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

by Lewis Grizzard

  I once assigned Art a story on pigeons. “Pigeons?” he asked.

  “Pigeons are all over big cities,” I said. “Where do they come from? Why do they seem to like cities? Why do they seem to like statutes? What do they eat? Can we eat them?”

  Art did a great pigeon story. His best anecdote never got into the paper, however.

  Jim Kennedy, heir to the Cox family throne (they owned the papers and Lord knows what else), was fresh out of college and was working at the papers to learn the business. Jim loved hunting, and he had been catching pigeons on the roof of the Journal-Constitution building to use in training his hunting dogs. We figured, A) that was illegal and B) even if it wasn’t, we ought not to put it in our pigeon story.

  Art went on to The Washington Post. He is the man who brought down Jimmy Swaggart in Penthouse and the one who also got a lot of the goods on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. He remains a hero of mine.

  I was also involved in two special series we did at the Constitution. The first, written by political editor Bill Shipp, was called “City in Crisis.” Atlanta’s politics had been almost completely taken over by blacks. But the downtown white power structure had all the money—so there was a stalemate between the two groups.

  Minter assigned me to do the graphics. The series was to start in the Sunday combined edition, which was put out by the Journal staff. I had to get special dispensation from Executive Editor Bill Fields to let me put the series on the top of page 1, design it as I wanted, and then to give word to the Journal not to touch it. He did.

  We also did a series entitled “The Welfare Mess.” Good series. I went down to Georgia’s southern coast to McIntosh County, which had the state’s lowest per capita income, to see how they were dealing with welfare. I sent back a story about a man I found living under an I-95 river bridge with his dog. The county welfare caseworker had told me she had tried to get the man to accept welfare, but he wouldn’t.

  I parked my car and climbed down under the bridge. The man said he didn’t need any welfare because he had the bridge to keep the rain off, and he had a boat from which he could catch fish to keep him in food. I offered him five bucks. He wouldn’t take it. I offered him half a pack of Marlboros. He took it. I went back to my room at the posh Cloisters, the five-diamond resort on Georgia’s exclusive Sea Island, and wrote about the man, his dog, and what it was like to live under a bridge.

  A devastating tornado hit Atlanta while I was at the Constitution. I handled the coverage and did the layouts, including a picture page.

  The Vietnam War ended when I was at the Constitution. I put out that section, too.

  But I was getting antsy again. Mostly, what I did was sit in Minter’s office and talk to him. He complained, “Not many of ’em around here have any idea of what I’m talking about.”

  I got a little bored and frustrated. I didn’t know where all this was leading to. Then I got an assignment about an Atlanta sports artist, Wayland Moore, from Sports Illustrated. I got the writing bug again. Six months after rejoining the Constitution, in the spring of 1975, I was a free-lance writer again.

  I also hooked up again with Norman Arey, who had left the newspaper to work for Lamar Hunt’s fledgling World Championship of Tennis. Norman traveled to each tournament all over the country and had a myriad of duties under his title as public-relations director.

  I traveled with him to a couple of tournaments. Norman had gone bald at this point and had a five-hundred-dollar hairpiece. I was at a tournament in Philadelphia with him. Sunday night, we took the train to Richmond for the next week’s tournament. We both lingered in the lounge car too long and took ourselves a couple of naps. When I awakened, Norman’s five-hundred-dollar rug had fallen from his head. The lounge car attendant was sweeping it and the other trash away when I stopped him and saved Norman’s five-hundred-dollar hair.

  Norman even got me a couple of jobs. A professional women’s tournament was coming to Atlanta’s Omni, and the promoter hired Norman to handle PR. Norman then hired me to do the public address for the tournament, five nights for three hundred dollars. The third night, I finally got the name of a new Czech women’s player down right. Nah-Vrah-Tee-Lo-Vah.

  Then Norman called one day and said he had us a week’s work at a local Atlanta public-relations firm, and it would pay us each five hundred dollars. Norman had left the WCT by then because he was never at home with his family and Peg. I knew very little about public-relations work, but there were few things I wouldn’t have done then for five hundred big ones.

  Here was the deal:

  The PR firm, Ball, Cohn & Weyman, had two new clients. One was a new Legends of Tennis tournament, featuring aging players like Ken Roswell and Rod Laver, that was coming to Atlanta.

