Lewis Grizzard Is Dead (And I Don't Feel So Good Myself)

Has it really been twenty years since Lewis Grizzard died?

He died in just the second year of  President Bill Clinton and before a Representative from Cobb County became The Speaker of House.

He missed Monica Lewinsky. He would have made a killing off of that. He missed Al Gore getting all prissy about "Global Warming" . He missed "The Macarena". He missed the Internet. He missed cell phones. He missed iPods, Gangsta Rap, and  Freaknik.

He missed The Atlanta Braves winning The World Series. He missed The Atlanta Falcons going to The Super Bowl. He missed the last Super Bowl in Atlanta and Ray Lewis. He missed the O.J. Simpson trial.

What would he have said about The 1996 Olympics? 9/11? The Second Iraq War?

What would he have made of George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? Sarah Palin?  What would he have said about Barack Obama? The Affordable Health Care Act?  Pick-up trucks with seat warmers?

I'm telling you, the columns would have written themselves.

There was a time when Grizzard was The King of Atlanta. Everybody loved or had a run in with Lewis Grizzard at one time or another. Everybody my age and older knows at least one woman Lewis either: 1) went to bed with or 2) tried to go to bed with.  The man was a hound.

I started reading Grizzard when he came back from Atlanta in 1977. It was just after his second divorce. He ended up being married four time before he died. He used to say, "Instead of getting married again, I'm just going to find a woman I don't like and give her a house."

 He introduced us to all of his friends, like Dorsey Hill, (a real person) who said the three most over-rated things in life are Home Cooking, Extra-marital sex and Rock City.

Who could forget Cordie Mae Poovey. If you grew up in the South, you know at least four Cordie Mae Pooveys.  Her polar opposite was the unforgettable Kathy Sue Loudermilk. Grizzard described her wearing a dress so tight "it looked like one hundred pounds of potatoes was stuffed in a fifty pound bag".

One of my favorite characters was "Wayman C. Wannamaker, Jr., a great American".  Imagine this Grizzard book title:  Wayman C. Wannamaker, Jr.,  A Great American, Will NOT Press One For English.

Who could forget his books? If Love Were Oil, I'd Be A Quart Low. Shoot Low Boys, They're Riding Shetland Ponies. If I Ever Get Back To Georgia, I'm Going to Nail My Feet To The Ground. They Took My Heart And Stomped That Sucker Flat. The man was a writing machine on a little device known as a typewriter.

For all of his fame, adulation, and attention, I've heard from more than one person that Grizzard was one of the most miserable individuals you'd ever want to meet. Some of it had to do with the booze, of course. Some of it had to do with the pressure of writing a column at least four days a week (Grizzard complained "Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It's great for the first two weeks.")

But a lot of it was "daddy issues" that he detailed in My Pappy Was A Pistol And I'm A Son of A Gun. Today, we would say Grizzard's father had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Back then, they would just say he wasn't the same when he got back from Korea.

I read Grizzard constantly back then. I wanted to write like Grizzard. He seemed like he understood the same people I understood. So, I began to write. It is tough to write when you can't spell or know the basic rules of grammar.

In the mid 80's Lewis began to diversify. He developed a stand up act that closed with these words of wisdom: "Life is like a dog sled. Unless you're the lead dog, the scenery never changes". He appeared on Johnny Carson. He acted on Designing Women. With the diversification, Lewis began to get a little bit formulatic. While I still read Lewis, I found a new hero: Dave Barry. I started to try to write like him.

Then one day, Lewis was gone.

No longer would there be a voice for the good old Southern boys. The boys whose dads worked on the graveyard shift at Lockheed and did not get invited into the country clubs or the fraternities.  The boys who have to work through college. The boys that go into HVAC.  People get nervous when the lower class white boys start wanting a voice. They think we're going to stand in the school house door and keep our women barefoot and pregnant. A lot of people speak about us and at us, but nobody really speaks for us.

Sometimes, I'll have a person tell me that my blog posts remind them of Grizzard. It is very flattering, but its like saying someone singing in the shower sounds like Pavarotti George Jones.