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Chapter 2

IF IT HADN’T BEEN for my Uncle Grover, who married my mother’s sister, Aunt Jessie, I could have wound up in any number of careers other than newspapering. The fact I give my Uncle Grover credit for getting me started toward the profession I chose is a little strange when I tell you Uncle Grover, oddly enough, was illiterate.

Uncle Grover had grown up hard and poor and had gone to work in a cotton mill in Carroll County, Georgia, when he was ten, and he never really escaped.

He married my Aunt Jessie in the thirties and moved to the next county and tiny Moreland, Georgia, in the early fifties. They had four children by this time, and both worked in the Moreland Knitting Mill, which produced women’s hosiery. Aunt Jessie sat at a sewing machine ten hours a day for a pittance and Uncle Grover was in charge of keeping whatever machinery there is in a knitting mill in running order. Uncle Grover may not have been able to read or write, but he could take apart most any machine and put it back together again with all of the parts in the same position as they were when he started. This is a gift.

People came to my Uncle Grover from all over the county to have him work on their tractors, trucks, automobiles, and power lawn mowers, which is another story. I’m not sure when power lawn mowers were invented, but one didn’t appear in Moreland until the late 1950s. Boyce Kilgore ordered one from Sears and Roebuck. It had a rope crank to it and an adjustable blade (it went up and down). You still had to push it, like the mowers of old, but the engine made a nice sound and it cut more evenly than the powerless mowers and Boyce said it made cutting the grass a real pleasure.

He shouldn’t have said that, because everybody took him literally and began offering him the opportunity to cut lawns all over town.

He also inherited the grass-cutting job at both the Methodist and Baptist churches, not to mention both parsonages.

Boyce finally admitted to Loot Starkins he was, and I quote him, “goddamn tired of cutting every goddamn blade of goddamn grass in this goddamn town,” and Loot said, “Hell, Boyce, that’s what you get for thinking you’re better than everybody else and going out and buying yourself a power lawn mower.”

What all that has to do with my Uncle Grover is beyond me, except that Boyce’s power lawn mower did quit running one day, and Uncle Grover offered to fix it for him, but Boyce said, “Goddamnit, Grover, you put one hand on that goddamn power lawn mower and your ass is mine.”

Boyce never did have his power mower repaired until three or four others had popped up around town, and he could pass on his heavy grass-cutting duties to somebody else.

Uncle Grover’s mechanical sense actually came close to making him rich. I know very little about machines, so I can’t be specific here, but Uncle Grover tinkered around with one of the machines at the hosiery mill and altered it so it would do approximately twice the work it was doing before in half the time.

Before you knew it, all sorts of big businessmen and slick-talking lawyers descended upon Uncle Grover. And this confused him greatly. He’d had so little in his life, and now he was getting offers of thousands of dollars for the rights to his invention.

It was unfortunate that Uncle Grover was illiterate, because what eventually happened was he sold the rights to his invention to a big cotton man from Memphis for a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Memphis went on to make millions from Uncle Grover’s genius.

But Uncle Grover did take some of his money and spent it on two things he wanted all his adult life—a new Pontiac and a trip to the Kentucky Derby. Nobody, not even Aunt Jessie, knew Uncle Grover cared anything for thoroughbred racing, but it turned out that he did, and he and Aunt Jessie drove the new Pontiac to Louisville for the Derby.

Uncle Grover never would say if he won any money betting at the Derby, but did tell everybody about the motel he and Aunt Jessie stayed in outside Chattanooga that had a bed that would vibrate if you put a quarter in the slot on the night table and about how smoothly the Pontiac ran.

After he returned from the Derby, Uncle Grover went back to the knitting mill and resumed his duties, making sure the machines he invented that made the guy in Memphis filthy rich operated properly. Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie never moved out of the house they were living in before the twenty-five big ones, and Uncle Grover was still driving the ’54 Pontiac when he died in the late sixties.

Now, how Uncle Grover had a part in starting me toward journalism:

My parents separated when I was six, and my mother and I moved in with her parents in Moreland. My grandparents lived next door to Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie.

My grandfather was still able to farm twelve acres back then, and certain agricultural chores were placed upon me even at my tender age.

I was in charge of gathering the eggs from the henhouse in the morning, rain or shine. That wouldn’t have been such a difficult task had it not been for the fact my grandfather’s rooster, Garland, didn’t like me. The minute I would set foot in the henhouse, Garland would charge at me. Six-year-old boys aren’t that much bigger than a rooster. I had to gather the eggs while defending myself from a crazed rooster with my legs, my hands being occupied with the eggs, of course.

“Get back, you goddamn rooster!” I screamed out one morning, unaware that my grandmother, a foot-washing Baptist, was in earshot. After a fifteen-minute sermon, based on the Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” my grandmother cut a switch off a small tree and thrashed me severely.

“When you say your prayers tonight,” she scolded me, “you must ask God to forgive you for what I heard you say in the henhouse.”

That night I prayed, “I’m sorry I said what I did in the henhouse, and would you please kill that goddamn rooster for me?”

Garland, however, was the Methuselah of roosters. I forget the exact year he died, but he outlived all the hens and two of my dogs.

The henhouse experience was enough to sour me against agriculture, but there were other things that made me even more certain I wanted no part of any career that had to do with dirt and attack roosters.

I had to pull corn one Saturday morning. There I was, relaxing with a bowl of Rice Krispies, when my grandfather said, “I need you to help me pull corn this morning.”

Corn doesn’t want to be pulled. It’s more stubborn than a rooster protecting his harem. Ears of corn grow on the cornstalks, and the idea is to separate the ears from the stalks. Mr. T. probably wouldn’t have any trouble pulling corn, because he can lift a Roto-Rooter van. But not me. I was a small, thin boy and my hands developed blisters and my grandfather said things like, “You’ll never make a good farmer if you don’t learn how to pull corn.”

“If he thinks I’m going to be a farmer,” I said to myself, “he is sadly mistaken, e-i-e-i-o.”

