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

by Lewis Grizzard

  But this thing in Athens would become as competitive as any other newspaper battle to the death. On a much smaller scale, yes, but a fight is a fight, regardless of the stature of the combatants.

  Glenn Vaughn, the editor, was the perfect editor for this perfect newspaperman’s dream. He was a graduate of the university. He had worked in Atlanta and on the Columbus Enquirer. I’ve never known a man who loved newspapering as much as Glenn Vaughn. Newspapers consumed him. He rarely talked of anything else. The Daily News was his and was whatever he wanted it to be. I don’t know when he slept or ate.

  And how much he looked his part, too. He wore suspenders long before stockbrokers and lawyers all started wearing suspenders. He wore thick glasses, and his hair usually was down over his forehead. He dressed better than Larry Young, which basically meant his taste in shoes was better and he had more than one suit.

  He edited in green ink. He had been known as “Foggy” to his Georgia classmates in the early fifties. Glenn often seemed to be in the Newsroom Out Yonder. He was absentminded, messy, and given to forgetting what the conversation was about. He also came at you from places no one else ever did, ever could, or ever will.

  After I’d been at the paper a year or so, I walked by his office one day, and Glenn said, “Lewis, you got a minute?” his standard way of saying, “Come into my office.”

  I sat down at the chair in front of his desk. Whenever Glenn had a new idea and was enthusiastic about it, he would beat a fist into the palm of his other hand, which is what he began to do soon after I sat down.

  “What,” he began, “would be the biggest local story we could ever have at the Daily News?”

  I thought for a minute. “The university burning down.”

  “Bigger than that.”

  “Georgia winning the national football championship.”

  “Even bigger than that.”

  “Twenty-five sorority girls indicted in a sex-ring operation.”

  “That’s big,” said Glenn, “but not as big as what I have in mind.”

  “I give up,” I said.

  “What if,” he followed, pounding his fist into his palm even harder now, “the Second Coming took place in Athens?”

  I didn’t have time to answer the question.

  “It’s got to happen somewhere, doesn’t it?” he went on. “A lot of people might think it would happen in New York or some other large city, but why not a small town?”

  I didn’t have any argument with that. Nothing I had learned in the Methodist Church had indicated where Jesus might actually touch down on that Great Gettin’-Up Morning. If I had been asked to guess, though, I really wouldn’t have selected Athens. New York, sure. Start with the big sinners and then work on down.

  I knew Glenn had a reason to be asking me all this. He did.

  “In case the Second Coming did happen in Athens,” he continued, “we’ve got to be ready for it.”

  Right. We certainly would want to beat the Banner-Herald. Lyndon Johnson coming to town was big, but this, this would dwarf even that.

  Glenn said, “I’ve already drawn up the front page.”

  He showed me the layout sheet. Across the top of the page was an eight-column, one-line 124-point headline. The higher the point size, the larger the headline. The New York Times, even today, rarely goes over, say, a 48-point headline, even when a president dies.

  Underneath the headline, Glenn had drawn the newspaper’s masthead. To take a headline or a story “above the mast” was to put the story in the category of stupendous, colossal, and far-reaching in its effects.

  Down the left-hand side of the front paper was our usual “Georgia Datelines” feature. It was a two-column compendium of Georgia news, taken off the United Press International wire. Even if the Second Coming was the main story, Glenn had reasoned, we couldn’t take “Georgia Datelines” off the front. There might be a big fire in Atlanta or a killing in Americus.

  The other six columns of the front page were taken up by a large photograph that went nearly to the bottom of the page. Glenn explained:

  “As you know, we get our UPI Wirephotos from the mail. So, if one of our own photographers didn’t get a photograph of the actual ascension, we’d have to wait a day for UPI’s. So I went over to the library and took out a book on religious art, and found what I thought was the best and clearest portrait of Christ.

  “I brought it back and had a Velox [a picture of the picture] made. It’s just a head shot, but we can paste it right on the front page in a matter of seconds. I’ve also already written the headlines and had them made up. We can paste them down right away too and be on the streets with a special edition before the Banner-Herald knows what hit them.”

