HOMER SOUTHWELL, AUTHOR
OCCASIONALLY, LUDLOW PORCH OF WRNG radio calls me on the telephone. That is because I knew him before he was a star. I knew him when he was a mild-mannered insurance claims adjuster with a secretary and a messy desk in Decatur. Ludlow wasn’t as much fun in those days, but he caused less trouble.
What Ludlow Porch does for a living now is host two hours of madness on Atlanta’s all-talk WRNG. Five days a week, he is set loose on the air to say anything he wants to. Listeners call in and the result is the city’s most popular radio show.
You may recall Ludlow’s revealing the “Montana Myth.” There is no Montana, he said. Or the Great Parsley Debate. Ludlow claimed parsley causes several rare blood diseases and shortness of breath.
Recently, he set about to prove smoking is the cause of homosexuality. He also interviewed an official from HEW who announced all marriage licenses issued in the seven Southern states—“and parts of Florida”—since 1958 were void because they were issued outside HEW guidelines.
“The only exceptions,” Ludlow explained, “are marriages con ducted on navigable waterways or in a Winnebago.”
Ludlow called last week to tell me about Homer Southwell.
Homer Southwell, it turns out, has been a frequent guest on the Porch program. He is the alleged author of books assailing the constant flow of Northerners southward.
“First he wrote, Yankee Go Home,” Ludlow said, “and then followed it with a sequel, And Stay There. He is terribly disturbed about Yankees who come South because of our warm weather and good food.”
Homer Southwell has stirred the masses. Calls come by the thousands when he is a Porch guest. Irate transplanted Northernpersons want him lynched. Southerners who share his feelings concerning Yankee emigration want his statue erected on the grounds of the state capitol. A Porch sponsor canceled.
I caught up with Homer Southwell Thursday as he worked away in his East Cobb County home.
“I’m starting my first novel,” he said. “It’s called Return to Marietta or East of the Big Chicken.”
The hero of his latest literary endeavor, Homer said, will be a fellow named Jimmy James Cheetwood.
“Jimmy James is a real person I knew growing up in Cobb County,” Homer explained. “He was the meanest man I have ever seen. He was so mean, he was born with a tattoo. They think he inherited it from his mama.”
I probed deeply into Homer Southwell’s disdain for Northern infiltration into the South. After all, I pointed out, the war has been over 113 years.
“So what?” Homer asked. “They’re flocking down here by the millions. What will happen to our wonderful Southern way of life if we let every fast-talking Yankee who wants to live on our precious soil?”
Homer immediately launched into a tirade. I hurriedly copied down all the remarks I could follow:
— “I wouldn’t go North for a three-week orgy with ‘Charlie’s An gels.’”
— “I encourage ripping-off of Yankee tourists on the interstates. You don’t even need a mechanic to do it. You just tell ’em you’re going to change their shocks and then don’t.”
— “The greatest form of birth control known to man is a Bronx accent.”
— “God lives somewhere in the Alpharetta area.”
— “I once made the mistake of dating a woman from Des Moines. She had hairy legs. All Yankee women have hairy legs.”
Frankly, I had suspicions Homer Southwell might be a fraud, a figment of Ludlow Porch’s weirdo imagination.
Then I asked him what he did for fun and relaxation when there is a break from the rigors of writing and Yankee-hating.
“I have a hobby I have enjoyed for years,” Homer said. “Reading the New York Times obituary page.”
Fergit, hell.
THE CYCLORAMA: A DISGRACE
THE STRAINS OF “DIXIE” come up softly at first and then grow louder and louder. Recorded musket fire bristles in the background. There is a vague human cry from somewhere in the background. There is a vague human cry from somewhere in the distance. Perhaps it is a Rebel yell, or perhaps it is some mother’s child catching a bullet 114 years ago.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” booms a familiar voice, “this is Victor Jory.”
I remember Victor Jory. Last time I saw him, he had a whip in his hand.
There are a couple of things that have always bothered me about the Battle of Atlanta production in Atlanta’s Cyclorama:
The painting is from Milwaukee, and the man who does the narration, Victor Jory, played the part of a most hateful carpetbagger in Gone with the Wind. I don’t forgive easily.