  The other client was Atlanta’s Six Flags Over Georgia, which had just constructed a giant parachute-jump ride it wanted to promote. Norman took the Legends job because he had all the right tennis experience. I got the parachute-jump ride.

  What we were supposed to do, Norman and I, was to call media outlets all over the South to seek a little publicity. So I started calling newspaper cronies. I’d give them my pitch, and they would listen, and then they would all ask the same question: “What the hell are you doing pushing some dumb carnival ride for a PR firm?”

  I said I was in it for the money. They all said to me, “You belong back at the newspaper.”

  No way that was going to happen. I had already quit twice.

  Monday: I don’t get a single confirmed plan for a parachute-jump story.

  Tuesday: I have a great idea. Why don’t I try to get a job with the New York Times Atlanta bureau, covering Deep South sports? The Times had just sent a man to the West Coast to cover sports out there. It seemed perfect.

  The trouble was, I didn’t know anybody with The New York Times. I made a couple of no-luck calls on the parachute jump, and then I remembered Jack Semmes.

  I had attended a seminar for sports editors at the American Press Institution at Columbia University in New York City. I met Semmes there. He was a fellow southerner and was deputy sports editor of the Associated Press, headquartered in New York.

  Jack and I became close friends. He later left New York to become dean of the journalism school at Auburn University. He would know somebody on The New York Times. So I called him and asked if he could get me in the front door.

  “Let me make a few calls,” he said.

  Tuesday afternoon: To hell with the parachute jump and the five hundred dollars. I wasn’t born to be a hack. Jack Semmes called me back. He told me if I really wanted the Times, he would help me. But he also said I could move to New York and get on the desk of the AP sports department. And then he said, “There are two sports editor’s jobs open, too—the Philadelphia Daily News needs a guy, and so does the Chicago Sun Times.“

  “I really want to write, Jack,” I said. “I’m not moving to New York to sit on a desk, I hate Philadelphia, and I’ve never been to Chicago, but I hear the weather’s bad.”

  He said he’d get back to me on the Times. I snuck out of the PR office and went and played tennis.

  Wednesday morning: I am sitting at my desk at the PR office, thinking. Chicago. That might be pretty exciting. The Cubs and the White Sox, the Bears and Bulls and Black Hawks and Notre Dame and the Fighting Illini. What’s a little cold weather? And how cold could it be, anyway?

  Chicago had a proud newspaper heritage, that was a plus. Ben Hecht and The Front Page. There were three newspapers there. One company owned two, the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times, but there was a battle with the Chicago Tribune. Maybe I could convince them to let me run the sports department and write on occasion. It was too late to go back to the Journal or the Constitution, and I just had a feeling the Times thing would never work out.

  I picked up the phone at Ball, Cohn & Weyman, and called the Chicago Sun-Times. I asked for the managing editor’s office. It’s ten-thirty Wednesday morning.

  I told the managing editor’
s secretary I was calling about the vacant sports editor’s job. The managing editor, Ralph Otwell, came on the line.

  I told him who I was, and I told him my background. He asked if I knew Reg Murphy, the former Constitution editor of kidnapping fame. I said I did. He said he and Murphy had been Neiman Fellows together at Harvard. Ralph Otwell took my number and said he’d be back to me in an hour or so.

  I never really asked him, but I think he called Reg Murphy to ask about me. I assume Reg gave me a good recommendation because Ralph Otwell called me back from Chicago. “Can you be here Friday for lunch and an interview?” he asked. “We’ll put you up in our suite at the Executive Inn.”

  “See you Friday,” I said.

  I walked out of my office and told the first guy I came to—I can’t remember if it was Ball, Cohn, or Weyman—thanks, but I’d had enough of the PR game, and that they didn’t owe me any money. I figured they were going to pay for the phone call to Chicago, and that would make us even.

  I talked to Kay about Chicago. She seemed excited. I think she thought if she could get me out of Atlanta, I might become a better husband.

  How to get to Chicago without flying? I was heavy into another nonflying stage at this point. I wasn’t going to ride a bus to an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, however, and it seemed too far to drive. I decided to take the train.

