Suggested Courses for Today’s Teenager - Why Teachers Play Hooky - Recalling My School Daze - It’s Only Sheepskin Deep - Today’s Teenage “Slanguage” - Capital Punishment - Attention, All You Racist, Sexist Swine - Is School Lunch Fare Fair? - Today’s Teens Discover a New Hangout
Caught Short in Bermuda - Back to Paradise - Into the Woods— to Go Camping - Cabin Fever at 21 Below - In Lieu of That Swimsuit Issue - Back-Home Thoughts
Ol’ Granny’s Curse - My Most Valuable Players - Casanova Couldn’t Get to First Base - Why I Hate the Yankees - Little Eddie, R.I.P. - Bike Riders, Beware - For Sale: One Complete Ski Outfit
Why Not Toss a Coin? - The Wall Around the Russians - The Russians Out in the Code - Sex in Moscow - In the Huddle with George Bush - How ’Bout Them Japanese! - Have You Heard of Boise, Idaho? - They’re Buying American—Literally - The Rising Sum Will Cost Us
Putting Their Best Chins Forward - Where Do All Those Lost Pounds Go? - Cordie Mae’s Gain-Weight Diet
Hints for Sobriety - Would You Walk a Mile for One? - How I Quit Smoking - Going Up in Smoke - Six Steps to Stop Smoking, Butt Don’t Stumble
Children Are Forever - Memories of My Father - Of Time and Birth
Life Calls No Time-Outs - Now Ear This - Roy Orbison’s Legacy - Cheers for a Real-Life Bar - When I Danced on the Ceiling - I’m Not Dying to Pay for My Funeral
17 - Life in the Twentieth Century
How Times Have Changed - Fighting Tooth and Nail - Special Delivery, Posthaste - Mebbe the Front Porch Should Come Back - How to Be a Clock-Eyed Manager - Gone with the Wind - Horses Drive Me Buggy - How to Treat a Lady - Thingamabobs and Whatchamacallits - Life in the Year 2000
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat
Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun
Introduction
Those of you who are reading this book and are not from the South (Georgia in particular) may be somewhat confused by the spelling of one of the words in the title.
That word would be “Dawgs.” I know the correct spelling for that word is “D-o-g-s,” but in Georgia, where I was born and where I currently live, we don’t spell it that way.
We spell it “D-a-w-g-s” because that’s the way we pronounce it, and we pronounce it a lot because the University of Georgia, where I went to school and where my heart remains, has had excellent football teams over the past quarter-century and we refer to those teams as the “Dawgs.”
Georgia’s official nickname is the “Bulldogs,” but nobody says that. What people say is “Dawgs,” as in “How ’bout them Dawgs!,” which also contains some grammatical indiscretions, but it’s an honored phrase by Georgia graduates, who use it after victorious games as a means of implying, “My, but isn’t our team a glorious group of scholar-athletes who have just kicked (hopefully, Auburn’s or Georgia Tech’s) butts!”
Georgia also once had a coach named “Butts.” Wally Butts, who guided the team in the forties and fifties. As a matter of fact, somebody wrote a book about him and entitled it No Ifs, No Ands, and a Lot of Butts, which should indicate the University of Georgia turns out some top book-titling talent as well as football players.
One of the questions readers ask me a great deal is, “Lewis, where do you get the titles