I hadn’t thought about Alfred Johnson in five years, but here he was across the room from me in Chicago, and now I could see the Guild’s next move.
Grizzard takes over as executive sports editor of the Atlanta Journal He gets rid of the black guy.
Grizzard takes over as executive sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. He gets rid of the black guy.
My lawyer buried his face in his hands as Alfred began his testimony, which went something like, “I was one of the top black journalists in Atlanta, and this white racist gave me the gate.”
Our side would bring in Jim Minter to Chicago to give a deposition refuting Alfred’s claims of his lofty position, but it wouldn’t do any good.
My lawyer said to me, “How could you forget something as important as this incident with Alfred Johnson?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
Somebody had put the Guild onto Alfred Johnson. I never found out who. Perhaps someone who worked for me in Atlanta. My mother had once said to me, “Not everybody is going to think you are as cute and love you like I do.” She sure was right.
The arbitrator had a lot to say about the “manuscript callously thrown into a wastebasket” and said I was “racially insensitive.” He ordered Lacey reinstated with all his back pay.
But the arbitrator did not have the authority to order that Lacey be put back on the Bulls beat, nor that he be given his column back. The First Amendment protects a newspaper from being ordered what it must print. It also protects newspapers from being told by the government what they can’t print.
Lacey J. Banks came back to the Sun-Times sports department after several months’ absence. By that time, Thom Greer had established himself as a top pro-basketball writer and an integral, important part of the staff.
I put Lacey on the desk. After I left, I heard they let him cover a women’s pro-basketball league that eventually flopped, and somebody said he covered some soccer occasionally. I also hear that he was still doing his preaching and often tried to convert wayward staffers.
Sad. Everybody involved shared the fault. It’s not a fair world.
I mentioned other problems beside Lacey J. Banks. Count ’em.
* Fitz wouldn’t write a column.
* Gleason would go crazy on me and write columns about “Prince Peter (Rozelle), King of All the Footballs.” I killed a few of his efforts, too. He used to rant and rave at me and throw his hands about and say, “But, Lewis, you don’t understand. I’m circulation.”
* Holtzman wouldn’t put any quotes in his baseball stories.
I did learn something about being a cocky, twenty-eight-year-old sports editor from Holtzman, however.
I called him into my office one day and began to tell him how baseball writers should be writing in the late seventies.
I mentioned the need for quotes, and then I said, “And you use too many clichés.”
“Clichés?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “You are still using worn-out baseball clichés like ‘hot corner’ for third base and ‘circuit clout’ and ’roundtripper’ for home run.”
Holtzman looked puzzled. Finally he said, “Lewis, you don’t understand. Those are my clichés.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Here was the dean of American baseball writers, and he probably did come up with those terms. And if a man invented a term, no matter how long he used it, it really couldn’t be called a cliché, could it?
I didn’t bother with Holtzman’s writing much after that.
* One night, we were trying to get out the Sunday edition, and Emil came out of the composing room complaining he couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should take care of him and forget about getting the paper in on time, or put Emil somewhere until I could finish up the job in the composing room. What if he died? I compromised. I got Emil a chair and I said, “I’ll keep an eye on you while I get the paper in.”
As soon as the edition closed, Emil started breathing a lot better again.
* Marvin Weinstein, the Guild steward, showed no quarter when it came to Guild rules. If a reporter was in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a story and his shift was over, Marvin would order him to leave the office.
* I hired a new assistant, John Clendenen, to take over the night desk. After the green edition, we would hold a nightly meeting that involved me, Shub, and Clendenen. John didn’t like Marvin. If Clendenen had somebody working on a piece and Marvin came over and said, “Leave the office, your shift is over,” Clendenen couldn’t understand it and would tell Marvin he was an idiot. They would argue, then Marvin would file grievances—and I suddenly began keeping a large jar of Maalox in my desk.
* Bob Pille, the college writer, did something I detested. He covered a Notre Dame–South Carolina football game in Columbia, South Carolina, and he made reference to Sherman’s burning of Columbia in his story.
