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

by Lewis Grizzard

  That’s hard to do. It’s hard for one person to look another person in the face for a photograph and pretend to be talking. It’s a little uncomfortable and embarrassing. And look like your talking? How can you talk normally when you know somebody is taking your picture?

  One other thing, however: It is easy to figure out which one is the outgoing president of the Rotary Club and which is the incoming in the paper the next day, even without the caption. The outgoing president will have a sense of relief all over his face. The incoming president will look constipated.

  Another newspaper cliché photograph is the Now-Just-Point-to-the-Sign shot. This is where the city has decided to put up a billboard near the city limits sign that says, “HARD BOTTOM, ALABAMA, HOME OF JAKE (NUB) DINKENS.”

  Jake (Nub) Dinkens will be the local state senator who introduced a bill in Montgomery when the state legislature was in session to outlaw anything that was fun, being the strict fundamentalist that he is.

  He will have been a guest on CBS This Morning and whoever the hostess is (I won’t name names since, like everyone else who was ever hostess, she’ll probably be fired before you read this) would have made him look like a complete idiot, but he wouldn’t know that, and neither would anybody else in town who agreed with him.

  So they will think Nub, whose bill didn’t pass (“But at least he tried, and that’s what’s important to the Good Lord”), is the best thing to hit Alabama since cable television let you get faith healer Ernest “Isn’t-Jeezus-wondahful” Ainsley every Sunday morning.

  So there will be an announcement at the church to collect money to immortalize Nub with a billboard. Mayor Filroy Gimple will be standing by the sign, and the photographer of the local paper, The Hard Bottom Blabber, will say, “Okay, Filroy, point at the sign and smile,” which he will do, and the picture will appear on the front page of the next edition of the paper with an accompanying article that notes, “Unfortunately, Sen. Dinkens could not be present at the dedication of his billboard because of pressing business in Atlantic City doing His work.”

  Sports photos can also be worn and tiresome. Ever really look at a newspaper photograph of a bunch of guys playing football?

  It usually looks more like a big pile of laundry than anything else. You can’t see anybody’s face. You don’t know if the action came on a pass play or a running play or on a fumble or when the referee was calling a penalty for one team having too many guys with weird names like Olphonzio and Hugehamism and Euphrates on the field at one time.

  Basketball photographs mostly show a lot of hairy armpits. Baseball photographs are mostly one guy sliding into a base. I got a shot one night of a local high school game where the player tagging the guy sliding had applied the tag square on the slider’s privates.

  I wanted to run the photo with the following caption:

  Stinky Marshall of Monroe Area applies Tag to Madison County’s Farley Denton, former bass in the Boys’ Glee Club.

  You had to be very careful with photographs of trackmen, especially high hurdlers. What could happen there was that a high hurdler could be caught by the camera just as he stretched over the hurdle—and you know how they wear those very thin shorts (recall “thinclads” from a previous chapter).

  Well, if the camera angle was just right, it could capture whatever might be dangling under the hurdlers’ shorts. Sometimes those guys forget to put on their jock straps.

  That happened to a friend of mine who was putting together the sports pages of a newspaper that should not be named here. He said when he first looked at the photograph, he didn’t notice what the camera had captured.

  “So I ran the damn thing in the first edition,” he told me. “The managing editor came out and went crazy. We replated (took the picture out) immediately, but it still made it into a lot of papers. We got about five hundred calls the next day, and at least that many letters with the photo and the object that shouldn’t have been in it circled.

  “The managing editor made me write back to everybody who wrote in and personally apologize. I didn’t, though. I wrote everybody back and said it wasn’t what they thought it was, it just was just an ill-placed shadow. A guy wrote me back and said, ‘I’ve got a shadow just like that, but it still doesn’t have any business being shown in the paper.”

  If I had ever had my own newspaper, I would have hired some great photographers and filled my newspaper with their work. A still picture often can tell more than one that moves. A still picture can capture a moment because there is time to study each detail, to pick up every nuance of an event.

