If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground
Lewis Grizzard
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2012 by Dedra Grizzard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-273-3
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-120-9
LCCN: 2012014679
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
Other books by Lewis Grizzard:
Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You (1979)
Glory! Glory! Georgia's 1980 Championship Season (1981)
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat (1982)
If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About A Quart Low (1983)
Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else But Me (1984)
Elvis is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself (1984)
Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (1985)
My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (1986)
Shoot Low Boys - They’re Riding Shetland Ponies (1986)
When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? (1987)
Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny - You Know Them Taters Got Eyes (1988)
Lewis Grizzard’s Advice to the Newly Wed (1989)
Lewis Grizzard on Fear of Flying (1989)
Does a Wild Bear Chip in the Woods? (1990)
Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night (1990)
Don’t Forget to Call Your Momma; I Wish I Could Call Mine (1991)
You Can’t Put No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll (1991)
I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 and Other Nekkid Truths (1992)
I Took a Lickin’and Kept on Tickin’ and Now I Believe in Miracles (1993)
The Last Bus to Albuquerque (posthumous) (1994)
It Wasn’t Always Easy but I Sure Had Fun (posthumous) (1994)
Grizzardisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Lewis Grizzard (1995)
Southern by the Grace of God - Lewis Grizzard on the South (1996)
TO BISHER,
WHO KNEW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT
AFTER ALL
Table of Contents
BEFORE I BECAME a newspaper columnist, which is the job I currently am holding down and will continue to hold as long as I don’t get fired, don’t say to hell with all of it and open a liquor store, and don’t die, I was a newspaperman. Newspaper columnists aren’t really newspapermen, or newspaperwomenpersons, as one might think.
Columnists don’t have anything to do with the editing of the paper, the way a paper looks, or how the news is displayed. Unless we start stinking it up for a long period of time, we also never get punished; no one ever makes us columnists go out in the cold at four in the morning to deliver the thing to the readers’ doorsteps.
I don’t think people who deliver the paper get enough credit, quite frankly. I don’t care how good the paper is, if the man or woman who is responsible for having it on your lawn—come rain, sleet, snow, or hangover—falters, what difference does it make if four gorillas and an orangutan produce the paper?
(Of course, four gorillas and an orangutan could put out a better newspaper than the ones some people try to shove down the readers’ throats. Most gorillas and orangutans I know at least aren’t pinko, left-wing communist bed-wetters, which a lot of newspaper people are.)
Newspaper columnists aren’t reporters, either. We can simply make things up if we want to. I, for instance, make stuff up all the time. I once made up
