slot?”

  “Remember,” I said, “you get a $5 raise and Saturday off.”

  I didn’t explain that I meant every third Saturday in July. Grizzard took the job. Three months later his wife divorced him.

  One day I took Lewis out for a beer. “Kid,” I said, “you’ve got a great future in this business. What do you really want to do with your life?”

  “Someday, I want to have my own barbecue place,” he answered. “With sliced pork pig sandwiches and cold beer in longneck bottles. With a jar of pickled pigs feet next to the cash register and an ol’ hound dog next to me. Most afternoons I would close up and go fishing, and some afternoons I would even put bait on the hook.”

  I knew Lewis was a comer. When I somehow became managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Lewis got my old job as executive sports editor at the Journal, the youngest ever. He moved on to become associate city editor at the Journal, and special assignments editor at the Constitution.

  Later (I forget the details) he wound up sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

  I went up there to visit him once. He took me out to lunch, and the wind was so strong they had a rope you had to hold onto walking from the newspaper to the restaurant. We had to write out our order because the waitress couldn’t understand us. Stray dogs in More-land might not have eaten what they served us.

  After about two years in Chicago, Lewis started calling me every night. Collect.

  “I’m looking out my window,” he’d say, “watching a guy mug a little old lady.”

  Or, “Thirty-third day in a row below zero.”

  Or, “Just had another bowl of boiled Polish cabbage.”

  He was down to 124 pounds and having fainting spells.

  One night I casually mentioned I was trying to hire a columnist for the Constitution.

  “Hire me!” Grizzard screamed.

  Never mind that he’d never written a newspaper column.

  Never mind that he’s already quit the Atlanta papers about six times.

  If they can’t take a joke, to hell with ’em, I decided.

  Besides, the long-distance charges were getting impossible to explain.

  So Grizzard came back to Atlanta to write a column for the Constitution.

  He’s up to 189 pounds, and if you think you’ll ever catch him in the office you’re kidding yourself.

  He’s the hottest thing on Southern newsprint.

  Everywhere I go people ask me if I know Lewis Grizzard.

  “Do you ever get to talk to him?” they ask.

  “No,” I reply. “But one day on the elevator he nodded to me.”

  And one day he did.

  Jim Minter, Managing Editor

  The Atlanta Journal

  1.

  COMING HOME

  IS A ONE-WAY TRIP

  I lived in Chicago for two years before returning to Atlanta to begin writing a daily column for the Atlanta Constitution. Chicago’s not a bad town. But the weather didn’t suit me, and the food didn’t suit me, and people talked funny.

  COMING HOME IS A ONE-WAY TRIP

  When I lived in Chicago, I used to think of the line from the country song that went, “If I ever get back to Georgia, I’m gonna nail my feet to the ground.” What the following columns about home and where my heart is should say is, I finally got back to Georgia and I’ll be dipped in hot buttered grits before I’ll leave again.

  CHICAGO—WHAT THIS NEIGHBORHOOD must have been fifty years ago! Eight blocks north on Lincoln Avenue is the Biograph Theatre where they shot John Dillinger down. The Biograph lives on with nostalgia flicks. Bogart and Davis in Petrified Forest for $1.50. Four blocks north on Clark Street is the site of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, now the site of a home for old people who don’t have homes. Capone, I am told, operated south. This was Bugs Moran’s territory.

  Today, it is ethnic and Democratic, congested and overpriced. It is alternately charming and frustrating. An automobile is an albatross. There is no place to park it. But this has been home for two years, and these are the very last moments.

  The dwarfish old man who delivers for the liquor store on the corner has already made two runs on my street, and it’s barely ten o’clock. Bloody Mary mix mostly. Bloody Marys are big anywhere on Sunday mornings. On the near north side of Chicago, they are a way of life.

  The line i
s already forming for brunch at R. J. Grunts. For $3.50— fork in one hand, plate in the other—you can shovel through a cornucopia somebody grossly underestimated and called a salad bar. Hash browns are extra with the eggs. Hash browns are a bad joke Chicago restaurants play on breakfast.

  The Loop is only ten minutes away. The most poignant memory will be the bleak, snowy afternoon a fire department ambulance, followed by four black limousines and a cadre of policemen on motorcycles, drove solemnly up Michigan Avenue, past the Wrigley Building and across the river, while all the power and force that is Chicago commerce came to a reverent halt. Inside the ambulance rode the corpse of Richard J. Daley.

