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

by Lewis Grizzard

  I wrote a Tuesday column, lampooning the show and quoting Coach Howard saying such words as “Heah” (here), “co-atch” (coach), “big-un” (large person), as in “Jawja’s gone brang in some big-uns ovah heah Satdy and Co-atch Dooley always has his boys ready to play.”

  Wednesday morning, I was having lunch at my apartment. The phone rang. I answered it. A gravel mixer on the other end asked, “Yo’ name Grizzud?”

  “That’s close,” I said.

  “This is Co-atch Frank Howard at Clemsun, and I done read what you had to say ’bout me, and I’m gon’ sue you butt.”

  Having not yet taken Journalism Law and knowing very little about libel laws, I panicked and drove quickly to the office to tell Glenn about the phone call from Co-atch Howard. I assumed he would go into a rage and say, “This could cost us millions.” Instead, he started hitting his fist into his palm and said, “This is great!”

  He interviewed me, wrote a story, and the next day we lead with, “Clemson’s Howard Threatens Suit Against Daily News.”

  Of course, there never was a suit, but it beat the Banner-Herald’s lead on rioting in South Yemen.

  One evening, there was nobody but me to go to a neighboring community and investigate what various callers had told us was the local police chief running a speed-trap operation.

  It was my first nonsports assignment for the paper. I had no idea what to do, since there’s no press box to sit in when you investigate a police chief operating a speed-trap operation.

  What I did was drive to the little community, walk into the oneroom police station, and ask the man I saw sitting there, “Are you the police chief?”

  He said that he was, and I said, “Glad to meet you. I’m Lewis Grizzard of the Athens Daily News, and I wonder if you would comment on the fact we’ve had several calls about you running a speed-trap operation.”

  The chief responded with something that went like this: “Get your ass out of my office, and if I catch you back in my town again . . .”

  I didn’t hear the rest of the quote because I was halfway back to Athens by this time.

  “What did you get?” Glenn asked me when I got back to the office.

  “Nothing,” I said. “The chief told me to get my ass out of his office, and that if he ever caught me back in his town again . . .”

  Glenn didn’t need the rest of the quote. By this time he was writing a story that appeared on the front page the next morning under the headline

  “POLICE CHIEF THREATENS

  DAILY NEWS REPORTER”

  Charges eventually were brought against the chief, incidentally, and he was run out of town. Journalism at work.

  Glenn would take risks.

  Dr. Aderhold had retired as president of the university, and the Board of Regents had launched a search for his replacement.

  The Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution had run a story naming eight finalists for the job. The new president was to be introduced at an Atlanta news conference Wednesday morning.

  Tuesday afternoon, Glenn said, “We’ve got to find out who it is. I want the new president’s name on the front page in the morning.”

  Glenn got on the phone. Larry Young got on the phone. They called one of the candidates at his home in Missouri. The man was there, so he was ruled out. The new president would be in Atlanta, waiting to be introduced at the press conference the next morning.

  For one reason or the other, six of the candidates were eliminated. That left two, a guy from Ohio or someplace and Dr. Fred Davison, vice-chancellor for the University system of Georgia.

  Glenn and Larry couldn’t find either one of them by phone. It was nearing deadline.

  “It’s got to be Davison,” Glenn said.

  “But what if it’s not?” Larry asked him.

  “Sometimes,” Glenn said, “you’ve got to roll the dice.”

  The headline was above the mast the next morning. It read:

  “DAVISON TO BE NAMED UNIVERSITY

  PRESIDENT TODAY”

  The Atlanta news conference was scheduled at eleven. Glenn and Larry, armed with copies of the paper, drove to Atlanta to be at the conference.

  I had a nine o’clock journalism class that morning. One of my professors said, “If you’re not right, your paper is going to look pretty stupid.”

  The Banner-Herald had only speculated the day before. Neither the Journal nor the Constitution had gone out on a limb, either.

  There was an Associated Press teletype in the journalism building. At eleven, I walked over to it and waited for the Georgia split (national and international news would be interrupted for state news).