Today is Confederate Memorial Day. All state offices will be closed. The United Daughters will celebrate. I prepared by spending a morning revisiting the Cyclorama. It had been a few years.
The guns are still blazing out of Hurt House. Sherman still watches the “inferno” from his mounted perch. The Wisconsin farmer’s eagle still soars above the battle. And there remains the classic portrait of brother meeting brother in the midst of hell.
One is dying. The other, his enemy, gives him water to ease the pain. “This,” roars Victor Jory, “is not a memorial to the decay of brotherhood, but a memorial to the birth of freedom. . . .”
For a time Tuesday morning, I was alone with the Battle of Atlanta. Tourists weren’t exactly tearing through the turnstiles.
I paid my two dollars. A young black woman took my ticket. She was polite and urged me to hurry. “The next presentation,” she said, “is about to begin.”
I noticed posters on the walls, posters asking donations for the Cyclorama. I walked up the winding staircase that leads to history in the round.
It took 8,000 pounds of paint to put the Battle of Atlanta on canvas. It has faded now. There are visible cracks.
Red is the dominant color around me. Victor Jory announces the earthen floor of the painting’s three-dimensional foreground is “actual Georgia red clay.” What did he expect?
Red covers the faces and chests of the dying and wounded figures that seem as real now as they did the first time a child looked upon them in amazement. “. . . Die they do by the thousands,” says Victor Jory of a Confederate charge that was, perhaps, the South’s last charge, on that day, July 22, 1864.
Once there was talk of moving the Cyclorama to another site. The building is old. It leaks. There was a fight for restoration funds, and somebody said, “If we don’t do something soon, it will be too late.”
It appears the Cyclorama will be restored now. Improvement can’t come too soon.
Four ladies from someplace like Akron finally joined me and broke my solitude Tuesday morning. When the presentation was over, we walked outside. I heard one of the ladies say to the others, “From the looks of this place, the South has finally forgotten the war.”
This shrine is, frankly, a disgrace. The years of neglect are taking their toll. And we really don’t have “Dixie” to play anymore. “Dixie” is considered offensive.
One of the papers had to remind Atlanta readers that today is Confederate Memorial Day. Most of them wouldn’t have known, otherwise. I heard a woman on a radio show the other day say, “We celebrate Confederate Memorial Day up North. We call it a tribute to Yankee marksmanship.” That got a big laugh from a group of southerners.
I don’t want to rally around the Rebel flag again. I don’t have a picture of Stonewall Jackson over my fireplace.
I do know, however, Robert E. Lee once said of the men we are supposed to be honoring today, “They were asked to give more than should have been expected of them,” and I know that they gave it.
That’s good enough for me.
THE TRUTH ABOUT GENERAL LEE
DR. EMORY THOMAS CAME on the line from Athens where he is a professor of history at the University of Georgia.
My question was quick and to the point:
“Is it true,” I asked, “what they are saying about Gen. Robert E. Lee?”
No true sons o
r daughters of the Confederacy have had a decent night’s sleep since President Carter, of all people, visited Gettysburg the other day and said His Majesty General Lee made a “big mistake” in the key battle of the Civil War.
Heresy. Pure and simple.
To make matters worse, there is a new book concerning Lee, The Marble Man, in which a Nashville military historian named Thomas Connelley fires further salvos at Our Hero and Leader.
Lee, says Connelley, was a man obsessed with failure, who suffered from “repressed vibrance.” (“He would have been a hell-raiser if he had had the opportunity” is Dr. Thomas’ translation of that phrase.)
Connelley also says Lee was depressive because of an unhappy marriage to a woman prematurely arthritic and that he used religion as a crutch.
Dr. Thomas recently reviewed The Marble Man for Virginia Magazine.
“The reference to religion,” he explained, “is basically that if Lee met anything he couldn’t deal with or didn’t want to deal with, he would simply put it off on Almighty Providence.”