I won’t go into all the stuff about shelling butter beans and digging up potatoes and planting tomatoes and going out, as they said in those days, to pick a mess of turnip greens. Simply know that as I hurried toward an age that included double figures, I was certain agriculture wasn’t in my future.

Some might tell a youngster that he doesn’t have to pick a career until he’s older, but that’s wrong. The earlier you decide what you are going to do in life, the bigger head start you get in pursuit of same.

My father had been a soldier, but I didn’t want to be a soldier. All that marching. My mother was a schoolteacher, but I didn’t want any part of that, either. Imagine having to go to school every day for your entire life.

I toyed with the idea of driving a train for a while. The Crescent Limited ran through Moreland between Atlanta and New Orleans on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad, and it seemed all the guy who drove the train had to do was sit there and blow the horn. I mean, you didn’t have to learn a lot about steering.

After that, I considered opening a truck stop. The only businesses Moreland had was the knitting mill, Cureton and Cole’s store, Bohannon’s Service Station, Johnson’s Service Station and Grocery Store, the Our House beer joint, and Steve Smith’s truck stop.

A boy could learn a lot in a place like Steve Smith’s truck stop. Steve was sweet on my mother, I think, and before she remarried (another guy), she would take me down to Steve’s for a cheeseburger. We’d sit in one of the booths, and I’d eat while Steve and my mother would talk.

Among the wonders I saw at Steve’s was a pinball machine that truckers would pour dime after dime into. I didn’t know it at the time, but Steve paid off on the pinball machines. Let’s say you aligned three balls, you won twenty free games. Steve paid a dime for each free game. The more dimes you put into the machine, the more free games you would win. Legend had it a man driving for Yellow Freight scored two thousand free games one night and won two hundred dollars. That legend brought truckers in by the droves, and Steve was just sitting there talking to my mother getting rich while truckers fed his pinball machine because of the two-thousand-free-game rumor. Advertising, false or otherwise, pays.

There was also one of those beer signs in Steve’s where the little strands of color danced across the sign.

“How does that work?” I asked Steve one night.

“It’s magic, kid,” he said, and went back to talking to my mother.

I went to the rest room one night at Steve’s and noticed a strange machine on the wall. There was a place to put a quarter for what was described on the machine as a “Ribbed French-Tickler—Drive Her Wild.”

My mother wouldn’t allow me near the pinball machines, but here was my chance to do a little gambling on my own. I happened to have a quarter, which I put in the slot. Lo and behold, I won. I received a small package and immediately opened it. There was a balloon inside. I filled it with air, tied a knot on the end, and walked out with it.

“Look, Mom,” I said. “I put a quarter in the machine and got this balloon.”

“Gimme that,” said Steve, trying to take my balloon away. He ordered the waitress to bring me another Coke. In addition to the balloon, I also got a Coke out of the deal, so I figured the quarter had been well invested.

After the urge to open a truck stop when I grew up passed, I even had a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a minister. My grandmother was always talking about her sister’s boy, Arnold, who “made a preacher.”

I wondered, how hard could it be being a preacher? You figure there’s Wednesday night prayer meeting, then the Sunday service. Throw in a few weddings and funerals here and there, and that’s about it. Also, somebody would always be trying to get you over to their house to eat, and nobody serves anything bad to eat to preachers. Plus, you’d never have to cut your own grass.

Only a few days into my thoughts of become a minister, however, an older cousin explained to me a minister wasn’t allowed to do all the things I was looking forward to doing when I became an adult. Namely, drinking, smoking, cussing whenever you wanted to, and, since by that time I had learned what the balloon in the machine at Steve’s truck stop was all about, I figured preachers likely would be denied that little pearl, too. I got off the minister thing in a hurry.

At this point, we finally have arrived at where this chapter was headed. I tend to run on now and then, but that is called “expanding a theme,” which really is nothing more than vamping, which is nothing more than stalling, for which I apologize. But it has always been one of my weaknesses. I showed up at all three of my marriages late and, as a writer, I am notorious for putting off projects for as long as I possibly can. I should have written this book, for instance, five or six years ago, but I stalled, hoping someone else would do one of those unauthorized biographies of me and include all this, so I could stall around on something else.

I’m doing it again.

As I said, Uncle Grover couldn’t read. But each day when he and Aunt Jessie left the mill to drive home for lunch, a quarter-mile away, they would stop by the post office, which was next to the knitting mill. There they would stop to pick up their mailed morning edition of the Atlanta Constitution and bring it home with them at lunch. Atlanta was a lot farther from Moreland back then than it is now.

When I was ten, it was at least five thousand miles to Atlanta, because I knew my chances of ever getting there were quite slim. Today, it’s thirty-five minutes by interstate. My grandmother’s yard looks a lot smaller to me when I see it now, too, so you know what time does to a lot of things. Shrinks them.

By the time I was ten, my brain was well on its way to being consumed by baseball. A lot of boys are like that, of course, but I may have gone to extremes heretofore unachieved. I never actually ate a baseball, or any other piece of baseball equipment, but I did sleep with the baseball my grandfather gave me for my birthday, and probably the only reason I didn’t eat it was I knew my grandfather certainly was not a man of means and might have had a difficult time replacing it with any sense of dispatch.

There was a marvelous baseball team in Atlanta when I was ten. They were the Atlanta Crackers. For years, I thought they were named the Crackers because they had to do with, well, crackers.

Later, I would learn that the term came from the fact Georgians were bad to carry around whips in the days of Jim Crow and slavery. And whips go “crack,” and, thus, the name of the ball team. But at ten, in 1956, my world was an almost totally isolated one, and I finally decided the name had something to do with saltines, but I didn’t have time to figure out exactly why or how.

How I came to fall in love with the Atlanta Crackers, I just remembered, should have come earlier, but remember my admissions about stalling.

Remember the part about Uncle Grover getting the twenty-five big ones for diddling with the machine at the knitting mill and how he bought a new Pontiac and took Jessie to the Kentucky Derby?

