I’VE NEVER BEEN very good with machinery. And machinery, in my mind, at least, is just about anything you can’t eat, wear, or read. I am the man, I think, who inspired Brother Dave Gardner, the late Deep South comedian and philosopher, to quote a mother speaking to her son and saying, “James Lewis, get away from that wheelbarrow! You know you don’t know nuthin’ about machinery!”
Wheelbarrows confuse me, too. Do you pull or push the thing? And shovels and rakes and hoes and post-hole diggers and sling blades. Forget it. In fact, one of the primary reasons I’ve never committed any crime to speak of is I am actually afraid of sling blades, which is what prisoners use to cut back the grass on state and county roads.
A sling blade is this thing with a wooden handle and a sharp, rectangular blade on the end of it. The idea is to sling the blade down onto the grass. If you are still confused, recall that in the marvelous movie Cool-Hand Luke (Paul Newman, George Kennedy, and Strother Martin as the warden), the prisoners often were taken out on state and county roads to cut the grass with sling blades.
What always frightened me about sling blades was the idea I might sling the blade down at the grass and hit my leg, ankle, or foot instead, thus causing myself great pain. It could happen. I’m so bad with machinery I can’t tell you how many times I have nearly cut my throat while shaving with one of those disposable razors.
All a disposable razor is, is a sling blade for whiskers. Once I was late for a party I was giving downstairs in my house, and in my rush to finish shaving I cut a place just above my Adam’s apple. The blood ran down my neck and onto my chest. I tried everything to make it stop bleeding. I applied direct pressure to the wound, something I learned about in the Boy Scouts. That didn’t help. I tried washing the wound with cold water, something I didn’t learn about in the Boy Scouts, but it seemed to be a good idea at the time. That didn’t help.
So I tried an ancient form of trying to make shaving wounds quit bleeding. I tore off a small piece of toilet paper and stuck it on the place on my Adam’s apple. Gross. The little piece of toilet paper instantly became saturated with blood, and when I removed it from the wound, the blood gushed faster than it had been gushing before. That’s when the doorbell started to ring, indicating my guests had begun arriving.
Then, I thought, Band-Aid! I found a box of Band-Aids in a drawer beneath my sink, where I also keep other items to be used in emergencies, such as condoms and peanuts. (You never know when you will be practicing safe sex and an elephant will walk into the room. What you do is give the elephant some peanuts to keep him busy until you’re through.)
The problem, however, was I couldn’t get the top off the Band-Aid case, and now blood was running down my chest into my abdominal area.
The instructions on the Band-Aid case said that in order to get the lid off I had to press down on the edges with my thumbs. But that didn’t work, so I went to the drawer where I keep my burglary tools, found a crowbar, and beat the case open.
Another problem with Band-Aids is that damn little string. You’re supposed to pull that little red string and the outer cover of the Band-Aid will come off, but that never works for me. Either I pull the string the wrong way, or it detaches from the Band-Aid altogether and I have to remove the outer covering by hand and the part of the Band-Aid with the sticky stuff on the bottom gets folded and then it won’t stick on wherever it is you’re trying to apply the Band-Aid to.
I went through three or four Band-Aids before I was able to remove the outer covering successfully. My next problem was this: The basic flaw in Band-Aids is they don’t stick well to a place that isn’t flat.
Try to get a Band-Aid to stick on a knuckle, for instance. The knuckles are raised above the skin, and if you try to put a Band-Aid there, it will stick at first, but as soon as you move the hand where the injured knuckle is, the Band-Aid will come loose.
Same with the Adam’s apple. I put the Band-Aid on my Adam’s apple, but as soon as I said, “That ought to do it” and my Adam’s apple moved, the Band-Aid came loose.
What I did next was curse the Band-Aid. All those who are machinery-impaired like myself know that when all else fails, curse at whatever it is that is giving you a problem. (Paul Newman again. In the movie Blaze, he couldn’t get his lawnmower to crank, so he cursed it. Then he went one step further. He went and got his shotgun and shot the lawnmower.)
I also knew a guy who got fed up with a car that would take thirty minutes to crank every time he tried to crank it. He got tired of all that and began cursing his car. Thirty minutes later, when the car finally cranked, he drove it to the nearest railroad crossing, shut off the engine, got out of the car and left it on the tracks so a train would hit it.
