Thanks for the wonderful memories
EDITOR’S NOTE: Rheta Grimsley Johnson is retiring. This is her final column.
In 1974, when I became editor of Auburn’s campus newspaper, The Plainsman, a former editor, Beverly Bradford, gave me a plaque emblazoned with the mock-Latin phrase “Illegitimi Non Carborundum.” It meant, sort of, “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down.” I am not ground down. I have had faithful readers for 42 newspaper years. I have had mostly good editors, the right friends, the right enemies and three husbands who understood the deadline business. But I am tired, and it seems like a good time to go to the porch. After crafting columns for 33 years, I’ve written too little too often about too much. I think in 550-word increments.
I won’t stop writing altogether; I would not know how. But no longer, to paraphrase Faulkner, will I be at the beck and call of every scoundrel who has fifty cents for a newspaper.
I have had a good run. I worked for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis at its best, The Atlanta Journal Constitution when it had a downtown presence, The Monroe Journal while Harper Lee was reading it. Right out of school I tried to start my own weekly on an island and got that fantasy out of my system. I learned to write fast at United Press International and well at Millard Grimes’ small town daily, where I used a manual typewriter.
I’ve done things and have been places and met people that the daughter of a butcher who attended Alabama public schools had no right to expect to do, to go, to meet. I’ve interviewed preachers, politicians, a Ku Klux Klan chaplain, murderers, prize zinnia gardeners, movie stars, Woody Hayes, a grave-digger, Willie Nelson, Captain Kangaroo and the inventor of a so-called perpetual motion machine.
I’ve never missed a deadline. I wrote the day of my father’s funeral and the morning after my husband’s death. I have pounded out columns while sick with the flu, from the fog of a hangover and for one week sitting on sand bars in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Yes, I am offended at the recent drumbeat that declares mine not an honorable profession. I know better. The same kill-the-messenger con that crooked politicians have used forever is amplified now, writ large by a tweeting and desperate president.
As H.L. Mencken predicted, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Trump tempts me to keep on, not to quit. But life and an oldschool editor named Michael Greahl have taught me a little about graceful benedictions.
I have more people to thank than to cuss. I walked the streets of Barcelona and skimmed the Atchafalaya Swamp, trolling for columns. I covered Bear Bryant’s funeral. I drove through the Delta with Jesse Jackson, judged a chicken beauty contest with Rufus Thomas, lunched with a minkdraped Dixie Carter, visited the law offices of Sam Ervin Jr. and laughed with B.B. King at the Parchman prison farm.
Most of my subjects were not famous at all, but unmined jewels in plain sight. They let me into their homes and lives for a few hours and permitted me to tell their stories. I owe them the most.
After all these years and thousands of columns, I must find a new way to structure my life. It will be a little sad. It will be a relief. It will be what it will be.
Roll the presses, Mister Bass, Rheta Grimsley Johnson is hanging up her guns.