The Constitution was our enemy. We had fought them with Minter leading our charge. And now he was one of them?
I called Hyland at the apartment.
“Minter’s gone to the Constitution,” I announced.
“To do what?” he asked.
“He’s the new M.E.”
“An era has passed,” said Frank.
We talked on. The primary question before us now was, who would be Minter’s successor? We decided it would have to be Wilt Browning, the baseball writer.
He was next-eldest to Minter and Bisher. We all respected his dedication to his beat, and we knew he was a family man and didn’t carouse, and that’s the sort of person that usually got the jobs where you told everybody else what to do.
I was certain it wasn’t going to be Frank. He wouldn’t want the job, anyway. Frank loved the road too much. And taken off expense account, he probably couldn’t afford the pay cut.
It certainly wouldn’t be me, either. I was only twenty-three. I wasn’t married anymore, and I had definite carousing tendencies.
Wilt. Had to be.
“I don’t think I’ll want to keep this job under Wilt,” I said to Frank. “He’ll probably be there for years. There won’t be anyplace for me to go.”
“What do you want to do?” Frank asked.
“If Wilt gets the job,” I said, “I’m asking for the baseball beat.”
Covering major-league baseball did intrigue me. Maxwell’s Plum after games at Shea Stadium. Dodger Stadium and Los Angeles. I didn’t get the Rose Bowl assignment, so I still hadn’t seen California.
The thing about the airplanes did bother me a little. Cover 162 baseball games, and you spend about half your life in an airplane. I mentioned my fears to Frank.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “In case there’s an emergency on board, all you’ve got to do is bend over, grab your ankles, and tuck your head between your legs.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“Then you can kiss your ass good-bye.” Just what I needed.
I called Minter, too. He seemed noncommittal on who might succeed him. He said the decision would be Managing Editor Durwood McAllister’s and Bisher’s.
“But it’s probably going to be Wilt, right?” I asked.
“Probably,” he said.
Wilt thought he was going to get the job, too, and he wanted it.
“I’ve seen all the baseball I want to see in this lifetime,” he told me.
“Wilt,” I said, “I think I’d like to change jobs. Two years in the slot is enough.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I want baseball,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate.
“It’s yours,” he said.
Three days after Minter left us, Bisher called me into his office.
“Grizzard,” he said, “you’re my new executive sports editor.”
I was the youngest person on the staff. Skip Caray, who also did a television sportscast on a local station, announced my appointment on his show. And he called to congratulate me, and he mentioned something I hadn’t thought of: “Do you realize,” he asked me, “you’re now Frank’s boss?”
I went to our refrigerator and drank what beer was left and pondered it all. Six years out of high school, and I’m running the place.
Me and Frank wouldn’t have a problem.
No way.
Would we?
Chapter 14
BEFORE HE MOVED upstairs as managing editor of the Constitution, Jim Minter had hired some new faces to replace some of the old ones. Bill Clark got his overtime pay and was gone. Teague Jackson took a job in golf. Bill Robinson had a misunderstanding with the paper, and he was gone. Wilt Browning gave up the baseball beat and went to work as public-relations director of the Atlanta Falcons, the unchallenged worst franchise in the National Football League. Doing PR for the Falcons was a little like doing PR for the Italian Army during World War II.
Newspaper people were different (euphemism for “weird”) from other people I had known in my brief twenty-three years. They just kept falling into my life from someplace in Celestial Central Casting where they create characters whose flaws and frailties and specialties make them almost immediately unforgettable.
So, the replacements:
—Norman Arey. He had been a boy wonder in the department-store business in North Carolina. In his early twenties, he was already some sort of retailing genius. But he wasn’t happy doing that. He wanted to be a sportswriter. He had a wife, a family, and a more-than-comfortable living, but he chucked it all and got a job on the sports staff of a suburban Atlanta daily, the Marietta Daily Journal, covering local high school sports.
Not satisfied there, either, he began to call and write Minter at the Journal about a job with us. As a matter of fact, Norman either wrote or called Jim every day for six months.
When the openings came, Minter needed another helper with the high school teams, so he hired Norman. I don’t know for certain, but I think Minter hired him just so he wouldn’t have to deal with Norman’s calls and letters anymore.
Norman couldn’t write a lick. But he was a determined sort (as evidenced by his never-ending effort to obtain a job on the Journal sports staff). And he wanted to learn.
Norman’s first assignment for the Journal was to cover a Friday night high school football game between two local schools, Chamblee and Druid Hills. I took him aside Friday morning and tried to give him some guidelines.
“Norman,” I said, “you are writing for an afternoon paper. By the time people get their Journals Saturday afternoon, most of them who care will already know who won the game you are covering. The Constitution and radio and television will have had it.
“So what you have to do is find an angle to the game. You have to talk to the coaches and get some color. It’s not enough just to report what happened for an afternoon newspaper.”
He nodded as if he understood. And he did in a way. And in any other situation, he might not have written what I still consider to be the worst lead (opening paragraph) of a sports story I ever read.