Well, that’s not all he did. He also bought the first television set in Moreland. When word got out, people came from as far away as Grantville, Luthersville, and Corinth to get a glimpse of Uncle Grover’s and Aunt Jessie’s amazing box. It had about an eight-inch screen, if I recall correctly, and you had to sit real close if you wanted to see any detail, such as whether or not someone on the screen actually had a head. The adults would watch John Cameron Swayze on the national news and Vernon Niles, who claimed to be his second cousin from Corinth, would always say, “If that’s John Cameron’s head, I’ve seen better hair on fatback.”

Even my grandmother became interested in television once she witnessed TV Ranch, a musical show that came on an Atlanta station each day at noon.

TV Ranch featured Boots and Woody Woodall singing country music as well as a comedian named Horsehair Buggfuzz, who probably said a lot of funny things, but I can’t remember any of them.

What my grandmother enjoyed most about TV Ranch was the closing number, which featured Boots and Woody in the day’s “song of inspiration.”

This was your basic hymn, like “Rock of Ages,” “Precious Memories,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (I’ll Be There),” or “Shall We Gather at the River?” But every now and then, they’d sing a comedy-hymn Horsehair Buggfuzz wrote, like “When the Lord Calls Me Home, I Hope Mildred Haines Ain’t on the Party Line, ‘Cause He’ll Never Get Through If She Is.”

The second most endearing thing to me about Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie’s television was Lucky 11 Theatre, which featured a western movie each afternoon at five.

Johnny Mack Brown would walk into a crowded saloon and say, at the top of his lungs, “I’ll have a milk!” which always seemed to me to be inviting trouble.

In the first place, if it was milk he wanted, why did he go into a saloon? I would spend a great amount of time in saloons later in my life, and I don’t remember anybody ever walking in and ordering a glass of milk, although I did know an old trombone player once who drank scotch and milk. After a few drinks, he’d play air trombone, which I like to think of as spiritual father to the air guitar.

Why didn’t Johnny Mack Brown hit a convenience store if he wanted milk? Oh, there weren’t any convenience stores in the Old West. There were all those cows, though. If Johnny Mack had wanted milk so badly, he could simply have pulled one off of the range somewhere and self-served himself all the milk he wanted.

But no. Johnny Mack Brown had to walk into a crowded saloon where there were always ornery galoots.

As soon as he’d order the milk, the piano player would stop playing, the dance-hall girls would stop dancing, and a cowboy in a black hat at the bar would say, “Give ’im a shot of red-eye, Sam.” (All bartenders in old western movies were named Sam.) “He needs a little hair on his chest.”

Johnny Mack Brown, who had been a famous football player at the University of Alabama, would say something akin to, “If it’s all the same to you, padnuh, I think I’ll just stick to my milk.”

It never was the same to the guy in the black hat, and a fight would always ensue in which thousands of dollars of damage would be done to the saloon. Nobody had insurance back then, either, is my guess.

All western movies also ended with the grandfather of the automobile chase scene. The star, whether he be Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Lash LaRue, the Durango Kid, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Gunther Toody (Forget him. He wasn’t a cowboy. I just tossed him in to see if you were paying attention.), Tom Mix, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, ad cowboyseam, would chase down the bad guy in the last moments of the movie and jump off his horse, taking the bad guy off his.

They would then tumble down a hill like a couple of tumbling tumbleweeds, and once they had stopped tumbling, would get up and fight. The Johnny Mack Browns would always win.

There was also the question of the six-shooter that would shoot 408 rounds of ammunition without needing to be reloaded, but there weren’t any Siskels and Eberts in those days to point out such obvious flaws in such films, which is what people who think they are better than everybody else call movies.

Okay, so we got through a headless John Cameron Swayze, Horsehair Buggfuzz, and Lucky 11 Theatre. Let us continue. The Atlanta Crackers, powers of the Class AA Southern Association, often had their games broadcast on television from their home field, hallowed be its name, Ponce de Leon Park, which Atlantans pronounced “Pontz dee Lee-ahn,” as in “Pontz dee Lee-ahn Russell,” the singer.

I could sit in my aunt and uncle’s house and watch my beloved Crackers, nearly all of whom I still remember.

There was Bob Montag (known affectionately as “Der Tag”) Corky Valentine, Poochie Hartsfield, Sammy Meeks, Earl Hersh, Ben Downs, Jack Daniel, not to mention Buck Riddle, a great first baseman. I have spent many hours in recent years with Buck, and I beg him for stories of the Southern Association, the games they played, the women they loved, the whiskey they drank, and the trains they rode.

The Southern Association in those days included the Crackers, the Birmingham Barons, the Mobile Bears, the New Orleans Pelicans, the Little Rock Travelers, the Memphis Chicks, the Nashville Vols, and the Chattanooga Lookouts, who were run by a man named Joe Engel who once traded a shortstop for a turkey.

I eventually would make it to Ponce de Leon Park to see the Crackers in person—and to eat a marvelous ice-cream treat they had there known as a vanilla custard—but television gave me enough to make me want to know and see even more.

The left-field fence at Poncey went as far as left center; then there was an open area that led to a terrace where there grew a magnificent magnolia tree. What a tree. A Cracker center fielder named Country Brown had become a legend by going, yea unto the base of the magnolia tree, to haul in fly balls.

There was a row of signs that was the right-field barrier. Above it sat a high bank that led up to the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, where the northbound Silver Comet, bound for Washington and New York, would pass sometime around the bottom of the first inning.

The Crackers were known as the Yankees of the Minors. I eventually would read somewhere that they had the most league championships of any minor-league franchise in the country, and I just thought of some more names:

Bob Thorpe, Bob Sadowski, Buddy Bates, the manager, Beans Hadley, the groundskeeper, Ken McKenzie, Don Nottebart, Ray Moore, the TV announcer, and Hank (the Prank) Morgan who did the radio play-by-play, recreating the road games by tape.

It was the television that summoned me first to the Crackers, but it was that copy of the Constitution Aunt Jessie and Uncle Grover brought home each day at noon that sustained my interest and affection. And one day, when I was reading of a Cracker sweep of a doubleheader in faraway Little Rock, it finally occurred to me:

The guy who wrote the story I was reading got to go to all the Cracker games, home and away, and ride trains, and actually got paid for doing it. What a revelation! My life set its course at that very moment.

