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

by Lewis Grizzard

  With Hudspeth’s help (while the band played “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and other songs from the early seventies I came to hate), we came up with my page 2 concept.

  I didn’t ask anybody if I could do it. I didn’t consult with the managing editor, and I certainly didn’t consult with Bisher, who I figured would be steadfastly against any infringement on his bailiwick.

  First, I went to advertising layout and asked if they could arrange the ads five days a week so I could get a five-column hole at the top. That was for what I called “Perspective.” It would be a piece of staff opinion. Sports Illustrated now runs “Point After” on the last page in its weekly magazine. Ron Fimrite remembers Billy Martin, etc., etc. I had the idea first.

  Under “Perspective,” I wanted room for something I could call “People in Sports”—a compendium to be gleaned from the wires and other sports sections. Under that, I wanted “Reaction”—letters from readers.

  I even came up with a complete new headline style for page 2. Kickers that appeared on top of headlines were always set in a smaller-size type than the main head. I turned that around. I came up with something we called “bullet head.” The page would look like this:

  PERSPECTIVE

  Aaron Can Break Ruth’s Home Run Record If ...

  PEOPLE IN SPORTS

  Papa Bear George Halas Celebrates a Birthday

  REACTION

  Hudspeth Off-Base on Calling Braves “Losers”

  Page 2 took off immediately. Hyland and Hudspeth both wrote “Perspectives.” They raised hell.

  The letters poured in. The only real problem I had with the page was horses would occasionally show up in “People in Sports.” Somebody on the desk would be chosen to compile “People” each morning. I wanted humor. I wanted So-and-so’s third baseman’s wife was picked up for shoplifting; some college football coach had been fired for having sex with a cheerleader; Howard Cosell had been attacked on the streets of Cleveland by irate Browns’ fans, angry at some innocuous statement he had made on Monday Night Football.

  I got some of that, but at least twice a week I would look at “People in Sports” and there would be an item about a racehorse. I finally issued a memorandum to the staff that read:

  For the last time: If it has more than two legs, it has no business in People in Sports.

  It took Bisher about a week to realize what had happened. Furman and I weren’t getting along anyway. I always wondered if the reason he had seen fit to give me the executive sports editor job was that he figured a kid like me would be easy to run over and he could get back to the complete control he had of the sports department before Minter. But I was determined he wasn’t going to push me around. He was my idol at the typewriter. He was my enemy when it came to how the paper looked and what appeared in it.

  There was Bisher’s early morning call. Furman would get up, read the Constitution, and then get mad. He would see something they had before us. (It didn’t matter to him that the story had broken at seven o’clock in the evening, on the Constitution’s time.) It might be something as small as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes All-American College LaCrosse team, but if it made the morning paper first, it would make Bisher mad. So after he read the Constitution, he would call me. No matter how busy I was trying to supervise our first edition, I had to stop and deal with the Bisher call.

  “Good God, Grizzard!” he would begin. “The Constitution broke the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Ail-American LaCrosse team. Were we asleep at the switch again?” It was always that “again” that got me.

  I would try to explain. We would argue. I would slam the phone down. Bisher would call his travel agent and make plans to fly to London to cover Wimbledon. For Christmas one year, my future second wife gave me a dartboard with Bisher’s photograph in the bull’s-eye.

  I tried to get a lot of feature material on the sports front. We did some off-the-wall things about an ex-Falcon turned bank robber, a hockey team in Macon, Georgia, of all places, called the Macon Whoopees, and a Rattlesnake Roundup in Whigman, Georgia. Meanwhile, Bisher would come into the office around eleven, see the first edition, find a story about some guy who had a lifetime batting average of .233 and played second base for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late twenties, and he would scream to the heavens.

  “We’re not running a magazine here, Grizzard! This is a newspaper. A newspaper. The obit we ran on [whozits with the .233 lifetime average] was a terrible error in news judgment.”

