Small town, big life

Lewis Grizzard, a great American, was a writer. I think that’s probably how he would sum it all up. Of course, to a lot of folks he was much, much more than just that. He was a sports reporter, he was a columnist for a couple of big-time newspapers, and he was an author with over 20 books in print, many of which made it onto the best seller lists. Why are we discussing this right now? Well, I am about to tell you. Grizzard was a devout spokesman (not a spokesperson) for small town America. He loved the environment, the characters and the loyalty that was and still is the culture of small towns. He didn’t care for super liberals, Chicago, Illinois, or folks who had outrun their raisings. He had a keen talent for saying things in a particular way that made you smile, nod your head in appreciation, and made you think “he just put his finger right on it”. He had that gift. One of his thousands of “slice of life” stories took place in Palatka, Florida back in the 70s. Palatka is not exactly known as a bright light, hot spot kind of town, but once it was the winter training camp for a pro baseball’s farm team. Lewis was down there doing a story. His breakfast every morning at the Holiday Inn was bacon and a fried egg, over easy. As he described it, “over easy” to most people means the yellow of the yolk runs out pretty fast, but Lewis liked his to “just crawl out”, and that’s exactly what he said to the waitress. For the whole week, that waitress got that “crawling yolk” just right every time. Grizzard said there is a special place in heaven for waitresses who don’t argue but just listen and smile. You might ask, is that the best Lewis Grizzard story you got? No, that story is not earth-shaking, but that’s exactly how I like my fried egg too, and I appreciate that Lewis took pains to write about that egg and honor that waitress. Now, when I try to tell the waiter or the waitress about crawling yolk, and how I want my egg, they usually smile understandingly, unless they are under the age of 30 in which case they just look annoyed or by that time have already made it back to the kitchen. Grizzard grew up in Moreland, Georgia, in Coweta County. Moreland has a population of about 400 people, but anybody who has read much of Grizzard’s writing will tell you that he believed there was always something interesting going on in any small town if you just looked hard enough to find it. So naturally when he made that first one hour and 50-minute trip from Moreland to Athens and enrolled as a freshman at the University of Georgia, he knew he had found his designated place in the universe. Lewis was a member of the same fraternity I was, but he was moving out the year that I was moving in. During that time, he was a part-time sportswriter for the Athens Banner Herald, a part-time student and a full-time card player at the fraternity house. The last time I saw Lewis was at a homecoming Georgia game in the late 1980s. By then, the fraternity had fallen on hard times and had moved into a “less-stately” shall we say, house. But I remember the grin on his face when he and his group came walking up on the lawn at the party after the game. “I been walking all over this campus trying to find a good soul band, and here they are right at my own fraternity.” Actually, his comments were a little more colorful than that. Lewis hung around for a little while, but in those days, he had become way too legendary to stay in one place very long. He died a young man in 1994 following a long bout with heart trouble. Grizzard was a walking, talking advertisement for the small town, Southern experience. Whenever I hear anything about him, that’s what I remember, and if you need any other explanation or understanding of what that’s all about, just grab a few of his books. You will learn that there’s always something interesting going on in a small town if you look hard enough, even in our small town. Thanks for the memories, brother Grizzard.