  Lake Michigan and the endless high rises on Lakeshore Drive’s gold coast are just across Lincoln Park where, on days that weather permits, thousands flock to walk on something that is not asphalt or concrete. It is warm this morning, and thank God for that. Chicago has two seasons, they like to say: Winter and the Fourth of July.

  Songs and poems are written about saying goodbye because it is one of those things in life that is usually impossible to do gracefully if it is worth doing at all. I got mine out of the way a day early. “If you’re ever in Atlanta. . . .”

  Slowly, a final order does come to the mess that is necessary for the moving of all one’s earthly belongings. My plane is at noon. There is one last run through the back bedrooms, and the movers left a box. Anybody need a dartboard, a rickety lawn chair, and forty-five slightly-used tennis balls?

  The cab pulls out on North Cleveland, left to Fullerton, and on to the Kennedy Expressway where it’s every man for himself to O’Hare. Some of it I have liked a great deal. Some of it I may have even loved. There were parts I hated. Regardless. It’s over.

  Living in a city other than Atlanta was something I had never considered. I am not native, but close. And Atlanta—even when the Dinkier Plaza was the big stop and Terminal Station was busy at midnight—was a mecca for those of us in the Coweta County hinterlands. “Atlaner” they called it where I lived, and a lot of people went there on Friday nights. Those who didn’t stop at the Farmer’s Market drove on to the city auditorium for the wrestling matches. No, the rasslin’ matches.

  Predictably, my first job out of school was in Atlanta. The changes were already at hand. Up jumped the Stadium and in came the Braves, the Falcons, the Hawks, and the Flames. Underground flourished and the New York Times did front page stories. Bobby Dodd retired, Lester Maddox faded, and Hartsfield went international. And everybody from Keokuk and Three Rivers showed up in his leisure suit for the hardware convention at the Marriot or the Regency. The Nitery? One block up and two over.

  I left Atlanta two years ago for Chicago, figuring what the hell, horizons are for stretching. I was homesick at the first stop light in Cartersville. Horizons without a red clay motif are somebody else’s horizons.

  I did keep up while I was gone. Jimmy Carter, a Georgian, became president, and that helped. Suddenly, it was fashionable at Hotspurs and Arnie’s in Chicago to be able to explain the difference between poke sallet and pot likker. A man stood on the corner of Rush and State and called another a “sumbitch.” I swear.

  Time Magazine even devoted a special issue to explaining the South. I noted with no small measure of pride that it no longer considered H. L. Mencken’s dismissal of the cultural South as the “intellectual Gobi or Lapland” to be operative.

  Ted Turner was front page in Chicago. “Is he a little goofy?” I was asked more than once. Midwesterners can’t really distinguish between Georgia Tech and just plain Georgia, but when Pepper upset Notre Dame last fall the question did come up. Playboy said the women were great in Atlanta. Sports Illustrated said the sports teams were lousy. Could be worse, I said. What if it were the other way around?

  I am sure a lot has changed. The new hotels are supposed to be incredible. One allegedly has a lake in the lobby. It is rumored liquor may be purchased on Sunday. Parts of the city, I understand, have disappeared altogether in the wake of MARTA bulldozers. And Mr. Young has gone to New York and Mr. Fowler has gone to Washington in his place.

  But folks still talk nice to you, don’t they? And Harold’s Barbecue hasn’t closed? Northside Drive from the expressway to West Paces has not gone commercial? And late on summer afternoons what of that stillness, that cooling, that sundown in the Deep South that makes whatever happened during the day worth it and whatever may transpire that night even better? Has the Fox been saved?

  I hope so. The commitment is made.

  The Delta lady on the other end of the phone was talking. “There is space available on the noon flight to Atlanta,” she said a few days ago. “Will this be round trip?”

  I just let it hang there, savoring the moment.

  “No, m’am,” I answered. “One way.”

  NO SPOT IS SO DEAR …

  ON A COLD DAY last week, I stood outside the church in my hometown of Moreland, Georgia, that is so dear to my childhood and tried to remember how long it had been since I was inside. Ten years? At least that long. But if there weren’t still roots here, would I come back so often in my mind?

  Church was about all we had. Sunday school was at ten, but preaching was only twice a month. We shared sermons and the preacher with another flock down the road.

