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 organi
zed 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.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 3