When he heard a train coming, he said to his car, “Good-bye, you suhbitch.”
The engineer of the train, however, saw the car on the tracks soon enough, and was able to stop the train before any collision could take place. The engineer got out of the train and asked the man, “Is that your car?”
The man said yes.
“Well, get the damn thing off the tracks,” said the engineer.
The man, realizing he might be guilty of some sort of Interstate Commerce Commission violation, got back into his car and attempted to crank it.
It wouldn’t crank, of course.
The engineer, becoming ever more impatient, finally said, “Push that damn thing off the tracks. I’ve got a schedule to keep.”
So the man put his car in “drive,” got behind it, and pushed it off the tracks. Unfortunately, the road went downhill on the other side of the tracks, and the car began to roll, picking up speed. The man chased his car and attempted to get inside and put on the brakes, but it was too late. His car rolled into a Dunkin’ Donuts place, knocking out the window front and coming to rest in the glazed and powdered section of the doughnut rack behind the counter.
The man wound up having to pay two thousand dollars in damages, not to mention paying for a tow truck to come pull his car out of the doughnuts. It wouldn’t crank, naturally, when he tried to back it out of the Dunkin’ Donuts.
What the man did to his car next was set it afire in his backyard. Noxious fumes covered the entire neighborhood, and somebody called the fire department, who came and put out the fire. The man was charged with burning without a permit, and now he had this half-burned piece of machinery in his backyard.
What he finally did was call the towing company again, and they charged him seventy-four dollars to tow the car over to a junk dealer who said he’d give the man ten dollars for the car.
“I’ll take it,” said the man.
“This is the last time you’ll embarrass me,” the man said to his car.
He called a taxi to take him home. On the way, the taxi got hit from behind and the man suffered whiplash. He sued the driver of the other car, but when he told Judge Wapner his side of the story, Judge Wapner said, “I had a car like that once, too. What I did was roll it off a pier, which is what you should have done. I rule in favor of the defendant.”
And I’m still bleeding. All my guests had arrived by now, and were complaining about the meatballs. “Damn things are probably made of soybeans,” I heard one of my guests say.
How I eventually got my Adam’s apple to stop bleeding is I prayed. I once saw faith healer Ernest Ainsley pray and a little girl that had one leg that was shorter than the other, suddenly had legs of the same length, and she jumped up and did the Jerk, right on the stage.
I said, “God, if you will make my Adam’s apple stop bleeding, I’ll never try to save a few bucks by serving meatballs made out of soybeans to my guests again.”
The bleeding stopped. A miracle. My guests at least liked the bean dip I had sitting next to the bowl of Fritos.
So how did an individual who has also had trouble with which of the knobs is for cold and which is for hot on unfamiliar sinks, hasn’t mastered a Mr. Coffee machine or a plastic ice tray that doesn’t have a handle, wind up driving a forklift in the summer of 1965?
It was Ronnie Jenkins’s fault. When spring quarter ended at Georgia, I no longer had a job with the Banner-Herald. Wade didn’t need me because school was out and all that was left to cover in Athens was boys’ baseball, an occasional swim meet, and the Saturday night auto races at Athens Speedway. The Atlanta Times had gone out of business, and football season didn’t start for three more months.
I decided to go back home for the summer. Ronnie had quit his job at the bank in Atlanta by then, and had also moved back home. He got a job in the accounting department at a Newnan plant that made plastic tabletops. Ronnie said, “I can get you a summer job at the plastic plant.”
I had some experience in accounting myself, thanks to my career in the loan-payment department the summer before. And the company put out a newsletter. Perhaps I could edit and write that? Or how about public relations?
Ronnie, who got to wear a tie to work and sit in an air-conditioned office, got me a job driving a forklift for minimum wage, $1.25 an hour.
The first forklift I ever saw, I was driving. A forklift is this vehicle that has two forks in front of it. There’s a handle near where the driver sits that makes the forks go up and down.
The idea is that things that needed to be lifted, moved to another place and then lowered onto that place sat on wooden platforms called “skids.” Each skid had two openings. You drove up to the skid, lowered the forks into the openings, then raised the skid and whatever was resting on them.
I likely was one of the few employees out in the plant with a high school education. I am certain I was the only one with any college experience.