Here’s what happened to poor Norman. Chamblee scored the winning touchdown on the last play of the game. However, the Chamblee head coach, just as the runner crossed the goal line, collapsed on the sideline. He was rushed to a hospital and then pronounced dead on arrival from a heart attack.
I will never forget coming into the office to do the Sunday edition, picking up the Saturday afternoon section, and reading following:
By NORMAN AREY
Atlanta Journal Staff Writer
Chamblee’s exciting come-from-behind 21–14 victory over rival Druid Hills Saturday was somewhat marred by the death of its coach.
Somewhat marred?
Norman was an excellent piano player. He played classical, he played jazz, but what he did best was play Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer.
Norman not only sounded like Jerry Lee when he played and sang “Great Balls of Fire,” he could also put in all the Killer’s antics, such as playing the piano with his feet and kicking his stool away when he got on a roll.
Norman’s wife was Peg. They had met at the University of Georgia, where Norman had transferred from the University of North Carolina.
Norman and Peg were the Fred and Ginger, the Marge and Gower Champion, of the Journal sports department. They could dance. Their specialty was the Belly Roll, which came straight out of the fifties from North Carolina. Norman and Peg doing the Belly Roll in the living room of their house was a sight to behold. It was no Lambada, to be sure, but a fairly sexy dance for the time.
Norman quickly picked up the nickname “Crazy Norman.” He never did learn to write, but he did develop into one of the great information-gatherers it’s been my pleasure to work alongside. Norman could, in fact, get the facts.
The Friday before a Georgia-Georgia Tech football game, we got a tip that Eddie McAshan, the Tech quarterback and the first black football player a
t the school, had had a falling out with the head coach and had been suspended from the team. He wouldn’t be accompanying his teammates on a Friday bus ride to Athens from the Saturday game.
Both Friday home-delivered editions of the Journal were already gone, but we still had the street-sales blue-streak edition. This was front-page sort of news.
I dispatched Norman to the Tech campus and told him to do whatever was necessary, but to find out if McAshan was not making the trip and, if he wasn’t, why.
There were forty minutes before deadline. When Norman arrived at Tech, the coaches and players were boarding the buses to Athens. Norman asked the head coach, Bill Fulcher, where McAshan was.
Fulcher wouldn’t comment. Norman asked some of the players. They were afraid to comment. When Fulcher had seated himself in the front of one of the buses, Norman went inside, closed the door, and wouldn’t let the head coach out or the driver in until somebody told him about McAshan. Norman got his story.
Norman Arey did something else that changed my life dramatically. There were several of us at the Journal who played golf. Teague would get us on the local private courses for free.
I had come from a golf-deprived background. There was no Moreland Country Club. I had picked up the game in college, but I was never very good at it.
I was twenty-two when I quit golf. I was playing in a foursome with Teague and Hyland and Tom McCollister on the seventeenth hole at the historic East Lake Country Club in Atlanta, where the immortal Bobby Jones had learned the game. On the seventeenth, I hooked my tee shot in the water. I calmly put my driver back in my bag, announced I would never play golf again, and left the course.
Later, when Norman had joined the staff, he asked me one day, “Does anybody on the staff play tennis?”
I certainly didn’t. I was assistant sports editor of a large newspaper, and I had no idea how you kept score in tennis. There had been no tennis courts in Moreland, either.
Norman asked around and found no other tennis players on the staff. Mr. Persistence finally said to me, “I need somebody to play tennis with. I’ll show you how.”
I weighed 135 pounds when I graduated from high school. But because I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of country food my wife prepared for me, and got no physical exercise whatsoever anymore, I had bloomed to 200. I sort of enjoyed being overweight. I’d been skinny all my life. Suddenly, though, I had this big fat face and was up to 42 in the waist. I distinctly remember my mother had to take up my baseball pants my senior year in high school. They were 28 inches in the waist and were too big for me.
I agreed to meet Norman at the DeKalb Tennis Center in Atlanta. I had bought a pair of tennis shoes, a tennis shirt, and some tennis shorts, 42 inches in the waist. I borrowed a racquet.
Norman said, “Hold the racquet like this, and swing it like that.”
I played tennis every day for the next sixteen years. I lost forty pounds in less than a year. I went from 42 tennis shorts to 34s. I looked better. I felt better.
It took me about three months to be able to beat Norman. Then, when I beat him one day at last, he never beat me again. Ever. I think he has always secretly hated me for that. I became a fair player. I even won a club tournament or two, and one wonderful year had my name in the rankings book with my partner as the number-13-ranked thirty-five-and-older doubles team in Georgia.
I had to give up the game when I was thirty-nine and awakened one morning to find I could no longer brush my teeth with my right hand because of the pain in my elbow and shoulder, put there by the fact I had played tennis every day for sixteen years. I went back to golf.
Norman basically became inactive as a player after I beat him a couple of hundred straight times. But the late sixties and the early seventies were tennis’s boom time, and Norman became the first tennis writer in Atlanta Journal history. He did a splendid job.
He started a national ranking service for collegiate tennis teams, and later quit the paper to go to work for Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis tour. There will be more on Norman and me and professional tennis tournaments later.