  There was only one way to do that. I would have to drive to Birmingham and catch Amtrak’s Miami-to-Chicago Floridian. It was a three-hour drive to Birmingham. I boarded the train at three in the afternoon on Thursday. I arrived in Chicago’s Union Station at eight the next morning, on a pleasant October morning, 1975.

  I took a cab to the Executive Inn, took a shower, ate some breakfast, then went and bought a copy of the morning Sun-Times to look over the sports section.

  It was a mess. The layout was terrible. The headlines and cutlines were awful. This was the Big Time?

  But I also thought, This will be a piece of cake. Give me a layout pad and half a day, and I can make this thing look 100 percent better.

  I went to see Ralph Otwell at the Sun-Times, across the street and the Chicago River on Wacker Drive. He was an older, soft-spoken man who smoked a pipe. He seemed quite harmless. “I want you to also meet and talk with our editor, Jim Hoge,” he said.

  What editor? At the Journal-Constitution, the managing editor did the hiring and firing. All the editor was in charge of was the editorial pages.

  The three of us, Jim Hoge, Ralph Otwell, and I, went to lunch. Hoge scared the hell out of me. A strikingly handsome man, he was just off a cover of GQ. He had severely punishing eyes that were hard to meet. He was no-nonsense.

  “Do you know our sports section?” he asked.

  “I saw a copy this morning.”

  “What would you do to improve it?”

  “The layout is terrible.”

  “Why?”

  “The stories should square off vertically. There’s too much clamor on the pages. It doesn’t look like there’s been any thought into what to play where. You don’t play your photographs large enough, and the headlines and cutlines show little or no imagination.”

  “What do you think of the writing?”

  “Poor. I didn’t understand a word of what Bill Gleason [columnist] had to say. And where did you get this guy Lacey J. Banks, who covers the Bulls? His story personified ‘Offense’ and ‘Defense’ and then he made up a dialogue between them. What in the hell happened in the game?”

  Hoge never flinched. He offered no defense for the section, nor did he say he agreed with anything I had said. Ralph Otwell lighted his pipe. I was covered in sweat.

  We went back to Hoge’s office at the Sun-Times. I had brought along some examples of my layouts. Some he liked. I had brought along the special section I had done of Henry Aaron. He didn’t like that.

  “You mentioned clamor,” he said. “Look how clamored this is.”

  I tried to explain that I’d done the best with the space I had been given. He did not seem impressed.

  “We’ll get back to you,” Jim Hoge said to me.

  I got back on the train at nine that evening and arrived in Birmingham at three Saturday afternoon. I went to Harrison’s and met Hudspeth. I got home at one. Kay was worried. “Why didn’t you call?” she asked me. I didn’t know the answer to that one.

  I made up my mind that if Jim Hoge offered me the job, I would take it. I would move to Chicago, Illinois, and out of the state of Georgia for the first time in twenty-two years. I was twenty-eight at the time. I had been born in Georgia, spent a few years out of the state with my father, being transferred to various army bases. Then I spent eleven years growing up in Moreland, Georgia, four years at the University of Georgia, and then seven working in Atlanta.

  I loved Georgia. I took up for Georgia. I had a Georgia public school education, I had a Georgia accent, and it burned me when someone from the North would run down the South, and Georgia in particular. I hated it when New Yorkers would ask, upon hearing me speak, “Where are you from? Texas?”

  “No,” I’d say. “Georgia.”

  And then they would say, with a laugh, “Well, shut yo’ mouth, you-all.”

  That wasn’t funny. In the first place, nobody had said “Shut yo’ mouth” in the South in a hundred years, and Yankees were always screwing up “you-all.”

  “You-all” was never used in the singular sense. If I were addressing one person, I would never ask “Would ‘you-all’ like something to drink?” I would just use “you.” And if I were addressing two or more persons, I wouldn’t say, “Would you-all like something to drink?” I would use the contraction, “y’all.”

  There was a lot of other stuff. Yankees called Cokes “pop.” Why? Because it was supposed to go “pop” when the top came off? It doesn’t go “pop.” It goes “whoosh.” What you say, to be proper, is, “I’ll have a Co-Coler.”

  Coca-Cola’s home is in Atlanta, and if we wanted to say “Co-Coler,” we could. I wasn’t going to tell a New Yorker he had to say “hot dawg” instead of “hot doo-ug.”