In fact, I was so much smarter than everybody else, they finally had to paint a little sign next to my lowering and lifting lever so I wouldn’t forget which way to push it for up and down.
“For a college boy,” my supervisor, Lonnie (Goat) Smith, a twenty-year veteran of the plant with terrible B.O., said to me one day, “you sure are a dumb suhbitch.”
“I’m a journalism major,” I said to Lonnie (Goat) Smith. “I have seen my byline in a metropolitan newspaper. The fact that newspaper no longer exists is irrelevant here. What is not irrelevant is I should be over there in an air-conditioned office wearing a tie like Ronnie Jenkins, but instead, I’m sitting out here on this machine and it’s hot, I am perspiring profusely, and the gas fumes are making me sick to my stomach, but at least they smell better than you do.
“Now, the only reason I am here in the first place was I needed a summer job and they are onto my clever ruse of last summer at the bank in Atlanta. So I will drive this snorting tool until September, when I will return to the University of Georgia and continue my meteoric rise as a sportswriter. Now, why don’t you leave me alone and go have your armpits steam cleaned?”
Actually, I didn’t say any of that to Goat, because if I had, two, and possibly three, things could have happened.
One, Goat wouldn’t have understood a word I was saying. Two, he might have understood I was being a smart-ass, and there’s nothing a supervisor of forklifts dislikes any more than a smart-ass college boy, and he would have hurt me. Three, I also could have got fired, which wouldn’t have been that bad a circumstance had I been Dan Quayle, who’s about my age, at the time.
If I had been Dan Quayle, I could have called Dad and he could have called the plant and had Goat Smith cleaning toilets and me switched over to planning and development where I could have spent the summer going around saying things like “What this company needs is a good slow-pitch softball team.”
Unfortunately, I was Lewis Grizzard and didn’t know Dan Quayle’s father, so I simply agreed with Goat that for a college boy I was a stupid suhbitch and continued to punch in at seven each morning for my eight-hour shift.
I never did come to master my forklift. I had the arrows to show me which way to push the lever, but I was still able to inflict much damage. I never hurt a person, but I did manage to destroy a fair amount of property. There was the day the shipment of resin arrived.
“Go back to the loading dock and unload the resin shipment out of the truck,” Goat instructed me.
The resin came in many paper bags that sat on skids in the back of a truck. I didn’t have any problem with the unloading part. I lifted each skid of resin, backed my forklift out of the truck, and deposited the shipment nearly inside the plant.
“Who’s goin’ to sign for ’is?” the truck driver said to me as I was backing the last skid out of his truck.
“You would want to see Mr. Smith about that?” I asked.
“Well,” said the driver, “tell him to git his ass out here, I ain’t got all day.”
I found Goat.
“The truck driver said for you to git your ass out there and sign for the resin, he ain’t got all day.”
I might not have been able to drive a forklift with great skill, but I was developing a good ear for quotes, and my communication skills were improving even outside the classroom.
I drove back out to the loading dock to see if Goat and the truck driver were going to have any words, forged by the truck driver’s impatience and the fact he had referred to Goat’s ass.
“What you in such a got-damn hurry about?” Goat asked the truck driver, who wasn’t as big as Goat and certainly didn’t smell as bad, but who did have a tattoo with the words “Born to raise hell” on his left forearm.
“Got-damn,” said the truck driver, wrinkling his nose, “when’s the last time you took a bath?”
“You sayin’ I stink?” Goat responded.
“Either that, or you got a dead dog in your pocket,” shot back the truck driver.
“I ain’t above whippin’ yo’ ass right here,” said Goat.
“Hell,” said the truck driver. “Your smell already ’bout knocked me down.”
With that, Goat took a swing at the truck driver, who dodged the blow and countered with a right to Goat’s belly. Goat doubled up, and fought for his breath.
When he was able to speak again, he said to the truck driver, “Where do I sign?”
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I just sat there on my forklift and howled, and after Goat had signed for the resin shipment and the truck driver had departed, Goat said to me, “There’s nothing I hate more’n a smart-ass college boy.”
At this point, I realized that I didn’t have a single tattoo on my person and could not handle Goat with the same ease as the truck driver, so when he added, “Git an empty skid and take it over to the paper press,” I stopped laughing and drove to where I happened to see an empty skid.