  Show me Henry Aaron’s eyes following the ball when he hit home run number 715 and broke Babe Ruth’s record. Let me study the face of a suspected VC man as he is being shot point-blank in the head in Vietnam. Give me a still so I have a long enough time to dwell with the portion of the Zapruder tape that shows the moment Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet shattered John Kennedy’s skull.

  And give me some life in a still photo. The New York Times and The Washington Post run too many photographs of guys in suits making speeches or of one guy in a suit welcoming another guy wearing a suit as he gets off an airplane.

  I also hate grieving-widow shots. All grieving-widow shots look the same. I was on a plane from Atlanta to Melbourne, Florida, four hours after the Challenger explosion. The plane was full of reporters and photographers from all over the country.

  I never found out what paper this particular reporter and this particular photographer were from, but as we walked out of the plane, the photographer asked the reporter, “Anything special I need to shoot?”

  “Just find the nearest grieving window,” said the reporter.

  The New York Daily News has always been “New York’s Picture Newspaper.” The little Athens Daily News played the same role in Athens.

  The new offset printing method made reproduction of photographs much better than the old method, so Glenn Vaughn decided his newspaper would say it with photos.

  In that first edition, when the Daily News got the Lyndon Johnson scoop, not only did Larry Young write the story, but Glenn used ten of his photographs to accompany it. Still, it would be a while before Glenn decided that the paper needed and could afford a full-time photographer.

  The Daily News used some weird free-lance photographers in the early days. One was a funeral director. Another was an absentminded old guy who actually would shoot an assignment, and do everything perfectly, except for one very important item—loading film in his camera.

  He was shooting an Athens High baseball game one night that I was covering. He brought along a lawn chair and sat down in it next to a light pole along the left-field line, where he promptly went to sleep, with his head resting on the pole. Several innings later, somebody hit a line-drive foul ball toward left. It struck the light pole inches above the sleeping photographer’s head. He never budged.

  After the game, I went down and awakened him. He said, “I’ve got some great action.”

  What he had was one out-of-focus shot of a girl buying a Coke at the concession stand. I had to blow up a head shot of the guy who hit the home run that won the game.

  But then came Browny. Brown Cline Stephens. He came from outer space, too.

  Browny was a native of Chattanooga. He enrolled at Georgia, in journalism school, in the early fifties. He got by working in an Athens bakery. After he paid for his food and his schooling, there wasn’t enough money left for even a dorm room, so Browny slept in the bakery on an army cot.

  After he graduated, he began an odyssey that would take him to more towns and more newspapers and more jobs than even he could remember.

  I doubt there are many people left in the newspaper business today like Browny Stephens. There once were a lot of them, people who bounced from one paper to the next, always seeking another ten bucks a week here, a publisher who wasn’t as tight there. Browny worked the small-town circuit. I doubt he ever in his life made over $250 a week as a newspaperman, and I doubt he ever worked any p
lace the publisher wasn’t tight, and I doubt he ever worked any place where it didn’t require sixteen-hour days, seven days a week.

  He told me once he went to work for a man in Ohio who had planned to start a weekly newspaper. Browny was his staff. He worked for a month getting ready for the first edition. The man said he would begin paying Browny his check when the first edition came out.

  Browny wrote scores of feature stories, took a like number of photos. But when the month was over, the man said he still wasn’t ready to start up the paper.

  So Browny kept working. Another week, another, and then another went by. Still no date for the first edition. Browny finally headed for another stop.

  “About a month later,” he said, “somebody sent me a copy of the first edition of that paper. Whoever put it out used everything I’d done for six weeks—for free—in that first edition.”

  Browny was slaving away for pauper’s wages in a forgotten place called Haleyville, Alabama, in the late fifties. There had been an earlier marriage that had lasted only a couple of weeks—Browny’s first wife had decided there was maybe a better future with the likes of a sawmill worker or a used-car salesman. That’s what small newspapers did for a lot of marriages, I suppose.

