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

by Lewis Grizzard

“Ain’t,” of course, was a hanging offense. You never got away with double negatives or the popular answer to “Have you done your homework?” “Yes, I done done it.”

  My mother did allow, however, certain words and phrases common to southern speech that might not be able to stand a harsh review, in the strictest sense, of whether or not they were proper.

  My mother, for instance, had no problem with the use of the term “fixing” in place of “going to” or “it is my intention to,” as in “I’m fixing to do my homework.” I still say “fixing,” and anybody who doesn’t like it can stay in Boston and freeze.

  My mother also had no problem with certain southern expletives, such as:

  Hot-aw-mighty (God Almighty)

  Dang-nab-it (Of all the rotten luck)

  Dad-gum-it (Same as above)

  Shut yo’ mouth. (You’re kidding me—and please note it’s not “Hush yo’ mouth,” which a lot of people from up North think.)

  Lawd, have mercy. (About the same as “Shut yo’ mouth.”)

  I’ll be a suck-egg mule. (See previous chapter for explanation.)

  My mother would not abide, however, any form of swearing.

  I never would have used the following words and phrases in this book if my mother were still alive, because it might have broken her heart. But she’s gone now, and I suppose I can offer up such examples of common southern curse words:

  Shee-yet far (Southerners can probably say “shit” better than anybody else. We give it the ol’ two syllable, “shee-yet,” which strings it out a bit and gives it more ambience, if words can have ambience. “Shee-yet far” is southern for “shit fire,” which means something between “Oh, my God” and “Look out, Knute, she’s headin’ for the brier patch.”)

  Sumbitch. Southern, of course, for “son of a bitch.” However, when people from the North try to say “sumbitch,” it doesn’t come out exactly right. Jackie Gleason tried to say it a million times in the immortal Smokey and the Bandit movies, but he never did pull it off.

  I don’t think southerners actually say “sumbitch.” It’s more “suhbitch,” as in “That suhbitch can flat play a cello,” which I’m not certain has ever been said in the South, but I like to throw in such classy allusions like that to prove we’ve got more class than Yankees often give us credit for.)

  Got-damn (You know)

  Ice (We don’t say “ass” like other people do. I can’t decide exactly how we say “ass,” but “ice” comes rather close, as in “Shee-yet far, Randy, if that got-damn suhbitch don’t watch his ice, somebody’s goin’ to break that cello right over his got-damn head.”)

  The term “ice” also brings up another interesting story about my mother. In the middle sixties the county schools of Georgia were integrated, and my mother wound up with a first-grade class made up mostly of black first-graders.

  I almost forgot that “nigger” was taboo in my mother’s house, too. In fact, my mother was the only person I knew who didn’t say “nigger.” She was the first person to explain to me that it was a derogatory term.

  In those days, however, there were only three substitutes available for “nigger,” all three of which are frowned upon by today’s blacks and African-Americans.

  The three substitutes were “colored,” “knee-grow,” and “nig-gra.”

  My mother never indicated to me which of the three substitutes she preferred, but thinking back, I’d think she preferred “knee-grow.”

  Although there remains the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” “colored” brings to mind such phrases as “Colored seat from Rear,” a command one might have read on a bus or train in the fifties.

  And people who used “nig-gra” always seemed to say that word with noticeable disdain. But “knee-grow,” I think, was an effort on the part of some white people, like my mother, to also say, “The times they are a-changin’, so let’s get on with the program.”

  What concerned my mother (her students referred to her as “Miz Christine”) most about the grammar of many of her black first-graders was their use of “axe” for “ask.”

  She attacked it this way:

  She said, “Students, can you say ‘assssssss’?”

  First-graders thought getting to say “assssssss” at school was a riot.

  After running through “assssssss” several times, my mother would say, “Now, can you make the ‘k’ sound?” which, I suppose, is “kuh.” Then Mother would say, “Put the two together: ‘asssssssskuh.’ “

  Her methods might be attacked today as a manifestation of racial insensitivity. Blacks have every right to pronounce “ask” as “axe” if they want to, but a person who had been on constant grammar patrol for all those years must be given some forgiveness if her methods reeked of any sort of bias.

