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

by Lewis Grizzard

  She would need such a hat for winter. And it looked like her, somehow. When she opened it and put it on, she looked so pretty, those big eyes and that big smile underneath the furry white hat.

  When she first left me, I used to think about her in that hat and curse myself for what I had done and hadn’t done that had caused her to leave me. And there I stood. The apartment was empty, except for me and the white furry hat. I picked it up. I looked at it, felt it, and then brought it to my face and smelled it. It smelled like her.

  I dropped to the floor and banged my fists against it. I cursed the Fates that had put me on my knees on that floor. When I finally arose, I put the hat back where I had found it. I didn’t want to carry it with me, to haunt me further.

  But I think I knew at that moment. I think I knew I had to get out of Chicago to save my life. Or die there from either the cold or the grief or the depression or because of another Gleason column or another night of the Guys with the Mops or another year of Beat the Champs.

  The winter of 1977 was awful, I forget the exact statistics, but there was one siege in January, soon after I had moved into my new apartment, where it didn’t get above zero for something like a week. The heat went out in my apartment. My landlord moved me downstairs with him and his wife. I couldn’t get to work. The three of us sat there for a week, huddled around the heat vent.

  My landlord and his wife were from Philadelphia. One day, he said, “This is crazy living like this. We ought to move to Florida.”

  I covered the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the first week in April in 1977. I had forgotten springtime in the South, the dogwoods and the azaleas and the girls in halter tops in the gallery on the sixteenth hole at Augusta National.

  On Sunday of the final round, I was standing on sixteen. It was a wonderful late-spring southern day.

  I had begun to fly a little again by then. The time off I had to go back home was precious, and I had decided it was foolish to waste half of it riding a train. I learned something about flying, too. If I went to O’Hare two hours before takeoff and drank six double screwdrivers, I wasn’t nearly as nervous on a flight. (I had previously been afraid to drink on a flight because of how hard I had prayed it wouldn’t crash. I was afraid if I sinned and had a drink, it would make God mad and He would crash the plane. Later, however, I realized if I had asked God what I should do to stop feeling terror on a plane, in all His infinite wisdom He would have said, “Have a couple of drinks.”)

  I had a 12:15 A.M. flight back to Chicago Monday morning. I had asked about the weather when I called home. They said it was cold, and snow was expected.

  On sixteen, I made my final decision. I was going to leave Chicago and come back to Atlanta. I didn’t know how long it would take me, or what I would do when I came back, but it didn’t matter anymore. Me and Chicago were through.

  I went to work Monday around noon. Hoge dropped by and said, “Let’s have lunch.”

  We went to the Wrigley Building restaurant. Hoge had the lamb. I had a cheeseburger.

  Hoge told me he wanted me to think about taking over the job of night managing editor when the man who held the job currently retired in a few months. “I see you as a future managing editor,” he said to me. “But you need some years getting ready.”

  I had heard something like this before.

  This was familiar. I didn’t want to stay in Chicago under any circumstances, much less move from sports. But I felt that tug about not disappointing somebody. Hoge had been great to work for. He wasn’t that popular with others. They resented his looks and his glibness, I suppose. They made fun of his clothes. It was the first time I had ever heard the word “preppie.” Jim was from a wealthy background. They resented that, too. They had a nickname for him—“Attila the Hoge.”

  But I respected him immensely. He knew the newspaper business, and he loved it as I did. He supported me in the Banks saga and in every other instance when I needed support.

  I didn’t commit to Hoge, and I certainly didn’t tell him I was going South as soon as possible. But I knew I didn’t want to be night managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. I had tried the news side once and had hated it. Plus, I knew what being night managing editor really involved. It involved coming to work at six in the evening and crawling out in a blizzard at two in the morning, and if there was anything wrong with the paper the next morning, it was my fault.

  I went back to the office and sat there and contemplated my next move. Should I call Minter in Atlanta and see if there was any possibility the papers might take me back? I was so desperate to go home, I’d volunteer to be garden editor if nothing else was available.

  I believe in God. Here’s one of the reasons why:

  “Lewis,” said Harold Newchurch, who answered the phones, “line two.”

  Another miracle.

  It was James G. Minter, Jr., in Atlanta. Was this spooky or what?

  “It took you a long time to find a new columnist, didn’t it?” he asked me.

  “I interviewed every suhbitch in the country,” I said.

  “I’m looking for a number-two sports columnist behind Outlar. Anybody impress you I could afford?”

  They didn’t pay well at the Sun-Times. The Atlanta scale was below that.

  It hit me. Just like that, it hit me.

  “I think I know a guy,” I said.

  “Who?” Minter asked.

  “Me,” I said.

  “You?”

  “Jim, I gotta get my ass out of here. They want me to be night editor, Kay isn’t coming back, the weather is killing me, and I’ve got to get out of here.”

  I was begging now.

  “But you’ve never written a column,” Minter said.

  “I know that,” I answered him. “But I’ve read practically everybody in the country now, and I might not be as good as the best, but I think I’ve got enough sense to know at least what to write about. I could improve.”