As soon as Goat was out of range, however, I started laughing again, and failed to notice there was a large nail sticking out of one side of the empty skid. Goat had often warned me, “Make sure you check over the skid and see there ain’t no nails stickin’ out.”
I had never paid attention to much else Goat had told me, so why was I going to make a lasting mental note about this bit of instruction?
I lifted the skid and started driving over to the paper press. I drove past the bags of resin I had unloaded out of the truck. I drove too close to the bags of resin I had unloaded out of the truck. The nail sticking out of the skid ripped open about eighteen bags of resin before I realized what was occurring. Resin was pouring out the bags and getting all over the floor. Goat saw what had happened, rushed over, and said, “Son, you ain’t study’n to be no doctor, are you?”
I assured him I wasn’t.
“Good,” he answered.
Later I thought, That was pretty funny what Goat said about me studying to be a doctor. His implication was that if I was dangerous driving a lift fork, what would I be with a scalpel in my hand?
Another time, I was carrying a skid of finished tops over to shipping and hadn’t pushed the forks far enough into the openings to the skid. As a result, the plastic tops fell, and many were scratched and rendered unshippable.
Goat asked, upon surveying the results of my improper forklifting, “What are you study’n over at that college?”
“Journalism,” I said with some degree of pride. “I’m going into the newspaper business.”
“Well, I hope you can walk while you’re deliver’n, ’cause you couldn’t drive a boot up a mule’s ass with directions written on the heel.”
To be quite honest, I began to both admire, and feel sorry for, Goat as the summer wore on. He was actually fairly patient with me, and I am certain now, in retrospect, he must have felt there was at least some hope for my becoming a good forklift driver. He kept saying to me, “As soon as you catch on to this, I’m goin’ to teach you how to flush the commode in the men’s toilet.”
The Newnan Times-Herald was the local weekly. It was always winning prizes. The Newnan Times-Herald was doing amazing things with color and printing twenty years before other newspapers, even the big ones, figured out a brighter package would help sell a product more.
The paper was, and still is, owned by the Thomasson family. Editorially, it was like most small-town weeklies. There was, as I discussed earlier, the news of the various communities and county, and there was news of who died and who was born and who got married and what local son had just completed his basic training and who spoke to the weekly Rotary meeting.
The paper took on a major project in the spring of 1965, the centennial year of Coweta County. The paper decided to print a special edition, covering the history of the county.
The family hired a woman with impressive credentials to write and edit the special edition. She was a flop, however, and it was the middle of July and the edition was due in a few more months. I was over at the plastic plant on my forklift.
I was never quite certain how Mr. Thomasson, the editor and publisher of the newspaper, got the idea to hire me to work on the special. I seriously doubt he went back through the files and found my work covering my little baseball league. But I came home from work one afternoon, and my mother said Mr. Thomasson from the paper had called me and wanted me to call him back.
I did. Here was the deal:
The fancy woman was gone, he was in a bind, and would I come help work on the centennial edition for the rest of the summer?
What, and leave my forklift?
I said, “When do you want me to start?”
He said, “Tomorrow.”
I reported to the plastic plant at seven the next morning, told Goat I was going to go to work at the newspaper, and he said, “Hell, you wasn’t cut out for this kind of work no way anyway,” but he said it with a smile and even parted with a “Good luck.”
I wore my regular clothes into the plant that morning. I certainly would report to the Times-Herald in a jacket and tie, but I didn’t want to show up that way at the plant and give off some message that said, “You poor suckers are stuck here, but I’m moving on to bigger and better things.” I’d decided I didn’t really want to be a smart-ass college boy after all.
What I did for the Times-Herald was write histories of the local communities. One of these communities was once known as “Wahoo Creek.”
I wrote, “Nobody remembers exactly how the village came to be called Wahoo Creek, but perhaps, when the first settlers arrived and saw the beauty of the sparkling creek that ran there, one was so overcome with joy, he jumped and said, ‘Wahoo,’ and that’s how, etc. etc.”
Okay, okay, I know—but I was eighteen at the time, for goodness’ sake.
I did the history of Arnco-Sargent, Sharpsburg, Grantville, Welcome All, and my hometown, Moreland, which used to be called Puckett Station before a guy named Moreland moved into town and promised the residents he would bring in a Popeye’s fried-chicken franchise and get the Jefferson Salt Company to paint everybody’s barn red if they would change the name from Puckett Station to Moreland.