But that didn’t answer my original question. Did, I asked Dr. Thomas—a Civil War authority and a native of Richmond, by-God Virginia—Robert E. Lee blow Gettysburg?
“Lee, himself, said it was all his fault,” Dr. Thomas began, “and it was.”
Allow the shock to wear off, and then we will continue. Recall that Lee had invaded the North in hopes of a major confrontation with the enemy. Although there was no clear-cut victor at Gettysburg, the loss of manpower and supplies Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia suffered was the knockout blow of the war to the South.
I pressed for more details from Dr. Thomas as a tear rolled down my cheek.
“My interpretation,” he went on, “is that Lee got up there, figured he had come all that way, and had gone to all that trouble and that it was maybe his last chance to do it big and do it right.
“He wanted a showdown battle. He had tried to turn the left and he had tried to turn the right. Finally, he said to hell with it, and went right up the middle.
“It was suicide.”
Dr. Thomas does take some of the blame away from Lee. Ewell, he explained, didn’t occupy Cemetery Ridge the first day he arrived, allowing the Yankees to take that strategic position.
Lee wanted Longstreet to take Little Roundtop. Longstreet could have, had he moved earlier.
“One of the problems,” said Dr. Thomas, “was that the Army of Northern Virginia was basically a command of gentlemen. Lee didn’t give his commanders specific orders. He just suggested what they might do.”
Lee ordered a charge, said the professor, “at the geographic center of the entire Yankee army.”
Get the picture: Flags are flying, bugles blowing, bands playing. And men dying. Fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers tried to take Cemetery Ridge from the Yankees. Maybe 300 made it to the top. They were easily repulsed.
“They were doomed,” said Dr. Thomas, “before they started.”
We talked more. About Pickett’s tears after the battle. About his dislike for Lee after the war. About Lee making the same mistake in the Seven Days Battle. About Lee’s words, “It is good that war is so terrible, else men would grow too fond of it.”
My heart breaking, an idol from my first history class crushed to mortal dust, I had to ask one more question:
Would the South have been better off with somebody else in charge of its military besides Lee?
“The best answer for that,” Dr. Thomas said, “is certainly it would. Then, it would have lost the war about two years earlier.”
7.
ON THE ROAD
My favorite place to be is home. I know all the bartenders and where to get great barbecue. But a man can have an occasional high time in Memphis, the music is good in Dallas, Washington isn’t such a bad place if you don’t have to work there, and they like to hear me talk in New York.
And once an angel cooked my breakfast in Tellico Plains, Tennessee. . . .
“HONK IF YOU LOVE ELVIS”
MEMPHIS—I DON’T KNOW what I expected Wednesday at Graceland on the first anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. Graceland is the walled mansion in Memphis where Elvis, the late King, lived and died and is buried behind the swimming pool, next to his mother.
I didn’t expect dignity because neither Elvis’ life nor his death was dignified. He lived in a world of glitter and rhinestones and $50,000 automobiles, and he died in his pajamas on his bathroom floor.
One doctor said death was from “acute blood pressure changes,” caused by straining for a bowel movement.
But I expected at least a certain reverence. A certain respect for Elvis’ memory. A man born to near-poverty rose to fame and the millions that went with it. And I have read so much about the love of his fans.
A sign on a car in downtown Memphis this week read, “Elvis—We Will Love You Forever.” Another said, “Honk If You Love Elvis.”
I expected respect and reverence at least. I found a circus. Worse, I found a carnival of money-changers.
It was hell-hot Wednesday morning, and the line in front of the wall at Graceland was long and barely moving. Thousands waited hours for a chance to file past the gravesite.
Across the street from the mansion were rows of Elvis souvenir shops. Hawkers were at every corner, and they worked the ready-to-buy crowd with the intensity of a worrisome fly. They had to be shooed away.
For sale: Elvis T-shirts, Elvis posters, Elvis plates, Elvis clocks, Elvis portraits, pictures of Elvis riding horses, pictures of Elvis riding motorcycles.
For sale: Elvis belt buckles, Elvis hats, Elvis bumper stickers, Elvis black armbands, and a game called “King of Rock ’n Roll,” a sort of Elvis Presley monopoly board with play money, lots of it.
