“For a college boy,” my supervisor, Lonnie (Goat) Smith, a twenty-year veteran of the plant with terrible B.O., said to me one day, “you sure are a dumb suhbitch.”
“I’m a journalism major,” I said to Lonnie (Goat) Smith. “I have seen my byline in a metropolitan newspaper. The fact that newspaper no longer exists is irrelevant here. What is not irrelevant is I should be over there in an air-conditioned office wearing a tie like Ronnie Jenkins, but instead, I’m sitting out here on this machine and it’s hot, I am perspiring profusely, and the gas fumes are making me sick to my stomach, but at least they smell better than you do.
“Now, the only reason I am here in the first place was I needed a summer job and they are onto my clever ruse of last summer at the bank in Atlanta. So I will drive this snorting tool until September, when I will return to the University of Georgia and continue my meteoric rise as a sportswriter. Now, why don’t you leave me alone and go have your armpits steam cleaned?”
Actually, I didn’t say any of that to Goat, because if I had, two, and possibly three, things could have happened.
One, Goat wouldn’t have understood a word I was saying. Two, he might have understood I was being a smart-ass, and there’s nothing a supervisor of forklifts dislikes any more than a smart-ass college boy, and he would have hurt me. Three, I also could have got fired, which wouldn’t have been that bad a circumstance had I been Dan Quayle, who’s about my age, at the time.
If I had been Dan Quayle, I could have called Dad and he could have called the plant and had Goat Smith cleaning toilets and me switched over to planning and development where I could have spent the summer going around saying things like “What this company needs is a good slow-pitch softball team.”
Unfortunately, I was Lewis Grizzard and didn’t know Dan Quayle’s father, so I simply agreed with Goat that for a college boy I was a stupid suhbitch and continued to punch in at seven each morning for my eight-hour shift.
I never did come to master my forklift. I had the arrows to show me which way to push the lever, but I was still able to inflict much damage. I never hurt a person, but I did manage to destroy a fair amount of property. There was the day the shipment of resin arrived.
“Go back to the loading dock and unload the resin shipment out of the truck,” Goat instructed me.
The resin came in many paper bags that sat on skids in the back of a truck. I didn’t have any problem with the unloading part. I lifted each skid of resin, backed my forklift out of the truck, and deposited the shipment nearly inside the plant.
“Who’s goin’ to sign for ’is?” the truck driver said to me as I was backing the last skid out of his truck.
“You would want to see Mr. Smith about that?” I asked.
“Well,” said the driver, “tell him to git his ass out here, I ain’t got all day.”
I found Goat.
“The truck driver said for you to git your ass out there and sign for the resin, he ain’t got all day.”
I might not have been able to drive a forklift with great skill, but I was developing a good ear for quotes, and my communication skills were improving even outside the classroom.
I drove back out to the loading dock to see if Goat and the truck driver were going to have any words, forged by the truck driver’s impatience and the fact he had referred to Goat’s ass.
“What you in such a got-damn hurry about?” Goat asked the truck driver, who wasn’t as big as Goat and certainly didn’t smell as bad, but who did have a tattoo with the words “Born to raise hell” on his left forearm.
“Got-damn,” said the truck driver, wrinkling his nose, “when’s the last time you took a bath?”
“You sayin’ I stink?” Goat responded.
“Either that, or you got a dead dog in your pocket,” shot back the truck driver.
“I ain’t above whippin’ yo’ ass right here,” said Goat.
“Hell,” said the truck driver. “Your smell already ’bout knocked me down.”
With that, Goat took a swing at the truck driver, who dodged the blow and countered with a right to Goat’s belly. Goat doubled up, and fought for his breath.
When he was able to speak again, he said to the truck driver, “Where do I sign?”
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I just sat there on my forklift and howled, and after Goat had signed for the resin shipment and the truck driver had departed, Goat said to me, “There’s nothing I hate more’n a smart-ass college boy.”