One other thing. Norman suggested he and I quit smoking at a staff New Year’s Eve party. It was our eighth or ninth day of nonpuffing. I called Norman at home. Peg answered the phone. Norman wasn’t there.
“Is he still smoking?” I asked her.
“We were sitting in the living room last night,” she said. “Me and Norman and the kids and the dog.” The dog was a large black poodle named Buffy. “Suddenly, Norman got off the couch, stood up on the coffee table, looked toward the sky, and announced to us all, in a very loud voice, ‘God wants me to smoke!’ Then he went down to the convenience store, bought a carton of cigarettes, and sat up all night smoking.”
If God wanted Norman to smoke, it occurred to me, He certainly wanted me to smoke, too. I went to the nearest store, bought myself a carton, and smoked until I was too sleepy to light another cigarette.
What I finally did about Norman’s writing was not allow him to write. I simply would send him out on assignment to gather information. He would then give me that information in the form of a memo, and I would have Hyland or another veteran put the information in the form of an article. Nothing wrong with that. Give me somebody who can bring back the information, and I can always find five other people to put it in the English language. Norman’s best work came in the form of a diary he convinced a high school football player in the Atlanta area to keep while he was being recruited by various colleges. After recruiting season was over, Norman took the diary, brought it to the office, and we published it.
One anecdote from that diary I’ll never forget. The kid had an idea that maybe he would like to be a doctor someday. When he visited Duke, recruiters took him over to the Duke hospital, where doctors allowed him to put on a doctor’s outfit and sit in on a hysterectomy. That cured the kid’s desire to be a doctor. He went to Georgia and majored in journalism instead.
—Priit Vesiland: Minter also hired him away from the Marietta Journal, and gave him Robinson’s old job as outdoor editor. Priit was a handsome young blond fellow who once wrote a story on the outdoor page questioning whether the killing of animals should be considered as a sport.
“Just what I need,” said Minter. “An outdoor editor who is antihunting.”
Priit was born in Estonia. His father, a college professor, had got his family out of Estonia and into the United States when the Soviets moved in after World War II. Priit was an intelligent, sensitive individual. He had a pretty wife. He expressed ideas and thoughts I’d never heard before. His arguments against racial injustice were a long way from Clark and Hyland discussing Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain.
Every day that I spent in the composing room, the more I became anti-union. Perhaps they had once served a purpose in the country, but the union I had to deal with was, more than anything else, a giant, arrogant pain in the butt that killed incentive and was stubbornly single-minded.
What the union did to Priit Vesiland broke my heart.
Priit had crossed a picket line when there had been a strike at the Marietta Daily Journal. In retaliation, union workers there went so far as to call Priit’s wife, telling her of a nonexistent affair her husband was supposed to be having with another woman at the newspaper. They also sliced the tires of his car. They even threatened his life.
When Priit left and came to the Journal he thought the harassment was over. Not so. Union members in our composing room heard from their brothers and sisters in Marietta, and thus were determined to make Priit’s life miserable.
He had to make up the outdoor pages twice a week. The minute he walked into the composing room, the badgering would start.
“There’s that scab!” somebody would shout across the room.
“Get the hell out, scab!” would follow.
His copy would mysteriously get lost. His type would be pied.
“You touched the type, scab,” a printer would say.
Priit w
ould deny it. But it wouldn’t matter. The type for his page would still be all over the floor, and he would have to wait until it was set again.
They sliced Priit’s tires at the Journal, too. They made his life miserable. But he still turned out quality work. He wrote a story about the death of an outstanding show horse that was a brilliant piece of writing.
We went fishing once together up on Lake Alatoona, north of Atlanta. We caught a long string of crappie, went back to his house, cleaned them, cooked them, and ate them. Priit told me then he was planning to leave the paper.
“I want to get into photography,” he said.
What he wanted to do was get the hell away from the composing room.
Priit left. He wound up as a photographer with the National Geographic. I used to get postcards from him from all over the world.
The new technology eventually killed off the composing-room union. A user-friendly computer could do what a user-unfriendly printer could do, and do it better. Me, I miss glue pots and the sound of manual typewriters in a newspaper office. But I still think of computers as Priit’s revenge.
—Ron Hudspeth: Minter got him out of the West Palm Beach bureau of the Miami Herald. He hadn’t been on the staff for two weeks when I needed to find him on a Sunday to give him an assignment that had come up unexpectedly. I called his house. His wife answered the phone. I asked for Ron. His wife said he wasn’t there. I asked if she knew when he would be in. She said she didn’t. I asked if she would she give him a message. She said she couldn’t. “Ron doesn’t live here anymore,” she told me.
Atlanta became the singles mecca in the South in the early seventies. Hyland and I were both divorced and often sought neon, but nobody ever took to it like Hudspeth, the boy from Bell Glade, Florida, on the outskirts of the Everglades.
We came to give him a nickname, too. We called him “the Butterfly.” In a bar, he was everywhere. Frank liked to prop on the bar and argue sports. Not Hudspeth. He fired on everything that moved. Oh, those warm spring Friday nights at Harrison’s on Peachtree, the singles bar that became an Atlanta legend.
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