Before Grizzard was Cool
The last time I saw Paul Hemphill, I was in Manuel’s Tavern watching the Presidential Election. He strolled past my table with a whiskey glass filled with ice and what looked like bourbon. He nodded at me, and I waved back.
I knew him to be a handsome, salty, sharp-tongued, tell-it-like-it-is, writer who loved baseball, country music, race cars, telling stories, and the occasional whiskey.
An excerpt from “Quitting the Paper” by Paul Hemphill, Copyright 1981:
“On the Kansas City Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and will help him. If he gets out of it in time.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Late one night in the fall of 1969, with the rain splattering against the front window and the gray light of a television set dancing across the bar, I sat in a booth at Emile’s French Café in downtown Atlanta with a feisty young newspaper reporter named Morris Shelton and methodically proceeded to get paralyzed on Beefeater martinis. By now this had become a daily ritual. I was thirty-three years old. I was the featured columnist for the Atlanta Journal, the largest daily newspaper between Miami and Washington. I had been one of a dozen journalists around the country to be selected to study at Harvard under a Nieman Fellowship the previous year. I fancied myself a sort of Jimmy Breslin of the South, cranking out daily one-thousand-word human dramas on everything from flophouse drunks to Lester Maddox, sufficiently loved and hated by enough people to have that sense of pop celebrity with which most newspapermen delude themselves. I had the most envied newspaper job in Atlanta, if not the South, and now and then I would see a younger writer in a town like Greensboro or Savannah or Montgomery imitating my style just as I had stolen from Hemingway and Breslin and too many others to talk about.. I had been sloppy and inaccurate, from time to time, but I had also written some good stuff. I had hung around all-night eateries and gone to Vietnam and hitchhiked and lain around with hookers and shot pool with Minnesota Fats and sat in cool suburban dens with frustrated housewives…
Here is a piece from the
AJC Peachbuzz remembering Mr. Hemphill.
Here’s a nice interview with him from Creative Loafing.
