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

by Lewis Grizzard

If something really interesting or odd happened in a foreign country, I will read that, however.

  There was a story about a British Airways jet recently. The windshield in the cockpit blew out at 23,000 feet and it sucked the pilot out. Luckily, another crew member grabbed his feet and held on to him until the copilot could land a half-hour later.

  That’s even better than a guy getting knifed in the stomach at Slick’s for saying Richard Petty couldn’t have carried Fireball Roberts’s lug wrench.

  I usually get through most of the “A” section in a paper fairly quickly, stopping only to read good political gossip, and the latest on where the killer bees are now located and how long it will take them to get to my house.

  Then, I read the editorial pages. I rarely read the unsigned editorials that come under the newspaper masthead. They are usually about something happening in South Yemen.

  I enjoy the readers’ letters, however, especially the ones from members of the National Rifle Association who say if we outlaw the sales of AK-47’s, the favorite weapon of drug dealers and drive-by murderers, they may also eventually lose their hunting guns and that they are actually doing the deer a favor by shooting them. If we ever do take away the AK-47’s from drug dealers, I think we ought to give them to the deer.

  I also enjoy editorial columns on the op-ed page. I’m always amazed how angry readers get at columnists. If Carl Rowan or William Safire or Richard Reeves writes an opinion, it’s his prerogative. I might say to myself, “Carl Rowan must have drunk some bad buttermilk when he wrote this,” or “What on earth was William Safire trying to say?” But I don’t ever get mad at them and call down to the paper and threaten to cancel my subscription. Disagreeing with a columnist is a lot of fun. A good columnist will stir debate and reaction.

  After the editorial page, I read the feature section of the paper which has names like “Lifestyle” and “People” and “Arts and Leisure.” That section usually has the comics, the TV and movie listings, and a lot of stuff women enjoy reading, like Dear Abby and stories about how women will soon take over the entire world and tell all the men to get up and go cook their own breakfasts and “Don’t let me hear any pots or pans rattling.”

  News for and about women is big in those sections. “News you can use” is a new catch phrase in the industry, which means running a lot of stories about why you should eat oat bran and how to make your house safe from radon gas.

  I do the Jumble every morning. That’s where you unscramble four words in order to figure out the answer to a puzzle.

  Okay, in ten seconds, what is this word: “Tigura”?

  Time’s up. “Guitar.” It took me an hour one morning to get that. I only glance at the business section because I don’t understand much about business.

  Reading my morning paper is, quite often, the highlight of my day. I’m always a little sad when I finish. To put off finishing the paper as long as I can, I even read stories about art exhibits. If I’m really desperate, I’ll even read Scheinwood on bridge. And I don’t know the first thing about bridge. I just don’t want it to be over.

  I fell in love with newspapers when I was eight because they took me to every minor league and major league baseball game. They taught me about Duke Snider and Senor Al Lopez, the manager of the Chicago White Sox. I could sit in Moreland, Georgia, and read about Mantle’s three home runs for the Yankees. There were a lot of people in the rural South who didn’t think there really was a New York City. Nobody knew anybody who had actually been there. But I’d been there, in my sports page box score where the Tigers’ Yankee Killer, Frank Lary, had beaten the Yanks again before 40,000 in Yankee Stadium.

  I’d also been to Wrigley Field in Chicago and Tiger Stadium in Detroit and Crosley Field in Cincinnati and Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

  I can go on all day about this, so here are “25 More Reasons I Love Newspapers Besides All the Stuff I’ve Already Talked About”:

  1. They ain’t heavy, except on Sunday.

  2. The Far Side.

  3. Mike Royko’s column out of Chicago.

  4. You don’t have to look at the ads if you won’t want to. It’s hard to escape television commercials no matter how fast your remote control finger is.

  5. Editorial cartoons.

  6. They are brief about the weather: “Today: Cloudy with a high near 75.” Television weather lasts longer than some thunderstorms.

  7. Baseball box scores that can tell you exactly what twenty-three guys did in a two-and-a-half-hour period in about three inches of agate type.

  8. Peanuts.

  9. B.C.

  10. Adult movie ads. I once saw one called “Thar She Blows.”

  11. Occasionally I have the pleasant surprise of finding humorous writing on the editorial page.

  12. The personal ads. They keep me up on what’s kinky.

  13. As I read my paper, I often fantasize about owning my own newspaper. Its slogan would be “Born to Raise Hell.”

  14. They don’t play any loud rock music.

  15. The fact there’s a crossword puzzle in every day in case I ever decide to take up doing the crossword puzzle.

  16. If you read a newspaper every day, there will be very few topics you can’t talk about.

  17. The Wizard of Id.

  18. College football and basketball odds.

  19. Those “People” columns where they tell you what’s doing with Prince Charles and Lady Di and Elizabeth Taylor.

  20. You can serve your dog leftover steak bones on a newspaper.

  21. You can be going through your grandmother’s attic and find a paper from 1939 and have a lot of fun reading it. You will want to say, “Watch out for Hitler.”

