Browny was fifty-nine when he died. We paid off his bills and set up a scholarship fund in his name at the journalism school at Georgia with what we collected that night.
After Browny died, I decided camping is something I never wanted to do again. Who would put up my tent?
As for the other Daily News people: Chuck Perry received a Master’s degree in English from the university and became associate editor of the Daily News and Banner-Herald and later joined me on the Atlanta Journal sports staff. He rose to become an assistant managing editor for the Atlanta papers. He is currently editor of Longstreet Press in Atlanta.
In the early seventies, he married a woman who would receive her Ph.D. in French. And she would join the Emory University faculty in Atlanta. One night, she and Chuck had played tennis on the Emory courts. They were in separate cars. Chuck drove through an intersection and looked behind him to see if she made it through the light. What he saw was another car crash into the side of his wife’s car. She was dead when he got to her.
Frank Frosch went to Vietnam as an intelligence officer. Later, he left the service and became a free-lance writer. His inside information made his piece for Playboy on the Mylai massacre one of the most compelling stories I ever read.
He eventually went to work for United Press International in Atlanta, and, for the record, he allowed my wife and me to keep his dog, Plato. (She got custody of him in a subsequent divorce.)
Frank later was assigned to the UPI bureau in PnomPenh, Cambodia. One day, his office received a tip of fighting near the area. Frank and a photographer jumped into Frank’s car and went to look for the action. They were found several days later. It appeared they had been dragged from their car, made to fall to their knees, and were then shot in the back of the head.
Fran Smith shot herself dead.
Larry Young got married, quit drinking, and retired as a columnist for the Daily News under the new management. A few months after his retirement, he died of lung cancer.
Gerald Rutberg is a successful attorney in his hometown of Orlando. I’ve written often of his ability to get a ticket to just about anything, and his ability to show up in incredible places.
There was the time Rutberg and I went to the Masters golf tournament for Sunday’s final round. I had a press ticket. He had no ticket. The Masters ticket is the most difficult ticket in sports to obtain. It may be the most difficult ticket in anything to obtain.
“You’ll never get in,” I said to Rutberg as I left him at the gate, where there stood a cadre of itchy-fingered Pinkerton guards.
“Meet you at number eleven in thirty minutes,” he told me.
After an hour, I went down to 11. There stood Rutberg wearing an L.A. Times photographer’s badge. “What kept you?” he asked.
Gerald Rutberg, in a ski jacket, made it onto the presidential platform for Jimmy Carter’s inaugural service.
“I just kept walking,” he explains.
Georgia played Penn State in the 1982 Sugar Bowl for the national championship. I had a two-bedroom suite at the Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans and two extra tickets to the game. I had moved mountains to get them.
Gerald had got me impossible tickets for years. I wanted to repay the favor. I called and invited him and his wife to stay in one of the bedrooms of my suite. I explained I had two tickets for them.
Rutberg and wife arrived in New Orleans. I handed him their tickets.
“These are in the end zone,” Gerald said.
“It took an act of God to get them,” I replied.
“No problem,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his coat. “These six I have here are on the forty.”
He wanted me to see something. He pulled a color photograph out of his briefcase. He had managed to slip into the National Collegiate Hall of Fame banquet in New York City the week before. The photograph showed Richard Nixon on the left and Gerald Ford on the right, both in tuxedos. The guy in the middle with his arms around the two former presidents was Rutberg.
A friend of Gerald’s in Orlando called me a year later.
“Gerald’s sick,” he said. “And it looks bad.”
Doctors had found a growth in Gerald’s hip. The prognosis was a bad one. If the growth could be removed surgically—which was a large “if”—Gerald likely would be left paralyzed from the waist down. And would be left impotent. If it couldn’t be removed, Gerald would die. He went to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. There were weeks upon weeks of tests.
Gerald Rutberg was the first person Glenn Vaughn hired at the Athens Daily News. Maybe that is why there was at least one more miracle left.