Well, they did, but there’s still not a Popeye’s fried-chicken franchise in Moreland, and there turned out to be a hitch in the barn-painting thing, too. The Jefferson Salt Company said it would paint everybody’s barn red, but that it would also paint JEFFERSON ISLAND SALT on the top of the barns for advertising.
Most people in Moreland who had barns didn’t want JEFFERSON ISLAND SALT painted on the top of their barns. Most of them already had SEE ROCK CITY, anyway.
The townspeople finally ran Mr. Moreland out of town. Some of them wanted to change the name back to Puckett Station, but they had already put up the new name of the town at the Atlanta and West Point Railroad Station, so, according to one elderly lady I interviewed, “They decided it was too late to screw with it.”
In my history of Moreland, I also wrote a lot of stuff about cows and chickens and mules and picking cotton.
That’s because horses, cows, mules, chickens and cotton picking were big deals in Moreland before the boll weevil came and ate all the cotton, mules gave way to tractors, horses got too expensive to keep a lot of them around, and most people quit raising cattle and went to work in either the Moreland Hosiery Mill or Cole Shop in Newnan, or they opened a beer joint, which is what Steve Smith eventually did in Moreland, which is also where I drank my first beer, but I didn’t mention that in my history.
At the end of spring quarter at Georgia, Wade had assured me I would have my job waiting back at the Banner-Herald in the fall. With the ten dollars a week I’d get from spotting for Georgia football broadcasts and the money I had saved over the summer, I figured to get by.
A couple of weeks before I was to return to Athens, I got another message from my mother. “A man called you from Athens and wants you to call him back.”
It was Wade. I called him back in Athens at the number he had left. Only the operator didn’t answer, “Athens Banner-Herald.” She answered, “Athens Daily News.”
The Athens Daily what?
Wade filled me in briefly. He said some men from Columbus had got together with some men in Athens and started a shopper, basically a newspaper with nothing but ads.
They had then decided to change the shopper into a six-times-a-week-daily and call it the Athens Daily News. He had been trying to find me all summer to come back to Athens and go to work for him.
“I’m the sports editor,” he said.
“You left the Banner-Herald?” I asked him.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Wade knew I had gone back to Moreland, but what he didn’t know was my mother had remarried and our phone number was under the name H. B. Atkinson, my stepfather. He finally called the university, tracked me down, and now wanted to know if I could come to work as soon as possible.
“I’m swamped,” he said. “Georgia has started football practice, and I need you to cover Athens High.”
I finished the last history for the Times-Herald, told everybody how much I had enjoyed it, and drove back to Athens. It was the beginning of the best newspaper experience of my career. Nothing that came later matched it.
A Columbus man who owned some radio stations joined with a couple of Columbus newspapermen and an outdoor advertiser in Athens and conspired to start the new morning paper in direct competition with the afternoon joke, the Banner-Herald. Athens was ripe. The university and the town were growing.
There was also an untouched opportunity in the surrounding northeast Georgia area, largely ignored by the Banner-Herald and dabbled with only ever so slightly by the Anderson (South Carolina) Independent, just across the state line.
The Banner-Herald had been asleep for fifty years. The Daily News came with thunder and smoke.
Claude Williams, the Athens outdoor advertising man, was the publisher. Glenn Vaughn, who was a part of the Pulitzer Prize the Columbus Enquirer won for its coverage of the Phenix City, Alabama, story, was the editor.
Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, was full of rigged gambling houses, prostitutes, and seedy bars that attracted soldiers from nearby Fort Benning in the early 50’s. The corrupt local city government ignored citizens’ cries for reforms. Finally, a state investigation closed down the Phenix City joints with the help of troops from Benning, and years of murder, thievery, extortion, and various other wide-open illegal practices came to an end. The Enquirer had crusaded for the reforms that finally came.
Wade Saye had sports. Larry Young, former police reporter for the Augusta Chronicle was city editor. Gerald Rutberg, who was to have interned at the Columbus paper that summer under Glenn Vaughan had, instead, followed him to Athens.
Gerald had just graduated from Auburn University, where he had been editor of the school newspaper. Glenn made him society editor. Glenn’s wife, Nancy, did whatever it was that needed doing.
And that was the editorial staff that put out the first issue of the Daily News on June 17, 1965. The thing was charmed from the beginning.
