If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

by Lewis Grizzard

  He wasn’t.

  Chapter 13

  I HAD BUT ONE opportunity to fulfill my dream of riding a train as a sportswriter, which is what I had had in mind, growing up in my mother’s house, reading about the Crackers in the Constitution, plotting my future in journalism.

  My first out-of-town assignment at the Journal was to cover Rice playing football against Louisiana State in Baton Rouge. You could ride the Southern Crescent from Atlanta to New Orleans. It left at seven each morning and arrived twelve hours later, through such interesting stops as Birmingham, Meridian, and Slidell. However, I was scheduled to be in the office on Friday. The game was Saturday night, so even if the Crescent arrived in New Orleans as advertised—seven in the evening, Central time—I wouldn’t be able to drive to Baton Rouge in time for the kickoff.

  I flew. I had flown a couple of times before. I wasn’t afraid of flying. It was the crashing and burning that concerned me.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I was terrified to fly. I got it from my mother. Before she and my father divorced, we were living in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and my mother became critically ill. She was transferred by the army to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.

  She talked about her own terror so many times.

  “They had me strapped in a bed,” she said. “It was the first time I had ever flown. We landed and took off three times during the trip. I told God if He would get me off that airplane alive, I’d never fly again.”

  She never did.

  But it was more than my fear of flying that caused my disappointment at not being able to take a train on my first out-of-town assignment for the Journal Airplanes and newspapers didn’t fit together for me somehow. Jet airplanes were modern. They involved too much technology. They didn’t have names like the Southern Crescent or the 20th Century Limited or the Super Chief. They got you where you were going much too quickly. Whatever happened to getting-there-is-half-the-fun?

  Newspapers went with trains. No technology in the newspaper business, if you throw out telephone and teletype machines. We didn’t even work with electric typewriters in 1968.

  Trains stayed on the ground, as God intended (Remember: “Lo, I will be with you always.” He never mentioned “high”). I understood trains. The engine pulled them. But how on earth does a thing as big as a Howard Johnson motel get into the air and manage to stay there?

  Trains meant tradition to me. So did newspapers. Airplanes were television. Trains were the morning paper on your doorstep. You could go to the club car and have a beer served by a man on a train. On an airplane, a lady would serve you a beer, but you had to stay in your seat to drink it, and if you weren’t through with it fifteen minutes before landing, that same lady would take it away from you. I still don’t understand why they make you give up your drink when an airplane starts to land. Are they afraid if the plane crashes, you might spill something on your suit and the airline would be responsible for your cleaning bill?

  When the plane is landing, that’s when I need a drink the most Will the tires hold up? Is the runway long enough? Is there a rookie pilot up there who’s never done this with 160 people sitting behind him?

  My plane to Baton Rouge didn’t crash. I was greatly relieved. LSU beat Rice. The LSU cheerleaders rolled out a cage with wheels on it before the game. Inside the cage was a large tiger. LSU’s nickname is the “Tigers.”

  The cheerleaders rattled the tiger’s cage, and the tiger growled fiercely—I could hear it up in the press box because there was a microphone in the cage with the tiger.

  Each time the tiger would growl, the crowd, thousands in number, would cheer. This on a hot, humid Saturday night near the banks of the Mississippi.

  A guy from the Lake Charles paper who was sitting next to me in the press box said the cheerleaders rattled the tiger’s cage before every game. I said, “If that tiger ever gets loose, there’s going to be some serious payback time.”

  The plane that brought me back to Atlanta Sunday morning didn’t crash, either. I made a deal with God. If He got me back on the ground safely, I never-under-any-circumstances would build a graven image.

  And I haven’t.

  When basketball season started, Minter put me on Oglethorpe University. Oglethorpe is a small school on the north side of Atlanta. Once, it had football. But football got too expensive, so it was dropped. Basketball survived and flourished, however. A crew-cut guy named Garland Pinholster, of all things, coached it into a national small-college power.