The growth turned out to be nonmalignant. Gerald walked out of the hospital. He’s now the father of a little blond girl named Leah. She looks a lot like another little blond girl I saw a picture of once.
Me: Okay. I’ve had too many wives and a couple of surgeries because of a lousy aortic valve in my heart. Compared to the others, I got off easy.
Wade Saye currently works for the Knoxville, Tennessee Journal. Claude Williams, the Daily News’s publisher, continues as a successful outdoor advertiser in Athens. Jones Drewery is retired, still lives in Athens, and is still smoking.
Colleen Kelly wound up married to our rival sports editor at the Banner-Herald. They later divorced, and Colleen became an assistant managing editor with the Atlanta newspapers. She later sued the papers on a sex-discrimination suit, and the papers settled with her out of court.
Mark Smith is publisher of the Daily News and the Banner Herald in Athens.
My ex-wife, the Daily News’s receptionist, remarried, had a couple of kids, and also had a successful career as a model. I saw her at my mother’s funeral in 1989. She looked great.
Glenn Vaughn would become an executive with the Knight-Ridder chain in Columbus, Georgia. He is recently retired.
“I’ve always had fun in this business,” he told me earlier this year, “and I’d still like to have some more.”
He always told me, after the Daily News was sold, “I’d like to do it one more time.”
I told him if he tackled anything, be sure to call me first.
Chapter 11
I KNOW I’VE ALREADY told you the end of the story, but now I’m going back to tell you the middle, back to when we were taken over by the Banner-Herald.
They stuck Glenn Vaughn in an out-of-the-way office at the new Athens Daily News headquarters. His duties were little more than to write an occasional editorial. Little did management realize that was dangerous because it gave Glenn time to do what he was best at—thinking.
He had said it before:
“You know what would be fun? To just start going into small towns with bad newspapers, start a new one, like we did in Athens, and give the old paper hell.
“Then, when we got it going good, we could leave one person in charge and go on to the next town. What we could wind up with is a chain of bright new Georgia community newspapers.”
I had an idea, too.
“What we could do,” I said to Glenn, “is get us a big tent. We go in, set up our tent, and put a news operation under it. It would be inexpensive, and we could get going overnight.
“When we left there, we could go on to the next place and get us another tent.”
” ‘Tent journalism,’ ” said Glenn, pounding his fist into his palm. “I like it.”
Glenn’s first idea out of his new headquarters had to do with a weekly in Toccoa, Georgia, a mountain town sixty miles north of Athens. Glenn’s wife, Nancy, was from Ellijay, another mountain community.
Glenn wanted to buy the Toccoa weekly, owned by an aging gentleman who, rumor had it, was anxious to sell.
“We could buy Toccoa,” Glenn said, “then start a five-day mountain daily. We could call it the North Georgia Mountain Bee.“
“The Bee?” I asked Glenn.
“There’s the Sacramento Bee,” Glenn said. “I’ve just always liked the name Bee for a newspaper.”
Bee isn’t that bad a n
ame when you think about it. There’s a spelling bee, of course, and a quilting bee. I don’t know if there has ever been such a thing as a sex bee, but you sort of get the idea it would be a lot like an orgy, a lot of people real busy doing the same thing.
I always had a few favorite names for newspapers myself. Names like the Times, Herald, Banner, Sun, and even the Daily News are pretty commonplace.
I like the name Plain Dealer, as in Cleveland. That sort of says, “We shoot straight with you.”
And there’s the Hollywood Tattler, which seems to be saying, “We know it all and we’re foaming at the mouth to tell.”
Sentinel is kind of boring, as are Post, Journal, and Oklahoman.
Dean Drewery always enjoyed talking about a small Georgia weekly known as the Hahira Golden Leaf. Probably the best name there ever was for a newspaper, however, was Grit, the national weekly kids used to sell door-to-door to earn a few extra pennies a week.