At this point, I realized that I didn’t have a single tattoo on my person and could not handle Goat with the same ease as the truck driver, so when he added, “Git an empty skid and take it over to the paper press,” I stopped laughing and drove to where I happened to see an empty skid.
As soon as Goat was out of range, however, I started laughing again, and failed to notice there was a large nail sticking out of one side of the empty skid. Goat had often warned me, “Make sure you check over the skid and see there ain’t no nails stickin’ out.”
I had never paid attention to much else Goat had told me, so why was I going to make a lasting mental note about this bit of instruction?
I lifted the skid and started driving over to the paper press. I drove past the bags of resin I had unloaded out of the truck. I drove too close to the bags of resin I had unloaded out of the truck. The nail sticking out of the skid ripped open about eighteen bags of resin before I realized what was occurring. Resin was pouring out the bags and getting all over the floor. Goat saw what had happened, rushed over, and said, “Son, you ain’t study’n to be no doctor, are you?”
I assured him I wasn’t.
“Good,” he answered.
Later I thought, That was pretty funny what Goat said about me studying to be a doctor. His implication was that if I was dangerous driving a lift fork, what would I be with a scalpel in my hand?
Another time, I was carrying a skid of finished tops over to shipping and hadn’t pushed the forks far enough into the openings to the skid. As a result, the plastic tops fell, and many were scratched and rendered unshippable.
Goat asked, upon surveying the results of my improper forklifting, “What are you study’n over at that college?”
“Journalism,” I said with some degree of pride. “I’m going into the newspaper business.”
“Well, I hope you can walk while you’re deliver’n, ’cause you couldn’t drive a boot up a mule’s ass with directions written on the heel.”
To be quite honest, I began to both admire, and feel sorry for, Goat as the summer wore on. He was actually fairly patient with me, and I am certain now, in retrospect, he must have felt there was at least some hope for my becoming a good forklift driver. He kept saying to me, “As soon as you catch on to this, I’m goin’ to teach you how to flush the commode in the men’s toilet.”
The Newnan Times-Herald was the local weekly. It was always winning prizes. The Newnan Times-Herald was doing amazing things with color and printing twenty years before other newspapers, even the big ones, figured out a brighter package would help sell a product more.
The paper was, and still is, owned by the Thomasson family. Editorially, it was like most small-town weeklies. There was, as I discussed earlier, the news of the various communities and county, and there was news of who died and who was born and who got married and what local son had just completed his basic training and who spoke to the weekly Rotary meeting.
The paper took on a major project in the spring of 1965, the centennial year of Coweta County. The paper decided to print a special edition, covering the history of the county.
The family hired a woman with impressive credentials to write and edit the special edition. She was a flop, however, and it was the middle of July and the edition was due in a few more months. I was over at the plastic plant on my forklift.
I was never quite certain how Mr. Thomasson, the editor and publisher of the newspaper, got the idea to hire me to work on the special. I seriously doubt he w
ent back through the files and found my work covering my little baseball league. But I came home from work one afternoon, and my mother said Mr. Thomasson from the paper had called me and wanted me to call him back.
I did. Here was the deal:
The fancy woman was gone, he was in a bind, and would I come help work on the centennial edition for the rest of the summer?
What, and leave my forklift?
I said, “When do you want me to start?”
He said, “Tomorrow.”
I reported to the plastic plant at seven the next morning, told Goat I was going to go to work at the newspaper, and he said, “Hell, you wasn’t cut out for this kind of work no way anyway,” but he said it with a smile and even parted with a “Good luck.”
I wore my regular clothes into the plant that morning. I certainly would report to the Times-Herald in a jacket and tie, but I didn’t want to show up that way at the plant and give off some message that said, “You poor suckers are stuck here, but I’m moving on to bigger and better things.” I’d decided I didn’t really want to be a smart-ass college boy after all.
What I did for the Times-Herald was write histories of the local communities. One of these communities was once known as “Wahoo Creek.”
