Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  There is a downhill glide into Toccoa, taken at a smooth sixty, and there is a tall trestle to cross over the river into South Carolina.

  Clemson is a flagstop. More than the normal number of passengers boarded the train at the old station in Greenville, northbound for such places as Charlotte, Greensboro, Danville, Lynchburg, and finally, Washington, at shortly past eight the next morning.

  The sun rises on the southbound Southern Crescent in the still-icy hills of Banks, Habersham and Hall. Greeting morning in the engine of a passenger train, with three other engines behind you making the noise of the devils of 10,000 hells, is something Freud should have experienced and interpreted.

  The little kid loved every minute of it. When we had left the engine back at Peachtree Station, I asked him what he thought of Brock Adams, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of transportation, who is trying to do away with 10,000 miles of the Amtrak system, including the route of the Crescent.

  “Why doesn’t he go to lunch with a highway construction lobbyist and leave the rest of us alone?” the little kid asked back.

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  Besides, his eyes were still wide and his heart was still pounding from what the engineer had allowed him to do as the train had approached the station moments before.

  He let the little kid blow the whistle, on the Southern Crescent.

  And his life was complete.

  SAYING GOODBYE

  ABOARD THE SOUTHERN CRESCENT—I don’t know exactly where we were. Between Spartanburg and Charlotte perhaps. Midnight approached. Four hours earlier, the Southern Crescent had pulled out of Atlanta’s Peachtree Station bound for Washington with three green-and-gold engines, thirteen cars and a pack of riders come to attend the funeral-on-wheels of America’s last privately owned overnight luxury passenger train.

  “I just wanted to say goodby in person,” said a man who had boarded in Gainesville for a half hour ride to Toccoa.

  There were three of them. The big one had a full beard, and he wore a cowboy hat. Somebody said his daddy was a big wheel with Southern Railway. You could have fooled me.

  From somewhere in the back of the train they had each pulled out a guitar, and the music they were making had hushed what moments before had been a noisy, close-to-rowdy crowd that had gathered in the lounge car to drink its final respects to the Southern Crescent.

  A black man and a black woman, wearing white starched coats in the South tradition, poured.

  Train songs. Naturally we wanted train songs. The guitar trio obliged. The big one with the hat and beard had a voice on him.

  They began·with “The Glendale Train.” Somebody robbed it. They played “City of New Orleans,” of course, and everybody sang along.

  People took pictures. Channel 5 rolled its film. A girl got drunk and suggested we all greet the waiting passengers in Charlotte with a group “moon.” The vote was close against her. A passenger ordered more beer for the singers, and I was in the middle of thanking the Lord for letting me be there when in walked Graham Claytor.

  Graham Claytor is secretary of the Navy. Before Jimmy Carter gave him that job, he was president of Southern Railway and a fine friend to people who like to ride in passenger trains.

  It was Graham Claytor who had insisted that the Southern Crescent continue running—and continue its excellence of service—when all others around him wanted it stopped. He was a paying passenger this night, however. He had his own goodbyes to say.

  The big one cut down on “Wreck of Old ’97,” a damn fine train song, and Mr. Secretary of the Navy Claytor soloed to the top of his voice.

  It was a poignant moment in the storied history of railroading.

  He lingered with the passengers after his song. He even signed autographs, and he assured those who asked that Amtrak, which assumed control of the Southern Crescent Thursday, would continue the train’s branch of service.

  “This isn’t the end of anything,” Graham Claytor said.

  But the Department of Transportation Secretary Brock Adams has proposed doing away with even the Amtrak version of the train.

  “I don’t think that will happen,” said Claytor. “The political reality is this train will continue.”

  Another round for the singers, please.

  Southern’s plush office car number 11, fit for the company brass it carried, brought up the rear of the train Wednesday night. Atlantan Jack Martin, a power in the National Association of Railroad Passengers—the group that would like to hang Brock Adams—was on board. And somebody said they spotted Marvin Hamlisch. Marvin Hamlisch, among other things, wrote the music for A Chorus Line.