  Pinholster had left by the time I got to Atlanta, but Oglethorpe still played quality basketball. At the end of the season, they had won a spot in the national small-college tournament in Evansville, Indiana. Minter said, “Go to Evansville.”

  Evansville. The Southern Railway didn’t have anything, but then I called Union Station, which served the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The tired old dusty Georgian, I found out, stopped in Evansville on its way from Atlanta to St. Louis.

  I left the office on my lunch hour and walked down to Union Station. Same old mess. Same old smell.

  The guy behind the ticket window looked at me as if I were crazy when I said to him, “Round-trip to Evansville, please.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “There’s no food on the train, and it’s a long ride to Evansville,” he went on.

  “I’ll bring some food with me,” I told him.

  “There ain’t no water, either.”

  “I can bring some water with me.”

  The man wouldn’t give up. “All the train is,” he continued, “is one car on the back of a freight. There won’t be anybody riding with you, and it’ll be the middle of the night when you get to Evansville. I don’t even know if there will be a light on at the station. I wouldn’t ride the damn thing.”

  If he wouldn’t, I decided I’d better not, either. You never know who is going to be around after midnight.

  Browny was living in Nashville at the time, and Nashville was on the way to Evansville. I wound up driving to Nashville, and Browny drove us on to Evansville.

  Oglethorpe lasted only one round. I don’t remember who defeated the Stormy Petrels (some kind of a bird, I think), but I do recall quite vividly that during an earlier game the giant scoreboard that hung from the roof in the arena fell on the playing floor and shattered into 6 zillion pieces.

  Browny took some great photos, but he was working for an egg magazine, and if it didn’t cluck, the magazine wasn’t interested.

  Before I ever got a shot at riding a train to an assignment again, Minter took me over to the Eagle Cafe that morning and said I was his new assistant sports editor, his slot man. I would be getting up at four in the morning four days a week, and working from two in the afternoon Saturday until some ungodly time in the early Sunday morning, fighting with the composing room to get my pages in on time and all that.

  I wanted to say to Minter, “Thanks a lot, but I think I’d like to succeed Bill Clark.”

  But I didn’t. Because Minter, when he gave me my promotion, had said, “I want you in the office, so don’t ask for Bill Clark’s job.”

  Assistant sports editor. I got a forty-dollar-a-week raise. Two hundred dollars a week! Two hundred big ones. Two hundred beany wienies. I was a wealthy man.

  I bought a 1969 brand-new, interior-smells-so-good, GMAC-financed Oldsmobile Cutlass with power windows, hi-fi radio, and air-conditioning. The car was one of the reasons I wound up divorced a year or so later.

  I decided the Cutlass was mine. I made Paula drive the old blue VW, the one where the rearview had fallen off, the gas pedal would get stuck, and Plato’s shed hair was three inches deep. And there was no air-conditioning.

  Years later, after she had married a man who would never even think of not allowing his wife to take the Cutlass, Paula told me, “One of the first times I really realized that our marriage would never last was when you made me take the piece of junk Volkswagen while you drove the new car. I
could have gotten killed in that thing. You never did get around to having a new rearview mirror installed, and what if the gas pedal had stuck just as I was approaching a busy intersection?

  “And by the time I’d get to work, I’d be wringing wet with sweat and have dog hair all over my clothes. You could really be a thoughtless man at times.”

  She was absolutely correct, of course. And there was a lot else I did and didn’t do. I flirted with a redhead at her company Christmas party, for instance. We were at a downtown hotel. Paula became so angry, she ran out of the hotel and headed down the street. Paula, like other women I have known, was a “runner.”

  Some women stand their ground when they are angry and jealous; they do things like scream at you or throw whatever object is nearby at you. In many ways, such women are preferable to runners. The screaming will eventually subside, and if you can dodge the flying object, you can avoid any personal injury.