I wrote, “Nobody remembers exactly how the village came to be called Wahoo Creek, but perhaps, when the first settlers arrived and saw the beauty of the sparkling creek that ran there, one was so overcome with joy, he jumped and said, ‘Wahoo,’ and that’s how, etc. etc.”
Okay, okay, I know—but I was eighteen at the time, for goodness’ sake.
I did the history of Arnco-Sargent, Sharpsburg, Grantville, Welcome All, and my hometown, Moreland, which used to be called Puckett Station before a guy named Moreland moved into town and promised the residents he would bring in a Popeye’s fried-chicken franchise and get the Jefferson Salt Company to paint everybody’s barn red if they would change the name from Puckett Station to Moreland.
Well, they did, but there’s still not a Popeye’s fried-chicken franchise in Moreland, and there turned out to be a hitch in the barn-painting thing, too. The Jefferson Salt Company said it would paint everybody’s barn red, but that it would also paint JEFFERSON ISLAND SALT on the top of the barns for advertising.
Most people in Moreland who had barns didn’t want JEFFERSON ISLAND SALT painted on the top of their barns. Most of them already had SEE ROCK CITY, anyway.
The townspeople finally ran Mr. Moreland out of town. Some of them wanted to change the name back to Puckett Station, but they had already put up the new name of the town at the Atlanta and West Point Railroad Station, so, according to one elderly lady I interviewed, “They decided it was too late to screw with it.”
In my history of Moreland, I also wrote a lot of stuff about cows and chickens and mules and picking cotton.
That’s because horses, cows, mules, chickens and cotton picking were big deals in Moreland before the boll weevil came and ate all the cotton, mules gave way to tractors, horses got too expensive to keep a lot of them around, and most people quit raising cattle and went to work in either the Moreland Hosiery Mill or Cole Shop in Newnan, or they opened a beer joint, which is what Steve Smith eventually did in Moreland, which is also where I drank my first beer, but I didn’t mention that in my history.
At the end of spring quarter at Georgia, Wade had assured me I would have my job waiting back at the Banner-Herald in the fall. With the ten dollars a week I’d get from spotting for Georgia football broadcasts and the money I had saved over the summer, I figured to get by.
A couple of weeks before I was to return to Athens, I got another message from my mother. “A man called you from Athens and wants you to call him back.”
It was Wade. I called him back in Athens at the number he had left. Only the operator didn’t answer, “Athens Banner-Herald.” She answered, “Athens Daily News.”
The Athens Daily what?
Wade filled me in briefly. He said some men from Columbus had got together with some men in Athens and started a shopper, basically a newspaper with nothing but ads.
They had then decided to change the shopper into a six-times-a-week-daily and call it the Athens Daily News. He had been trying to find me all summer to come back to Athens and go to work for him.
“I’m the sports editor,” he said.
“You left the Banner-Herald?” I asked him.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Wade knew I had gone back to Moreland, but what he didn’t know was my mother had remarried and our phone number was under the name H. B. Atkinson, my stepfather. He finally called the university, tracked me down, and now wanted to know if I could come to work as soon as possible.
“I’m swamped,” he said. “Georgia has started football practice, and I need you to cover Athens High.”
I finished the last history for the Times-Herald, told everybody how much I had enjoyed it, and drove back to Athens. It was the beginning of the best newspaper experience of my career. Nothing that came later matched it.
A Columbus man who owned some radio stations joined with a couple of Columbus newspapermen and an outdoor advertiser in Athens and conspired to start the new morning paper in direct competition with the afternoon joke, the Banner-Herald. Athens was ripe. The university and the town were growing.
There was also an untouched opportunity in the surrounding northeast Georgia area, largely ignored by the Banner-Herald and dabbled with only ever so slightly by the Anderson (South Carolina) Independent, just across the state line.
The Banner-Herald had been asleep for fifty years. The Daily News came with thunder and smoke.