For sale: copies of Elvis’ driver’s license, copies of Elvis’ birth certificate, copies of Elvis’ high school report card (F’s in English), copies of Elvis’ marriage license, and for $5, get your picture taken sitting in Elvis’ first Cadillac, a 1956 purple El Dorado.
For sale: Elvis Frisbees.
Flowers and a picture of a hound dog covered the Graceland lawn. Flowers covered the gravesite. A pink teddybear had been placed nearby. “I love you, Elvis,” read a card around its neck. It was signed “Your teddybear, Columbus, Ohio.”
Back at the gate, national guardsmen, in the city because of the police and firemen’s strike, had stopped allowing people inside the gates.
“The family wants a little time to itself,” said a burly sergeant.
In came Vester Presley, Elvis’ uncle, blowing the horn of his Cadillac. His books are on sale at the gate. In came Ginger Alden, Presley’s girlfriend who was with him at the time of his death. She rode in the back of a car with two men in the front.
Later she would be driven out again. She would be in the back seat, crying. Twenty people would rush to the window of the car to snap pictures of her. Look for those pictures on sale here next year.
A Memphis garbage truck pulled out of the Graceland driveway Wednesday after its daily pickup.
A man standing in the line said to his wife, “Grab a sack of that garbage, honey. No telling what it would sell for.”
TEXAS CHIC
DALLAS —THERE ARE A lot of things I like about Texas, but let me start at the top: in Texas, they sell barbecue downtown.
Take the lovely city of Dallas, for instance. A person can step right out of his hotel onto bustling Commerce Street, walk into Neiman-Marcus for a little shopping, and then lunch at Gus’s or the Copper Cow or the Golden Steer and feast upon sliced barbecue sandwiches in a modern, urban setting of glass and steel and taxi and bus exhaust fumes.
You can’t do that in most other cities.
There are good barbecue places accessible from Atlanta—like Harold’s at the federal pen—but in mid-city, the closest thing to barbecue is a truckload of hogs in a traffic jam on the downtown connector.
Regardless of where barbecue is eaten, its flavor and enjoymen
t are always enhanced by something cold to drink—preferably beer.
In Texas, you can have Coors beer with your downtown barbecue. Coors, the Colorado light nectar, is the favorite beer of Americans who can’t get it. Coors isn’t sold in Atlanta. It is smuggled into the city by airline stewardesses who fly out West.
I was in Dallas over the weekend for the Texas-Oklahoma football game, a good excuse for three-fourths of the population of both states to get drunk for three days.
Before the game, I stepped out of my motel room onto bustling Commerce Street, walked into Nieman-Marcus for a little shopping, and then had lunch at the Golden Steer in a modern urban setting of glass and steel and taxi and bus exhaust fumes.
I ordered two sliced barbecue sandwiches and a Coors and settled into thinking about why Texas has suddenly become so popular and chic. Do you realize New York City has even discovered Texas?
One of the hottest spots in town is a country music bar where they serve the Texas state beer, Lone Star, in longneck bottles, and the clientele wears cowboy hats and boots and is attempting to learn the correct pronunciation of “sumbitch.”
I asked a Texas native about the phenomenon.
“Texas just feels good,” he said, and “it encompasses about every thing. We’re out West, but we’re also down South. And look what we’ve done for the culture of this country.”
The list of Texas’ cultural donations is staggering. Texas gave us chicken-fried steak and Walter Cronkite. It gave us Dan Jenkins and his marvelous book, Semi-Tough.
Don Meredith is from Texas. So is Phyllis George, and I would imagine most of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Which brings up the musical question: Whatever happened to the Kilgore Junior College dancing rangerettes?
And you know who else is from Texas. Willie Nelson. His buddy, Waylon Jennings, says everybody in Austin thinks when they die, they go to Willie’s house.
Dallas is my favorite big city in Texas.
“It’s nothing more than a big Mineola,” said another native. “Dallas is made up of all the people who left the farm and learned to count.”
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life Page 11