  My loyalty to Glenn and the paper had grown to living-and-dying proportions by this time. What if we were wrong? Would we go out of business? Would Glenn be fired? Would my future be clouded because of my association with a newspaper that might be deemed irresponsible if we had guessed and missed?

  The AP machine typed the dateline, “ATLANTA . . .”

  This was it. The first letter was a D. The second was an r. A period followed.

  ATLANTA—Dr. Fred Davison, vice chancellor for the University system of Georgia, was named president of the University of Georgia. . . .

  I skipped my next class and went directly to the paper. When Glenn came back, he was ecstatic:

  “You should have seen it!” he laughed, beating his fist into his palm. “We were standing there with all those Atlanta reporters, and as soon as Dr. Davison was announced, I started handing out copies of the paper.

  “They couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe a little paper in Athens had scooped the world.”

  Glenn also had sent a reporter to the Davisons’ home. She came back with an exclusive interview with Mrs. Davison for the following day’s paper.

  The beer was cold that night. We stopped celebrating when the sun came up and Glenn had a great idea (most ideas that were crazy, and worked, were Glenn’s) about a catfish with false teeth.

  Yeah, a catfish with false teeth.

  If you can make the lead story in a daily newspaper a report on a chicken that wouldn’t come down from a tree, certainly you could run a story about a catfish with false teeth.

  In late March, Glenn said to Larry, Wade, and me over a grease burger at the Open House, “We need to do something for April Fool’s.”

  Other newspaper editors sit around and ponder series on China, suburban sewerage problems, the environment, large cracks in the earth, needed changes in the tax codes, and the coming crisis someplace in Chad, which you thought was a folk singer not a place.

  Not Glenn Vaughn. Every day’s newspaper presented him with the opportunity for an adventure. If there were more newspaper editors like Glenn, there actually would be a lot of interesting things to read in the paper, like somebody broke into Lurleen Furgesson’s house down the street last night and stole her La-Z-Boy recliner and skinned her cat. Who cares about Chad when there is great stuff like that?

  So Glenn had this idea. He dispatched Larry Young and a photographer out to Pete Dickens Lake, west of Athens. Pete Dickens had one of those lakes where you could pay a dollar or so and catch all the catfish you could haul out of the lake.

  Catfish make tasty eating, unless you’ve seen one up close. Up close, they look like skinned, slimy cats. It’s also unappetizing to see somebody clean a catfish. What you do—and I’m not making any of this up—is you find a tree and nail the catfish’s head to it.

  Then you take a tool like a pair of pliers and you pull the catfish’s skin off the catfish. Then, of course, you have to cut the catfish open and remove everything you wouldn’t want to eat, such as the catfish’s gallbladder.

  I’ve seen catfish up close and I have seen catfish being cleaned, but I have a strong stomach and I still have been able to eat catfish through the years, which also has something to do with newspapers other than the obvious tie-in that newspapers make great wrapping for fish.

  Most newspapers have started to pay decent wa
ges, but in 1965 a person could starve on a newspaper salary. That’s where all-u-can-eat catfish places come in. All over the South there were those kinds of places with names like “Catfish King” and “Catfish Corner,” that advertised “All the Fried Catfish U-Can-Eat, $2.95.”

  That usually included all the French fries and coleslaw you could eat, not to mention all the rolls, butter, and iced tea you could consume.

  I would expect that I ate catfish around thirty times a year during my early career as a newspaper man. I also used to hide some of the rolls in my pocket and walk out with them. I tried getting out with a couple of extra catfish one night, but the waitress noticed a dorsal fin sticking out of my back pocket and summoned the manager. He made me put it back on my table, but at least some of the tartar sauce was left to give the roll a little flavor.

  So Glenn’s idea was for Larry to catch a catfish out of Pete Dickens Lake, put on it a pair of false teeth—procured from I know not where—then have a picture taken of it.