I would be a sportswriter! Wasn’t I sitting in my aunt’s living room with my grandmother as she watched TV Ranch, and didn’t I arise and declare, “Mama Willie! I’ve decided I want to be a sportswriter!”

And did she say, “Hush, Boots and Woody are about to sing ‘Beulah Land,’ ” or did she say, “So that means you’re not going to make a preacher?,” or did she ask, “What’s a sportswriter?”

I honestly can’t remember, but from that day I had but one ambition, and that was to be the guy who covered the Atlanta Crackers, home and away, rode trains, and got paid for it.

There was something about that newspaper. Something that said to me it knew everything that was happening in the whole world but would kindly share it with me.

I cannot describe the anticipation I felt during the summers as I waited for Uncle Grover to drive into his driveway in the Pontiac with that paper.

I would begin my daily paper watch about eleven-thirty. It would seem a lifetime until a few minutes from noon when I would see Uncle Grover’s Pontiac heading down the street.

Aunt Jessie usually held the paper, while Uncle Grover drove the car. She would never make it into her house with the paper, however. I would meet her as she stepped out of the car, and she would hand over that precious folding of newsprint.

I must mention The Atlanta Journal here, as well. The Constitution and the Journal were both owned by the Cox family of Ohio. The Journal was the afternoon paper.

My friend Bob Entrekin’s father took the Journal, which I always read when I went to visit my friend.

I didn’t understand how newspapers worked at that point, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Journal because it had all the stories and box scores from night games that the early edition of the Constitution didn’t have.

What I didn’t know was the early edition of the Constitution closed before night games were finished, but the Journal didn’t close until the next moning.

I also became quite found of the Journal because the sports section included sports editor Furman Bisher’s column. It was funny. It was biting. It was a daily treasure. I made up my mind that when I became a sportswriter, I would write like Furman Bisher, and if it ever came down to a choice, I would rather work for the Journal than for the Constitution. You have to work out the details of your career early.

The odd thing is, now that I look back, after making my decision as to what to do with my life, it really wasn’t that difficult achieving it. Maybe it’s because I was just lucky. Maybe it’s because my decision was just so right. I don’t really know. I do know that most everything that has happened to me afterward in the newspaper business has felt natural and that must mean something.

My first sportswriting job came when I was ten. Moreland and the surrounding hamlets had no organized Little League program, as they did in the county seat of Newnan, where the well-to-do, not to mention the pretty-well-to-do, all lived. Out in the county, we were not-well-to-do-by-any-means.

What happened when I was ten was that the Baptist churches in the county decided to start a baseball league for boys. I was a Methodist at the time, but I showed up at the very next Baptist baptismal and was immersed in the name of the Lord, as well as in the name of a nicely turned double play or a line drive in the gap between left and center.

I was a pitcher. When our coach asked me, “What position do you play?” I simply said, “I am a pitcher,” and that was that.

It also occurred to me it would be a fine thing to have the results of our league printed in the local weekly, the Newnan Times Herald, which always carried all sorts of news about the fancy-ass Newnan Little League, where all the teams actually had uniforms. They also got a new baseball for every game.

For the first time in my life, I attempted a phone deal. I called the editor of the paper and told him of my desire that he run results of my baseball league.

The Times-Herald did run bits of news from the outlying areas, normally in a column under a thrilling heading that read, “News from the Moreland Community,” which would be followed by something along the lines of the following:

Mr. and Mrs. Hoke Flournoy were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Lon Garpe at their lovely double-wide home, located in the Bide-A-Wee Trailer park, Sunday afternoon. Iced tea was served and a watermelon was cut.

Miss Jeanine Potts visited her mother, Elvira Potts, this weekend. Jeanine is currently a student at the Kut ‘N’ Kurl beauty school in Macon. Jeanine said Macon is a nice place to visit, but she was having troubles meeting fellow Christians.

Hardy Mixon and his wife, Flora, have returned home after their vacation to Panama City, Florida. Hardy said he enjoyed the air conditioning in the motel, the Sun ‘N’ Surf, but that Flora made him turn it down because it made her feet cold.

Narkin Gaines caught a possum last week and promptly ate it.

Brother Sims, the Baptist preacher, brought us a lovely message Sunday morning at the worship hour concerning the coveting of thy neighbor’s ass.

As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult a proposition talking the paper’s editor into carrying the results of our games.

“You get ’em to us by Tuesday,” he said, “and we’ll have ’em in the paper on Thursday.”

I had my very first sportswriting job. And the very first week, I ran into my very first journalism ethics problem. In Moreland’s opener, I happened to no-hit Macedonia Baptist in a 14-0 rout in which Dudley Stamps hit three home runs.

We hosted the opening tilt (“tilt” being one of the first sportswriting clichés I ever learned). For some reason, “tilt” can be used as a replacement for “game,” “contest,” or “showdown.” At the field behind the Moreland school, which had no fences, Dudley hit three shots into the patch of kudzu in deep left, and by the time they found the balls, he was already back on the bench pulling on a bottle of Birley’s orange drink.

I had results of other league games phoned in to me, but there wasn’t much there in the Arnco-Sargent vs. Corinth, well, tilt. They had to end the game after four innings, with Corinth ahead, 11–7, when various cows from a pasture that bordered the ballfield broke through a barbed-wire fence and into the outfield, which they left unfit for further play.

In the Grantville-Mills Chapel engagement (I was learning more clichés by the moment), the only thing that happened that was the slightest bit interesting was that a stray dog had wandered onto the field, chased down a ball that got through the Grantville defense, and tried to run away with it. The dog was finally caught by the Grantville shortstop, who would become the league’s fastest man and most prolific scorer, but by that time, the dog had gnawed several of the stitches off.

Since that was the only ball anybody had, they had to finish the game with it, and by the end of the sixth inning, it resembled a rotten peach more than a baseball. The game ended in a 8–8 tie, and Jake Bradbury, who owned the dog, was told to keep it penned during future games.

