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

by Lewis Grizzard

  Copy boys usually had a lot of zits, couldn’t find a job doing anything else, didn’t mind being screamed at or told of their basic worthlessness, and could live on beans and bread, since that’s all they could afford on what newspapers paid them.

  Copy boys usually were at least a little insane. We had one copy boy at the Journal, Ernest, who refused to allow anybody else to push the button for his floor when he got on an elevator.

  Ernest would get into the elevator and it would be crowded and somebody near the buttons would ask him, “What floor?” intending to do him a favor by pushing his desired button since it would be basically impossible for Ernest to get through the wad of human flesh between him and the little panel with the buttons.

  It didn’t matter. Ernest would say, “I’ll push my own button, thank you,” and then proceed to stomp on numerous toes on his way to push his own button.

  Horganmeyer was another copy boy. He was the dumbest human I ever met. He had been at work for about three days, and had dutifully picked up my materials to be sent to the composing room. But the composing room called me and said, “We don’t have anything from you.”

  I screamed, “Copy!” and Horganmeyer showed up. I seem to recall he was drooling.

  At any rate, I said to him, “Horganmeyer, you idiot, the composing room says they haven’t gotten anything from me. What have you done with all the copy?”

  Horganmeyer said, “There ain’t no tubes.” Materials were sent to the composing room in glass tubes that were sucked down a pipe, or some such magic.

  “Well, Horganmeyer,” I said, “call the composing room and tell them to send you some tubes back up.”

  What Horganmeyer should have done was pick up the hot line to the composing room and say, “Send up some more tubes.” What he did was go over to the pipe, open it, and scream down inside it, “Send more tubes!”

  I had many delicious fantasies about killing Horganmeyer. In my fantasies, I stuffed him inside a tube, and he died.

  There was something else that was necessary to the composing room. They were called “shorts.” A “short” is a one-paragraph item, a two-paragraph item, even a three-paragraph item with small headlines.

  There was a system whereby you could count the number of lines in a piece of copy and determine what length it would make when in type. It wasn’t a perfect system, however. Sometimes you would assign a story an eighteen-inch hole. It would turn up sixteen inches long. That’s where the shorts came in. You plugged up empty holes with shorts.

  Because of an odd configuration of the ad layout one morning, I wound up with a tiny piece of white space, capable of holding a 14-point headline and maybe five lines of type. I was already two minutes past deadline.

  “What do you want to put here?” asked the printer working on the page.

  “Find a short,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Any of ’em. Just plug the damn hole.”

  He grabbed a short. It was three lines too long to fit in the space. Printers were not known for taking a situation in hand and dealing with it themselves.

  “It’s three lines too long,” said the printer. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “Find a period and cut it there,” I said.

  Type was set in lead. Printers all carried a little tool they used to snip off type.

  The first edition of the paper came up. The little short on the front page read, “Cincinnati utility infielder Marvin Snobbs was optioned Tuesday afternoon to the Red Triple AAA affiliate in Louisville, but he never got there.”

  The first period the printer had come to was after the word “there,” and, as I told him to do, that’s where he snipped the type.

  The rest of the story had explained infielder Snobbs got halfway to Louisville in his car, decided he’d had enough of baseball and wasn’t going down to Triple A, and called the Reds front office to say he was retiring. But the readers didn’t get to read that. We were flooded with calls the next day.

  “What happened to Marvin Snobbs?” they wanted to know.

  Nobody had ever heard of Marvin Snobbs until they read that story, but I must admit there was a suggestion of sinister plots and kidnappings in the tantalizing little short that had ended so abruptly.

  One of the best illustrations of deadline frustration was the story about a poor slotman in Louisville who was trying to get the copy for the first afternoon edition down to the composing room on time.

  The sports department was partitioned off from the rest of the newsroom by a rail.

  It’s late, the composing room foreman has called seventeen times, and finally, with forty-five seconds to go before his copy deadline, the slot man grabs the last batch and decides to run it down to the composing room himself.

  As he is about to step out of the sports department, the foreman appears and says, “You’ll never make it. There’s only ten seconds to go!”

  The beleaguered slotman suddenly stopped and threw all the copy—wire stories, headlines, and photos—over the rail, scattering it across the newsroom floor.

  “What in hell are you doing?” asked the foreman.

  “I’m throwing the copy out of bounds,” said the slot man, “to stop the clock.”

  The composing room at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a war zone. There were the long lines of Linotype machines where the operators set each letter of each story by hand. Headlines were cast in another corner. Each page sat on a movable table, so that it could be hustled way toward the presses when it was locked. There was much noise. Machines made some of it. Editors screaming at printers and printers screaming at editors and composing-room foremen screaming at everybody made the rest of it.

  The noise and the deadline pressure in the composing room could kill a man. Joel Huff was a soft-spoken, kind man who was an assistant managing editor and supervised the makeup of newsside pages.

  I was always amazed how calm he seemed to stay in the composing room. I threw at least one screaming fit daily.

  But maybe Joel should have screamed a time or two. He had a heart attack one day and died right there in the composing room, just after he got the first edition in on time.