Why did every northern writer have to mention Sherman or the Civil War when he covered a ball game in the South?
I wrote Pille a memo and told him what I thought of his reference, and pointed out that Sherman didn’t burn Columbia, anyway. His siege ended in Savannah.
Pille wrote me a subsequent memo, pointing out Sherman had, indeed, burned Columbia. He even had exact dates and a quote or two from a history book.
I wrote him a third memo and said, “I still maintain references to the Civil War when one is covering sporting events in the South is a cliché, but I do stand corrected about Sherman’s burning of Columbia, the capital of the great state of South Carolina. Realize, however, I am a product of the Georgia public school system, where we were taught when the little bearded bastard of a firebug got to Savannah, they hung him.”
* The Guys with the Mops: Damndest thing. Every Friday night at six o’clock, three guys with mops would walk into the Sun-Times newsroom. All work of a journalistic nature came to a halt. The Guys with the Mops would go around to each desk and put the accompanying chair on top of the desk. Then they would mop the floors. You couldn’t remain in the newsroom while they were mopping. There was no place to work, and even if there was, it was tough to work while a guy was mopping underneath you.
I always forgot about the Guys with the Mops. Shortly before six o’clock each Friday, I would start laying out the first Sunday edition. I would have my layouts on my desk, my pencils, my glue pot, the copy, and just as I would begin, here they would come, the Guys with the Mops. I would have to pick up all my work and move down to a table in the employee cafeteria while the Guys with the Mops brought a major news operation to a complete halt.
* Sandy Shub and Beat the Champs: I meant it earlier when I said I loved Sandy Shub. He was such a gentle little man, and he helped me put out a zillion brushfires. But Sandy Shub had another job at the Sun-Times, besides handling work schedules, expense accounts, and keeping me sane. Each year, the Sun-Times sponsored a bowling tournament called Beat the Champs. I went through three Beat the Champs. I still couldn’t tell you exactly how the darn thing worked. But I do know this: Half of Chicago entered. Bowling, an indoor sport, is big in Chicago. And everybody who entered got his or her name and his or her score set in small agate type in the Sun-Times sports section. And everybody who entered then called the Sun-Times to ask if his or her name and score was going to be in the paper that day.
Beat the Champs, I swear, lasted longer than the NBA season. And Beat the Champs ate space. It ate it without conscience. It ate space like a lion devouring a lamb. Inches and inches of names and bowling scores, running day after day in my sports section.
Bob Langer brings in a great photo. Can’t run it, though. Beat the Champs.
Beat the Champs finally ended when finalists were chosen and they rolled off against some pros. They put the thing on television, and Sandy would proudly state, “We’ve raised over a million dollars for charity with Beat the Champs.”
I hated Beat the Champs. I hated it more than I did when somebody put a horse in “Peo
ple in Sports” back in Atlanta. I hated it more than I hated communism and loud rock music and cabdrivers who spoke no English, who were in the front seat of every cab I ever took in Chicago.
I eventually began to hate Chicago itself. Oh, there were some moments. I got to meet the famous mayor Richard Daley at the press lounge at Comiskey Park one night. He was very fat.
I found a great place to play tennis, Mid-Town Racquet Club. It had sixteen indoor courts. I joined an early-bird league and played five mornings a week, between seven and nine. That helped keep me sane. I made a new friend at the tennis center, Tim Jarvis.
We were a pair. He was an ex-hippie, liberal social worker, who openly admitted he had used drugs during his hippie days. I was a conservative, southern patriot, who had been close to marijuana only once in his life. I had seen The Gene Krupa Story, starring Sal Mineo as the legendary drummer, at the Alamo Theatre in the county seat back home.
We did both have beards, however, and we both enjoyed tennis. The pro introduced us. When Tim heard my name, he said, “Are you the guy who got rid of Lacey Banks at the Sun-Times?”