Clearly, my no-hitter was the big news, but should the lead of my first sports story feature my own exploits?

Later, I would learn journalism ethics were nebulous, to say the least, so I followed my developing nose for news and went with the following:

Brilliant Moreland right-hander Lewis Grizzard, in his first start in organized baseball, baffled the visiting Macedonia Baptist nine Saturday afternoon with a no-hitter. Dudley Stamps, in a lesser role, had three home runs in the 14-0 romp.

Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie also took the weekly Times-Herald. When they brought it home at Thursday noon, I opened it even before the Constitution. Besides, the Cracker game had been on television the night before, so I’d seen little Ernie Oravetz lead the Chattanooga Lookouts to an easy 9–4 victory.

I will never forget gazing upon my name appearing in a newspaper for the first time. In fact, my name appeared in the newspaper for the first time three times.

The headline read:

“MORELAND’S LEWIS GRIZZARD

NO-HITS MACEDONIA 14 – 0”

Then came my byline:

By LEWIS GRIZZARD.

Then came the lead of my story, “Brilliant Moreland right-hander Lewis Grizzard . . .”

I had also mentioned my heroic exploits to the lady who wrote the column about who had iced tea and watermelon with whom, in hopes she might also make mention of my no-hit game. But she said she ran out of space because there was so much to tell about the Women’s Bible class taking a trip to an all-night gospel singing in Grantville that featured LeRoy Abernathy and Shorty Bradford (known as “the Happy Two”), as well as the Sunshine Boys, the Blackman Brothers Quartet, and a little blind girl who sang “Just as I Am.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that lineup.

Despite that, I still broke into organized baseball and sportswriting in a big way, and I would wonder afterward if there was a possibility I might play for the Crackers when I grew up and also cover the games and get paid by the Constitution.

My dream of pitching professionally, however, came to an abrupt end my senior year in high school. They bused those of us out in the county to Newnan High School.

It was my final game as a Newnan High baseball player. We were playing mighty Griffin. We led 3–2 in the bottom of the sixth when I faced the Griffin catcher, who, with two outs and the bases loaded, looked about twenty-five years old.

I had whiffed the Griffin catcher in two previous plate appearances with slow curveballs. Now I worked the count to two balls, two strikes. My coach called time and came to the mound.

“Grizzard,” he said, “don’t throw this guy another one of those slow curveballs. He’s seen too many of them already.”

What did he know? The slow curve was my out pitch. The slow curve to me was what a piano had been to Mozart, a rifle to Davey Crockett, a tank to George Patton.

The Griffin catcher dug in, and I delivered that tantalizing dipsydo of mine.

Are you familiar with the term “hanging curveball”? Mine not only hung, it actually stopped directly over the plate and waited for the Griffin catcher to hit it.

After the game, which we had lost 6–3, I asked my left fielder, “Did you have any chance to catch that ball the Griffin catcher hit?”

He said, “No, but I did manage to get a brief glance at it as it was leaving the planet.”

So, no offers of a professional contract or a college baseball scholarship were forthcoming, but I still had my dream of being a sportswriter. At least you didn’t sweat as much up in the press box as you did down on the field actually playing the game.

My journalism career stalled for a time after I got too old to play ball for the Baptists and report on my heroics on the mound for Moreland.

I was quite frustrated by this, especially during my first two years in high school where they tried to teach me such things as algebra.

Why should I have to take algebra? I asked myself. How on earth will I ever use it as a sportswriter? Did Red Smith have to go study algebra? I should be taking courses on wordsmithing and how to turn in an expense account after a road trip to Little Rock.

They tried to teach me biology, too, but I resisted. When it came time to dissect a dead frog, I refused on the basis that I might throw up during the procedure and that since I had no interest whatsoever in becoming a doctor, a veterinarian, or frogologist, I should be allowed to go to the library and read some Victor Hugo.

I was lying about reading Victor Hugo, in case you couldn’t tell. What I really wanted to do, since it was September, was to go get the Constitution they kept in the library and read the sports papers to brush up on my clichés.

My biology teacher thought about my proposal for a second and then issued the command, “Cut.”

As I made my initial incision into Mr. Dead Frog, fighting back the gag reflex, the thought occurred to me, How does the school get its hands on all these croaked croakers? There was probably no place you can order them from, or was there? I made myself a mental note to check the phone book when I got home to see if there was somebody in the business of selling dead frogs to schools for tenth-graders to mutilate.

What if there was no such place? Then how did the school get their frogs? Does the biology teacher call up the chemistry teacher and one of the assistant football coaches late in the summer and say, “Hey, guys, it’s almost time for school, how about helping me go out and get some frogs?” Then do they go out to a pond somewhere, sneak up on a bunch of frogs, catch them, and put them in a sack? And if they do that, how do they kill them? Or do they put them into jars of formaldehyde while they’re still alive?

Just then, my biology teacher walked behind and asked, “How’s it going?”

“I’m on my way to the stomach right now,” I answered. “By the way, how did you get your hands on all these dead frogs?”

The question obviously made my biology teacher uncomfortable. He stammered around with an answer for a couple of seconds and then said, “Keep cutting.”

Hmmmmm. So, there was something fishy (we also had to cut up a perch one day) going on here after all.

There were two things I noticed about myself at that point.

One, I obviously was a budding animal-rights activist and, two, I just as obviously had what every newspaperperson should have—the proverbial “nose for news.”

I also discovered something else about my nose. It didn’t like smelling formaldehyde and dead frogs. Before I finished my dissection, I did have to be excused while I went to the boys’ room and threw up. I also swore to myself I’d never eat frog legs, which brought up another question: What do they do with the rest of the frog when they take off his legs for frying?

I was a deep thinker as a young man.

Anyway, algebra, biology, chemistry, geometry, and such were quite unappealing to me during my formative years. I did like some history, especially the part about George Washington slipping out his window at night during rainstorms in order to rendezvous with one of his slave girls and subsequently catching a cold and dying.