  I made excellent grades throughout school. Again, if I hadn’t, my mother would have inflicted both a verbal and physical beating upon me. My constant fear was, “What if my mother saves up all that money for my college and I can’t get in because I made a ‘C’ in ancient history?” I hated ancient history because I didn’t give a shee-yet when Rome was sacked, nor who won the Punic Wars. But because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother, I studied and paid a fair amount of attention in class and made an “A” in ancient history anyway.

  I applied to only one school, the University of Georgia. My high school counselor, one Mr. “Cheeks” Chandler, as he was affectionately known, told me Georgia’s journalism school was one of the best in the country, right up there with the journalism schools at the University of Missouri and Northwestern.

  I remember the day the letter came. It said on the front of the envelope, “This is your official University of Georgia acceptance.”

  I gave Mr. Killingsworth my notice at the bank the middle of August. I went into his office and said, “Mr. Killingsworth, I have decided a career in banking is not for me. This is my two-week notice.”

  He gazed up at the organizational chart to make certain I was still at the bottom of it, so, I suppose, he could handle this with a so-who-cares attitude. He didn’t say, “Who cares?”, but I could see it on his face. What he did say was, “Good luck, now get back to work.”

  I actually was happy with his reaction. I was afraid I was going to have to explain I was leaving his employ to attend the University of Georgia in the fall and he would get suspicious and say, “Hey, you knew all along you were taking this job on a temporary basis, didn’t you? You misled me and the bank, and I’m going to see to it you never work in this town again.” How did I know that he wasn’t Furman Bisher’s good friend or neighbor and could say to Bisher, “Let me warn you about this little creep named Grizzard who misled me and the bank”?

  The first of September, I packed my things at Ronnie’s apartment, assured Paula I wouldn’t be interested in any of the college girls I met, and went back home to Moreland. Three days later, my stepfather would drive me to Athens and help me unload my clothes and notebooks and portable typewriter and Sears radio, which is all I owned at the time, into my room in freshman dorm at Reed Hall.

  Mama had paid for my first quarter. It was perhaps a two-hundred-dollar lick, counting books. She also gave me two hundred dollars cash from some hidden shoe box somewhere for other expenses.

  She hugged me when I left home and said, “I’ve looked forward to this day for a long time. I know you will do well and don’t drink.”

  I would do well.

  One out of two’s not bad.

  Before classes began, there was the matter of Georgia’s opening 1964 football game against Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

  Ed Thelinius wouldn’t fly. There was a reason for that. He was frightened to. Freshman were not allowed to have cars at Georgia, so I caught a pre-dawn bus from Athens to Atlanta on the Saturday of Georgia’s opener, to be played under the lights at Alabama’s Denny Stadium. (“Under the lights” is another sports cliché. It won’t be long before I’ll get into a lengthy discussion about sports c
lichés, all of which I had memorized by 1964.)

  Thelinius picked me up in his car at the bus station in Atlanta. John Withers, the Georgia spotter, sat in the front. I sat in the back for the ride to Tuscaloosa and didn’t say very much.

  Georgia’s football program had fallen into scandal and hard times. A Saturday Evening Post article had claimed former Georgia coach Wally Butts had conspired with Alabama’s Bear Bryant to fix the 1962 Georgia-Alabama game in Alabama’s favor. Butts and Bryant would win their libel suit against the Post later, but when the season opened in 1964, Georgia had had three straight miserable seasons, and the fix scandal still hadn’t been resolved.

  What the school had done after the 1963 season was to clean the athletic department house and move Joel Eaves of Auburn in as athletic director. Eaves then shocked the state by hiring a thirty-one-year-old assistant coach at Auburn, Vince Dooley, as the new Georgia head football coach. The alumni wanted a name. They got Vince Who?

  Thelinius’s broadcast crew consisted of six people. Besides himself and Withers and me, Jim Koger kept statistics, L. H. Christian of WRFC in Athens was the engineer, and a legendary pioneer of radio sports-casting, Bill Munday, provided what we know today as “color.”