I admitted I was, not certain what would come next.
“I’m glad,” said Tim. “He was awful.”
I also met a neighbor in the apartment building, Johnny Reyes, a free-lance photographer who was originally from Colombia and knew everybody I knew, including Lacey. He was from Colombia, as in Juan Valdez, the coffee picker, not as in South Carolina, which Sherman burned.
Johnny was always inviting Kay and me over for dinner or drinks. He had a thick accent, and often I had a difficult time figuring out what he was trying to say. I would listen to Johnny, and then when he finished speaking, I had two responses. I would either laugh, say, “You’re absolutely right,” or “I know exactly what you mean,” which I rarely did.
Two weeks after we had moved to Chicago, Kay had gone to visit her family and her brother at his home in Virginia for Thanksgiving. I stayed in Chicago. Thanksgiving night, Georgia and Georgia Tech were to play their annual football game on national television. I planned all day for the event. I bought a couple of six-packs of beer, built a fire, and awaited the game.
Georgia led 42–0 at the half.
Johnny called. I think he said, “Hey, man, come on over. I got some chicks and some food, man.”
I thanked him but told him I wanted to stay in my own apartment and watch the football game. Georgia won 42–26. Johnny called again. I said I would be right over.
There were some strange people in Johnny’s apartment. I suddenly felt terribly homesick. Back in Atlanta, the bulldog faithful were celebrating. I’m seven hundred miles away with some people who didn’t speak English, were puffing away on odd-looking cigarettes, and listening to music I couldn’t identify.
“Come try my dressing,” said Johnny.
I was hungry. The dressing was good. I ate two helpings. I awakened on Johnny’s couch the next morning.
“Hey, man,” he said laughing at me. “I put pot in the dressing. You sleep good, no?”
I never ate with Johnny again.
But one more problem—Chicago itself:
Winter came that Thanksgiving weekend. I had found a neighborhood bar, John Barleycorn’s. I went there on Saturday night, sat alone at the bar, and had a few beers. It hadn’t been snowing when I walked into John Barleycorn’s around seven.
When I decided to leave and walk home at around ten, there was more snow on the ground than I had ever seen before. Maybe five inches. Later, that would be nothing, but I’d been in Chicago only two weeks.
I was wearing my Bass Weejuns. It was eight blocks home. The next morning, my Weejuns had turned white. The two things I had vowed never to do, no matter how much it snowed in Chicago or how cold it got, was wear a pair of rubber overshoes or get me one of those Russian-looking hats with all the fur.
The only individuals I had known in the South who wore rubber overshoes were sissies and nerds, or guys who hung around the science lab a lot and grew up to be billionaire computer-company CEOs. I didn’t like those Russian-looking hats because my father used to talk a lot about how one day we would have to fight the Russians to keep us safe from the peril of communists, and how we should have just kept everybody over there when World War II ended and gone ahead and fought them then.
As it got deeper into winter, however, and I had ruined my third or fourth pair of shoes, I bought a pair of rubber overshoes. But allow me to save some face from the embarrassment of finally giving in to something I had vowed never to do—I never did get one of those Russian hats.
The weather was more than enough to tell me I was in the wrong place. I had never lived anywhere where a television announcer would warn, “Do not go outside with any part of your skin exposed. Frostbite warning.”
The lake would freeze. Everybody’s pipes would freeze. Streets froze. People walking on streets froze. Cars froze. Dogs and cats froze, and I guess the birds had the good sense to go find a condo somewhere in Florida.
I saw it snow in May. That’s not natural. I was down by the lake one June evening, and a temperature sign at a bank read 38 degrees. That’s not natural, either. I heard a line that I thought was funny, as well as quite descriptive: “There are only two seasons in Chicago—winter and Fourth of July.”
They put up ropes and lines along the street in the Loop so you could hang on and not be swept across the ice and into the Chicago River by a blizzard wind. I had never been in a blizzard until I lived in Chicago. Being in a blizzard is like standing in a wind tunnel, getting pelted by ice cubes going three hundred miles an hour.