You didn’t know about that? It was in all the papers.

That was when I realized something else about myself: I really like famous people being involved in scandals, which is an explanation of why I thought the Rob Lowe thing was the best story to come out of the 1988 Democratic Convention.

I did pay a great deal of attention in English class, however. I was learning my craft there. I probably—no, I was—the best diagramer of sentences in the history of Newnan High School. I didn’t care how long or how complex the sentence, if it could be diagramed, I could diagram it in a matter of seconds.

I originally thought this rare ability might get me some girls, but it didn’t.

I was fascinated by grammar. I thrilled at the term “antecedent.” I was Mr. Appositive. And how could anybody be interested in delving into the innards of a dead frog when there were onomatopoeia, hyperbole, similies, and metaphors to be studied?

And English literature. I dived deeply into the satirical writings of H. H. Munro (the biting “Saki”). And Thurber’s visit to the bank. And “Quoth the raven” and “Me and my Anabelle Lee.” I even enjoyed Shakespeare and wondered what he would have written if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. (I probably ought to take a stab at his lead, but to be quite honest, I have forgotten most of what I knew about Shakespeare, and since he was English, he wouldn’t have known very much about baseball in the first place. Plus, if he happened to be working for the sports section of The New York Times, they’d probably have him off somewhere covering a yacht race anyway.)

I read Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Frost and Sandburg. They weren’t that bad to be as old as they were. I also discovered the humor of such writers as S. J. Perelman and Henry Wodehouse. O. Henry was a newspaperman, I learned, and “The Ransom of Red Chief” was my favorite of his works. He played a major role formulating my own style as a columnist. Poor O. Henry had to come up with all those stories on a daily basis. That’s a lot to make up, but I decided if O. Henry could do it, so could I. That’s where I got the inspiration to, when I became a columnist, make up a lot of stuff and never let facts get in the way of a good column.

There were several of my high school teachers who influenced me and inspired me. One of them wasn’t my biology teacher, of course. I have no idea whatever happened to him, but I hope he was eventually arrested for doing something like trying to dissect his neighbor’s cat.

Richard Smith, an English teacher, should be mentioned first. The man loved words and writing as much as I did. One day in the tenth grade, I asked him why my talent with diagraming sentences with such speed and accuracy wasn’t getting me any girls. He answered, “I don’t know.”

This also helped me later in life, because, if you work for a newspaper, people think you know more than they do and they’re always asking you questions like, “Why the hell didn’t Rob Lowe look at the girl’s driver’s license before he started videotaping her lesbian sex acts?”

I was able to answer, “I don’t know,” and not feel guilty about it. Actually, however, I do have an answer to that question, but it didn’t come to me until I’d been asked it a hundred times.

The answer comes from a scene in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack Nicholson, playing the part of a mental patient who had more common sense than his doctor, was being interviewed by a psychiatrist, who brings up the fact Nicholson’s character had an arrest record that included having sex with an underage female.

Nicholson’s excuse for committing such an act was something like, “Doc, when you’re this close to [a part of the female anatomy], you don’t go asking for no driver’s license.”

Richard Smith did more for me than what I just mentioned, of course. He knew of my interest in writing, and one day I asked him another question:

“Do you think when I grow up I can make a living writing?”

He answered, “A meager one, perhaps, but it beats selling shoes, which is what Norman [the Monk] Montgomery is going to wind up doing.”

The Monk was stupid. In fact, he was the only member of my senior class not to graduate on time, which brings up another of my teachers who impressed me, the late Miss Maryella Camp, who taught senior English.

Miss Maryella was an elderly lady. She was quite southern and called everybody “shugars.” She also could recite The Canterbury Tales in the original auld English, and brought the Bard alive for me in her classes. Come to think of it, I probably should have asked Miss Maryella, such an expert on Shakespeare, what his lead might have been if he had covered Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the ’56 World Series. She might have had some idea that I could have used on the previous page where I, instead, copped out.

What Miss Maryella did for me that was most important, however, was to teach me that the best way to deal with stupidity is by the use of humor.

Miss Maryella’s best line had to do with the Monk, as a matter of fact. She was also senior-class sponsor and called us all together as graduation neared.

“Shugahs,” she began, “only one member of the class is not going to be able to graduate—Norman Montgomery.” At this point, the Monk uttered a “god-dammit” under his breath, only the Monk was so stupid he uttered under his breath the way most people screamed, and Miss Maryella heard him. She immediately replied, “Don’t blame Him, shugah, He’s not the one who failed Senior English.”

It would also be a terrible oversight if I didn’t mention Mrs. Sarah Jane Skinner here. I mentioned the fact my career as a journalism practitioner stalled for a time. I picked it up again in the eleventh grade, however. It was eleventh-graders who produced the school newspaper, Tiger Tracks, which ran every Thursday as a part of the Newnan Times-Herald.

If an eleventh-grader wanted to have something to do with the school newspaper, all he or she had to do was go see Mrs. Skinner, who taught a class in journalism and was, quite naturally, the school newspaper’s sponsor.

The first day I was in the eleventh grade, I went to Mrs. Skinner and said if she didn’t let me be sports editor of Tiger Tracks, I was going to write a book one day about my newspaper career, and in the part where I told about how I got started, I was going to write about her as a cruel person who didn’t know a well-written obituary from a dissected dead frog.

That didn’t seem to get her attention, so I told her if I didn’t get the job as sports editor, I was going to kill myself and leave a note saying she was responsible.

She sent me to the principal’s office for being disrespectful to a member of the faculty, but she did give me the job of sports editor. As a result, please notice I am a man of my word and mention her here in favorable terms.

Mrs. Skinner was (and still is, I might add, sticking with favorable) a dark, attractive lady whom students called “Gypsy Woman” behind her back. There was always some discussion as to who was the better looking, Mrs. Skinner or Miss Fleming, the algebra teacher.

I always held out for Mrs. Skinner, on the basis of anybody who would teach algebra for a living would eventually grow old and ugly. I don’t know if Miss Fleming grew old and ugly, and I’m sorry to have to mention her in such a light, but she should have known better than to send me to the board to work out algebra formulas in front of the entire class when my interest in her subject was too small to be represented by any mathematical term.

