Johnny Mack Brown, who had been a famous football player at the University of Alabama, would say something akin to, “If it’s all the same to you, padnuh, I think I’ll just stick to my milk.”
It never was the same to the guy in the black hat, and a fight would always ensue in which thousands of dollars of damage would be done to the saloon. Nobody had insurance back then, either, is my guess.
All western movies also ended with the grandfather of the automobile chase scene. The star, whether he be Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Lash LaRue, the Durango Kid, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Gunther Toody (Forget him. He wasn’t a cowboy. I just tossed him in to see if you were paying attention.), Tom Mix, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, ad cowboyseam, would chase down the bad guy in the last moments of the movie and jump off his horse, taking the bad guy off his.
They would then tumble down a hill like a couple of tumbling tumbleweeds, and once they had stopped tumbling, would get up and fight. The Johnny Mack Browns would always win.
There was also the question of the six-shooter that would shoot 408 rounds of ammunition without needing to be reloaded, but there weren’t any Siskels and Eberts in those days to point out such obvious flaws in such films, which is what people who think they are better than everybody else call movies.
Okay, so we got through a headless John Cameron Swayze, Horsehair Buggfuzz, and Lucky 11 Theatre. Let us continue. The Atlanta Crackers, powers of the Class AA Southern Association, often had their games broadcast on television from their home field, hallowed be its name, Ponce de Leon Park, which Atlantans pronounced “Pontz dee Lee-ahn,” as in “Pontz dee Lee-ahn Russell,” the singer.
I could sit in my aunt and uncle’s house and watch my beloved Crackers, nearly all of whom I still remember.
There was Bob Montag (known affectionately as “Der Tag”) Corky Valentine, Poochie Hartsfield, Sammy Meeks, Earl Hersh, Ben Downs, Jack Daniel, not to mention Buck Riddle, a great first baseman. I have spent many hours in recent years with Buck, and I beg him for stories of the Southern Association, the games they played, the women they loved, the whiskey they drank, and the trains they rode.
The Southern Association in those days included the Crackers, the Birmingham Barons, the Mobile Bears, the New Orleans Pelicans, the Little Rock Travelers, the Memphis Chicks, the Nashville Vols, and the Chattanooga Lookouts, who were run by a man named Joe Engel who once traded a shortstop for a turkey.
I eventually would make it to Ponce de Leon Park to see the Crackers in person—and to eat a marvelous ice-cream treat they had there known as a vanilla custard—but television gave me enough to make me want to know and see even more.
The left-field fence at Poncey went as far as left center; then there was an open area that led to a terrace where there grew a magnificent magnolia tree. What a tree. A Cracker center fielder named Country Brown had become a legend by going, yea unto the base of the magnolia tree, to haul in fly balls.
There was a row of signs that was the right-field barrier. Above it sat a high bank that led up to the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, where the northbound Silver Comet, bound for Washington and New York, would pass sometime around the bottom of the first inning.
The Crackers were known as the Yankees of the Minors. I eventually would read somewhere that they had the most league championships of any minor-league franchise in the country, and I just thought of some more names:
Bob Thorpe, Bob Sadowski, Buddy Bates, the manager, Beans Hadley, the groundskeeper, Ken McKenzie, Don Nottebart, Ray Moore, the TV announcer, and Hank (the Prank) Morgan who did the radio play-by-play, recreating the road games by tape.
It was the television that summoned me first to the Crackers, but it was that copy of the Constitution Aunt Jessie and Uncle Grover brought home each day at noon that sustained my interest and affection. And one day, when I was reading of a Cracker sweep of a doubleheader in faraway Little Rock, it finally occurred to me:
The guy who wrote the story I was reading got to go to all the Cracker games, home and away, and ride trains, and actually got paid for doing it. What a revelation! My life set its course at that very moment.
I would be a sportswriter! Wasn’t I sitting in my aunt’s living room with my grandmother as she watched TV Ranch, and didn’t I arise and declare, “Mama Willie! I’ve decided I want to be a sportswriter!”
And did she say, “Hush, Boots and Woody are about to sing ‘Beulah Land,’ ” or did she say, “So that means you’re not going to make a preacher?,” or did she ask, “What’s a sportswriter?”
I honestly can’t remember, but from that day I had but one ambition, and that was to be the guy who covered the Atlanta Crackers, home and away, rode trains, and got paid for it.
There was something about that newspaper. Something that said to me it knew everything that was happening in the whole world but would kindly share it with me.
I cannot describe the anticipation I felt during the summers as I waited for Uncle Grover to drive into his driveway in the Pontiac with that paper.
I would begin my daily paper watch about eleven-thirty. It would seem a lifetime until a few minutes from noon when I would see Uncle Grover’s Pontiac heading down the street.
Aunt Jessie usually held the paper, while Uncle Grover drove the car. She would never make it into her house with the paper, however. I would meet her as she stepped out of the car, and she would hand over that precious folding of newsprint.
I must mention The Atlanta Journal here, as well. The Constitution and the Journal were both owned by the Cox family of Ohio. The Journal was the afternoon paper.
My friend Bob Entrekin’s father took the Journal, which I always read when I went to visit my friend.
I didn’t understand how newspapers worked at that point, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Journal because it had all the stories and box scores from night games that the early edition of the Constitution didn’t have.
What I didn’t know was the early edition of the Constitution closed before night games were finished, but the Journal didn’t close until the next moning.
I also became quite found of the Journal because the sports section included sports editor Furman Bisher’s column. It was funny. It was biting. It was a daily treasure. I made up my mind 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 Constitution. You have to work out the details of your career early.
The odd thing is, now that I look back, after making my decision as to what to do with my life, it really wasn’t that difficult achieving it. Maybe it’s because I was just lucky. Maybe it’s because my decision was just so right. I don’t really know. I do know that most everything that has happened to me afterward in the newspaper business has felt natural and that must mean something.
My first sportswriting job came when I was ten. Moreland and the surrounding hamlets had no organized Little League program, as they did in the county seat of Newnan, where the well-to-do, not to mention the pretty-well-to-do, all lived. Out in the county, we were not-well-to-do-by-any-means.
What happened when I was ten was that the Baptist churches in the county decided to start a baseball league for boys. I was a Methodist at the time, but I showed up at the very next Baptist baptismal and was immersed in the name of the Lord, as well as in the name of a nicely turned double play or a line drive in the gap between left and center.
I was a pitcher. When our coach asked me, “What position do you play?” I simply said, “I am a pitcher,” and that was that.
It also occurred to me it would be a fine thing to have the results of our league printed in the local weekly, the Newnan Times Herald, which always carried all sorts of news about