April was the cruelest month. One morning an April day would dawn, and you would exclaim, “The long gray nightmare is over.” It would reach 67 degrees, and you would put your rubber overshoes away. The next day, it would snow seventeen inches.
I mentioned earlier how I never got a cabdriver in Chicago who spoke English. I never got on a city bus when there wasn’t some sort of crazy on board, either. There was a man who rode to work on the same bus as I did who used to talk to his hands, like they do in New York subways.
He would open his hands, look at them, and say, “Good morning, hands.” Then he would break into a diatribe involving everything from freeing Castro’s slaves to there will never be another Cubs’ shortstop as good as Ernie Banks.
A man dressed as Abe Lincoln would ride my bus occasionally. He not only dressed like Lincoln, top hat and the works, he even looked a lot like Lincoln. He was tall and gangly, and had a beard.
He never said very much. The bus driver would always say, “Good morning, Abe,” and Abe would tip his hat to the bus driver.
That’s nothing. One morning a man with a live chicken on his head tried to get aboard number 151. The bus stopped, and a few people got on in front of the man with the live chicken on his head. When he tried to board the bus, the driver said, “You can’t bring that chicken on here.”
“I’m a taxpayer,” said Chicken Man.
“I don’t care,” said the bus driver. “No animals on the bus.”
A rather heated argument ensued.
The man with the live chicken on his head said, “I’ll pay an extra fare for my chicken.”
The bus driver closed the door and drove away.
Later, I thought, why didn’t I get off the bus and interview the man with the live chicken on his head? I should have, because, now, it would be nice to be able to sit here and explain about the chicken. But I was late that morning, and if I didn’t get to work pretty soon, Sandy would fill up three quarters of the sports section with Beat the Champs names and scores, and there wouldn’t be room for the U.S. Open golf story. Maybe the guy just liked chickens.
Food was a continuing problem for me in Chicago, too. In Chicago, barbecue was ribs, and that was it. You could find plenty of barbecued ribs in Chicago, but what you couldn’t find was a barbecued pork sandwich (described, elsewhere, as a “barbecue pork-pig sandwich”), and I dearly love barbecue
d pork sandwiches, which I grew up on at the world-famous Sprayberry’s Barbecue in Newnan, Georgia.
You go into a restaurant in Chicago looking for maybe some country fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and other southern delectables, and what you might get was Salisbury steak, a baked potato, and green beans that had been steamed. I don’t like steamed vegetables. I like green beans that have been simmering for about a week with a large piece of ham thrown in for flavoring.
There were many ethnic restaurants in my rather ethnic neighborhood, but once you’ve eaten one portion of boiled yak, that’s about it for the rest of your life.
Kay tried. She would still fry an occasional chicken or cook a pork roast, and she did manage to find some grits for breakfast, but where were the home-grown tomatoes, the speckled-heart butter beans, and the fried okra? And the cornbread mix she found was too sweet. I hate sweet cornbread. Not as much as I hated Beat the Champs, but close.
Okay, the hot dogs were good at a little joint up on Clark Street near my apartment. Yankees, I must admit, know something about hot dogs, even though they pronounce them as they do. I learned to eat nothing but sharp mustard on my hot dogs while I lived in Chicago, a practice I have continued even until today. What’s good about northern hot dogs is they are all beef and they are much smaller than the plump dogs they serve down South. I prefer smaller dogs because they are easier to eat, and the smaller the dog, with apologies to Ralph Nader, the fewer rodent hairs I’m getting.
Speaking of grits, I invited my friend Tim Jarvis and his wife over to a Sunday morning breakfast once. Kay had found some country ham someplace, and she was planning scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and homemade biscuits.
Tim and his wife arrived at our apartment. He walked into the kitchen and saw Kay’s biscuits, just before they were to go in the oven. He took a long look at them and said, “So those are grits.”
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 35