I didn’t last very long as sports editor of Tiger Tracks. Newnan High had a terrible football team my junior year. (I didn’t play because I weighed only 130 pounds at the time and was afraid of the Monk, who played linebacker.) In my first column ever, I questioned the ability of the head coach and suggested he get out of coaching and be made assistant biology teacher.

Realizing the controversy this might lead to, I wrote a phony column that brought Mrs. Skinner’s approval. Then I suggested that I be the one to take all the Tiger Tracks copy down to the Times Herald. She agreed and, when I got to the Times Herald, I exchanged columns.

When the column appeared, the football coach threatened to make me do blocking drills against the Monk. (It would have been an even more severe punishment if he made me attempt to have an intelligent conversation with him.) Mrs. Skinner was aghast at what I had done, and the principal, Mr. Evans, said if I ever, ever got near Tiger Tracks again, he would personally flog me with a piece of the cafeteria’s Wednesday “mystery meat” (I always figured it was horse or dog).

Controversial Tiger Tracks sports editor Lewis Grizzard was relieved of that position today after a column critizing the Newnan High head football coach.

Said principal A. P. Evans, “Never in my thirty-five years in education have I run across a student with such obvious disdain for authority. His column was filled with lies and hateful innuendos, and he has brought harm to our head coach and shame upon himself and the school.”

Mrs. Sarah Jane Skinner, school newspaper sponsor and journalism teacher, said, “I was shocked to learn that Lewis had substituted another column for the one I approved. I will not, and cannot, tolerate such deceit.

“There is no place in journalism for such, and I will devote the rest of my year to cramming that fact down Lewis’s throat.”

Coach Albright’s only response was, “After the Monk gets through with him [Grizzard], I’m going to kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County.”

Okay, so that never actually appeared in print, but it’s sort of what did happen. What exactly did happen was they took away my job and my title and called my mother, who said to me, “I certainly didn’t raise you this way.”

Fortunately, Coach Albright was told he couldn’t kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County because I might get seriously injured during the process, and although I did, in fact, deserve to be seriously injured, it might not look good with the Board of Education, and he already was on thin ice with them for producing such a rotten football team.

I might have, indeed, been a little piss-ant back then, but at least I was a clever little piss-ant. Camilla Stevens was social editor of Tiger Tracks. What the social editor did was keep up with who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing. One day I said to Camilla, a good friend, “Let me write your column this week.”

Camilla had a big date with Dudley Stamps coming up on Saturday night and figured she needed the extra time to spend on her hair, so she granted my request.

I figured I was safe here, because no members of the faculty knew beans about who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing, so I could get away with a lot.

The lead in the column I wrote for Camilla went, “What’s this? Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple seen holding hands on their way to study hall? Tell me, guys and gals, is this the start of something big?”

Here was the deal. Filbert Fowler, a Presbyterian minister’s son, was afraid of girls because his father had warned him that any interest in the flesh would stunt his growth and send him straight to hell. Phyllis Dalyrimple, on the other hand, was known to be the loosest girl in school and was rumored to have taken on the entire tenth-grade boys’ shop class in the back of Scooter Williams’s ’54 Chevy.

To link Filbert Fowler with Phyllis Dalyrimple was maybe the funniest thing my school readers had ever heard of. I had some other gems, too:

“Can’t mention names, but a certain quarterback is said to have his eye on a certain tenth-grader who sits in the second chair of the first row in fifth period home economics class. . . .”

The quarterback obviously was Phil Manderson, the best-looking boy in school, and as soon as everybody checked out who sat in the second chair of the first row in fifth-period Home Ec class and discovered it was Linda (the Haint) Cunningham, they broke up.

The Haint not only was ugly, she was scary. The word was, she could spook an entire Holiday Inn by herself. The Haint had ratty hair, was cross-eyed (when she faced southward, her left eye looked toward Galveston and her right toward Miami), and had zits that could have won prizes for both size and color. Her feet, placed end-to-end, would have stretched from the library halfway to the audiovisual room.

The only people who were not amused by my linkage of the quarterback and the Haint were the quarterback and Camilla Stevens. (The Haint didn’t read the school paper, or anything else for that matter, because of a large zit that sat on the end of her nose and blocked out her eyes when she looked down to read something.) The quarterback, young Mr. Manderson, was not used to being held up to public ridicule. He quickly tracked down Camilla, whom he thought to be the source of his troubles, and said, “If you weren’t a girl, I’d make you bleed in numerous places.”

Camilla ratted on me, of course, and told quarterback Manderson who was really to blame for linking him with the Haint. He tracked me down in the hall between second and third period and said, “When school’s out this afternoon, I’m going to kill you.”

At sixteen, I was about to have to deal with the first of many irate readers to come.

I did a lot of thinking as I waited to be killed when school was out. Should I offer Phil Manderson money not to kill me? Should I ask for asylum in the principal’s office? Should I move to Wyoming?

I decided the best path was to go ahead and confront Phil Manderson and attempt to reason with him. That failing, I would take one punch, hit the deck, and pretend to remain unconscious—if I wasn’t actually unconscious—until he got bored with me and left.

He tracked me down in the parking lot about eight seconds after the three-thirty bell rang.

“Trying to get away?” he said to me.

“Listen, Manderson,” I began, beginning the try-to-reason-withhim part of my plan, “at least I spelled your name correctly.”

He didn’t seem impressed with that fact.

“Hey, I was just having a little fun,” I went on. “It was a joke. Where’s your sense of humor, man?”

He hit me in the stomach. I didn’t have to pretend to fall down. I really did fall down because he hit me in the stomach. But I did continue to remain fallen down.

“Get up!” he ordered.

I didn’t move. My eyes were closed tightly.

“Are you okay?” he finally asked. I could sense he was beginning to think he had killed me.

Still no response.

“Hey, Monk,” he called to Norman Montgomery. “I think I’ve killed this son of a bitch.”