  Bisher once went somewhere exotic like Morocco, where he rode the Royal Moroccan train and played golf at the Royal Moroccan golf course with the Royal Moroccan king or some such thing. He was gone about three weeks. When he returned, he went back over all the sports sections he missed with his red grease pencil. He circled everything he didn’t like. He didn’t like a lot more than he liked.

  He called me into his office between editions.

  “Grizzard,” he said, “we just aren’t playing the little stuff big enough.”

  “But, Furman,” I said, “if we play the little stuff big, then we won’t have any little stuff anymore.”

  Made sense to me.

  Bisher thought a minute and then said, “You’re the goddamned executive sports editor, you figure it out.”

  So, soon after page 2’s debut, I heard the call from Bisher’s office. “Grizzard,” he said, “got a minute?”

  I walked in. I never took a seat when I went into Bisher’s little office. I felt a bit safer standing up for some reason.

  “What the hell’s going on on page two?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to start a sports editorial page,” I told him.

  “Well,” he said, “I thought this was just a onetime thing. Do you mean to say, we’re going to have this on page two every day?”

  The general manager of the paper himself had come down one day to tell me he thought page 2 was a great addition to the section. The managing editor liked it. The pro teams were raising hell about it. The readers loved it. I was prepared to go to the wall with Bisher about it. But Bisher didn’t order it out of the paper. He simply said, “One thing to remember. If nobody’s got anything to say, leave it at that. Don’t force opinion and commentary.”

  I would cut “Perspective” to three times a week eventually. Bisher was right. As a matter of fact, he turned out to be right about a lot more things than I gave him credit for at the time. It had to do with age and his perspective.

  We did spend too much time on features and not enough on details, such as making certain all the attendance lines were at the bottom of each day’s baseball box scores, seeing to it the rosters for the annual Blue-Gray all-star football game in Montgomery, Alabama, were in the paper, and not failing to realize that just because, at our tender ages, we’d never heard of a dearly departed Pittsburgh batting star, a lot of people older than us had—and would like to know if he had died. Bisher cared. He wanted the sports section he represented, or that represented him, to be without reproach.

  I want to say it again: Bisher was right. As much as I fought him, cursed him, and hated to get that morning call, the old man knew his newspapers. When Earl Mann, who had owned my beloved Crackers during my boyhood days, died in 1990, the Atlanta papers didn’t do much with it. I was outraged. A brilliant Bisher column (he’s still at it at seventy-two) made me feel better.

  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution moved out of 10 Forsyth Street in 1972 and into a new six-story building around the corner on Marietta Street. Underground Atlanta, beset by crime, closed. Amtrak took over the nation’s passenger trains. The Union was torn down, and what was left of the Georgian was quietly put to sleep. The winos and hobos had to go somewhere else.

  The sports department in the new building sat at one end of the newsroom. A waist-high partition was all that separated us from the gatherers of real news from the real world. It was the dawn of the new technology era for newspapers.

  They took away our manual
typewriters and gave us electric. Hot type was on the way out. Soon the Linotype machines would vanish, and type would be set by some magical, computerized method.

  The power that was the composing-room union was dying. The newsroom, with the help of the new technology, was getting more control of the production process. Soon it wouldn’t matter if the printers went out on strike. They couldn’t close the paper down anymore. Push a button here and push a button there, and voilà, a newspaper.

  I didn’t like many of the changes. I missed the old building. We had carpet on the floor at 72 Marietta Street. Frank had to find an ashtray to dispose of his Camels. Electric typewriters are too quiet. I missed the jingle and jangle of somebody pecking away at a manual. The phones didn’t buzz anymore. The new ones made a sound that reminded me of the coo of a sick pigeon. You couldn’t say “copy boy” anymore, because now there were girl copy boys, and the new sensitivity made the word “boy” socially unacceptable.

  I couldn’t edit with a pencil anymore. I had to use a felt-tipped pen. I had to mark out words carefully in deep black so whatever it was that was setting type now would understand it should skip over those words.