  But you’ve got a major problem with a runner. First, you have to decide whether or not you are going to run after her. You could just let her go, of course. You know that eventually she will come back.

  But she’s out there running somewhere, and something could happen to her, and you would feel awful about it. She could get attacked or pull a muscle.

  Seconds after Paula hit the air and began running down Spring Street, a busy Atlanta thoroughfare, just as midnight approached, I went after her.

  She had a bit of a pigeon-toed gait, and I had retained possibly 50 percent of my high school speed, coming down the court on a fast break or rounding first base, trying to stretch a single into a double. I was what they called “sneaky-fast.”

  But after I caught her, I still had a problem. She wanted to run some more, and struggled to break free of my grasp.

  So, there we were, on a busy street in downtown Atlanta at midnight, and I’m wrestling with my wife. A passing cabbie, who doesn’t know she’s my wife, stops and gets out of his cab, comes over and puts a half-Nelson on me, figuring I am Lewis the Ripper.

  I would have told him it was my wife and he was intruding on what was a simple domestic quarrel, but I was unable to speak because the cabbie, a rather burly individual, has his forearm pressed tightly on my Adam’s apple, rendering me speechless.

  But Paula would tell him, of course, that it was okay, I was her husband.

  “You son of a bitch!” is how she introduced me to the cabbie. “You and that slut were practically screwing out there on the dance floor in front of all the people I have to work with. I have never been so embarrassed in my life!”

  That didn’t help my position much with the cabbie. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I fought for air. My eyes seemed quite serious about popping out of my head and falling, rearview mirrorlike, on the sidewalk.

  I did manage to get out one small sound. I’ll try to spell it. “Gurrrrq,” which meant, “For God’s sake, tell him!”

  Finally, my wife told him.

  “He’s my husband,” she said. “He was practically screwing a redheaded slut on the dance floor at my company Christmas party.”

  The cabbie released his hold on me.

  “You really do that, buddy?” he asked me.

  It would be a few moments before my blood had redistributed itself and I could speak. I finally managed, “She’s the one who got so close to me. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You lying . . .” Paula began.

  “Listen,” the cabbie interrupted, “why don’t you both get in the cab and I’ll drive you back to the party. You shouldn’t be screaming and fighting like this out in public.”

  We went back to the party. The redhead was gone, but Paula didn’t speak to me again.

  My undying ambition and my dedication to my new post at the paper also had a lot to do with our eventual divorce. I didn’t talk about much else other than newspapers. And then there were my new hours.

  I got Mondays off. But then I was up at four A.M. Tuesday through Friday. I was off each afternoon by one, and Frank and Doctor Whitley and I would be in Manuel’s Tavern twenty minutes after one. Sometimes those afternoons reached into early evening, past dinner, and on towards midnight. Then I would grab a couple of hours’ sleep and be off to work again. The only times I ever went home on time was when I was simply too exhausted to stay out late. I would wind up snoring away on the living-room couch at eight o’clock, which wasn’t Paula’s idea of a great time, either.

  I was having a great time. I knew very little about neon and the call of the wild, but I was learning. Hyland was a great help. He wound up getting a divorce, too.

  I dug deep into my job. Getting an afternoon sports section out four mornings a week and then producing a Sunday morning section was the most difficult, most frustrating task I’ve ever had. Nothing before or afterward compared to it.

  The typical weekday:

  The alarm goes off at four. My first thought is to open one eye to see if it’s still dark. If it is, I’m okay. If it’s not, I’m late and I’ll have to throw the section together and Minter will redraw it between editions and the composing-room wiseacres will say, “Why didn’t you do it right the first time?”

  But it’s still dark, and I’m in the office at five. First, I go to the composing room where the printers’ union has a Coke machine. Cokes are a dime. They come in little six-ounce bottles. They have ice in them. This is what God had in mind when he created, through some Georgia druggist, Coca-Cola.

  I get a jolt from the Coke. I light a Marlboro. I strip the sports wire.