  There were reporters and photographers and television people. And a group from the Atlanta that would ride northbound to Salisbury, North Carolina, and then return on the final southbound Southern Crescent at 2:30 in the morning.

  One Atlanta man had ridden the train from Atlanta to New Orleans Tuesday then boarded again Wednesday morning for the full trip back to Washington.

  “It’s my birthday present to myself,” he said.

  Southern also had extra security on the train. That was to keep souvenir-seeking passengers from stripping it. Extra security didn’t help that much. Menus disappeared by the dozens from tables in the dining car.

  So did napkins and coasters, and a sleeping-car porter was missing his platform stool.

  “My God,” said a conductor, “I’m glad the toilets are bolted down.”

  There was one ugly incident. A young woman who had driven from Jacksonville to Atlanta to ride the train had her purse stolen. Security men finally located the culprit in a dark coach. They retrieved the purse and put the thief off the train in the cold and dark of Greensboro, North Carolina, at 3 in the morning, which is exactly what he deserved.

  The Southern Crescent had been ten minutes late in arriving in Atlanta from New Orleans. With maybe a couple of hundred standing in the cold night to watch. The train finally poked its nose around the corner, gave a blast of its horn, and there was scattered applause.

  “It’s a sad day,” said a man taking pictures.

  Over the Peachtree Station loudspeaker came the Southern Crescent’s final call. The caller sang it out: “Here comes the Southern Crescent, all the way from New Orleeeens!”

  He added, “Thank you for riding Southern all these years.” A touch of class.

  All these years were 149 of them. Southern Railway opened regularly scheduled passenger service in the United States in 1830. The Southern Crescent was born the Washington and Southwestern Vestibuled Limited in January of 1893. Timetables advertised trips to Atlanta, the “Queen City of the New South.”

  Gainesville was the first stop Wednesday night. Then Toccoa, Clemson, Greenville, Spartanburg, Gastonia, Charlotte, Salisbury, High Point, Greensboro, Danville, Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Culpeper, Alexandria and finally across the Potomac River into cold and windy Washington and Union Station. Twenty minutes later than the advertised 8:50 a.m.

  There were no bands, no speeches. The train pulled in. The train stopped. The people got out. An era passed.

  I own a book called A Portrait of the Rails. A man named David Morgan wrote the introduction. As I left the Southern Crescent for the last time Thursday morning, I thought about a line from that introduction.

  The unmatched adventure of rail and steel is nearly over. I admit that. So does David Morgan. But at least he sounded hopeful when he wrote, “Oh, Lord, but it will take some doing for America to get that adventure out of her soul.”

  9.

  AIN’T LOVE GRAND?

  Somewhere in this chapter is a column that expresses my feelings about homemade biscuits and their relationship to love and marriage. You would think a column like that would not make anybody mad.

  You would think wrong. They came at me with hatpins. One militant women’s rights group wanted to chase me down Peachtree Street with large sticks.

  I have always considered myself an expert on women’s liberati
on. In the last fifteen years, I have given two their freedom myself.

  VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE

  THIS MAY BE AN inappropriate time to break such news. Then, again, today is Valentine’s, and this is a love story, or what’s left of it.

  It began when I was in the third grade. So was my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr., a great American.

  The summer break had passed, and it was the first day of the new school year. We were standing, Weyman and I, by the playground swing set where Weyman ran a thriving porno business.

  Weyman’s older brother was in the Navy. He came home on leave and brought Weyman a deck of playing cards with pictures you didn’t see that often in those timid times.

  For a dime, you got a blind draw out of Weyman’s deck, and you didn’t have to give the card back until lunch period. Weyman sold out almost every morning, and by the time the cards and pictures were too worn for further rentals, he had a down payment on a movie projector, which is another story.

  “There’s a new girl in our class,” Arnold Bates walked up and told us. Arnold, who was one of Weyman’s best customers, got all the inside information at school because his mother taught sixth grade.