  I knew he would show me the headlines. He did.

  The eight-column over-the-mast, 124-point head said:

  “HE’S BACK!“

  Underneath the Velox of Christ, there was a small headline that said,

  “DETAILS, PAGE 2.”

  “I want you to write me a cut-on line [caption] for the head shot of Jesus,” Glenn said.

  I wrote, “Christian Savior Jesus Christ Returned to Earth Today.”

  “Needs more pizzazz,” Glenn insisted.

  I wrote, “Biblical Prediction Comes True: Son of God Returns.”

  “Still not right,” said Glenn. “It needs a local angle.”

  So I wrote, “Athens Set to Give Hero’s Welcome to Returning Son of God, Jesus Christ (pictured above).”

  Finally, Glenn rewrote the cutline himself. His said, “Athenians say ‘Glad to Have You Back’ After Surprise Drop-In by Jesus. Larry Young’s exclusive interview inside.”

  “Do you think Larry could get to him first?” I asked Glenn.

  “No question,” he said. “I’ve already told him to make sure he has at least a half of tank of gas in his car at all times, just in case.”

  What Glenn Vaughn thought a community newspaper should do is cover the community first. He figured you could wrap up most of the national and international news in a brief summary inside the paper. It was rare a nonlocal story ever made front page of the Daily News, and if it did, it had to be the sort of story no other newspapers could carry out front.

  “I remember the old wire editor in Columbus,” he told me once.

  “He’d go through the wire and find some incredible story, pass it around, and say, ‘Here, read this.’ It would be a helluva story. But as soon as everybody had read it, it would go back to the wire editor, and he would throw it in the trash.”

  “Why was that?” I asked him.

  “Because the story wasn’t on the wire budget,” he explained.

  Each day, the wire opens with its summary of what editors considered to be the top stories of the day. This was the budget. Not to carry a story that was on the wire budget was considered a manifestation of poor news judgment.

  “You know how the wire budget probably gets made up?” Glenn asked me. “Somebody in New York says to a copy boy, ‘Go around and see what everybody’s got today and make me up a budget’ There’s some nineteen-year-old kid who’s determining what wire stories are on the front page of newspapers all over the country.”

  I first walked into the Athens Daily News building in the morning of August 22, 1965. I was nineteen. The Daily News building had once been an automobile agency. The showroom, with huge glass windows looking out onto the street and directly at the Open House Restaurant (open twenty-four hours a day, all the grease you could eat and breathe), had been turned into a newsroom.

  There were six desks. On each desk sat a manual typewriter. Facing the window, Gerald Rutberg had the far desk on the right. Larry Young’s desk was the closest. Nobody was in the far desk on the left. Wade Saye had the near desk on the left.

  There was another desk to the left of Wade. Next to that desk was the UPI teletype. That’s where Jim Sheppard, the managing editor, worked. He stripped the wire, edited copy, handled assignments, and laid out what pages Glenn hadn’
t already taken his green pen to.

  I went to Wade’s desk first. He said, “You need to go in and meet Glenn Vaughn, the editor.”

  Glenn’s office was to the right as you stepped up from the newsroom. It probably was the office of the sales manager when the place was still an automobile dealership. You know the sales manager. He’s the one the salesman talks about when he’s trying to sell you a ’64 Plymouth and he says, “My sales manager is going to kill me for this, but I’ll let you have it for nine-hundred-fifty dollars.”

  I knocked on the door.

  “Wade said you did a good job for him at the Banner-Herald” he said to me.

  “Well, sir,” I said, “I worked as hard as I could. I feel practical experience is very important when one is seeking a career in journalism.”

  I was proud of myself for saying that. I sounded like a young man who knew what responsibility was all about and who could be trusted not to sniff a glue pot intentionally.

  “I can give you twenty hours of work a week,” Glenn said. “At a dollar twenty-five per hour.”

  I went back to see Wade. He said, “Athens High is practicing at one. Cover it.”