  The Associated Press sports wire has been running all night. It has typed out fourteen hundred miles of paper. I have to look at all of it.

  I have to determine what needs to go into the sports section and what the readers won’t miss. What I would do is take all the paper off the teletype and put it on the floor on the other side of the horseshoe desk, the rim.

  I would then put a large wastebasket next to my seat in the middle of the horseshoe. I would then utilize a tool known as the “tear rule.” A tear rule is sort of like a lead ruler with one sharp end. You use a tear rule for a lot of things. One use is when you draw the lines of a layout page that shows the printer exactly where each story and photograph goes.

  Tom McCollister hit Teague Jackson on his knuckles with his tear rule once. Teague, who was from Chicago, wanted to call the Cubs “Cubbies” in a headline, and McCollister said that sounded silly.

  “But that’s how they do it at the Trib,” said Teague, and McCollister hit him on his knuckles. As far as I know, “Cubbies” still has never appeared on an Atlanta Journal sports page.

  What else you can do with a tear rule—produced in the composing room—is to tear things. I had to separate each story on the wire. I would hold the tear rule between stories with one hand and rip away. What wasn’t going into the paper I’d toss in the wastebasket next to me. What would go I would fold neatly to my left. I would edit each story, mostly for length, and then assign it a headline and pass it to somebody on the rim when the rest of the staff rolled in, in various stages of disarray, an hour or so later.

  It would take at least a half hour to strip that wire and pull off the baseball standings, the box scores, the National League roundup, the American League roundup, and so on, depending upon the season.

  Then there was the Western Union telex machine. The beat men, working out of Dodger Stadium, or Madison Square Garden, or Lambeau Field in Green Bay, would file their stories back to the office overnight via Western Union telex.

  I had to strip that machine, too, and that wasn’t so much of a problem, but Western Union sent everything back in capital letters. I suppose that made it easier on the teletype operators. It certainly made it easier on the writers.

  If you do a lot of typing, you know how much trouble it is to have to hit that shift key to capitalize. Writers simply did everything in lowercase, which got them out of the press box earlier enough to hit the bars when there might still be some local tale
nt around.

  But the poor slot man. Those sons-of-bitches were out there in San Francisco, New York, or L.A., and here I was at six o’clock in the morning, going through all their stories and underscoring each letter I wanted the Linotype operator to capitalize. God, I hated doing that. It didn’t seem fair.

  After that, I laid out the section. Here’s how that works: The advertising department produces a dummy layout sheet that shows the size of each ad and where it appears on the page. It was my job, basically, to fill in what space was left in the sports section after the ads went in. There was never enough room for what I wanted to do. I’m not certain what the ad-space-to-news ratio was in those days, but it often seemed like 100 to 1.

  Even the front page of sports had ads in those days. It was the Wednesday front I hated the most. Every Wednesday, there was a huge, four-column by eleven inches Jack Daniel’s ad that took up about a quarter of my front space. You’ve seen those Jack Daniel’s ads. They usually include a photograph of two old geezers sitting on a front porch in Lynchburg, Tennessee, playing checkers. The truth be told, they probably had been in a batch of the stuff over at the distillery and couldn’t even hold on to a checker, much less move it into a strategic position.

  That ad was so big and that photograph was so dominant, nothing else I put on the page would catch the reader’s eye first.

  I had to run Bisher’s column all the way down the left side of the page, and what space I’ve got left goes to the Braves, Al Geigberger shooting a 59, and Richard Petty being on the pole for the Firecracker 400 in Daytona.

  I would select the best and most newsworthy photographs I had room for each day, give each story a designated length so as to fit in the space I had allotted for it, and then I would put all my materials in a basket on the side of the rim and scream, “Copy!”

  That was a signal for the lowest of all lows, the boys on the bottom rung, the newspaper version of banking’s accounting clerks, the legendary “copy boys,” to come fetch what was in the basket and get it to the composing room as fast as possible.