Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It’s great for the first two weeks.
Lewis Grizzard
I expected to be strictly a dispassionate chronicler of events when I got into this business, dear reader, but you and I have now been together here on Page 4 for going on 33 weeks. And our battle against ICE (indifference, chaos, and enmity) continues.
Remember when I told you about going to St. Mary’s Good Samaritan ER in January and how the medical professionals there put an IV in my arm because my heart was beating like a freshman standing next to the prom queen?
That was our first date. By week three, I was pouring out my heart to you about lost love and loneliness like I was Don Gibson adrift on a “Sea of Heartbreak.”
And you listened. When nobody else would, you listened.
I nearly didn’t make the deadline a few times back in the spring as the ideas thinned out, but I decided to soldier on no matter what and write a column each week until at least the end of the year if the editors would let me.
I feel pretty good about that now. It’s like I’m running in Atlanta’s Peachtree Road Race and I’m just a few blocks from the left on 10th Street.
The column published here on the day after Christmas will be the realization of my goal: One complete year of columns.
Five days after that red-letter date, something quite a bit more significant in the world of journalism will take place.
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution will cease printing a newspaper and become a digital-only service.
And that’s sad for me. Sure, I refer to Atlanta’s paper as the Urinal and Constipation sometimes, but a newspaper that never upsets anyone isn’t doing its job. The AJC is my hometown newspaper, and the print edition has been a part of my life since I was a toddler.
In the beginning, before the Journal and Constitution were connected by a hyphen, my grandparents subscribed to the morning paper, which was the Atlanta Constitution. My parents preferred the afternoon paper, the Atlanta Journal.
So, I saw both all the time.
My dad was a big baseball fan, so I learned how to interpret a box score before I could accurately determine when it was time to visit the bathroom.
I checked the baseball standings in the newspaper almost every day, even when the Atlanta team was in the International League. Eventually, I realized that I was more interested in pretty girls than in how many hits Pete Rose had against the Pirates at Forbes Field last night.
The iconic Lewis Grizzard became the sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at the age of 23, but he wandered off to Chicago for a while and came back in the late ’70s. He became so popular in Atlanta that an envious college student named T. Michael Stone wrote a scathing criticism of his work for an Advanced Composition class at Georgia State University.
Since Stone’s readership consisted of his girlfriend and his professor, it did not affect Grizzard’s career or reputation.
In fact, Grizzard became so popular in Atlanta that Creative Loafing included in its annual Best of Atlanta poll the category of “Best Columnist besides Lewis Grizzard.”
I stopped reading the AJC every day when I moved out of my parents’ house and couldn’t afford the subscription, but I still bought it on Sundays for many years.
I was a devout reader of the “Arts and Entertainment” and “Travel and Leisure” sections, as well as the sports.
And here’s one of my favorite sports ledes of all time, written by Thomas Stinson in 1985: The ACC awoke Monday morning to find a gold and black vagabond sitting in its throne room. With its feet up. Smoking a cigar. Completing one of the most stunning turnarounds in the college game’s recent history, Georgia Tech, the league’s ultimate whipping boy only four years ago, won the 32nd ACC tournament Sunday afternoon.
Reading that wouldn’t have been the same experience online. Not for me. Not even close.
There is a tactile quality to sports that is enhanced by holding a paper.
You can visit baseballreference.com anytime, but you’ll have to see a concession stand to get a cold beer.
RIP, AJC. FYI: I borrowed my customary closing line of “Selah” from AJC sports editor Furman Bisher.
So . . . Selah.