THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 9, 1995 TAG: 9508090405
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Recent columns on grits stirred a recollection in Joe Hoppel, the ever-fresh virtuoso veteran of WCMS Radio, FM 100.
``As a born and raised Pennsylvanian who came to Virginia never having heard of grits, the column really hit home,'' Joe writes.
(It dealt with the cooks of my outfit in World War II, all of them Pennsylvanians on duty one morning when a sack of grits arrived from the central supply depot. The cooks undertook to boil all 100 pounds of grits for one prodigious snow-white blizzard of a breakfast with drifts in the corners.)
``The first time I had grits,'' Joe recalls, ``they told me to put cream and sugar on it, then rolled in the aisle as that damnyankee dined on grits for the first time.''
Joe, it was the practical jokers who were naive, provincial yokels, unaware of grits' cosmopolitan air.
Many individuals eat sugar and milk on grits with great gusto and often are the better for it, I suspect.
Why, it's no more outlandish than cream of wheat!
Grits are delectable mixed with red-eye gravy made from the droppings and leavings in the pan of fried country ham; and, of course, grits accompany a dozen other dishes, without being requested.
They are a side dish for many foods. In some grits-riddled localities, you have to ask not to have them.
Approaching the cashier in a restaurant in South Carolina, a fellow was heard to say: ``Give me a pack of Chesterfields - and hold the grits!''
A depiction of the country where grits may be found would be like a weather map of highs and lows, fronts, and precips, ever changing. It ought to appear daily on the Travel Channel for wandering Southerners.
Generally, grits are in Dixie, being most prevalent in the Deep South.
They are plentiful in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and still strong in North Carolina, although they may be waning in some areas of the Old North State since it has become one of the top dozen mega-states with infusions of newcomers.
Grits begin to phase out in Virginia. They are rare in Maryland. There's a grits line that falls short of the Mason-Dixon line and begins to fade to flurries around Richmond, yet crops up north and west of it.
Joe Hoppel delivered one stricture on the column: ``Pennsylvanians don't say `Yers,' we say `Yuz.' ''
Actually, the only one in our outfit who said ``yers'' was Sgt. Bull Maypop, a sort of mother figure for us, ``the Fightin' 4-Fs.''
He was from Chicago; but then he was sui generis, distinct in every respect. There was but one Maypop.
Maypop's booming voice yet rings in my ears and ever will. ILLUSTRATION: Color drawing
by CNB