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

by Lewis Grizzard

  I can give you a personal example of what happens when you lose your press pass and have to deal with a press-box security guard.

  It was maybe twelve years ago. I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for the annual Georgia-Florida football game in the Gator Bowl. The traffic, as usual, was awful, and I reached the elevator that goes to the press box a minute or two after kickoff.

  A female security guard in a green outfit, and packing a large black pistol, stood between me and the press-box elevator. I looked into my briefcase for my press-box pass. It was gone. Breaking into a geyser of sweat, I dumped everything out of my briefcase on the ground. Still no press pass. The game is now five minutes old.

  Here is my dilemma: I absolutely must get to the press box. That is because it’s my job. However, I am a veteran dealing with press-box security guards, so I know somebody—probably me—must die if I am to get to my working station.

  I decided to attempt to deal with the female security guard from a position of logic.

  I said, “I’m Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Constitution, and I seem to have misplaced my press pass. You must see, however, that here I stand with a briefcase and a typewriter and am not just some nut trying to get into the press box. If you would like, I can show you my press card, my driver’s license, and give you my mother’s home telephone number to prove I am who I say I am.

  “What I propose is that you allow me to go upstairs and obtain another press pass. I will then come back down the elevator—even though the first quarter will be over by then—and allow you to punch my press pass so you will know you haven’t committed a breach of Gator Bowl security.”

  First she unbuckled the top of her holster. She rested her right hand lightly on the butt of her gun. Then she said, “I don’t care who you are. You ain’t getting on that elevator without no pass.”

  I tried to keep a clear head, and assessed my options.

  One was, I could just get back into my car, go back to the hotel, and watch the game on television. When it was over, I could write a story based on what I had seen on TV and make up some quotes for various coaches and players. Various coaches and players at college football games never say anything interesting anyway, and anybody could make up, “Well, we just got took to the woodshed today.”

  That, of course, was the easiest and safest way out of my situation. The other option, quite a dangerous one, would be to see if I could gain access to the press-box elevator by force.

  I sized up the female security guard. I probably outweighed her by forty pounds and had much the longer reach. I didn’t think if it came down to sheer strength, she could keep me from entering.

  There was one other consideration, of course. The gun.

  If she had had the opportunity to shoot somebody before, perhaps she wouldn’t be so quick to shoot me. But what if she was new to the job? What if she’d been through all that rigorous training and still hadn’t had one single opportunity to shoot at a living person? What if her trigger finger had developed a powerful itch? What if she had arisen that morning and said to herself, “I’m going to be guarding the Gator Bowl press box today, and the first sumbitch that crosses me is going to get a lead sandwich”?

  What I decided was I absolutely had to get inside the press box. Danger is my dateline. So here’s what I said to the security guard:

  “Ma’am, after thinking all this over, I need to ask you a question that is very important to both of us. I have looked you over, and I do not believe you could physically keep me out of the elevator if I stormed it the next time it comes down. There is, however, the matter of your weapon, or perhaps you refer to it as your ‘heater’ [trying to get familiar here]. I must know whether or not, if I did decide to force my way onto the elevator, you would shoot me.”

  She thought for a moment and then answered, “Well I wouldn’t try to kill you, but I’d wang you real bad.” (“wang,” as in “wing,” as in, “Shucks, Roy. All he did was wang me.”)

  I must admit the fact the security guard had said she wouldn’t shoot to kill did convince me to stampede the elevator—but only for a second. Then I thought about all the places a person could be wanged, so I tossed out any ideas about storming past.

  I finally did get in, however, about four minutes into the second quarter. I was standing by the elevator, and a photographer friend walked out on his way back to Atlanta with first-half photos.

  He went back up the elevator, told officials of my problem, and brought me back a press pass.

  As I walked past the security guard toward the elevator, my press pass tied to one of my belt loops, I think I caught a glimpse of a twitch in her trigger finger. “Have a nice day, Marshal Earp,” I said a second before the elevator door closed and I was out of range.

  There is yet another disaster that can arise in regard to a press pass. It begins when you call the sports information office at, say, the University of Tennessee, and ask for a press pass for Saturday’s game against Auburn. Often, one makes such a request too late in the week for the press pass to be mailed.

  This is when you hear the words, “You can pick up your press pass at the press gate.”

  That sounds simple enough, but it’s not. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would be willing to wager a large sum of money that at least 50 percent of the time somebody goes to a press gate to pick up his or her press pass, it’s going to be a large hassle.

  People who sit in the booths at press dates are a lot like security guards, except they don’t wear guns. I believe they usually are packing a knife or hand grenade, however.

  Here’s a typical conversation between somebody—say, me—trying to pick up his press pass at the press gate thirty minutes before kickoff.

  “Hello. Do you have a pass for Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal?”

  “What was ’at name?”

  “Grizzard.”

  “Spell it.”

  “G-r-i-z-z-a-r-d.”

  “And where did you say you’re from?”

  “Atlanta. I am from the Atlanta Journal.“

  This is followed by a long silence while the press-gate person goes through about a thousand envelopes, looking for one with your name on it.