  “I couldn’t pay you anything,” Minter said.

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  “You serious?”

  “Dead.”

  “Write me three columns and send them to me.”

  I worked all night. I wrote one column about a college football player in California who was dying of cancer. I wrote what I thought was a funny piece about athletes’ overuse of the phrase, “You know.” I wrote one about a sports bar in Chicago that turned away a seven-foot basketball player with the Bulls because he didn’t have an ID. “Didn’t have nothin’ to do with the fact he was black,” the bar owner had been quoted as saying.

  I mailed the three columns to Minter in Atlanta.

  Three days later, he called me back. It had seemed like three years.

  As I have said before, he was a man of few words. The same man who had sat down beside me that day in the press box at Georgia’s Foley Field in 1968 and had asked, “Want to come to work for us?” said perhaps the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard.

  I picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” He didn’t say, “This is Jim in Atlanta.” All he said was, “I believe you can write. I can pay you twenty-two-thousand dollars a year.”

  I was making thirty-four thousand dollars at the Sun-Times.

  Exactly twelve days later, April 21, 1977, I boarded a Delta flight to Atlanta. I had got Hudspeth to get me an apartment back at Mi Casa. I had told Hoge, “I just can’t live in this place anymore.”

  I had said good-bye to my staff. I’d said, “Some of you, it has been a pleasure to work with. Others of you, it has not been. And one of you has been an incredible pain in the ass.”

  With that, Lacey J. Banks got out of his chair, walked over to me, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

  I would never have anything to do with the production of a newspaper section again, I would never manage again. A decade after Wade Saye had taught me layout and after all those mornings and late nights in composing rooms, after all that editing, sweating over graphics, wa
iting anxiously for a new edition to arrive, that part of my career was over.

  I would never strip another wire. I would never put my hands on another tear rule or glue pot. I would never write another headline or cutline.

  Hoge offered to let me stay on as a writing sports editor. But I declined. Nothing could have made me stay. I had never even applied for an Illinois driver’s license, and my watch remained on Eastern time during my entire Chicago experience.

  My first column as the number-two sports columnist for the Atlanta Constitution appeared on the front sports page, Monday morning, April 22, 1977.

  I had already mailed it to Minter from Chicago. It was about the years in Chicago. It went on about how happy I was to get home. I wrote, “From now on, if it doesn’t have a red clay motif, I’m not interested.” I ended it with the conversation I had with a Delta Airlines reservations agent when I called to get my ticket home.

  “Will this be round-trip or one-way?” she had asked.

  I had allowed a delicious pause, and then I said, “One-way.”

  Epilogue

  My Mother died in October 1989.

  Glenn Vaughn has retired as publisher of the Columbus, Georgia, newspapers. He tells me he has lost thirty pounds and has quit smoking.

  The Athens Daily News lives on.

  Gerald Rutberg is a successful attorney in Orlando.

  Chuck Perry is editor of Longstreet Press, an Atlanta book publisher. He remarried. He and his lovely wife have a baby girl.

  Paula has two boys by her second marriage.

  My divorce from Kay was final in the fall of 1977. She is still in Chicago and is a member of a band. She has never remarried.

  Tim Jarvis divorced and moved to Atlanta a year after I moved back.

  Jim Hoge is publisher of the New York Daily News. At this writing, he is in a fight with one of the last powerful newspaper unions to keep it alive.

  Lacey J. Banks is still a member of the Chicago Sun-Times sports staff.

  Jim Minter became editor of both the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. He was kicked upstairs as senior editor when the papers hired Bill Kovach of The New York Times. Minter took retirement and bought a suburban Atlanta daily.

  Kovach lasted two years. He was replaced by Ron Martin of USA Today. The paper’s circulation has been growing rapidly under Martin.

  The Journal and Constitution sports departments have been combined. The section regularly wins the award for Best Sports Section among major dailies.

  Bisher is still at it. Minter and I often say to each other, “Bisher was right a lot more times than he was wrong.”

  Frank Hyland still works in the sports department. He just turned fifty.

  Norman Arey is currently co-writing a gossip column for the Atlanta papers. He writes a lot better now.

  Ron Hudspeth is single after three divorces. He left the newspapers and publishes The Hudspeth Report, which is all about Atlanta nightlife.

  Harrison’s closed. The clientele got too old.

  I wrote a sports column for the Constitution for eight months. Then I began writing a humor column for the news side. This is my thirteenth year.

  I married for the third time in 1980. It lasted three years. My third wife wrote a book about me titled “How to Tame a Wild Bore.” She remarried and moved to Montana.

  I live in a house in Atlanta with two Black Labs—Catfish and Cornbread.

  This is my thirteenth book.

  I’m forty-four.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lewis Grizzard, Jr., was an American writer and humorist known for his commentary on the American South. Although he spent his early career as a newspaper sportswriter and editor, becoming the sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at age 23, he was much better known for his humorous newspaper columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a popular stand-up comedian and lecturer.

  To learn more about Lewis Grizzard and If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/georgia.