  What did they call it on Sunday night? MYF? We had a couple of rowdy brothers in town who broke into a store. They were juvenile first offenders. Their punishment was to attend Methodist Youth Fellowship for six months. First night they were there, they beat up two fifth-graders and threw a Cokesbury hymnal at the lady who met with us and always brought cookies.

  She ducked in time and then looked them squarely in their devilish eyes. Soft as the angel she was, she said, “I don’t approve of what you boys did here tonight, and neither does Jesus. But if He can forgive you, I guess I’ll have to.”

  She handed them a plate of cookies, and last I heard, both are daddies with steady jobs and rarely miss a Sunday. That was the first miracle I ever saw.

  Revivals at the church were the highlight of the summer. I remember a young visiting preacher talking about the night he was converted.

  “I was drunk in an Atlanta bar,” he said, “and I was lost. But Jesus walked in and sat down beside me. Praise His name, because that’s the reason I’m with you here tonight.”

  That frightened me. If Jesus could find that fellow in an Atlanta bar, he certainly wouldn’t have any trouble walking up on me smoking behind the pump house in Moreland. I always took an extra look around before lighting up after that.

  Workers were smoking one day in the attic of our church. They left a cigarette. It took less than an hour for flames to destroy that old building. I didn’t cry, but grown men did.

  We built it back—of brick this time. Country folks will dig deep in the name of the Lord.

  The best fried chicken I ever ate, the best iced tea I ever drank were the fried chicken and the iced tea on Homecoming Day at the church. Dinner on the grounds, we called it. The chickens had been walking in someone’s backyard earlier in the morning. The tea went into a galvanized washtub. A piece of block ice kept it cold.

  The day Red Murphy died, they announced it in the church. The congregation wept as one. Everyone loved Red Murphy. He ran the little post office and took children on pony rides.

  Maxine Estes taught my Sunday school class. In rural Georgia in

  the fifties, she was big on being kind to your neighbor no matter the color of his skin. I learned to sing Hymn No. 153, “Love, Mercy and Grace,” in that church. And “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And the one I still break into occasionally today, “Precious Memories.” They do linger.

  My mother married my stepfather inside that church. And one hot Saturday afternoon a long time ago, a pretty nineteen-year-old girl married me at the same altar. I told her I would never forget her, and I haven’t.

  It’s easy to fall away from the church, no matter the closeness to it in times past. I have done it. So have you. Gr
own people can do as they please. The 10:30 Sunday morning movie is even an excuse I use. So are Saturday nights that should have ended a lot earlier.

  I never could bring myself to walk inside my old church last week. But some Sunday morning soon, maybe I will. And maybe I’ll put a ten in the collection plate, and maybe they’ll have chicken and iced tea, and maybe afterward I’ll make a habit of it.

  There is a new country song out. An old man is singing to a group of fellow derelicts. “Lean on Jesus,” goes the chorus, “before He leans on you.”

  I’m not one to panic, but it’s something to think about.

  COUNTRY STORE

  THERE IS NO SIGN, but the lady inside at Bailey’s General Store assured me this was, in fact, Jones Crossroads.

  “The Joneses don’t own the land anymore,” she said, “but they still call it ‘Jones Crossroads.’” Who’s being picky?

  Jones Crossroads is one country store and a house or two and some nice trees at the intersection of Georgia highways 18 and 219 half the distance between West Point and Pine Mountain. The population depends on how many people needed to go to the store that day.

  I have a thing about country stores, a love affair that goes back to my youth and a wonderful place called Cureton and Cole’s. I could never quite understand why Cureton and Cole’s was owned by Lee Evans and J. W. Thompson, but again, who’s being picky?

  You name it, they sold it at Cureton and Cole’s in downtown Moreland, as long as it was coal, sacks of guano, corn meal, Sugar Daddy all day suckers, Hollywood candy bars, Zero candy bars, Zagnut candy bars, snuff, work shirts, work pants, work shoes, kerosene, soda crackers, Vienna sausage, Home Run cigarettes, potatoes—sweet and Irish—Blue Horse notebook paper, ice cream in cups with lids that if you licked the ice cream off the underside you would uncover the picture of a movie star like Yvonne DeCarlo, Prince Albert in a can, chicken feed, thread, seed, moon pies, and cold drinks such as R.C. Colas, Nehi oranges, Double Colas, and NuGrapes from a box filled with chunks of block ice, and other of life’s necessities.