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

by Lewis Grizzard

  Hoge seemed tough. But was he also mean? Could I work for him? What about the sports staff? Hoge had told me it was my section, and I could do what I wanted to do. There would be shake-ups. There would be assignment changes. Would the staff resent my age and the changes I would make and the fact I was from the South?

  Where would I find a great bar like Harrison’s? What if I went in there and didn’t meet anybody? Nothing worse than sitting in a bar and not knowing anybody. Would I miss my friends Hyland and Hudspeth and the other men I had sported with?

  Chattanooga. I’ve been quiet for an hour.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked my wife.

  “Nothing,” I said. A lie. I was thinking about a million things.

  Nashville. What if something happened between Kay and me? What if I wound up alone and divorced in Chicago with no Harrison’s to fall back on?

  Louisville. My stomach hurt.

  Gary, Indiana. God, what an ugly place.

  Chicago and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Six lanes on each side, trains running down the middle. It’s raining. I’m looking for the Fullerton Avenue exit, but it’s dark and it’s raining and I can’t see a thing and people are whizzing past me at seventy miles an hour bumper-to-bumper.

  We find the Fullerton exit. We find our new apartment. We’re both too tired to unload anything. I bring up a six-pack I’d had iced down in the car. I drank it and went to sleep. I had my first Chicago nightmare that very first night. I dreamed I was on the Dan Ryan Expressway and all the other cars were being driven by the Grim Reaper and there were no exits, and I had to drive on and on in total exhaustion and I’m halfway to Des Moines when I finally wake up.

  Nightmare No. 1. Others, many others, would follow.

  Chapter 16

  FIRST DAY. November 10,1975. It’s still relatively warm in Chicago. The high is in the 60s that day.

  I have on a blue blazer, khaki slacks, white shirt, red tie, and a pair of Bass Weejuns. I look like I’m going through fraternity rush at the University of Georgia.

  I leave the car for Kay. I took the Clark Street bus. It lets me off near the Sun-Times office, which is just a few steps from the rival Tribune.

  The sports department is on the fourth floor. The first time I had seen it, my feathers had drooped. There was no clearly marked separation between the sports department and the news side—just five rows of desks sitting quite close together, three abreast. My desk was next to the sports rim, which looked exactly like the one at the Journal. I had always wanted my own office at the Journal, but there was only one in the sports department, which was separated from the news side by a waist-high partition, and Bisher had occupied it.

  I take the elevator to the fourth floor and stopped and tell Jim Hoge’s secretary I had arrived.

  “He’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

  I waited thirty minutes. Finally, Hoge walked out, dressed impeccably as always, and stuck out his hand. He smiled and said, “Welcome.”

  He had called a meeting of the sports department to introduce me as the new executive sports editor. The old sports editor (Jim Mullen) believe it or not, was going to stay on until he retired in six months—and would keep the title. Hoge had decided to replace him as the department head, but to let him stay on until his retirement and cover the Chicago Bears football team.

  Here was my staff:

  Bill Gleason: Columnist.

  Tom Fitzpatrick: Columnist

  Jerome Holtzman: Baseball writer

  Joe Goddard: Baseball writer

  Bob Pille: College writer

  Joe Agrella: Horse racing (turf) writer

  Dave Van Dyke: General assignment, tennis

  Lenny Ziehm: Desk and golf

  Marvin Weinstein: Desk, auto racing, and Guild steward

  Joe LaPointe: Desk and general assignment

  Eddie Gold: Desk, hockey writer

  Dave Manthey: High schools

  Don Edwards: Desk, some layout

  Harold Newchurch: Clerk, racing results, and handicapper

  Bob Langer: Photographer

  Emil Stubits: Makeup editor, assigned to the composing room

  Seymour Shub: My assistant

  Lacey J. Banks: Basketball and once-a-week columnist

  Let’s go over them again in more detail:

  —Gleason: Veteran, mid-forties, maybe. Irishman with a temper. Loud, always gesturing with his hands. Cigar always in his mouth. He had asked the paper for more filing cabinets years earlier, but he had been refused. He vowed to pile every piece of mail that came to him on his desk until he got the new space. I couldn’t see him over the ten-year-old mountain of paper. I knew he was in the office and at his desk only by the blue smoke from his cigar that rose over the pile.