  One hour later, the next edition carried his obituary on page 2. You bust your tail all those years getting the paper in on time. You die in battle and all they give you is a lousy obit on page 2.

  The second edition, incidentally, got in on time, too. Joel would have been proud. The rest of us realized that no matter how much our lives might mean to our friends and families, the paper would get the next edition out, with or without us.

  The printers, the men who actually picked up the type and put it where it belonged on each page, were members of the typographical union. They moved up only on the basis of seniority. They got paid the same amount of money regardless of how hard they worked or how cooperative they were.

  Some of the printers would bust their tails and be pleasant about it, anyway. Others, however, wouldn’t.

  They didn’t give a damn if the paper got in on time or not. But they held your testicles in their hands. Don’t get the paper in on time and it costs the company money; the publisher calls the general manager and he calls the managing editor and the managing editor calls you and says, “Why the hell didn’t it get in on time?”

  All I could say was, “R. D. Cocklesmith made up my pages this morning, and he doesn’t give a damn whether the paper gets in on time or not.”

  Didn’t matter—it was still your fault. And there was nothing you could do if R. D. Cocklesmith went into the dreaded four corners on you. The rule was simple: You ain’t a member of the union, you don’t touch the type. You don’t lay one millimeter of skin on one letter. You don’t touch the type with something that is affixed to your hand, like a pencil. You don’t put your pencil down on the National League roundup and say to R. D. Cocklesmith, “Put that on this page.”

  There was another rule. If somebody outside the union touched the type, the printer had
the right to pick up the tray that held it and dump it on the floor. That was called “pieing the type.”

  “R.D., listen to me. I just sort of slipped. I didn’t mean to touch your type, I swear. R.D., there’s only four minutes to go before deadline. Please don’t pie that type, R.D. In the name of God, R.D., don’t dump that type. . . .”

  All over the floor. You would either have to put something in the National League hole like about fourteen shorts that were not related whatsoever, or have the type on the floor reset and risk being late and getting yelled at while R. D. Cocklesmith went to the break room and ate his goddamn lunch.

  The one thing I could do to help insure getting my section in on time was give away free tickets to the foremen and printers.

  Of course, it was bribery. In desperation, one grabs for any straw available.

  The sports department had free tickets out the nose. The Braves gave us dozens, as did the other pro teams in town, and a phone call would produce Georgia Tech and Georgia football tickets as well.

  It wasn’t like we were on the take. We took the tickets, but we didn’t go out of our way to do the teams or schools any favors, and I often wondered why they continued to supply tickets when they knew it wouldn’t matter when a writer sat down to his typewriter and decided to perform surgery without using anesthesia.

  (Later, most sports departments did away with the practice of taking free tickets. I have no idea how they are able to get the paper in on time without them.)

  Let’s say I’m in the composing room to begin putting the section together. A smiling foreman walks over and asks, “How about four for Sunday’s Braves–Reds game?”

  “You got it,” I reply.

  A nice, smooth morning follows.

  Or, I’m in the composing room to begin putting the section together. A smiling foreman walks over and asks, “How about four for Sunday’s Braves-Red game?”

  “I’ve already given them away to my grandfather who is terminally ill and is going to die Monday and his last wish was to see Sunday’s Braves-Reds game,” I reply.

  The National League roundup gets lost. So does Bisher’s column. I get a rookie printer with bricks for hands, and I’m eight minutes late getting the section in.

  I eventually learned to say, “My grandfather can watch the game on TV. Here’s your tickets.”

  I had a crusty old makeup man from the news side who helped me get the pages in on Saturday nights for the Sunday football section.

  His name was Doug Cocking. I loved him. Even though he was small, he was the toughest son of a bitch that ever went eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose with a printer and said, “You lazy bastard, get off your ass and get this page in on time or I’m going to kick it halfway to Chattanooga.” Sometimes that worked. If it didn’t, Doug at least had tried something.

  There was one page to go on a football Saturday night. It was a late page we had held for Southwest Conference night games. I grew to hate the Southwest Conference for being in the Central time zone and playing night games that ended so perilously close to deadline. The idea was to put the feature game in the conference under a main headline and then to follow with the other SWC games.

  A printer they called Boy-Boy was making up the page. He got the Texas-Baylor game in under the main headline and then started filling in the remaining space with TCU–Texas Tech, Arkansas–Rice, and Texas A&M-SMU. Boy-Boy locked up the page and said to Doug, “Want to see this before it goes?”

  Cocking took a look at the page and said, “There’s something wrong.”

  Boy-Boy said, “What in hell is it this time?” Boy-Boy and R. D. Cocklesmith were brethren in pain-in-the-buttship.

  “You’ve got the Harvard-Brown game in the Southwest Conference roundup,” Cocking explained.

  “What in hell difference does that make?” Boy-Boy asked, indignantly. Two minutes to go before deadline.

  “The difference, you dumb piss-ant,” Doug explained, “is that Harvard and Brown are in the Ivy League, and they’re already on another page. You’ve left out TCU–Texas Tech.”