Larry Young was in his late forties. He was straight out of the mold. He was a tall man with a deep, thick South Carolina accent and he smoked one cigarette after the other. He would hold the telephone between his shoulder and his cheek and interview a police chief while beating out the quotes on the old manual at his desk. He could do that with a cigarette in his mouth, and the longer he talked and typed and the longer the cigarette remained in his mouth, the more his face would go into contortions from the smoke of the cigarette billowing toward his eyes and nose.
It was only when the smoke teared his eyes to the point he could no longer see that he would take one of his hands off the typewriter in front of him, pull the cigarette out of his mouth, take a deep breath, and dump the ashes onto the floor. Then the cigarette would go back into his mouth, and I can hear him now, “Chief, if anything breaks on this, how ’bout calling me first?”
Larry even dressed the part of the veteran small-town reporter. His clothes never seemed to match, and he apparently had only one pair of shoes, beige Hush Puppies. But his appearance didn’t matter to him, and, obviously, money wasn’t very high on his list, either, since small-town reporters might expect to make $120, tops.
He was divorced. He had a history of problems with the booze. If his marriage had worked and he’d never looked for an answer in the bottom of a glass, he wouldn’t have fit the mold.
Glenn Vaughn had rescued Larry. The drinking cost him his Augusta job, but Glenn had hired him anyway. When he was sober, he could get the news. Glenn simply hoped the sober days outnumbered the other ones.
Larry Young had no college degree in journalism, or in anything else. (Today, with no college degree, you might land a job in the mail room.) Larry simply could do what all good reporters can. He could make people tell him things and then convince them not to tell anybody else. Cops, politicians, members of the city council, bartenders, night clerks, the president of the university—Larry Young could talk all of them out of whatever story he was seeking. Remember Abe Lincoln’s line about Grant? “Find out what kind of whisky he drinks and give it to my other generals.” Glenn Vaughan might have said the same about Larry Young.
Shortly before the first edition of the Daily News, Georgia’s senior senator, Richard Russell, died. Richard Russell had been a power in the Senate for years. They used to say, “If Richard Russell hadn’t been from the South, he would have been president.”
Russell’s home was Winder, Georgia, twenty miles west of Athens. His funeral and his burial would be there. Larry Young got on the phone. He asked a Russell aide what Washington names would likely fly down for the Russell funeral. The aide told him, “We expect the president.”
Larry, a few hours from deadline, phoned the White House, and it was confirmed Lyndon Johnson would be flying to Winder for Russell’s funeral.
The Banner-Herald had missed the story in its afternoon edition. The President was coming, and Larry Young had the story. Scoop. It was a delicious newspaper term that has given way now to “exclusive,” and mostly it is used by television news. So few towns still have competing newspapers anymore, there’s nobody to scoop. The best a reporter can hope for is some prize for an in-depth series on the troubles in Lower Slamdunkovia.
But this thing in Athens would become as competitive as any other newspaper battle to the death. On a much smaller scale, yes, but a fight is a fight, regardless of the stature of the combatants.
Glenn Vaughn, the editor, was the perfect editor for this perfect newspaperman’s dream. He was a graduate of the university. He had worked in Atlanta and on the Columbus Enquirer. I’ve never known a man who loved newspapering as much as Glenn Vaughn. Newspapers consumed him. He rarely talked of anything else. The Daily News was his and was whatever he wanted it to be. I don’t know when he slept or ate.
And how much he looked his part, too. He wore suspenders long before stockbrokers and lawyers all started wearing suspenders. He wore thick glasses, and his hair usually was down over his forehead. He dressed better than Larry Young, which basically meant his taste in shoes was better and he had more than one suit.
He edited in green ink. He had been known as “Foggy” to his Georgia classmates in the early fifties. Glenn often seemed to be in the Newsroom Out Yonder. He was absentminded, messy, and given to forgetting what the conversation was about. He also came at you from places no one else ever did, ever could, or ever will.
After I’d been at the paper a year or so, I walked by his office one day, and Glenn said, “Lewis, you got a minute?” his standard way of saying, “Come into my office.”
I sat down at the chair in front of his desk. Whenever Glenn had a new idea and was enthusiastic about it, he would beat a fist into the palm of his other hand, which is what he began to do soon after I sat down.