  I was raised on southern food. My dress was traditional (they call it “preppie” now). Yankees tend to dress funny. They wear black socks and sandals with their shorts, for one thing. You can pick out a Yankee tourist in Panama City, Florida, in a heartbeat.

  I always felt Georgians and southerners were looked down upon. Hey, I wanted to say, we’ve got paved roads now, too, and indoor plumbing.

  And there were the racist things. If you were from the South, you were automatically expected to say “nigger” about every other word.

  I really had no racial agenda at that point in my life. To be honest, I had been so involved in the newspaper business, Vietnam had sailed by me, too, with the exception of losing one fraternity brother and a high school classmate, neither of whom I was particularly close to. I simply figured black people should be able to eat in any restaurant or stay in any hotel they pleased. It was fine with me black students shared classrooms with me as a student at Georgia.

  I had only worked with two blacks in the newspaper business. Minter had a part-time stringer named Alfred Johnson who covered Atlanta University (Morris Brown, Morehouse, and Clark College) sports. He was paid on a per-game basis and had another job with the Atlanta boys’ club. I sort of liked Alfred, but I admit it didn’t go any further than that.

  In my last summer as executive sports editor, Mac had hired a black reporter named Chet Fuller, who came with impressive credentials out of college. Mac didn’t have an opening for him on the news staff at that point. One wouldn’t come open until September. But the paper occasionally hired journalism students for summer internships. Mac gave me Chet Fuller, who would be my summer intern and then move to the news side.

  Chet Fuller was talented and had tremendous potential as a writer. He also had a great sense of humor. We were sitting on the rim one day, and Kent Mitchell, who had replaced Priit Vesiland as outdoor editor, asked Chet where he lived.
Chet told him. Kent said, “I don’t live far from there.”

  Chet said, “There goes the neighborhood.”

  Chet went on to write a critically acclaimed book, to become an editorial-page columnist, and is now an assistant managing editor at the Atlanta newspapers.

  Ten days after my interview in Chicago, Jim Hoge called me in Atlanta and offered me the job as executive sports editor of the Sun-Times. It would pay $28,000 annually.

  I accepted. Kay and I immediately drove to Chicago and found a top floor, two-bedroom apartment in a four-story building for $425 a month. Apartments in Atlanta of the same sort would have gone for maybe $250. But I was making $28,000 a year, remember?

  The apartment was on Chicago near the North Side, on Arlington Place, just off busy Clark Street, eight blocks south of Wrigley Field, where the Cubs played their home games, all in the daytime. In 1975, nobody would have thought of putting lights up at Wrigley Field.

  We were close to Lincoln Avenue, the only street in Chicago that runs diagonally. The Biograph Theatre, where John Dillinger was fingered by the Woman in Red and shot down by the G-men, was still in operation, showing nostalgia movies. There were clubs on Lincoln Avenue where you could walk in with your guitar and get up and sing. Bette Midler had been discovered in one of those places on Lincoln Avenue.

  We were close to Lincoln Park and the Lincoln Park Zoo. We were only a few blocks from Lake Michigan and the Oak Street Beach.

  I had given away all of my dog Chauncey’s puppies. I found a good home for her, too. No dogs in our new apartment.

  I was to report to the Sun-Times on November 8,1975, a Monday. On Saturday, a beautiful, bright autumn day in Atlanta, we left Casa Loma apartments and headed north on highway 41 toward Cartersville, Georgia, where we could pick up 1-75 North. The last traffic light between Atlanta and Chicago in 1975 was in Cartersville, Georgia, just before you hit the interstate. The route was 75 to Chattanooga, 24 to Nashville, 65 to Gary, Indiana, and into Chicago on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

  I started having my doubts at that last traffic light in Cartersville. Was I doing the right thing here? Whom did I know in Chicago? Nobody. What if I were a flop? What would I do then? Come back to Atlanta and beg Minter to hire me for the third time? What if I absolutely hated Chicago? What if the people were rude to me because I was from the South? Where could I get a sliced pork-pig barbecue sandwich and good fried chicken? What about the crime? I used to watch The Untouchables all the time on television. Was that an accurate depiction of Chicago street life?