  Munday may be mentioned in the same breath as other sportscasting giants of the Golden Age of Sports and Atwater-Kent radios. The story went that once he was going to do the Harvard-Yale game back in the thirties on nationwide radio. The night before the game, he was having dinner with Harvard officials. At one point, Munday, a Georgia alumnus and son of the South, was asked, “Mr. Munday, who will you be pulling for tomorrow? Yale or Fair Harvard?” Munday thought for a moment, then replied, “Neither one. You’re both a bunch of damn Yankees, and I wish there was a way you both could lose.”

  We took our seats in the visitors’ radio booth in the Denny Stadium press box. Thelinius was in the middle. To his extreme left was Koger, who lived in Athens and did Georgia basketball play-by-play.

  Withers sat at his near left. I was on his near right. Munday sat next to me on the right. I think he’d had a few pre-game drinks. L. H. Christian was behind us, engineering the broadcast.

  Georgia kicked off. On Alabama’s first play from scrimmage, Georgia defensive tackle George Patton threw Joe Namath for a loss.

  “George Patton throws Namath for a loss,” said Thelinius into his microphone.

  “Jawja’s ready! Jawja’s ready!” screamed Munday into his.

  I was terrified. In the first place, I was supposed to watch the action on the field through a pair of binoculars Thelinius had provided me. But I had neglected to focus them on the field before the game began. All I saw during the kickoff was white blurs, Georgia, and crimson blurs, Alabama. I had no idea who ran back the kickoff for Alabama, but Thelinius familiarized himself with the players before each broadcast, so he was able to say “Richard Thurgood, a two-hundred-twelve-pound junior from Talladega, Alabama, brings it back to the Crimson Tide twenty-eight.”

  By the second quarter, I had finally focused my binoculars and actually was able to be of some assistance to the announcer.

  As it turned out, Jawja was not ready. Namath routed the Dawgs, 31–3.

  What else I remember about the evening of my press-box debut is it took four hours to get from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, thirty miles away, in all the traffic. We got back to Atlanta at six the next morning. Thelinius dropped me at the bus station. I got back to Athens at noon. That’s the bad news.

  The good news is that Jim Koger rode back with us, and as we sat in traffic in Tuscaloosa, he got out of the car and went inside a package store and bought some beer and gave me one. This was going to be even better than I had thought.

  I should note here that Jim Koger eventually left the Georgia crew and involved himself in a number of other ventures, which included a stint (another sports cliché) as a television sportscaster in Columbus, Georgia. After that, he ran the Columbus minor-league baseball franchise and may have been the first person to think of having parachutists jump out of airplanes and land on an athletic field before some sort of contest.

  I’m not certain what-all he did after that, except that the last time I saw him, approximately twenty years after the night in Tuscaloosa when he gave me a beer, he informed me he was a born-again Christian and that the End was near.

  What I want to say here is that if Jim Koger is still feeling guilty about giving a seventeen-year-old a beer in 1964, he shouldn’t be. I would have found a way to get my own beer. And as far as the End is concerned, I really don’t think God will count off for drinking beer. Tequila shooters, maybe. But not beer.

  I got off to a terrible start when classes began. The first really bad thing that happened to me at Georgia was that I was told upon registering for fall-quarter classes that I was eligible to take part in the Honors Program.

  That sounded impressive. I had been a member of the Beta Club in high school, and being eligible for the Honors Program in college seemed to indicate to me I was just as smart as I thought I was.

  I registered for three 5-hour courses. All freshman journalism students were required to take Introduction to Journalism. Besides that, I also registered for the honors version of Psychology 101 and Math 105.

  There were only six of us in Honors Psych 101. The first day of class, the instructor, whose suit was too small for him, gave us a list of books we must buy for his course. Three of the four books, the instructor had written. I smelled a laboratory rat.

  The second day of class, the instructor, who wore the same ill-fitting suit he had worn the first day, gave his first lecture.