  Doug pointed at the TCU–Texas Tech type and touched it. Ever so slightly. Maybe the tip of his fingernail hit the dateline that said “Lubbock.”

  It didn’t matter to Boy-Boy. He picked up the tray that held the TCU–Texas Tech type and dumped it.

  I could tell Doug intended to do something violent. I wasn’t sure what, but his face had contorted, the veins popped out of his neck, his fists were clenched. He had the eyes of Charles Earl Whitman as he climbed the steps to the tower on the University of Texas campus that day and began shooting at anything that moved.

  What Doug did was pick up an empty type tray and try to kill Boy-Boy with it. Boy-Boy managed to duck Doug’s swing, however, and ran. Doug chased him. They disappeared out the back of the composing room, headed toward Spring Street.

  Thirty seconds to go before deadline.

  There wasn’t time to reset the type Boy-Boy had dumped. I would hear about it Monday morning for having Harvard and Brown in the Southwest Conference roundup—but I had no other choice.

  “Go ahead and take it,” I said to a reserve printer the composing-room foreman had fetched me. And there they were on the page for the world to see Sunday morning: the Harvard Horned Frogs and Brown Red Raiders.

  The Reverend was another printer. They called him that because he was a religious nut and occasionally went around the composing room handing out pamphlets entitled Are You Saved? and Five Ways to Heaven. He went to one of those churches where they spoke in tongues.

  If you are not familiar with that, it’s where a member of the congregation will become so moved—“slain in the spirit,” they called it—and begin speaking in a strange language of which he or she had no previous knowledge. The words were supposedly sent to the person directly from God.

  The minister, whom God had given the ability to interpret any sort of language that a person slain in the spirit might say, would then pass on the meaning to the congregation.

  The tongue-speaker might say, “Ala babble meno lipbog filadingdong,” and the minister would break in and say, “Woe be unto the wicked, for they shall perish,” which is what he decided “Ala babble meno lipbog filadingdong” meant.

  The Reverend told me a great story once. I had mentioned something to him about my basset hound, Plato, getting his ears in his food and then dribbling wet Purina Dog Chow all over the carpet.

  “I gave my wife a dog one time,” said the Reverend. “It was just a little ol’ feist dog. My wife named him ‘Norman,’ after her brother. He drank himself to death and went to hell. The Bible says, ‘A drunkard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,’ and I tried my best to tell him....”

  “So what about the dog?” I said to the Reverend. I was afraid he was about to start barking in tongues or some such thing.

  “Little ol’ dog was mean. He’d just soon bite you as look at you. He’d go in the garage, and if he couldn’t find anything else to chew up, he’d start on the tires to my truck.

  “I was going to have to get shed of him, but I decided I would see if the power of God could cure him of his meanness.”

  I had to hear the rest of this.

  “How did you do that, Reverend?”

  “I anointed his head with oil.”

  “You did what?”

  “I got hold of him, then poured oil over his head and asked God to cast out the demons that beset him.”

  “What kind of oil did you use, Reverend?” I asked.

  “Any kind will work,” he said. “I just went to the kitchen and got some Wesson Oil.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Never had a minute’s trouble with that dog again.”

  The Reverend cost me a deadline once in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, his savior.

  It had been a tough morning. Engraving lost one of my photographs, and I had to remake the page. It looked like hell.

  Hyland’s Hawks story was missing for a time. We finally fo
und it over next to the obit page. It was about 10:08, and I had a fairly good shot at making the 10:10 deadline. Only the sports front was left. Bisher’s column had run slightly short, and the Reverend was spacing out the lines to fill the hole.

  Suddenly, he stopped working, he dropped his makeup tools on the floor, and grasped the table that held the page. His head rolled back and his eyes closed and he seemed to be about to have some sort of fit.

  “You okay, Reverend?” I asked him.

  “Gee-zus is here!” he screamed out.

  “Do what?” I asked him.

  “Geee-zus is here!” he screamed again.

  There were two minutes to go before deadline, and my printer was having a vision.

  “Reverend,” I said, “Jesus can wait a couple of minutes, can’t He?”

  At that point, he started speaking in tongues.

  A minute to go.

  “Reverend,” I said, “get hold of yourself.”

  “Ika dong feldo mana quartzel,” he replied.

  Thirty seconds.

  “Reverend,” I begged, “please finish the page. I’ll buy you and Jesus both a cup of coffee as soon as you’re finished.”

  “Hilma, botswa, fingo dellabelle extapo,” said the Reverend.

  I was a minute late.

  I found the foreman.

  “The Reverend’s having a vision,” I said to him. “Can you get me another printer?”

  He sent over R. D. Cocklesmith, who complained for a good three minutes before he finally finished spacing out Bisher’s column and sent the page on its way.

  I was five minutes late on the first edition, and when I tried to explain why to the managing editor, he said, “Surely, Jesus has enough sense to stay out of the composing room.”

  Getting out the Sunday section during football season was an awesome task. I am certain I could learn brain surgery, how to build a computer, and French. I put out the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday sports section during two football seasons. Nothing could be as difficult or more complex than that task.