  He was from the South Side of Chicago, and South Siders were a proud group. He didn’t like anything about the North Side, particularly the Cubs. He preferred the South Side White Sox. He often wrote in parables. I read Gleason for three years, and I’m not certain I ever had any idea what he was trying to say. I often wondered if it was just me, or whether the readers were puzzled, too.

  —Fitzpatrick: Also Irish. They called him “Fitz.” I would say late thirties. He had won a Pulitzer Prize by running with the gangs the night of the Democratic party riots in 1968 and had filed report after report back as the night wore on. He had a book published that gave examples of his work that night. Brilliant.

  Fitz drank. All newspaper people drank, but Fitz drank a lot, and sort of hung it up after his Pulitzer. You couldn’t fire a Pulitzer Prize winner, so he’d been sent to the sports department to write a sports column. He was supposed to write five days a week. He wrote one occasionally.

  He would come into the office, smelling of a few eye-openers.

  “Got a column today, Fitz?” I would ask.

  “Not today,” he would say.

  “But, Fitz,” I would reply, “you’re supposed to write one five days a week.”

  “I know,” he would say, and sort of look at me with a half-smile.

  I complained about him to Hoge, who chewed him out about a thousand times, but nothing helped. As I said, you don’t fire a Pulitzer Prize winner.

  —Holtzman: A dark, severe man in his late fifties. He was the dean of American baseball writers. He had written a book, No Cheering in the Press Box.

  He never smiled, but he had the keys to Cooperstown. No major leaguer ever got into the Hall of Fame if Holtzman didn’t want him there. He had tremendous sources. He was writing about the fact there would one day be a baseball players’ union and possibly a baseball players’ strike long before anybody else got on the story.

  Despite all this, he was a terrible writer. He wouldn’t talk to anybody and get quotes. Used all the clichés, like circuit-clout, hot corner, keystone. Impossible to deal with.

  —Goddard: He was in his late twenties and eager. He liked the idea of fresh blood taking over. Worked his tail off for me.

  —Pille: Good guy. Had a lot of tremendous Woody Haynes stories.

  —Agrella: I never met him. He was always at the track.

  —Van Dyke: Young, energetic.

  —Ziehm: Young, too. Did some of the layout work for me.

  —Weinstein: I never saw him smile.

  —LaPointe: Another kid who wanted to learn. Give me twelve Joe LaPointes and I’m happy. He wanted to be a hockey writer.

  —Gold: Covered home Black Hawks hockey games. We didn’t spend the money to cover the team on the road. Quiet man in his late thirties. He had that Mr. Peepers look. His older brother had been a doorman in an old Chicago theater, and would slip his little brother in for performances. He had heard Henny Youngman countless times, and knew at least a thousand Henny Youngman jokes. He was a nervous sort of guy, and when he would be typing close to deadline, I could hear him reciting Henny Youngman jokes to himself: “Hear about the shoe store that burned down? Not a sole was saved.”

  —Manthey: Late twenties. Dev
oted to the high school beat. Always covered the International, Chicago’s big dog show. We used to talk a lot about dogs. Dave Manthey was a keeper.

  —Edwards: Desk, some layout work. Quiet. Never gave me any trouble. Always had a couple of pops before he came to work. Fine with me.

  —Newchurch: Young black man. Friendly, always cooperative. He took down the racing results and the following day’s charts. We carried a couple of handicapping boxes on the racing page. One was “Tack Towne.” For months, I thought Tack Towne was a real person. Harold did Tack Towne.

