As I stepped back on the elevator and pushed the button to take me back to the streets—defeated in my first attempt to begin my real newspaper career—it occurred to me that what I should do is find out where the Journal sports department was located, go there, find Furman Bisher Himself, and share my career intentions with him. On the way down in the elevator, I played Fantasy Interview:
“Mr. Bisher?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Bisher, sir, my name is Lewis Grizzard. I’m going to attend the University of Georgia in the fall, and I intend to major in journalism, learn everything there is to know about it, and then return here after graduation to work for you.
“I admit that at the present time I have no earthly idea who invented movable type, but you can bet your butt I’ll know in four years.
“But what I was wondering, sir, is that since I am obviously a bright and promising young man, is there any way you could give me a summer job?”
“You’ve been to see personnel?” Mr. Bisher would reply.
“Yes, sir, but I couldn’t get past the secretary.”
“I know her, the old bat. She wouldn’t know a bright and promising young man from a Shetland pony. My boy, you have come to the right place. I happen to need—just for the summer—somebody to travel all over the world with me to take notes, make certain I have enough typing paper and fresh ribbons for my typewriter.
“There will, of course, be a great deal of travel involved. We’ll be going to the U.S. Open golf tournament, Wimbledon, to the All-Star baseball game and other such places. When can you come aboard?”
Just then, the elevator door opened onto the ground floor. I walked out, found a security guard, and asked him where the Journal sports department was located.
“Go to the fourth floor,” he said, “take a right off the elevator. First door on your right.”
I got back on the elevator and pushed 4. I got off the elevator, took a right, and walked into the first door on my right.
The room was small. There were maybe ten desks crammed together. All the desks had manual typewriters sitting on top of them. All of them also had immense amounts of such items as unopened mail, brown typing paper, ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, an occasional empty doughnut box, black telephones, empty coffee cups, and on one desk I spotted a box of Mueller’s spaghetti sticks. I made a mental note to ask one of my future journalism professors the significance of such a find.
There was also a horseshoe-shaped desk in the room, with chairs on the two outside rims. Inside the horseshoe sat another chair. On the desk was a glass pot filled with what appeared to be glue. The desk seemed to be the central focus of the room. Something important went on at that desk, I concluded.
Behind the horseshoe desk sat a teletype machine that spit out words at an astounding rate. I walked over to the machine. It was typing the current major-league baseball standings. I had no idea as to where the source of this machine was located, but the sound of it gave out both a sense of urgency and energy. This, I reasoned, was the background music for the practice of big-time sports journalism. Against that sound, it seemed to me, a man could put zest in the words he typed. That sound likely was what set Furman Bisher into his mood to crank out his poetry.
To my left, I saw a glass-enclosed office. The door to it was closed. On the door it said, FURMAN BISHER, SPORTS EDITOR.
This was Furman Bisher’s office! I looked through the glass. There was a desk, just as cluttered as the ones outside. An obviously elderly manual typewriter sat on a table near the desk. The Oval Office in the White House could not have impressed me any more.
This was it. This was where Furman Bisher wrote. All those columns of his I’d read since childhood came out of this hallowed place. Bisher on riding the train to Little Rock with the Atlanta Crackers. Bisher on Bobby Dodd, the legendary Georgia Tech football coach. Bisher from the World Series. Bisher from the Kentucky Derby. Bisher from the Masters.
I was looking at where Michelangelo mixed his paints, where Edison conceived the light bulb, where Alexander the Great plotted his battles, where Irving Berlin beat out the first notes of “White Christmas.”
I knew I would work in this place one day. Sometimes you just know, the way you know you won’t like liver even if you’ve never tried it. It wasn’t going to be this summer. The idea of talking to a man of Furman Bisher’s stature and having him be so awed by my only credentials—the fact I was Lewis Grizzard, the future journalism student—that he would give me a summer job as his caddie, suddenly seemed a bit ridiculous.
But at least I had been to this room. I had heard the sound of the teletype and seen my first glue pot. And I had noticed a certain order to all the mess. This is what I thought a sports department at a large newspaper would look and feel and sound like, and one day I would be in the middle of it. I had seen my dream, I had stood in it, listened to it, and, by God, it would come true.
I swore to devote myself to that end. It didn’t matter what it would take. I would do it.
Just before I left the room, I said something to it. Out loud. “I’ll be back,” I said. Profound, no. But filled with determination.
I returned to the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor again. I hadn’t accomplished what I had wanted to accomplish, a summer job, but being in that place had stoked the fire in my belly.
I had to walk back past Union Station to get to my car. There was a newspaper box in front of the station. “Aha, the classified ads,” I said to myself.
I put a dime in the box, took out a copy of the Journal, fresh from next door. I walked into the station. It was a death wish inside, dark and lifeless. A wino was asleep on one of the benches in the waiting room. He, like everything else in the place, was covered with grime. But at least it was quiet, save the wino’s occasional snore. And I had spotted a pay phone. So I pulled away the front section of the paper, put it down on one of the filthy benches, and sat on it.
I went directly to the classifieds and began to read under the “Help Wanted” section. Amid all the small type was a display ad that stopped me.
“Do you like people?” asked the ad. “Would you like to make as much as $125 per week in the exciting field of sales?”
How did they know this was just what I was looking for? I loved people. I could hang out with people the rest of my life and never get tired of it. And $125 a week? I looked back at the ad to make certain it hadn’t said “month” instead of “week.” It did say “week.”
Classes at Georgia didn’t start until the middle of September. I counted up the weeks and figured I could make nearly eighteen hundred dollars in that period, getting rich in the exciting field of sales just by liking people.
I called the number given in the ad. A woman answered. I introduced myself and explained I was the man the ad was looking for.
“First,” said the woman, “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Go ahead,” I shot back, my confidence at eye level.
“Do you like people?”
“Do I like people? I love people. People to me are, well, what it’s all about. I mean, you give me some people, and I’ll like them right away. I don’t even care what kind of people they are. As long as I know they’re people, you can bet I’m going to like them. What’s the next question?”
“Could you come by this afternoon?”
I had the job. No question. Eighteen hundred big ones. The first thing I would do would be to buy Paula one of those Evening in Paris perfume sets, the one that also came with the powder.
The woman gave me the address of the office. I said I could be there in half an hour.
Driving