  Arnold also wore thick glasses and got extra dessert in the lunchroom. “Arnold ain’t worth killing” is what Weyman thought of him.

  This time, however, Weyman was keenly interested in what Arnold had to say. I knew that because when Arnold wouldn’t tell him the new girl’s name unless Weyman rented him his favorite card for free, Weyman belted him one.

  “Kathy Sue Loudermilk,” said Arnold, picking himself up off the playground dirt. You didn’t make deals with the third grade godfather.

  It was love at first sight. Weyman already had a stable of grade-school lovelies that even included a fifth-grader, Margie Roundtree, who wore lipstick and was talked about in faculty meetings.

  “She’s headed for nothing but trouble,” is what Arnold Bates said his mother heard the principal say about her. Weyman simply wanted to be there when she arrived.

  But there was something special about Kathy Sue Loudermilk. Even at eight, she made a tight sweater seem much more than a woolen garment.

  I had never seen Weyman act as he did over the new girl in class. He brought her candy. He walked her home from school every day. He tried to break Arnold Bates’ arm for talking to her during morning recess. He even offered her one of his playing cards for half price. Weyman was delirious with love.

  As the years passed, nothing changed. When Weyman was sixteen, he bought his first car, a 1953 Ford. He covered the backseat with a chenille bedspread, put shag carpets on the floorboard, and hung a pair of foam rubber dice from the rearview mirror.

  It was in this romantic setting that they spent evening after evening parked in the pecan grove behind the Line Creek Fundamental Back-to-the-Bible Church.

  One night the preacher dropped by the church to prepare his Sunday sermon. He caught Weyman and Kathy Sue as they were about to drive away. The lint on her skirt was a dead giveaway.

  “My children,” asked the preacher, “have you sinned?”

  “I don’t know about her,” said Weyman, “but I did all I could.”

  Nobody knows the real reason they never married. Weyman bought a truck and went into the produce business. Kathy Sue had already filled out her ambitions by the time she was out of high school. They retired her sweater when she graduated.

  Weyman called the other day. I could tell something was wrong.

  “Hear about Kathy Sue?” he asked.

  I hadn’t.

  “Ran off and got married,” Weyman said.

  “I’m sorry,” is all I could think to say. “Anybody I know?”

  “Arnold Bates,” Weyman answered, choking back the tears. He was sacking a load of onions at the time.

  He will eventually get over the hurt, of course. Not Weyman. Arnold. Weyman went on to mention he had given the happy groom a wedding present. They’ll take the cast off in six weeks.

  CHARLIE AND JULIA

  I CALLED THE ATLANTA federal pen to inquire about Charlie Hines, Number 31579-120. Charlie, who is sixty-four, robbed a bank down in Florida a couple of years ago. After his conviction, he was shipped off to the “Big A.”

  “Yep,” said a most unpleasant voice on the other end of the phone, “we still got ’im.”

  And probably will have for some time to come.

  Charlie sent me something in the mail once. It was a copy of an article by a Florida Times-Union reporter named Ken Cruickshank. The article explained how Charlie became a bank robber.

  I’ll take the story from Cruickshank’s article. He said he didn’t mind.

  Charlie got married in 1968 to a lady named Julia. Cruickshank told me, “They were a very devoted couple.”

  But hard times soon followed the marriage. Charlie had trouble with his feet. He was a diabetic. He had managed an amusement park in Tampa, but his health forced him to quit.

  He bought some property in Tampa and opened a tavern and restaurant.

  But Charlie Hines was in and out of the hospital and was eventually declared disabled by the Social Security Administration. He and his wife were trying to live on $156 a month.

  In 1973 their problems worsened. Julia had to have an operation for cancer.

  Charlie tried to go back to work to pay for her medicine. He tried a paper route of 125 miles for eleven months. Because of his health, he lost money on the route and was forced to quit again.

  The bank took the tavern and restaurant away. Charlie turned sixty-two. His disability payments stopped. Social Security payments started. Now, Charlie and Julia Hines were trying to live on $137.10 a month.