  I didn’t understand anything he was saying. And he said it all too fast, so I panicked.

  I looked around at the other five students in the room. Not a single one of them had their mouths half-open, as I did.

  One of the sure signs that somebody is completely lost in a situation is if somebody has his or her mouth half-open. When a dog doesn’t understand something, such as what in the hell you are talking about when you say, “Here, poochie, poochie, poochie” (Since the dog’s name is “Jerome”), the dog will cock his head to one side and look at you like you’re nuts.

  But when people find themselves in that situation, they half-open their mouths. I sat there in Dr. What’s-his-name’s Honors Psych 101 class for fifty minutes and never took a single note. That’s because I had no idea what to write down in my notebook.

  A few minutes before class ended, Dr. Strangespeak asked the class, “Are there any questions?”

  I wanted to say, “Yeah, I’ve got one. What in the name of God have you been talking about for the last forty-five minutes?”

  One hand did go up from one of my fellow students, a fat girl. I didn’t even understand her question, much less the instructor’s answer. A boy with terminal acne then raised his hand and asked the instructor a question in something that sounded like Chinese. The instructor answered in Portuguese.

  Finally, I raised my hand, and asked, “Did Sigmund Freud have a dog?”

  I dropped out of Honors Psych 101 the very next day and signed up for a course called Earth Science Survey. We talked about what causes lightning and thunder. I could deal with that.

  Lightning is caused when cold air bumps into hot air and the clouds catch on fire. Thunder is caused by God beating His drum. I would make an “A” in Earth Science Survey. The instructor had a sense of humor.

  Honors Math 105 turned out to be the same mismatch for me Honors Psych had been. The real problem may have been that the instructor was a male. I had taken all my algebra from the sex symbol of my high school faculty, the lovely Miss Fleming, she of the tight sweaters and skirts.

  Somehow, a man in a pair of baggy pants didn’t stir my interest in, or recollections of, algebra. I dropped Honors Math after the first day of class and enrolled in Introduction to Goat Roping over at the Ag school. To this day, I still think I could rope a goat much easier than I could solve some mathematical problem, such a
s “If Darryl leaves Chicago headed for Des Moines, a distance of 330 miles, driving at 55 miles an hour and he gets 22 miles to the gallon in his Corvair and gasoline costs (this is 1964), 37 cents a gallon, what is Ralph Nader’s shoe size?”

  Introduction to Journalism, on the other hand, turned out to be a wonderful change.

  It was taught by Dean John E. Drewery, the distinguished and learned dean of the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism. Dean Drewery was an elderly man who wore three-piece suits and peered down over his glasses. He was John Houseman with a classic, to-the-manor-born southern accent.

  The Grady School had, in effect, risen to national prominence under his guidance. The Grady School, then and now, hands out the prestigious Peabody Awards each year, broadcast journalism’s Pulitzer prizes.

  Dean Drewery, it was widely rumored, had the credentials to have risen to the presidency of the university, but an indiscretion that received a great deal of publicity had kept him in his deandom.

  There are many versions to the story, which every student in the School of Journalism knew by the second day of enrollment. My favorite went like this:

  Dean Drewery was having an affair with his secretary in the early sixties. He was married at the time. One afternoon, between classes, the dean and his secretary gave in to passion’s urging and decided to have at it right there on top of the dean’s desk.

  At some point during their lovemaking, the door to the dean’s office opened suddenly, and there stood Mrs. Dean Drewery with a pistol.

  Before the dean, who was on top with his pants down, could say, “This isn’t what it seems to be,” his wife opened fire. She aimed at her husband’s bare hindparts and put three bullets into her target.

  The dean’s secretary, despite the fact she was shielded by the now-bleeding dean, was also hit.

  When the ambulance arrived, Dean Drewery is said to have commented to the attendants, in his best stentorian southern, “Do hurry. We’ve been shot.”

  Dean Drewery recovered from his wounds and obtained a divorce from his wife, who left Athens and was never charged in the shooting. The trial would have been terribly messy. After his divorce, the dean married his secretary, who was much younger than he was.