“Let’s see,” said Monk, kicking me in the ribs. More pain, but still I remained still.

“I believe you have killed the son of a bitch,” said Monk, adding, “Let’s go. We’ll be late for practice.”

“Do you think I’ll get in any trouble if I really did kill him?” Manderson asked the Monk.

“They might make you sit out a couple of games, but that’s about it,” said the Monk.

When I was certain they had gone, I got up off the ground, got into my car, and drove home. I was in a great deal of pain, but I knew I had acted correctly. To have attempted to fight back would have resulted in getting hurt even more. Plus, I sensed I had brought at least a smidgen of guilt into Phil Manderson’s life, and I was pleased with that.

As far as Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple were concerned, they actually did get together before the school year was out. Against his father’s protests, Filbert wound up marrying Phyllis when they were twenty, and both had a long career in porno movies. Filbert produced them, while Phyllis played various starring roles.

Camilla got over being mad at me eventually, and she now gives me credit for launching her own career in journalism. She later made it to New York, changed her name to Liz Smith, and became a premier gossip columnist.

I had no more opportunities to practice my craft the rest of my high school days. Oh, I wrote a sonnet here and there, did a Chemistry essay entitled “Halogens: Friend or Foe?” and wrote a magnificent paper on President Chester A. Arthur, but that was it.

I did, however, have the opportunity to learn something that would benefit me greatly as a professional journalist. I learned to type.

My basketball coach, Mr. Sheets, taught typing. I’ve seen enough newspaper movies by now (Bogart’s Deadline USA and Jack Webb’s 30 to name a couple), to know you had to be able to type if you wanted to write for a newspaper. Writing things out longhand becomes painful after a time (during the last eight or nine pages of my Chester A. Arthur tome, I developed severe hand cramps), and I didn’t have a particularly attractive handwriting style in the first place.

Mr. Sheets would not allow the two-finger hunt-and-peck system, so I learned the technique where you put the fingers of your left hand on asdf and the fingers on your right hand on jkl; and went from there. It was surprisingly easy.

The first thing I could type fast without making an error was: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” (I didn’t make a mistake just now, nearly thirty years later, either.)

I also learned to compose on a typewriter. A lot of people learn to type so they can get a job typing what other people have written down longhand. I learned to type so I could sit before my typewriter in Sulphur Dell, where the Nashville Vols played, and compose:

By LEWIS GRIZZARD Atlanta Journal Staff Writer

NASHVILLE, TENN—First baseman Buck Riddle picked the Atlanta Crackers off the canvas here Saturday night with a three-run homer in the top of the 9th inning that hatched a come-from-behind 6–4 Atlanta Cracker victory.

Of course, Mr. Sheets did insist that I copy a few things on the typewriter and not make any mistakes. He’d give tests in that. I did okay, but I’ve never been the neatest of typers. And, just as I figured it would, it worked out that if you write for a newspaper, you can be as messy as you want to be with your typing. When you make a mistake while writing your story, you can simply crossover the mistake with a bunch of x’s.

In those days, when you were on the road, you would send your stories back to the newspaper by Western Union, and Western Union sent back every word in all caps, no matter how you typed it. That meant you could type your entire story in lower case, since it would still be sent back in all caps. That saved a lot of time and energy, too.

By the end of the year, I had composing on a classroom typewriter locked, and my mother found out my Aunt Emily, on my father’s side, had a typewriter that had belonged to her late husband, my Uncle Frank. She called Aunt Emily and asked if I could have it.

Aunt Emily agreed, as long as we would come over to her house to pick it up. I was reluctant to go, because my Aunt Emily was a little strange. She talked quite fast and had once been a fortune-teller—or witch, I forget which—and I was afraid she would put some sort of hex or curse on me.

Also, Aunt Emily’s daughter, Cousin Helen, was much younger than I was, but the last time I had seen her, she had kicked me on the shin.

“Aunt Emily is giving you Uncle Frank’s typewriter, and you should be grateful enough to at least go ride over with me to pick it up,” said my mother.

“But what if Helen kicks me in the shin?” I asked.

“You’re afraid of a nine-year-old girl?” my mother asked back.

I didn’t say anything else and, somewhat ashamed, got into the car. When we arrived at Aunt Emily’s she suggested Helen take me outside to see their new horse. I had no interest whatsoever in seeing a horse, but my mother cut me one of those looks that said, “Get out there with Helen and see that horse. Now.”

We were looking at the horse, Helen and I, when she snuck behind me and poured a bucket of water she’d found in the stall all over my head. It didn’t just stay on my head, of course; it dripped down on the rest of me.

I attempted to catch Helen and feed her to the horse, but she ran inside and said, “Mama, make Lewis stop chasing me!” Great, I thought. Not only is my mother going to get mad at me, but here’s where Aunt Emily gives out the curse.

I did explain why I was chasing Helen, of course, and the fact I was drenched in water from head to foot gave my story a great deal of credibility.

“You shouldn’t pour water on your cousin,” Aunt Emily said to Helen.

“Oh, he’ll dry out,” said my mother, thinking, I’m sure, What am I raising here? A young man who can’t deal with a nine-year-old girl cousin?

Many years later, when I got divorced for the third time, my mother said, “Your troubles with women may have started with your Cousin Helen.”

I wondered to myself if I had been able to get even with Helen, which I never did, would my marital record perhaps be a brighter one?

I did get Uncle Frank’s typewriter that day, however, and practiced writing sports stories. I even practiced what I would write if the time came when I had to compose my first professional column:

Hello, world, for the first time, subjectively,

I thought it was low-key, yet obviously written by a man who had stored up a lot of things he wanted to say.

I don’t remember the first line of the first professional column I ever wrote—which would appear years later on the sports page of the Daily News in Athens, Georgia, but I know it wasn’t what I had practiced on my Uncle Frank’s typewriter during high school. Still, I did get around to using the line—right here—which is why my advice to young people who want to be writers is:

1. First learn to type

2. Practice writing

3. Never turn your back on your cousin in a horse stable.