  I’m not certain how much the catfish Larry caught weighed, but it was a fairly good-sized catfish, certainly too large to fit inside anybody’s back pocket.

  Somebody, I’m not clear who, hit the catfish on the head with a hammer, rendering it unconscious, which is a good idea when you’re trying to put a pair of false teeth into a catfish’s mouth. Otherwise, the catfish will be jumping all around with all that slime, which makes them hard to hold on to. Plus, catfish will fin the dickens out of you, unless they are dead or knocked out.

  Larry put the false teeth in the comatose catfish’s mouth (Good name for a catfish restaurant, huh? The Comatose Catfish), and the photographer took a picture of it.

  We ran the picture of the fish on the front page of the paper the next morning, accompanied by a story written by Wade Saye that began:

  Anglers from all over the Southeast were astounded to learn that a catfish caught out of Pete Dickens Lake, west of Athens, was wearing a pair of false teeth.

  The story went on about a fictitious fisherman who caught the fish.

  “Dangest thing I ever saw,” the fisherman was quoted as saying.

  Fictitious game and fish wardens were also quoted, and the story came off as completely straight.

  We got a call from Australia. A local minister phoned and said it was a sign the world was going to end soon.

  I answered one call. The man said, “Y’all made that up about the fish, didn’t you?”

  I said, “Absolutely not”

  And he said, “Come on. You can tell me the truth. Y’all just made it up, didn’t you?”

  Again, I assured the man the story was for real.

  The man said, “Hold on a minute.” Then he turned away from the phone and said, “Earl, come over here. This man at the paper said they just didn’t make that up about that fish.”

  Then he talked to me again, and said, “I told Earl y’all didn’t make that up about that fish, but he won’t believe me.”

  Earl came on the line.

  “Y’all didn’t just make that up about that fish?” he asked.

  “It’s all true,” I said.

  “Caught on a red wiggler or a Loosiana pink?” the man asked.

  “Wiggler,” I answered.

  “Blue cat?”

  “Channel.”

  “You ain’t shittin’ me?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, ’bye.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  The fish captured Athens’s imagination. It was the main topic at Rotary. Bubber, down at Bubber’s Bait and Beer Store, said, “I caught a fish one time in Florida, and when I cut him open, there was a man’s watch inside. I wonder if the paper wants to do a story on me?”

  A week after the April 1 catfish story ran, Glenn put the photograph back on page one with a headline that said, “APRIL FOOL, ATHENS!”

  Nobody got mad.

  Somebody did phone in to say he had spotted a large black bear on the outskirts of Athens. Page one. For several days.

  “BEAR STALKS ATHENS”

  We never knew if there was a bear or not, but people talked about it for days, and Glenn milked the story for all it was worth.

  There was a legendary whorehouse in Athens, known to generations of University of Georgia students as Effie’s. When Effie died, Glenn put her obit on page one, under a headline that said, “PROMINENT BUSINESS WOMAN DIES.” Later, when they tore down Effie’s old place, somebody went by and loaded a trunk with bricks from the house and passed them out with a plaque that read, “A LITTLE PIECE OF EFFIE’S.”

  Newspapers really should print more rumors. There’s nothing like a good rumor to attract readership.

  Sportswriters are best when it comes to planting a rumor. On a slow news day, you simply call the manager of, say, the Atlanta Braves, and ask him, “Is there any truth in the rumors that say you’re going to trade Dale Murphy to the Mets?”

  The manager says, “Are you crazy?”

  And then you write a story with a headline that says, “BRAVES PILOT DENIES MURPHY TRADE RUMORS.”

  I don’t think Glenn made up the alleged Jeane Dixon rumor in Athens, but he did have a good time with it.

  The rumor was simple: Clairvoyant Dixon was supposed to have predicted the University of Georgia coliseum would fall in during upcoming graduation ceremonies. Most newspapers would have ignored such a rumor. Not us. We reported the rumor, then investigated and ultimately told our readers Jean Dixon had forecast no such thing. A good story, a public service, and, twenty-five years later, the coliseum is still standing.