  —Stubits: It was hard to tell how old Emil was. I’d guess late forties. He was a nervous man, too. The composing room will do that to you.

  —Bob Langer: The best newspaper photographer I’d seen since Browny Stephens. Sports Illustrated had tried to hire him for years.

  —Shub: He was near retirement age, too. They called him “Sandy.” He was a Jewish guy from Skokie. I would have never made it without him. He had basically been running the department for the old sports editor. He handled the expense accounts, made out the week’s work schedule, argued with Weinstein, the Guild steward, and usually put out the day’s first edition, the Green, which hit the street around four in the afternoon for commuters going back out to the suburbs.

  He had arthritis. At times, I don’t see how he held a pencil. His hands shook. But he worked harder than anybody. I was constantly amazed at his energy.

  —Banks: Black man in his late twenties. Hoge had hired him from Kansas City and had given him the Bulls beat. The Sun-Times had put in an affirmative-action policy, and Lacey was a beneficiary of it.

  The Sun-Times had a large black readership, and the Bulls had a large black following, yet there were no black sports columnists in any major newspapers. Lacey was given a once-a-week column, with his picture, and the Sun-Times even took out a front-page ad on the cover of the industry’s Bible, Editor and Publisher, to publicize his column.

  He was also a lay Baptist minister. He had a strong, resonant voice. Lacey J. Banks would be my second Chicago nightmare.

  Hoge called the meeting in a conference room at the Sun-Times. Each member of the staff was there, with the exception of Joe Agrella. He was somewhere writing about hay-eaters.

  Hoge introduced me. He gave them my background. Then he turned it over to me.

  I stood up before the troops, stared into the empty eyes before me. I was nervous and unsteady. The sweat began to pour out. I said that I was happy to be at the Sun-Times, that I wanted to improve it and make it a big-league section as I knew it could be, and a few other clichés. Then I asked if anybody had any questions. Nobody did.

  Then I gave them a few thoughts about what I might do—improve the graphics, work on better writing, do more in-depth and offbeat features. Save for my words, God, was it quiet in that room.

  After that, I named a few of the sports sections that really impressed me around the country: the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Louisville Courier-Journal. I asked, “Can anybody here add to that list or make a comment?”

  Nothing. I was inside the Tomb of the Unknown Sportswriter.

  Hoge saw the trouble I was in and saved me. “Well, if nobody has anything else, let’s go back to work,” he said.

  The schedule went like this:

  Seymour Shub and a few others reported to work around ten in the morning on weekdays. Shub would get the layouts for the next day’s paper and begin work on the Green edition. During baseball season, we always tried to get a Cubs final for the commuters if they were playing a home game.

  Those working nights reported in the late afternoon and then produced three other morning editions. What was easier about Chicago was that it was in the Central time zone. East Coast games were mostly over by nine-thirty, and West Coast results were in a couple of hours later. There wasn’t nearly the panic we had in the Atlanta composing room to get in games finishing near deadline.

  What I also liked was that the Sun-Times was a tabloid. It made laying out the paper easier, because it didn’t take as many elements to finish a page.

  Surprisingly, I would have none of the problems in the Sun-Times composing room that I had had in Atlanta. Not only did the pages come together more quickly, but the printers were more cooperative and more willing to work as well. It was the newsroom union, or Guild, that would cause me the most headaches in Chicago. The only labor problem involving the Journal had been the Bill Clark case. But members of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which included members of the Sun-Times sports staff, were fiercely union. There was not one second’s extra work without overtime.

  It was a completely new experience for me, one nobody spoke with me about or explained to me before I came to work. I was naive and ill-prepared for a problem that arose my first week at the paper, one I would have to deal with, in some fashion, during my entire career in Chicago.

  The first time I put out the green edition, I did something that would play a major role in what was about to happen. I got the edition in on time. I was experimenting with cleaner-looking, vertical layouts. I had reduced the size of the sports logo, which seemed to be about the size of Kansas when I got there.