“What,” he began, “would be the biggest local story we could ever have at the Daily News?”
I thought for a minute. “The university burning down.”
“Bigger than that.”
“Georgia winning the national football championship.”
“Even bigger than that.”
“Twenty-five sorority girls indicted in a sex-ring operation.”
“That’s big,” said Glenn, “but not as big as what I have in mind.”
“I give up,” I said.
“What if,” he followed, pounding his fist into his palm even harder now, “the Second Coming took place in Athens?”
I didn’t have time to answer the question.
“It’s got to happen somewhere, doesn’t it?” he went on. “A lot of people might think it would happen in New York or some other large city, but why not a small town?”
I didn’t have any argument with that. Nothing I had learned in the Methodist Church had indicated where Jesus might actually touch down on that Great Gettin’-Up Morning. If I had been asked to guess, though, I really wouldn’t have selected Athens. New York, sure. Start with the big sinners and then work on down.
I knew Glenn had a reason to be asking me all this. He did.
“In case the Second Coming did happen in Athens,” he continued, “we’ve got to be ready for it.”
Right. We certainly would want to beat the Banner-Herald. Lyndon Johnson coming to town was big, but this, this would dwarf even that.
Glenn said, “I’ve already drawn up the front page.”
He showed me the layout sheet. Across the top of the page was an eight-column, one-line 124-point headline. The higher the point size, the larger the headline. The New York Times, even today, rarely goes over, say, a 48-point headline, even when a president dies.
Underneath the headline, Glenn had drawn the newspaper’s masthead. To take a headline or a story “above the mast” was to put the story in the category of stupendous, colossal, and far-reaching in its effects.
Down the left-hand side of the front paper was our usual “Georgia Datelines” feature. It was a two-column compendium of Georgia news, taken off the United Press International wire. Even if the Second Coming was the main story, Glenn had reasoned, we couldn’t take “Georgia Datelines” off the front. There might be a big fire in Atlanta or a killing in Americus.
The other six columns of the front page were taken up by a large photograph that went nearly to the bottom of the page. Glenn explained:
“As you know, we get our UPI Wirephotos from the mail. So, if one of our own photographers didn’t get a photograph of the actual ascension, we’d have to wait a day for UPI’s. So I went over to the library and took out a book on religious art, and found what I thought was the best and clearest portrait of Christ.
“I brought it back and had a Velox [a picture of the picture] made. It’s just a head shot, but we can paste it right on the front page in a matter of seconds. I’ve also already written the headlines and had them made up. We can paste them down right away too and be on the streets with a special edition before the Banner-Herald knows what hit them.”
I knew he would show me the headlines. He did.
The eight-column over-the-mast, 124-point head said:
“HE’S BACK!“
Underneath the Velox of Christ, there was a small headline that said,
“DETAILS, PAGE 2.”
“I want you to write me a cut-on line [caption] for the head shot of Jesus,” Glenn said.
I wrote, “Christian Savior Jesus Christ Returned to Earth Today.”
“Needs more pizzazz,” Glenn insisted.
I wrote, “Biblical Prediction Comes True: Son of God Returns.”
“Still not right,” said Glenn. “It needs a local angle.”
So I wrote, “Athens Set to Give Hero’s Welcome to Returning Son of God, Jesus Christ (pictured above).”
Finally, Glenn rewrote the cutline himself. His said, “Athenians say ‘Glad to Have You Back’ After Surprise Drop-In by Jesus. Larry Young’s exclusive interview inside.”
“Do you think Larry could get to him first?” I asked Glenn.
“No question,” he said. “I’ve already told him to make sure he has at least a half of tank of gas in his car at all times, just in case.”
What Glenn Vaughn thought a community newspaper should do is cover the community first. He figured you could wrap up most of the national and international news in a brief summary inside the paper. It was rare a nonlocal story ever made front page of the Daily News, and if it did, it had to be the sort of story no other newspapers could carry out front.
“I remember the old wire editor in Columbus,” he told me once.
“He’d go through the wire and find some incredible story, pass it around, and say, ‘Here, read this.’ It would be a helluva story. But as soon as everybody had read it, it would go back to the wire editor, and he would throw it in the trash.”
“Why was that?” I asked him.
“Because the story wasn’t on the wire budget,” he explained.