  22. Newspapers make great starters for fireplace fires.

  23. Automobile dealers can’t do their own commercials.

  24. Newspapers are the only romance in my life that hasn’t eventually picked up and left me.

  25. If you really think about it, newspapers are one of the last great bargains. Most daily newspapers cost a quarter. What else can you get for a quarter that tells you how various wars and famines are going, how much money you lost in the stock market or betting on a ball game, what new thing will kill you according to researchers, how many people got killed in the latest soccer riot, how many people are going to have AIDS by the year 2015, what Congress did, how bad the president is doing, what the weather is going to be like, not to mention informing you of the day and month and year it is?

  What really gets me is, after all the service newspapers give people, most people don’t really like newspapers. Perhaps it’s the old messenger-who-brings-the-bad-news thing. A newspaper tells you the ozone layer is going to disappear in twenty years and you’re going to be fried alive, and you get mad at the newspaper.

  Readers are always asking, “Why don’t you print more good news?” The answer is simple: There’s not any.

  If there were any good news, we’d print it. Let’s say I was interviewing God again, and He said, “Tell everybody we’re going to throw out the Sixth Commandment on Judgment Day.”

  You recall the Sixth Commandment. Moses tried to get God to forget it in the first place, but God didn’t know at the time that the Playboy Channel would come along on cable and make everybody want to commit adultery.

  So now God realizes “Thou shalt not commit adultery” isn’t really an operative thought anymore, and He tells me He’s going to overlook it for everybody born since 1945, except for Jimmy Swaggart, of course. God would have forgiven him for simply committing adultery, but he couldn’t forgive him for selecting that sweat hog he found in a New Orleans motel room as his adultery-ette.

  Anyway, if that story broke, it would indeed be good news and newspapers would carry it, front page, top story.

  The New York Daily News would say:

  “GOD ON SEX:

  ’LIVE IT UP’ “

  The New York Post would say:

  “I WANT YOUR BODY”

  T
he New York Times would say, in a headline size much more dignified than that of the Daily News and Post:

  “GOD GRANTS FORGIVENESS FOR

  ADULTERY FOR THOSE BORN AFTER 1945.”

  Followed by these subheads, in descending type size:

  “SUPREME BEING INDICATES

  SIXTH COMMANDMENT PASSÉ”

  “PLAYBOY’S HEFNER

  ELATED AT NEWS”

  “POPE STARTLED,

  CANCELS TRIP”

  “THOUSANDS CELEBRATE

  IN TIMES SQUARE”

  “WADE BOGGS GOES 5-FOR-5

  IN BOSOX ROMP OVER YANKS”

  So this is to be a book about newspapers, written by a man who has been both a newspaperman and a newspaper columnist, and that makes me an expert on just about everything about newspapers except how to sell advertising, how to crank the delivery trucks, and why the accounting department always questions my expense accounts. This is also going to be a book about how and why I got into the newspaper business and where it has taken me. Not all of it will be pretty. I’ll have to deal with my days as sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance. This was the worst period of my life. I was dragged to court by one of my sportswriters, divorced by my second wife, once sat next to a man who had a rooster on his head on a Chicago Transit bus, and had to help push a friend’s car, which had a dead battery, eight blocks through the snow, quite a shock to my southern-born hatred of cold weather.

  To work your tail off getting a paper out, and then be handed a first edition, which always felt warm to me somehow, like it had just been taken out of the oven, was a joy. It was instant reward. I would never have been happy in a business where it took more than forty-five minutes to see the results of my labor.

  And after I got into the business, I met a thousand characters who loved newspapers as I did and didn’t really give a damn they were getting paid so poorly.

  There were so many other rewards. Like knowing we got the news first and it was our job to tell everybody else. It’s an awesome responsibility, but it’s also good for the ego. I always felt a little superior to civilians.

  I got my first newspaper job when I was ten. I didn’t get paid, but I did get to see my name above an article for the first time, and it was a thrill the likes of which I have not often known again.

  That makes thirty-four years in the profession. I mentioned earlier that, one day, I might quit all this and open a liquor store, but I won’t.

  In the immortal words of Frank Hyland, a friend and colleague, “Wouldn’t it be hell to have to go out and get a real job?”

  It would.

  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.