Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 24, 1994 TAG: 9403240281
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By STEVE LOVE KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They buried Grizzard's ashes Tuesday in Moreland, Ga., and there should have been tears in beers and sad country songs on the jukebox.
Bars should have flown flags at half staff - Confederate flags. Forget that they no longer are PC.
Grizzard loved the South and hated PC, from political correctness to personal computers to, I'm sure, premature cremation.
He was only 47 when he died, leaving a wife, three ex-wives, 20 books and 450 newspapers with a hole to fill where Grizzard's syndicated column appeared.
Grizzard wrote humor, but he had a rotten heart.
In his book ``They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat,'' Grizzard wrote: ``I've had trouble with my heart for as long as I can remember. Somebody keeps breaking it.''
That wasn't his only heart problem, though. A congenital defect damaged his aortic valve. He wound up with one from a pig.
His critics labeled him a pig-headed redneck, but they were wrong. Grizzard was a pig-hearted redneck, who ended up too soon like the monkey in the best beer joint in Georgia, a place with No Name but with Conway Twitty's ``We're Not Exactly Strangers'' playing over and over on the jukebox.
A guy named Jim Stone introduced Grizzard to the No Name beer joint in Willacoochee, Ga., but lamented: ``This place just ain't been the same since the monkey died.'' The monkey swiped the change off the tables.
Grizzard asked how it died.
``Bad diet,'' Jim Stone explained in ``Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You.'' ``You can't live that long on just beer and peanuts.''
Or, sadly, with a pig valve.
Grizzard died Sunday after his fourth heart operation, one that he knew his chances of surviving were not good. We weren't friends, but as ol' Conway said, we weren't exactly strangers, either.
Born the same year. A Southerner and a fringe Southerner. Strong mothers who influenced our lives. Parallel careers, first sportswriting and editing, then columns, his, of course, on a higher, funnier plane.
We once talked about me going to work for him. Grizzard was sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and looking for someone to write about the Chicago Bears.
I was bullish on the idea and so, it seemed, was he. Then pfft.
No Grizzard. No job.
He left Chicago and editing, both in which fit him like narrow shoes and crimped his style.
He always knew, more or less, what he wanted to do and where.
Grizzard grew up reading Furman Bisher's sports columns in the Atlanta Journal.
Let him explain, which he did in ``If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground: ``Bisher's column ... was funny. It was biting. It was a daily treasure. I made up my mind [as a teen-ager] that when I became a sportswriter, I would write like Furman Bisher, and if it ever came down to a choice I would rather work for the Journal than for the [Atlanta] Constitution. You have to work out the details of your career early.''
Bisher acknowledged in a column about Grizzard's death: ``He overshot his goal considerably.''
I didn't forgive Grizzard for leaving me hanging on that Chicago job until I read his columns and then his books.
Sometimes you identify with someone you don't really know. You feel a kinship that defies logic, that has no foundation except a commonalty of experiences.
It was like that for me with Lewis Grizzard. Each time he had surgery and it became a small item in the papers, I worried.
He was like the brother, a twin, really, I never had and now in death comes a final recognition.
Lewis Grizzard had it all. The right place. The right job. Big money as a stand-up comedian. Even the right woman in the end.
But then in a magazine interview he said: ``I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do ... get me a villa in Spain and go there and write a book. I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.''
Now it is too late.
His 21st book was to be about his dog named Catfish. Instead, I like to think Grizzard now has the chance to do the interview he had only imagined as a columnist.
``I once made up an interview I had with God,'' he admitted.
God was his kind of Guy.
(God could never be a woman. That would be too PC.)
He fired Jimmy Swaggart, met the ayatollah at the Pearly Gates with a bazooka, and on first day of spring greeted Lewis Grizzard with a cold one in longneck bottle.
Steve Love is a columnist for the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal.|
by CNB