  I have often thought that press-gate persons know fully well where your press-box pass is, but they pretend they can’t find it because they enjoy doing such things as putting live cats in Laundromat dryers.

  “Ain’t got no pass for nobody named ‘Grizzono.’ “

  “It’s not ‘Grizzono.’ It’s ‘Grizzard.’ “

  “Don’t have ’at, either.”

  “I’m sure it’s there somewhere. The sports-information office told me Thursday there would be a pass left here in my name.”

  “Ain’t here.”

  “Well, could you phone up to the press box and ask for somebody in the sports-information department? They could tell you it’s okay to let me in.”

  “Ain’t got no phone.”

  It is at this point you wish you had gone to law school or opened a liquor store.

  Despair. Anger. Frustration. Then, “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Grizzard.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Here’s your pass.”

  Press-gate people not only put cats in Laundromat dryers, they also probably have sex with pigs and made motorboat sounds in their soup as children.

  One final interesting note about press passes. Until the more enlightened times came, you could always find the following statement written on a press-box pass: No women allowed in the press box.

  I didn’t think much about that the first time I saw it written on a press-box pass. It made sense to me, I suppose. You get a bunch of women in the press box and how are you going to get any work done with them saying, “I’m cold. When is this going to be over?”

  Later, of course, women certainly would gain access to press boxes, even to locker rooms. Thinking turnabout is fair play, I once tried to get into the women’s locker room a
t the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, at the U.S. Open, to see if I could get a glimpse of Chris Evert naked. The security guard threatened to shoot me if I took another step.

  My Start. I traveled with Thelinius and his crew to famed football arenas around the country, even to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Georgia upset the Wolverines in 1965. Withers went crazy. I turned over coffee on my spotter board. Thelinius said, “... And Georgia wins.”

  I actually met Furman Bisher one night at Dudley Field on the campus of Vanderbilt in Nashville. He was nice to me and said, “Come see me when you graduate.”

  I could tell he was thinking, What a bright, promising young man. I wish he had come to see me last summer, I had an opening for somebody to take notes and keep me in typing paper and fresh ribbons.

  I also met Wade Saye, sports editor of the Athens Banner-Herald, in Georgia’s Sanford Stadium before the 1964 game against Clemson. Wade Saye would give me my first paying newspaper job.

  Many interesting and bizarre things would happen to me in the coming years, like the time I got blitzed with Bear Bryant in the Eastern Airlines Ionosphere Room at the Atlanta Airport. I was also ringside when Muhammad Ali returned to boxing after losing his license because he didn’t want to go to Vietnam. His comeback began at the old Atlanta City Auditorium, and Ali went three rounds with Jerry Quarry. Five feet above me, in the second round, Ali landed a jab, and Quarry’s blood splattered down on my typewriter.

  But it all goes back to Thelinius. I never did get around to asking why on earth he spoke with me for fifteen minutes and invited me on his crew. I don’t guess I ever got around to thanking him, either. Not in person at least. I did write a column about him when he died.

  When the National Football League expanded into Atlanta in 1966, Ed left Georgia and went to work with CBS, doing Falcon telecasts. A couple of years later, however, CBS decided to cut back on its announcing staff, and the Turk, in the parlance of pro football, came to visit Thelinius and gave him his walking papers.

  He also lost his job as sports director of WAGA-TV. His hair was turning gray, and television only wants to keep fresh faces on the screen.

  I never did know just how many wives Thelinius had. Several, I know that. The last time I saw him, he was working as sports director for a small AM country music station in Atlanta. He had a young woman in his office whom he introduced as his “fiancée.”

  He was dead a month or so later. There were rumors of his heavy drinking. You had to search through the papers to find his obituary.

  So I wrote one of those lest-we-forget columns about Ed, wrote what he did for me, and wrote what a fine man he was. Two weeks later, I got a letter from one of his ex-wives. It was mean.

  Ed and I would share, as it turned out, more than a broadcast booth.

  Chapter 5

  IF I HAD SAID to my mother, “I don’t think I’ll go to college,” at some point during the years I lived at her house, she would have killed me.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have killed me, but she would have inflicted severe neck and head injuries upon me.

  My mother was like a lot of Baby-Boom parents. As soon as I reached the age where I could understand the basics of the English language, she began saying to me, “I want you to have it better than I did.” Translated, that meant, “If you ever say, ‘I don’t think I’ll go to college,’ I am going to inflict serious neck and head injuries upon you.”

  My mother grew up red-clay poor, on her father’s precious-few acres in Heard County, Georgia, the only one of 159 Georgia counties that didn’t have one inch of railroad tracks.

  My mother—and I have my grandmother’s word on this—actually did walk three miles to school barefoot. It rarely snowed in Heard County, Georgia, which is the only thing that saved me from a complete guilt trip when my mother put the “I walked three miles, etc.” line on me when I complained I didn’t have a Thunderbird.

  There were five children in my mother’s family. The eldest, Uncle Johnny, also walked three miles to school barefoot and later became a doctor. I wish I could say he became a podiatrist but I can’t. Well, I could, but I’d be lying. My mother, the third child, was the only other member of the family to get a degree.