Each day, the wire opens with its summary of what editors considered to be the top stories of the day. This was the budget. Not to carry a story that was on the wire budget was considered a manifestation of poor news judgment.
“You know how the wire budget probably gets made up?” Glenn asked me. “Somebody in New York says to a copy boy, ‘Go around and see what everybody’s got today and make me up a budget’ There’s some nineteen-year-old kid who’s determining what wire stories are on the front page of newspapers all over the country.”
I first walked into the Athens Daily News building in the morning of August 22, 1965. I was nineteen. The Daily News building had once been an automobile agency. The showroom, with huge glass windows looking out onto the street and directly at the Open House Restaurant (open twenty-four hours a day, all the grease you could eat and breathe), had been turned into a newsroom.
There were six desks. On each desk sat a manual typewriter. Facing the window, Gerald Rutberg had the far desk on the right. Larry Young’s desk was the closest. Nobody was in the far desk on the left. Wade Saye had the near desk on the left.
There was another desk to the left of Wade. Next to that desk was the UPI teletype. That’s where Jim Sheppard, the managing editor, worked. He stripped the wire, edited copy, handled assignments, and laid out what pages Glenn hadn’t already taken his green pen to.
I went to Wade’s desk first. He said, “You need to go in and meet Glenn Vaughn, the editor.”
Glenn’s office was to the right as you stepped up from the newsroom. It probably was the office of the sales manager when the place was still an automobile dealership. You know the sales manager. He’s the one the salesman talks about when he’s trying to sell you a ’64 Plymouth and he says, “My sales manager is going to kill me for this, but I’ll let you have it for nine-hundred-fifty dollars.”
I knocked on the door.
“Wade said you did a good job for him at the Banner-Herald” he said to me.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I worked as hard as I could. I feel practical experience is very important when one is seeking a career in journalism.”
I was proud of myself for saying that. I sounded like a young man who knew what responsibility was all about and who could be trusted not to sniff a glue pot intentionally.
“I can give you twenty hours of work a week,” Glenn said. “At a dollar twenty-five per hour.”
I went back to see Wade. He said, “Athens High is practicing at one. Cover it.”
So I found some brown typing paper—we weren’t provided notebooks at the Daily News—folded it, and put it in my back pocket. Then I found a red copy pencil, put it behind my ear, and got into the car I’d bought over the summer in Newnan, a red-and-white 1954 Chevrolet. The salesman had said, “My sales manager is going to kill me for this, but I’ll let it go for four-hundred-fifty dollars.”
I drove over to Athens High and watched practice. When it was over, I walked up to Weyman Sellers, the head coach and a former Georgia star, and introduced myself. Weyman Sellers was a large man.
“I’m Lewis Grizzard of the Daily News,” I said.
“Grizzard?” he asked back. “What kind of name is that? What are you, a Japanese exchange student?”
I would have a lot of trouble attempting to interview coaches during my sportswriting career. I might as well have started here.
I asked Weyman Sellers, “Coach, what kind of team are you expecting this year?”
He looked at me as if I were crazy.
“You sure you aren’t from Japan?” he asked.
I assured him that I wasn’t. “Grizzard” is a French name. My mother’s ancestors were Scottish and Irish.
“How do I know what kind of team we’re going to have?” he went on. “Right now, we’ve got so many people hurt, we can’t even scrimmage.”
Ah, so, my angle. I asked him to name the key players hurt, and I wrote down the players’ names on my brown copy paper with my red editing pencil, said it was nice to meet him and that I would be covering the team the entire season.
“You believe that, Frank?” he said to his assistant, Frank Malinowski, who’d also played at Georgia. “We’re going to have a Jap with us all year.”
Frank just laughed.
I drove back to the Daily News. Wade told me to sit at the empty desk across from Rutberg.
I wrote:
By LEWIS GRIZZARD JR.
Daily News Sports Writer
“Oooh! Ouch! Oh!”—familiar interjections at the Athens High Trojan football practice yesterday.
I learned the word “interjection” in English class my senior year in high school and never had had an opportunity to use it. I had filed it away, however, awaiting just the right moment. This was clearly it
Wade ran the story without comment.
I would work for the Daily News for a thousand days. Each of those days were precious. Like nothing before, like nothing since. I have cried in reminiscence more times than I remember. If only it, like so many things, could have lasted.