  Julia was in terrible pain, the story continues. Her medicine was expensive. Liquor was cheap. She began drinking heavily.

  “I would mix her a drink to ease her,” Charlie told Ken Cruickshank. “That’s how it started.”

  Charlie’s condition hadn’t improved, either. He was having dizzy spells and periodic blackouts. A doctor ordered a brain scan.

  “I couldn’t do it, though,” Charlie explained. “I didn’t have that kind of money.”

  It was May 1977 and Charlie Hines was desperate. He borrowed a .22 pistol and took five times his normal amount of painkillers—“so I could walk”—and went out to look for a bank to rob.

  He found one in Inverness, Florida. Charlie doesn’t know exactly how much money he took. He never got a chance to count it. He was captured an hour later, fifteen miles away. He tried to plead insanity, but the jury wouldn’t listen.

  “I thought I was dying anyway,” he said. “We had no food, no money and no prospect of getting any. So I went in and robbed that bank.”

  Last I heard, Charlie hadn’t seen his wife since his interview with Ken Cruickshank. She can’t come for visits.

  Julia Hines, who accompanied her husband everywhere, was outside in the car that day while Charlie was inside robbing the bank.

  Her number, incidentally, is 01129-179, Women’s Unit, Lexington, Kentucky. She got fifteen months.

  What made me think of Charlie and Julia was the exciting news that heiress Patty Hearst, who was also convicted of robbing a bank, had been freed from prison in time for her upcoming wedding to her former bodyguard.

  It may be “the biggest wedding California has ever seen,” said one news story, or just a “simple, private ceremony.”

  Whatever, they can afford it.

  Let’s all wish the happy couple well.

  LOVIN’ IN THE OVEN

  JERRY CLOWER, THE FUNNIEST man alive, does a routine on one of his records about biscuits. Jerry says the absence of homemade biscuits at the American breakfast table is one reason the divorce rate is going up.

  “Saddest sound in this world,” Jerry once told me, “is the sound of them little canned biscuits being popped open early evah mawnin’ in evah house in the neighborhood.”

  Jerry goes, “Whop! Whop! Whop!” as
an illustration. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

  I agree with Jerry Clower. Give a man homemade biscuits in the morning, and he’ll come home to you at night. The Pillsbury Doughboy, with his dratted canned biscuits, is a lousy home-wrecker.

  There was a time, especially in the South, when the woman arose early enough in the morning to prepare homemade biscuits for her husband and family. It was a simpler time. Before mixed doubles replaced sex.

  Women in those days served plates of piping hot biscuits. Big, fluffy biscuits. Cut one open. Slap a portion of butter between the halves and then cover that with your choice of jam or jelly.

  “A breakfast without biscuits,” went a famous saying, “is like a day without sunshine.”

  But what, if anything, endures? The last homemade biscuit I saw was in a museum behind a glass case.

  It is time, women of America, to come to your senses. Halt the alarming increase in the divorce rate! Bring the homemade biscuit back to your breakfast table! We can all work together! You make ’em, we’ll eat ’em. What could be more fair?

  I must insist on taking a hard line on this matter. Any woman within the range of this column who subsequently serves her family canned biscuits for breakfast in anything but an extreme emergency is a brazen hussy who smokes filterless cigarettes, drinks beer from a can and doesn’t shave her legs.

  I called the editor of a famous cookbook, A Taste of Georgia, for help. She lives in Newnan and later this month, she is taking her book to the White House to present a copy to Rosalynn Carter.

  A Taste of Georgia is in homes all over the country, including Alaska, where the Eskimos are now eating grits with their whale blubber. The book contains thousands of Deep South recipes, including some for biscuits.

  The editor of A Taste of Georgia is Mrs. White. Mrs. John N. White. Martha White. I swear.

  “It’s not that hard to make biscuits in the morning,” said Martha White. “It’s just that it takes a lot of time. Most women these days simply don’t want to spend that much time in the kitchen in the morning when there are so many other options open to them.”