  There was a small restaurant in town where Browny ate dinner every night, and there was a waitress there. Nancy was her name. She would flip quarters with customers in order to play the jukebox.

  If she lost, she put her quarter down the slot in those five-plays-for-a-quarter days. If the customer lost, he paid for the jukebox with his quarter, but Nancy got to choose the songs. You did what you could for kicks in a small northwest Alabama town in the late fifties.

  But the waitress never flipped Browny, even though he was there every night for his supper. The cook had asked Nancy, “Why do you never flip that guy?”

  She said, “He looks too much like a stick-in-the-mud.” “Stick-in-the-mud” was late fifties Alabama for nerd, I suppose.

  But one night, she figured what the hell. (No, the late fifties in Alabama. Heck.)

  “Wanna flip for the jukebox?” Nancy asked Browny.

  He would recall later, he nearly fell out of his chair trying to get a quarter—“one of my last”—out of his pocket.

  After that, he and Nancy would talk when he came in for dinner. One night, he was paying his bill at the cash register and noticed a photograph of a little girl on the counter.

  “That’s Kathy,” Nancy said to Browny. “She’s mine.”

  Cleverly, Browny asked, “Does she look like her Daddy?”

  “She ain’t got no Daddy,” Nancy answered. Daddy had split.

  “I’d like to come see her sometime,” Browny said. “I’ve never seen a prettier little girl.”

  Nancy would say later, after she and Browny married, “I’ve always told people Browny fell in love with Kathy and then married me.”

  From Haleyville, Nancy and Browny and little blond Kathy made more stops than the Greyhound between Little Rock and Dallas.

  Browny saw an ad in the newspaper industry’s Editor and Publisher for a sports editor’s job in Butte, Montana. Browny was out to see the world, and Nancy hadn’t seen much more than Haleyville, so to Butte they went. Later, Browny left Butte for a job in Billings.

  “We loved Montana,” Nancy would say. “But I knew we couldn’t last there. Browny was a sucker for a sad story, which is one reason why we moved around so much. Anybody who called him and said, ‘I really need you,’ he would be there. We left Montana to go back to Fort Payne, Alabama, which is one of the last places I wanted to go.

  “I remember when we pulled out of our driveway and headed back, I started to cry. I was holding Kathy in my lap. She said, ‘Mama, don’t cry. We’ll move again. We always do.’”

  So there was, in no particular order, Fort Payne and then Pasadena, Texas, and Sandusky, Ohio, and Cedartown, Georgia, and someplace in Michigan, and then back to Alabama, and then back to Texas or Mississippi or Louisiana.

  By then, Nancy and Browny had two more children to go with Kathy. Daughter Miranda (Browny had named her after a camera) came first. Then a son, Clark.

  The camera thing is important here. Browny had to do it all on the small papers where he worked. He wrote, he edited, he laid out the pages, and he took all the photographs. It was photography he enjoyed the most.

  By 1966, he had become sort of legend on the back-roads newspaper circuit, and what they were saying is, if you wanted a guy who would work cheap and churn out great photography, he was your man.

  Glenn found him in Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1966, and said, “I need you.”

  Browny and Nancy packed themselves, their belongings, and their three children, and moved to Athens. Glenn gave him a raise— albeit small—built him a tiny darkroom and told Browny what he’d been wanting to hear for years:

  “You take pictures. That’s all you’re responsible for.”

  Browny and his photography would cut a swath through Athens and the Georgia newspaper community. He could make the Ladies’ Garden Club Carnival Awards thing look like the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. No Firing Squad shots. Browny would focus the ladies behind a flower. He would mount a chair and shoot down on them while they looked up. He would have had them form a human pyramid with awards in hand, if they had been able to do such a thing.

  The Oconee River flooded in Athens. The Daily News ran two open pages of nothing but Browny Stephens photographs. The one I will always remember is the rooster perched on a fence. Flapping its wings in defiance of the rising water.

