If an eleventh-grader wanted to have something to do with the school newspaper, all he or she had to do was go see Mrs. Skinner, who taught a class in journalism and was, quite naturally, the school newspaper’s sponsor.
The first day I was in the eleventh grade, I went to Mrs. Skinner and said if she didn’t let me be sports editor of Tiger Tracks, I was going to write a book one day about my newspaper career, and in the part where I told about how I got started, I was going to write about her as a cruel person who didn’t know a well-written obituary from a dissected dead frog.
That didn’t seem to get her attention, so I told her if I didn’t get the job as sports editor, I was going to kill myself and leave a note saying she was responsible.
She sent me to the principal’s office for being disrespectful to a member of the faculty, but she did give me the job of sports editor. As a result, please notice I am a man of my word and mention her here in favorable terms.
Mrs. Skinner was (and still is, I might add, sticking with favorable) a dark, attractive lady whom students called “Gypsy Woman” behind her back. There was always some discussion as to who was the better looking, Mrs. Skinner or Miss Fleming, the algebra teacher.
I always held out for Mrs. Skinner, on the basis of anybody who would teach algebra for a living would eventually grow old and ugly. I don’t know if Miss Fleming grew old and ugly, and I’m sorry to have to mention her in such a light, but she should have known better than to send me to the board to work out algebra formulas in front of the entire class when my interest in her subject was too small to be represented by any mathematical term.
I didn’t last very long as sports editor of Tiger Tracks. Newnan High had a terrible football team my junior year. (I didn’t play because I weighed only 130 pounds at the time and was afraid of the Monk, who played linebacker.) In my first column ever, I questioned the ability of the head coach and suggested he get out of coaching and be made assistant biology teacher.
Realizing the controversy this might lead to, I wrote a phony column that brought Mrs. Skinner’s approval. Then I suggested that I be the one to take all the Tiger Tracks copy down to the Times Herald. She agreed and, when I got to the Times Herald, I exchanged columns.
When the column appeared, the football coach threatened to make me do blocking drills against the Monk. (It would have been an even more severe punishment if he made me attempt to have an intelligent conversation with him.) Mrs. Skinner was aghast at what I had done, and the principal, Mr. Evans, said if I ever, ever got near Tiger Tracks again, he would personally flog me with a piece of the cafeteria’s Wednesday “mystery meat” (I always figured it was horse or dog).
Controversial Tiger Tracks sports editor Lewis Grizzard was relieved of that position today after a column critizing the Newnan High head football coach.
Said principal A. P. Evans, “Never in my thirty-five years in education have I run across a student with such obvious disdain for authority. His column was filled with lies and hateful innuendos, and he has brought harm to our head coach and shame upon himself and the school.”
Mrs. Sarah Jane Skinner, school newspaper sponsor and journalism teacher, said, “I was shocked to learn that Lewis had substituted another column for the one I approved. I will not, and cannot, tolerate such deceit.
“There is no place in journalism for such, and I will devote the rest of my year to cramming that fact down Lewis’s throat.”
Coach Albright’s only response was, “After the Monk gets through with him [Grizzard], I’m going to kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County.”
Okay, so that never actually appeared in print, but it’s sort of what did happen. What exactly did happen was they took away my job and my title and called my mother, who said to me, “I certainly didn’t raise you this way.”
Fortunately, Coach Albright was told he couldn’t kick the little piss-ant all over Coweta County because I might get seriously injured during the process, and although I did, in fact, deserve to be seriously injured, it might not look good with the Board of Education, and he already was on thin ice with them for producing such a rotten football team.
I might have, indeed, been a little piss-ant back then, but at least I was a clever little piss-ant. Camilla Stevens was social editor of Tiger Tracks. What the social editor did was keep up with who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing. One day I said to Camilla, a good friend, “Let me write your column this week.”
Camilla had a big date with Dudley Stamps coming up on Saturday night and figured she needed the extra time to spend on her hair, so she granted my request.
I figured I was safe here, because no members of the faculty knew beans about who was going steady with whom and that sort of thing, so I could get away with a lot.
The lead in the column I wrote for Camilla went, “What’s this? Filbert Fowler and Phyllis Dalyrimple seen holding hands on their way to study hall? Tell me, guys and gals, is this the start of something big?”
Here was the deal. Filbert Fowler, a Presbyterian minister’s son, was afraid of girls because his father had warned him that any interest in the flesh would stunt his growth and send him straight to hell. Phyllis Dalyrimple, on the other hand, was known to be the loosest girl in school and was rumored to have taken on the entire tenth-grade boys’ shop class in the back of Scooter Williams’s ’54 Chevy.
To link Filbert Fowler with Phyllis Dalyrimple was maybe the funniest thing my school readers had ever heard of. I had some other gems, too:
“Can’t mention names, but a certain quarterback is said to have his eye on a certain tenth-grader who sits in the second chair of the first row in fifth period home economics class. . . .”
The quarterback obviously was Phil Manderson, the best-looking boy in school, and as soon as everybody checked out who sat in the second chair of the first row in fifth-period Home Ec class and discovered it was Linda (the Haint) Cunningham, they broke up.
The Haint not only was ugly, she was scary. The word was, she could spook an entire Holiday Inn by herself. The Haint had ratty hair, was cross-eyed (when she faced southward, her left eye looked toward Galveston and her right toward Miami), and had zits that could have won prizes for both size and color. Her feet, placed end-to-end, would have stretched from the library halfway to the audiovisual room.
The only people who were not amused by my linkage of the quarterback and the Haint were the quarterback and Camilla Stevens. (The Haint didn’t read the school paper, or anything else for that matter, because of a large zit that sat on the end of her nose and blocked out her eyes when she looked down to read something.) The quarterback, young Mr. Manderson, was not used to being held up to public ridicule. He quickly tracked down Camilla, whom he thought to be the source of his troubles, and said, “If you weren’t a girl, I’d make you bleed in numerous places.”
Camilla ratted on me, of course, and told quarterback Manderson who was really to blame for linking him with the Haint. He tracked me down in the hall between second and third period and said, “When school’s out this afternoon, I’m going to kill you.”
At sixteen, I was about to have to deal with the first of many irate readers to come.
I did a lot of thinking as I waited to be killed when school was out. Should I offer Phil Manderson money not to kill me? Should I ask for asylum in the principal’s office? Should I move to Wyoming?
I decided the best path was to go ahead and confront Phil Manderson and attempt to reason with him. That failing, I would take one punch, hit the deck, and pretend to remain unconscious—if I wasn’t actually unconscious—until he got bored with me and left.
He tracked