  The back page of the Sun-Times was the front page of sports. You read the section from the back toward the middle, which took a bit of getting used to. But what I liked about dealing with the tabloid open-page front (or back, if you want to get technical) is that, in many ways, it was designed like a magazine cover.

  I thought the sports front had been much too cluttered, so I began reducing the number of articles that started there. I wanted one major headline, a large photo, and then other smaller heads, teasing to stories inside.

  You know the tabloids at the grocery stores that feature headlines screaming, “NAZI ASTRONAUTS RETURN TO EARTH?” That’s what I wanted, as far as packaging went. I wasn’t about to put a head out there that read, “NEW CUBS MANAGER FROM MARS,” but I would go with a huge Langer action photo, and a big headline screaming, “CUBS SWEEP REDS.” Done neatly, a tabloid page can get much more immediate attention from a reader than a broadsheet with seven or eight smaller elements on a page. That made things easier in the composing room, as well. Pages came together much faster than they had in Atlanta where the papers were broadsheets, wider and longer pages than tabloids.

  When I returned to the rim after the Green closed, I did what I always did when I had worked the slot. I found myself a large wastebasket. Then I cleared off every piece of paper that was still on the rim, so it would be neat for the person who was putting out the next edition. There would be leftover copy, leftover local copy, rejected headlines, full ashtrays, rejected photos that didn’t make the first edition. I would do sort of a sweep with my forearm and dump it all into the wastebasket.

  The trouble started the first week. Shub had put out the Green. Lenny Ziehm had come in to work the night desk. When the Green arrived on my desk, I looked through it and came upon the once-a-week Lacey Banks column.

  It was something about a couple of newsboys. There were religious references. I’m thinking, They’re letting this sort of thing in the paper? It had little or nothing to do with sports. The writing was cumbersome. I didn’t get the point of the column.

  I sat down with Shub and Ziehm to plan the rest of the night. “Take that Banks column out of the paper,” I said.

  I could see shock fall over the faces of both Shub and Ziehm.

  “Are you sure?” asked Shub.

  “We aren’t supposed to touch Lacey’s column,” said Ziehm.

  Not supposed to touch it? Since when did a beat writer get to write a once-a-week column the executive sports editor couldn’t touch?

  “Shouldn’t you ask Hoge or Otwell first?” Shub continued.

  “Just throw the column out,” I said. “It stinks.”

  I was at my desk the following morning. Lacey J. Banks walked over and said he wanted a word with me. I said, “Sure.” He wanted to know why his column h
adn’t been in the morning edition.

  “I didn’t like it,” I said.

  He asked why.

  I said it really didn’t have anything to do with sports, I didn’t want my writers expressing their religious beliefs on the sports page, and that I hadn’t understood the point of the column.

  “Why wasn’t I told the column wasn’t going to be in last night?” Lacey went on.

  I said I didn’t have time to track him down last night.

  He walked away. I thought nothing more of our conversation.

  The next morning when I returned to work there was a pink memo slip in my mail slot. It was from Lacey J. Banks.

  What the memo said was he thought I had killed the column because of a racial motive. He said nobody ever killed a column by Gleason or Fitzpatrick, who were white. He said the column made perfect sense. He demanded it be placed in the next day’s editions.

  I’m thinking, What?

  Racially motivated? I hadn’t cared if Lacey Banks were orange, the column still stank and had no business in a major-league sports section.

  I wondered if the fact I was from Atlanta had anything to do with this. I figured it had. It was a neat story: White racist from South kills black man’s column.

  I decided I would explain to Lacey how wrong that was. But before I could get a chance to, Hoge brought me in a copy of a local black-owned newspaper. A columnist had written a piece about the column being killed. Lacey Banks was quoted as saying he thought I was racist.

  Hoge said, “We’ve got to handle this.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “If we allow him to get away with this, then it will send a message to the staff that you’re weak.”