  There was something at the University of Georgia known as Sigma Chi Derby. The fraternity sponsored a tricycle race for coeds. Browny got a shot of the winner, head forward like a thoroughbred stretching for the wire, that we ran six columns on the front page. It remains one of the best action photographs I’ve ever seen.

  Browny didn’t take photos of laundry piles at Georgia football games. He got the strained looks on coaches’ faces. He got a running back turning a flip in the air after being tackled.

  He got fans with silly hats, players on the sidelines, their helmets off, looking up and cursing the sun when a defeat became apparent.

  Browny’s old open-air Jeep had given way to a VW Beetle by then. But he was in such demand, was sent on so many assignments, even a VW Beetle became cumbersome. He had to find a place to park it, had to get out with all those cameras around his neck, had to get back in and hustle to his next stop and find a place to park again. So Browny got himself a motor scooter. It was blue. I can still see him riding off to Prince Avenue or to the campus, or to somebody’s farm in Watkinsville to get a picture of an eleven-pound squash, Browny with his crash helmet on, his cameras around his neck, pencils and notepads bulging out of his pocket, a man on a mission.

  Browny and I became friends. Maybe our relationship was more journeyman-takes-apprentice-under-his-wing than simply friends.

  Whatever, I loved his stories about where he’d been and what he had done. When the paper was closed around midnight, I would usually wind up at Browny’s little rented house east of Athens. If you got off work at five, you wouldn’t rush home and go to bed. Same if you got off at midnight.

  I had discovered beer, and there was always plenty of it in Browny’s refrigerator. Sometimes we would talk until dawn. Other times we would play pre-dawn Ping-Pong on Browny’s table. I never beat him. His forehand smash always was more than I could handle. How I managed to stay in school—or even stay awake for classes—after eight hours at the Daily News and then those mornings I greeted at Browny’s house remains a mystery. I suppose I got by tap dancing and using mirrors.

  After Browny came Frank Frosch. Frank Frosch wasn’t a real person, either. He was created by some screenwriter, and he came to the Daily News by some unexplained magic I’ve long ago forgotten about trying to trace.

  Frank Frosch was from Speedway, Indiana. He had graduated from Virginia Military Institute, but he had a year off before he had
to take his commission into the army. He decided to use the year, 1966—67, teaching English and working on a Master’s degree at Georgia.

  Frank Frosch played something like twenty-five musical instruments. He spoke four or five foreign languages. One was Russian. I used to say, “Frank, let me hear some Russian.” If he didn’t know it, he could have fooled me.

  Frank had two basset hounds. He lived in another neighboring county, Oglethorpe, to the east of Athens.

  Frank discovered there wasn’t a band at tiny Oglethorpe County High. So he said he would organize one for free. That was Frank Frosch—leader of the band.

  And Frank was a writer. He already had published one book, a novel, and he wanted to write more. So, one day he called Glenn, introduced himself over the phone, told Glenn of his background and his desire to find a place for his writing. Glenn, ever with the instincts, was intrigued.

  What came from all that was something called “Dateline: Lexington.” Lexington was the small county seat of Oglethorpe; Frank was our-man-in-Lexington. Frank may or may not have been paid for anything he did, but what he wrote captivated our readership.

  Frank could do a gentle piece on a dying farmer. He could dig up a hundred-year-old hanging of a black and rile the living relatives of those long dead who were responsible for the incident.

  Frank was visiting his own relatives during Indy 500 week in Speedway. He sent back a story on a camper city outside the speedway, and one of my journalism professors called it “the best piece of sportswriting I’ve ever seen.”

  But after a year at Georgia and the Daily News, Frank had to take his army commission. Vietnam was starting to boil over.

  Frank had those two dogs, those two basset hounds. The female was Patsy. The male was Plato. I loved those two drooling, howling dogs, and Frank knew that. His mother-in-law had promised Frank she would keep the dogs back in Speedway when he entered the service. Then, as he packed to leave Lexington, his mother-in-law called to say she had thought the dog thing over a time or two and had decided she would take only Patsy. Plato was much the rowdier of the two.