  You sat at your electric typewriter, and before you did anything else, you had to type the pound mark (#), followed by the letters PD at the beginning of the margin set.

  When you had finished whatever it was you were composing at the electric, it was necessary to type #ET, which signaled Hal it had reached the end of that particular article. Said veteran Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, “Pound PD is going to be the ET of me.”

  Professional athletes were forming unions. Hockey had come to Atlanta. Gasoline was short. Nixon was in deep doo-doo. Men were growing sideburns and wearing leisure suits. Lime-green ones. And Babe Ruth’s career home-run record of 714 was being challenged by Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves.

  The hype began at the start of the baseball season in 1972. With a good year, Aaron could break Ruth’s record that season. This was big. It was one of the biggest sports stories of all time, and it was happening in my town.

  We began the countdown. Each time Aaron hit a home run in ’72, we dropped in a little box on the Braves story that noted what number home run it was and how many more Aaron had to hit to get to Ruth’s 714.

  Aaron hit 713 on the last day of the season in 1973. In five more months, spring training would begin, and Aaron would tie and then break the record when the season began in April.

  Management wanted a Henry Aaron special section that would come out before the season began. I began work on it in January. I had to plan it and design it. I basically ceased to deal with the day-to-day operation of the department. All my time was put into the special section and planning for the day Aaron would tie the record and the day he would break it.

  What had never occurred to me was that racism would get involved in the process. The more we wrote about Aaron’s challenge, the more phone calls we got calling us “nigger lovers.” The callers all wanted to point out that Aaron might, included, break the record, but that he had more at-bats than Ruth.

  The composing room was all white, all male. The printers referred to Aaron as “Super Nigger,” as in, “How many stories you doing on Super Nigger today?”

  I began to worry that something might happen to Aaron. What if some nut decided to save the white race’s pride and kill him? I ordered an obit written and filed away just in case.

  I was determined to make the Aaron special the best piece of newspaper work I had ever done. I ordered stories on his boyhood days in Mobile. I spent hours on the phone tracking down family photos. I dispatched a writer to Mobile to do a piece on the old neighborhood.

  Baseball experts said the secret to Aaron’s hitting was his powerful wrists. The writer in Mobile uncovered the fact he had worked in an ice house as a youngster and had to lift heavy blocks of ice. Thus, the powerful wrists.

  I ordered a listing of each of the 713 home runs Aaron had hit in the major leagues. I wanted the date of each homer, and who threw the home-run pitch for the opposing team. I could have filled encyclopedias with the amount of information I had compiled on No. 44. I even had Hyland ghostwrite a piece by Aaron himself. The strawberry incident had long since been forgotten.

  I got my layout. It was filled with ads. I had been promised copious space. I didn’t get it. There wasn’t room for even half the material I had gathered. I had to shrink marvelous photographs to make them fit in the space I had been given. I was prepared to give them a Cadillac, but management was willing to settle for a Nash.

  But there was still The Record. The Braves opened the season in Cincinnati and sure enough, Aaron tied Ruth’s record on opening day. Then the Braves came home to play the Dodgers. The problem I faced was that I had to have everything in place for each game, in case it was the one that gave us number 715. What if Aaron didn’t hit it for weeks? I would still have to be ready each night, just in case.

  A few weeks earlier, I had hired Chuck Perry, my old assistant at the Daily News in Athens. Chuck had become executive editor of the Daily News and Banner-Herald, but I’d convinced him he needed to try it in the Big Time. Chuck would be my assistant. His first day at work was the day the Braves were to play the Dodgers in their home opener. He came in at seven that morning. We got the edition out, went to lunch around one, and then came back to work on planning for the next day, in case Aaron hit 715.

  I had every conceivable angle to the story covered. I even had a staffer go into a men’s room each time Aaron came to bat so that if he did hit the homer, Norman could do a sidebar on some unfortunate soul who was standing at the urinal at the moment history was made.