  So I found some brown typing paper—we weren’t provided notebooks at the Daily News—folded it, and put it in my back pocket. Then I found a red copy pencil, put it behind my ear, and got into the car I’d bought over the summer in Newnan, a red-and-white 1954 Chevrolet. The salesman had said, “My sales manager is going to kill me for this, but I’ll let it go for four-hundred-fifty dollars.”

  I drove over to Athens High and watched practice. When it was over, I walked up to Weyman Sellers, the head coach and a former Georgia star, and introduced myself. Weyman Sellers was a large man.

  “I’m Lewis Grizzard of the Daily News,” I said.

  “Grizzard?” he asked back. “What kind of name is that? What are you, a Japanese exchange student?”

  I would have a lot of trouble attempting to interview coaches during my sportswriting career. I might as well have started here.

  I asked Weyman Sellers, “Coach, what kind of team are you expecting this year?”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “You sure you aren’t from Japan?” he asked.

  I assured him that I wasn’t. “Grizzard” is a French name. My mother’s ancestors were Scottish and Irish.

  “How do I know what kind of team we’re going to have?” he went on. “Right now, we’ve got so many people hurt, we can’t even scrimmage.”

  Ah, so, my angle. I asked him to name the key players hurt, and I wrote down the players’ names on my brown copy paper with my red editing pencil, said it was nice to meet him and that I would be covering the team the entire season.

  “You believe that, Frank?” he said to his assistant, Frank Malinowski, who’d also played at Georgia. “We’re going to have a Jap with us all year.”

  Frank just laughed.

  I drove back to the Daily News. Wade told me to sit at the empty desk across from Rutberg.

  I wrote:

  By LEWIS GRIZZARD JR.

  Daily News Sports Writer

  “Oooh! Ouch! Oh!”—familiar interjections at the Athens High Trojan football practice yesterday.

  I learned the word “interjection” in English class my senior year in high school and never had had an opportunity to use it. I had filed it away, however, awaiting just the right moment. This was clearly it

  Wade ran the story without comment.

  I would work for the Daily News for a thousand days. Each of those days were precious. Like nothing before, like nothing since. I have cried in reminiscence more times than I remember. If only it, like so many things, could have lasted.

  Chapter 8

  THERE WAS THE STORY about Dr. Aderhold’s wife’s chicken. Dr. O.C. Aderhold, was president of the University of Georgia, and he lived in a stately mansion on Prince Avenue.

  Mrs. Aderhold had a pet chicken. I seem to remember the chicken’s name was Hilda, but it could have been Rhonda. No, Rhonda was the waitress at the Open House who didn’t have any teeth and used to sit at the counter during her breaks gumming pickles out of the counter pickle jar, which was something to see and something the Daily News should have done a story about. Hilda was a girl who worked back in the mail room, I think. It was twenty-five years ago. Who cares what the chicken’s name was?

  Anyway, one day, Mrs. Aderhold’s pet chicken (maybe it was Veronica) climbed up in a tree in Mrs. Aderhold’s yard and wouldn’t come down. Mrs. Aderhold tried to get her chicken down out of the tree for hours, but the chicken wouldn’t budge. Mrs. Aderhold was afraid the chicken would catch cold at that altitude, or would be carried off to the Casbah by a lecherous chicken hawk. You know how they are.

  When she panicked, she did what any wife of the president of a large southern institution would do when she couldn’t get her pet chicken (Florence?) to come down out of a tree.

  She called the fire department.

  Larry Young covered the story. We had photographs. Glenn Vaughn made it the lead story in the Daily News the next morning. Who remembers what the Banner-Herald led with?

  “THE RESCUE OF MRS.

  ADERHOLD’S CHICKEN”

  screamed the 72-point, eight column headline.

  And then:

  By LARRY YOUNG

  Daily News City Editor

  A pet chicken owned by Mrs. O.C. Aderhold, wife of University president Dr. O.C. Aderhold, wouldn’t come down from a tree in front of her stately Prince Avenue home yesterday, so the Athens Fire Department came to the rescue.