I’m not sure whatever happened to Grit, but the name implies a newspaper that isn’t about to give up on any story and will stomp all over you to get the news. Mike Wallace would have made a great editor for Grit.
I’ve often thought, What would I name my own newspaper if I ever wound up with one?
How about the Rumormonger, or the Believe It or Not, or the Busybody, or the We Ain’t Shittin’ You. There are certain animals you could name a paper for. You could have the Hound, or the Hawk, or the Weed Snake, or the Barracuda.
Or how about the Cat? Cats look as if they know a lot of secrets. If the truth be known, cats probably sneak into their owners’ bedrooms a lot to see what’s going on, and they listen to telephone conversations and keep notes on who comes and who goes.
Cats are sneaky and spylike, and that’s what a good newspaper should be, too.
I suggested to Glenn that an alternative to the North Georgia Mountain Bee might be the North Georgia Mountain Wildcat.
“Not bad,” he said, pounding his fist into his palm.
Glenn wanted me to go with him if he wound up in Toccoa. His idea was that I would be the managing editor. He also wanted to take along Mark Smith, the boy-wonder advertising whiz, who had also come along with us to our new address.
I went so far as to accompany Glenn to Toccoa to meet with the owner of the paper. Our chat with him was simply to get a reading on just how much he wanted to sell. I wouldn’t say he seemed desperate, but he was getting on, and Glenn said, after the meeting, “I wonder if we could get Browny back as photographer?”
My dream of getting to the Atlanta Journal sports department hadn’t exactly diminished, but I had found a new angle to newspapering that I liked—being a part of what it looked like, what news it carried, what direction it took. I relished another fight. We go into Toccoa, start a five-day mountain daily, and take on the various community weeklies, as well as the other dailies that tried to appeal to mountain folk.
Working under the new Daily News management was terribly boring. It suddenly didn’t matter that much anymore what news we broke. There was no longer any competition, any camaraderie, any reason to go beyond a call of duty to make a page look as though the news were jumping off it.
Browny was gone. I was back to getting a lot of armpit shots of basketball games. The only real interesting element of working at our new headquarters was there was an abundance of coeds working in the production department, pasting up pages. It was rather a pleasure to walk downstairs to production to oversee the sportssection makeup. Coeds smile and do your bidding energetically. I would learn later just how important that is for the poor devil in charge of getting a page together and to the presses on time.
At the old Daily News, every day was an adventure. At the new Daily News, I felt sleepy a lot. The only real action came as a result of a teirible error that slipped past me.
Because the Daily News had always attempted to appeal to the surrounding counties, as well as to Athens, I had started an annual Athens Daily News All-Northeast Georgia basketball team for boys and girls. I asked the area coaches to vote on the team, and they picked an All-Northeast Georgia player of the year for both sexes.
The results of the voting were in for the 1968 teams, and the girls’ player of the year was some quirk of nature who was about six-five and weighed 210 and was named Betty Lou Ann Sue, or something like that.
In those days, there were six players on each girls’ high school team. It was a half-court game. Three girls were guards. Their job was to defense the three opposing girls, who were forwards. When they got a rebound, they would then take the ball to center court and pass it off to their three forwards. I suppose they didn’t figure girls were strong enough to play by boys’ rules back then, which was also before married women were named Henry-Dilmont in an effort to retain their maiden name in some form so as to indicate they might be married but they weren’t taking any stuff from their husbands.
On her nomination sheet, I recall quite clearly, her coach had written, “What is amazing about Betty Lou Ann Sue is she hit 75 percent of her shots for the entire season.”
So I wrote the story about her being named player of the year, and I quoted her coach in the story: “What is amazing about Betty Lou Ann Sue,” said Coach Matthew Grubb, “is she hit 75 percent of her shots for the entire season.”
It is amazing there aren’t more errors in newspapers. If you could see just how many people have a hand in getting one out on a daily basis, you would understand. You get that many people involved, somebody usually is going to blow it along the way.