  Chuck and I were in the press box in Atlanta Fulton County Stadium at six, a couple of hours before the first pitch. Aaron came to bat in the bottom of the first inning before fifty thousand. Al Downing was pitching for the Dodgers. Aaron hit it out to left. Chuck and I split back to the office.

  We worked all night. The writers came in and typed their stories. We went through hundreds of photographs trying to find the ones that best told the story.

  A huge spring thunderstorm hit about two in the morning. The lights went out a couple of times. Around three-thirty, the storm ended. The cleanup people were in the newsroom. The only noise was that of their vacuum cleaners working on the carpet. I was sitting at the copy desk, editing and laying out the pages. Suddenly, I heard a noise. I jumped. Chuck jumped. It sounded like an elephant.

  I’m serious here. It sounded like an elephant. Aaron breaks the record, a frightening thunderstorm had hit, and now it’s four in the morning and we hear an elephant.

  It turned out to be Mike McKenzie, a new staffer I had hired to cover the Hawks. He had finished his sidebar. We thought he had gone home. But he had walked down to the men’s room first, and when he came out, he decided to do his elephant impression.

  To be honest, it was a damn fine elephant impression.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked McKenzie.

  “Just felt like it,” was his answer.

  Our support staff came in at seven. But Chuck and I stayed until the first edition came up and we could see the results of our efforts. We wanted to hold them in our hands. The best story came from a men’s restroom. The poor guy standing at the urinal had figured there was no way Aaron would hit the homer his first time at bat.

  We left the office at eleven in the morning. Chuck’s first day at work had lasted twenty-eight hours.

  We went and had a large breakfast.

  “What makes us want to work this hard?” Chuck looked up from his country ham and grits and asked me.

  “We love it,” I said.

  Hudspeth met a girl. He met her in the elevator at the newspaper. She worked for the company that supplied our vending machines. He got on the elevator to go down for coffee, and she was on her way there, too. Hudspeth got a date with her. All those nights on the streets, and he meets a girl on an elevator at the newspaper.


  She clipped the Butterfly’s wings. All of a sudden, my running mate had been taken away.

  That had a lot to do with why I got married for the second time. I was struck down at the newspaper, too.

  I was sitting at my desk in the sports department. Tons of kids came in all the time. The tour guide would say, “This is the newsroom. Those are typewriters. There are the editors. There are the reporters. . . .”

  So I’m sitting at my desk one day, and I hear a female voice say, “And that is the executive sports editor, Mr. Grizzard.” Only the voice didn’t pronounce my name as I pronounced it. The voice said “Griz-erd,” as in “lizard”; not “Griz-zard” as in “yard” and “lard.”

  I looked up. She was gorgeous. Maybe cute is a better description. She was short. She had those eyes. Big, wide eyes. She was smiling as she spoke to the kids on the tour. Great smile. Big and wide like her eyes.

  Her accent was decidedly southern. It had a peculiar lilt. Syrupy, but not too syrupy. It was a small-town accent. Small-town accents were disappearing in the South. Small-town people were moving to the cities, and suddenly everybody was sounding like Nelson Nowhere on the television news.

  The girl disappeared down the steps with the kids toward the composing room. Maybe the Reverend would have a vision for them.

  I called the public-relations department, which handled the tours for the kids. I asked the name of the girl. It was Kay.

  I gave it an hour or two, then walked down to the fourth floor to PR. Kay was sitting at her desk.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said to her.

  She looked up with those eyes.

  “I heard you giving the tour,” I went on. “You blew my last name.”

  “But aren’t you Mr. Griz-erd?” she asked.

  “It’s Gri-zard,” I said. Then followed it with, “Want to have dinner with me tonight?”

  “Sure,” she replied.

  We went to dinner. We went to her apartment afterward, and she took out her guitar and sang songs to me.

  It was over after that. She was from the low country of South Carolina. That was the accent.