  My mother graduated from Martha Berry College in Rome, Georgia. Berry offered students from poor backgrounds one choice: Come here and wash dishes, clean toilets, work on our farm, and we’ll give you an education. My mother, in other words, was never a member of a college sorority.

  She finished Martha Berry in the thirties with a degree in education. Then she married my father, then World War II broke out, I was born in ’46, Daddy went back to Korea in 1950, came back from his second war a complete mess, and left my mother when I was six and she was forty-one.

  We left Fort Benning, Georgia, my father’s last station, and moved in with my mother’s parents in a tiny little house in Moreland. My grandparents moved there from Heard County in the forties when the few red-clay acres would no longer provide.

  My grandmother went to work in a local hospital as a maternity nurse, my grandfather got a job as janitor at the Moreland Elementary School.

  Mother had never used her degree. Marriage and a child and life as a military wife had stripped her of an opportunity to do so. But it’s 1953, she doesn’t have a dime, her husband has split, and no child of hers is going to walk to school barefoot. So my mother got a job teaching first grade in Senoia, Georgia, another small town near Moreland.

  Her first year of teaching, she was paid $120 a month. A month. And one day, I would blow the opportunity to make as much as $125 a week selling encyclopedias for Howard (aka Dipstick and Zorro) Barnes.

  Senoia was six miles from Moreland. Mother needed a car. She bought a 1948 Chevrolet. Its body was the color of an orange Dreamsicle. The top was blue. The stuffing was coming out of the front-seat upholstery. It was hard to crank on cold mornings, and it burned oil.

  Mother taught one year at Senoia, and then she got a break, which she certainly deserved at this point in her life. The first-grade job came open at Moreland Elementary. Mother applied for the position and got it.

  The Moreland School was maybe a quarter-mile from my grandparents’ house. Most mornings, I walked to school. When I asked my mother if I could go barefoot, she said, “No. You might step on a rusty nail and get lockjaw.”

  Ever think about all the warnings your parents gave you growing up? Could stepping on a rusty nail really give you lockjaw and cause you to die because you couldn’t open your mouth to eat? What a horrible way to die.

  Remember “Never drink milk with fish, it’ll make you sick”? How about, “No, you can’t have a BB gun, you’ll put your eye out”?

  Today, parents are concerned about their children joining a religious cult or becoming a drug dealer. When I was growing up, they were worried about us putting an eye out.

  It wasn’t just BB guns. We were also told, “Stop running with that sharp stick. You might fall down and put your eye out.” And, “Did you hear what happened to the little boy in Hogansville? He drank some milk with his fish and got sick and was running with a sharp stick and fell down and put his eye out.”

  My mother would teach first grade at Moreland School for twenty years before the illness that killed her forced her to take an early retirement with a pittance of a pension for her disability.

  My mother’s background had taught her frugality. I’m convinced my mother could have solved the federal deficit problem. She simply would have said to the government, “Okay, turn all your money over to me and give me the list of what you owe.” She would have had us out of the hole shortly.

  I cannot remember my mother ever spending a dime on herself for something she didn’t desperately need. When the old ’48 finally gave out in 1955, she did buy a new car, a green Chevrolet. When the salesman said, “I can put a radio in for another twenty dollars,” my mother said, “We already have a radio at home.”

  I can never remember her buying more than
five dollars worth of gas at a time, either. She would pull up to the pump and say each time, “Five, please.” I think she was afraid if she filled up the tank and died, she would have wasted money on whatever gas remained in her car.

  Mother began saving for my college education with the first paycheck she ever earned. She bought bonds. She put cash in shoe boxes and hid them in the back of her closet.

  Having enough money to send me to college when the time came consumed my mother. Besides the bonds and the shoe-box cash, she kept a coin bank, bought day-old bread, sat in the dark to save on the electric bill, never had her hair done, quit smoking, and never put more than a dollar in the collection plate at church. She used some simple logic for not tithing the Biblical tenth: “If the Lord wanted me to tithe that much, he wouldn’t have made college so expensive.”

  Mother had no problems with my intention to study journalism. She wouldn’t have cared if I had studied chicken proctology at the School of Agriculture, just as long as I was enrolled.

  As a matter of fact, my mother did have something to do with my interest in putting words on paper. My mother was on constant grammar patrol when I was growing up.

  Going to school with children from poor, rural backgrounds, as I did, I often fell in with a bad-grammar crowd.

  What follows is a glossary of the way a lot of words were mispronounced around me constantly:

  “His’n” (his)

  “Her’n” (hers)

  “Their’n” (theirs)

  “That there’n” (That one)

  “You got air asack? (Do you have a sack?)

  “I ain’t got nairn.” (No, I’m afraid I don’t)

  Mother also disliked another common grammatical error of the times. Many of my friends would say, in referring to their parents, “Daddy, he went to town last night”; or “Mamma, she went with him, and they didn’t bring us air a thang.”

  “There is no reason to say, ‘Daddy, he,’ ” my mother would remind me. “ ‘Daddy’ is identification enough.”