  Answering a call from Mrs. Aderhold at 2:17 P.M., Athens fireman arrived on the scene at exactly 2:20 and had the chicken safely out of the tree in a matter of moments.

  “I just love that chicken,” Mrs. Aderhold said. “I don’t know what I would have done had it been carried off by a chicken hawk. You know how they are.”

  The chicken was rescued when hook and ladder engine No. 8 was driven under the tree and fireman Arnold Spintz was hoisted to the limb where the chicken was perched. With great care not to injure or alarm the chicken, he brought it down and placed it into the waiting arms of Mrs. Aderhold.

  As for President Aderhold, he had no other comment except to say he appreciated what the fire department had done and was going to sleep.

  The story had Athens talking for weeks. Some reacted, of course, by whispering, “How could the wife of the president of the university become so attached to a chicken?” Others simply thought it was pretty funny, while others called in with their own chicken-in-a-tree story.

  A man from nearby Comer, Georgia, called to say, “Any fool knows a chicken will come down out of a tree soon as it gets hungry enough.”

  A Watkinsville woman commented, “Mrs. Aderhold ought to go ahead and eat that chicken before she becomes even more attached to it.

  “I had a pet chicken once, but the preacher came to eat one Sunday, and Daddy went out an’ wrung its neck and Mama fried it and served it to the preacher. I wouldn’t eat none of it myself, on account of I was so attached to it, and I was hungry all Sunday afternoon until Mama opened a can of Spam for dinner.”

  A journalism professor of mine said it was embarrassing to see a daily newspaper carry a story about a chicken rescue as the banner, but that he’d had a pet chicken once and his dog killed it trying to have sex with it.

  How stories get on the front page of most morning newspapers goes like this:

  There’s a late-afternoon news meeting of the editors. The managing editor usually conducts the meeting, and he asks each of his or her various underlings what stories they are preparing for the first edition. Once all this information is in, there’s a roundtable discussion to decide which stories are important enough go to on the front page.

  As I mentioned earlier, there is the wire budget to consider.

  The managing editor will ask the wire editor, “What’s on the budget?”

  The wire editor will resp
ond, “Congress has voted to give statehood to American Samoa, the Supreme Court (which the budget always refers to as SCOTUS—you figure it out) has ruled it’s unconstitutional to turn right on red, the Russians have invaded Argentina, there’s a piece on tangerines causing cancer, and Willie Nelson has decided to shave off his beard.”

  Then the city editor will come forward with the local stories of the day:

  “City Council is studying a proposal to sell the entire town and all its citizens to the Japanese; something ate an entire garbage truck. Lon Dinkle’s pit bull “Skippy” is the prime suspect; the mayor has admitted he is a homosexual and will seek reelection as a Whig; a sinkhole swallowed the bowling alley and the entire Pin-Busters team; and a drive-by mooning incident has been reported by the weekly meeting of the United Daughters of the Boxer Rebellion.”

  The managing editor will decide all these stories are much too interesting to go on the front page (“This ain’t no tabloid,” he will say), and the editors will be told to go back and find a lot of stuff about South Yemen and rezoning hearings.

  That’s not the way we did it at the Athens Daily News. Glenn, ever the journalistic pioneer, insisted every story on the front page was worth reading, shocking other journalism instructors, who said, “If the Daily News keeps this up, it won’t last six more weeks.”

  But we never let up. For instance:

  * In neighboring Jackson County, the local solicitor had decided to crack down on an infamous car-theft operation. One morning, he went outside and cranked his car and his car blew up with him in it. We covered it like the Second Coming.

  Three men were arrested in the incident, but a fourth was still at large. Fearing for his life because of the outrage the bombing brought, the suspect finally called Larry Young and said he would turn himself in to the newspaper if we could guarantee his safety.

  The headline went something like:

  “BOMBING SUSPECT GIVES

  UP TO DAILY NEWS”

  Scoop.

  * Georgia was to play at Clemson the following Saturday. On Sunday morning, I happened to catch The Frank Howard Show. Frank Howard was head coach at Clemson and talked as if he had a mouth full of mud, which was really tobacco.