  The Banner-Herald, under its old ownership, was an easy prey for Glenn Vaughn’s aggressiveness and understanding of what a small-town daily should be, above all a mirror of the community.

  But the Banner-Herald was sold in 1965 to the Morris newspaper chain, out of Augusta and Savannah. Naturally, the Daily News reported a story that people from Augusta and Savannah were buying the Banner-Herald, and what does that say to you? It says, “We’re Athens. We’re your local paper.”

  The new owners of the Banner-Herald put a new staff in place, moved the offices to a modern building, and changed over to offset printing, from the old hot-type method. The Daily News had been offset from the beginning, which, for one thing, enabled it to reproduce much clearer photography than our competitor.

  The Morrises even attempted to buy the Daily News after they had acquired the Banner-Herald. When the owners wouldn’t sell, the Banner-Herald, with much greater resources than the Daily News, simply vowed to run us out of business.

  It wouldn’t happen. By this time, the Daily News had become the legal organ of the county, and its ad lineage was way ahead of its competition.

  And, as I mentioned earlier, we were charmed. The Newspaper God saw our need and filled it. He sent us Brown Cline Stephens.

  Chapter 9

  THE ATHENS DAILY NEWS lasted for thirty months as an independent newspaper. The charmed life it led during that period had to have had its origin in a cosmic force that brought to it an assortment of people who, even it they had been fictional, would have challenged the imagination.

  Glenn Vaughn had to have come down from the sky. Larry Young fell out of a tree and into the newsroom. My uncle doesn’t come home from the hosiery mill with a newspaper every day, and who knows if I would ever have made it there? Wade Saye should have left town years before, the way he was treated at the Banner-Herald. Why he stayed long enough for the Daily News to rescue him must be written in the stars somewhere, too.

  Gerald Rutberg wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid. Then he goes to Auburn, becomes interested in the school newspaper, expects to intern for Glenn in Columbus, and all of a sudden, he’s in Athens, available for any duty from writing wedding announcements to covering local news and sports with an energy and creativity that would mark the rest of his life as well.

  And they kept coming, from backgrounds as diverse as their abilities and personalities. Some would even change my lif
e.

  I’ll start with Browny:

  There are as many photograph clichés in newspapers as there are examples of worn and tattered writing.

  First, there’s the Firing Squad shot. That’s where the Ladies’ Garden Club is giving out its annual awards.

  The publicity chairman calls the newspaper and says, “We’re giving away our annual awards. Would you please send a photographer to take a picture?”

  So the photo editor, or whoever, awakens a photographer and dispatches him.

  It angers the photographer that he’s not off covering a war or a moon shot somewhere, so when he gets to the Garden Club luncheon, he’s as irritable as can be and wants to get out of there as soon as possible and have a drink. (In fact, just about everybody drank when I was actively involved in the business, and that’s one of the reasons why: It made the long hours and low pay easier to bear.) So the photographer puts all the ladies who won awards side by side, like the Germans used to do when they were going to shoot prisoners, and takes their picture.

  If you’ve seen one photograph of the Ladies’ Garden Club Awards winners, you’ve seen them all, and that goes for the new slate of chamber of commerce officers, a group of new Eagle Scouts, a winning bowling team, and the twenty-eight members of the Get Down Baptist Church choir that is off to sing at the Democratic Convention just before Jesse Jackson makes a three-hour speech.

  I’m not certain how long there has been such a thing as the newspaper photographer, but I do know the Firing Squad photos have probably appeared in more newspapers over the years than photos of Earl Scheib trying to sell you a paint job for your car.

  A variation of the Firing Squad shot is the Shake-Hands-and-Look-Like-You’re-Talking-to-One-Another setup.

  This is often used when there is a photograph to be taken of the outgoing Rotary Club president shaking hands with the incoming Rotary Club president.

  Even the laziest photographer will tell the two individuals, “Okay, shake hands and look like you’re talking to one another.”