Claude Williams, the Athens outdoor advertising man, was the publisher. Glenn Vaughn, who was a part of the Pulitzer Prize the Columbus Enquirer won for its coverage of the Phenix City, Alabama, story, was the editor.
Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, was full of rigged gambling houses, prostitutes, and seedy bars that attracted soldiers from nearby Fort Benning in the early 50’s. The corrupt local city government ignored citizens’ cries for reforms. Finally, a state investigation closed down the Phenix City joints with the help of troops from Benning, and years of murder, thievery, extortion, and various other wide-open illegal practices came to an end. The Enquirer had crusaded for the reforms that finally came.
Wade Saye had sports. Larry Young, former police reporter for the Augusta Chronicle was city editor. Gerald Rutberg, who was to have interned at the Columbus paper that summer under Glenn Vaughan had, instead, followed him to Athens.
Gerald had just graduated from Auburn University, where he had been editor of the school newspaper. Glenn made him society editor. Glenn’s wife, Nancy, did whatever it was that needed doing.
And that was the editorial staff that put out the first issue of the Daily News on June 17, 1965. The thing was charmed from the beginning.
Larry Young was in his late forties. He was straight out of the mold. He was a tall man with a deep, thick South Carolina accent and he smoked one cigarette after the other. He would hold the telephone between his shoulder and his cheek and interview a police chief while beating out the quotes on the old manual at his desk. He could do that with a cigarette in his mouth, and the longer he talked and typed and the longer the cigarette remained in his mouth, the more his face would go into contortions from the smoke of the cigarette billowing toward his eyes and nose.
It was only when the smoke teared his eyes to the point he could no longer see that he would take one of his hands off the typewriter in front of him, pull the cigarette out of his mouth, take a deep breath, and dump the ashes onto the floor. Then the cigarette would go back into his mouth, and I can hear him now, “Chief, if anything breaks on this, how ’bout calling me first?”
Larry even dressed the part of the veteran small-town reporter. His clothes never seemed to match, and he apparently had only one pair of shoes, beige Hush Puppies. But his appearance didn’t matter to him,
and, obviously, money wasn’t very high on his list, either, since small-town reporters might expect to make $120, tops.
He was divorced. He had a history of problems with the booze. If his marriage had worked and he’d never looked for an answer in the bottom of a glass, he wouldn’t have fit the mold.
Glenn Vaughn had rescued Larry. The drinking cost him his Augusta job, but Glenn had hired him anyway. When he was sober, he could get the news. Glenn simply hoped the sober days outnumbered the other ones.
Larry Young had no college degree in journalism, or in anything else. (Today, with no college degree, you might land a job in the mail room.) Larry simply could do what all good reporters can. He could make people tell him things and then convince them not to tell anybody else. Cops, politicians, members of the city council, bartenders, night clerks, the president of the university—Larry Young could talk all of them out of whatever story he was seeking. Remember Abe Lincoln’s line about Grant? “Find out what kind of whisky he drinks and give it to my other generals.” Glenn Vaughan might have said the same about Larry Young.
Shortly before the first edition of the Daily News, Georgia’s senior senator, Richard Russell, died. Richard Russell had been a power in the Senate for years. They used to say, “If Richard Russell hadn’t been from the South, he would have been president.”
Russell’s home was Winder, Georgia, twenty miles west of Athens. His funeral and his burial would be there. Larry Young got on the phone. He asked a Russell aide what Washington names would likely fly down for the Russell funeral. The aide told him, “We expect the president.”
Larry, a few hours from deadline, phoned the White House, and it was confirmed Lyndon Johnson would be flying to Winder for Russell’s funeral.
The Banner-Herald had missed the story in its afternoon edition. The President was coming, and Larry Young had the story. Scoop. It was a delicious newspaper term that has given way now to “exclusive,” and mostly it is used by television news. So few towns still have competing newspapers anymore, there’s nobody to scoop. The best a reporter can hope for is some prize for an in-depth series on the troubles in Lower Slamdunkovia.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 14