Ever been reading your newspapers and suddenly the next sentence didn’t have anything to do with the subject matter of the former sentence? That happens when type gets mixed up, and it happens a lot. The makeup man isn’t paying close attention, and type that was supposed to go under a headline on page 8 winds up mixed in with a story on page 12. I’ve always worried that if I ever did win the Pulitzer Prize, the article announcing my award would somehow get mixed up with type from other articles.
My worst fears were that I would win on the same day there was a huge fire at a gay bar and some guy had been arrested for indecent exposure at a major-league baseball game.
The story might read: “Columnist Lewis Grizzard today was named, along with two others with a history of arson arrests, as the yet-unidentified man who exposed himself to a group of nuns at Wednesday’s Kansas City–Baltimore game.
“Authorities said that Grizzard, whose jilted lover is reported to have been behind the blaze at The Boy Next Door, won the second game of the doubleheader 3–2.
“The popular communist will be arraigned Tuesday.”
What happened at the Daily News was that somehow the gremlins who haunt newspaper production departments removed the o from the word “shots,” as in “hit 75 percent of her shots,” and replaced it with an i.
I didn’t see it when I checked the page for the last time. The lovely coed making up the page didn’t see it.
But there it was the next morning, and it seemed the whole world saw it.
“What is amazing about Betty Lou Ann Sue,” said Coach Matthew Grubb, “is she hit 75 percent of her shits.”
Coach Grubb called me. “You idiot,” is what he said.
Betty Lou Ann Sue’s father called to say, “I’m suing.”
The managing editor came over to my desk and said, “Grizzard, you dingbat. Do you know how this makes us look?”
And then a guy called and asked me, “What about her other twenty-five percent?”
I considered suicide. Then I was afraid my obituary might read, “Athens Daily News sports editor Lewis Grizzard was found dead Thursday night as the Bulldogs came back with the bottom of the eighth to stop Vanderbilt 3–2 on a suicide squeeze play.”
It was May 1968. Springtime in Athens. Dogwoods and azaleas. The coeds sunning in the front yard of the sorority houses. The beer so good and cold at Harry’s, and I was only a few hours short of graduation. I was eighteen hours short, as a matter of fact, an
d my last spring quarter at Georgia I had only one more journalism course to take. It was a three-hour course called Trade Journals. They would teach us how to put together, say, a weekly company newsletter. We met three times a week, and it was pretty dull stuff. I knew that I would never wind up putting out a company newsletter, so I dozed off a lot.
Then, one day, the professor announced that everybody in the class had to make up his or her own trade journal.
I forget the details of what all was involved, but there were a lot of them, and it seemed to me that here was a thing that was going to take a lot of time and effort, and I didn’t want to waste either doing it.
When the professor made that assignment, I knew in my heart I’d never turn in my trade journal. I would find a way to get out of it. I would have the professor shot. Or I would beg out of the assignment on account of having to go to my brother’s funeral. I didn’t have a brother, but if I couldn’t think of anything else, I could always try that.
I was the official scorer at Georgia baseball games that spring. My duties also included manning the public-address system to the handful of fans who showed up for Georgia baseball games.
Georgia was playing some touring team from the frozen north in middle May. I was sitting in the press box, trying to figure out how to get out of my trade journal and how to pronounce the name of the visiting team’s center fielder.
Southern names are usually pretty simple. Most of us are Scots-Irish, which means we have names like “McDonald,” “Pierce,” “Gunterson,” or, of course, “Smith.” (My last name is French, however. It means “wild stallion.”) But touring college baseball teams from places up North can have a lot of players who descend from towns where people have names that include a lot of j’s and z’s mixed up together to form names southerners have no idea how to pronounce.
The center fielder’s name was spelled something like “Wjozlfmepzjski.” I finally came up with, “Now batting for New Jersey A and M, the center fielder Al ‘Wahjahjocowski.’ ” The batter looked up at me in the press box, and I am certain he was wondering, How did this dumb redneck come up with that?
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 20
