by T-Bone
Several years ago, when Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump (I give the author more credit than the movie producers did) was raging through the movie theaters, I was chagrined to notice an awful lot of similarities between my past and the fictitious Mr. Gump’s. Can’t say I saw that observation as a compliment. Yet I did have a way of unknowingly getting into historical Southern situations on a regular basis, and my path has crossed with more than a skosh of famous characters and figures.
According to my departed father, once, way back when, he briefly worked with Hank Williams (the original, not his Monday Night Football son) at a sawmill outside Andalusia, Alabama and later worked for a company owned by Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant (few called him Bear to his face). Apparently Hank was fired for playing his guitar during lunch. Go figure.
In March 1965 I sat on the Mobile Highway in Montgomery and watched the historic Civil Rights March from Selma to the capitol. The authorities had fearfully let everyone out of school that day, so several of us kids gathered on the curb. We saw Dr. Martin Luther King and many other heroes of the movement as they walked not 20 feet in front of us.
Dr. King even looked over at me, sitting with an African American friend of mine, and he winked. Maybe seeing black and white boys sitting together with a basketball between them - on a highway that had been so horribly bloodied only a week earlier - inspired him to use that analogy later in a famous speech.
Can’t confirm my place in his inspiration, but I like to think that happened.
Moving to the other side of the political fence, I also encountered Alabama Governor George Wallace. On an elementary school field trip to the capitol, we were told that he was busy. Dejected, my classmates and I walked away from his door ... until I caught sight of the governor just sitting in his office, looking out the window.
"There he is!" I yelled. "He ain't busy! He's right there!"
Caught, the governor was forced to shake every single kid's hand, saving a particularly tight squeeze for mine.
"Good to see you, little fella," he said. He was faking a smile. Even back then I knew what an angry man looked like.
Years later, when I was in college, at The University of Alabama, I was standing in line waiting to get into a football game when I felt a forceful tapping on the back of my head. Several drunken frats had already tried to break in line earlier, and this time I was ready for them.
"Look you –,” I stopped mid-threat.
Coach Bryant’s hounds-tooth hat loomed over me and his craggy face grimaced down at me like a mad John Wayne.
"Son, mind if the football team cuts in line here?" he growled. He didn’t wait for an answer, and I was shoved aside to make room for the team.
A year later, during what would be a national championship season, one of the assistant coaches asked me to work on a logo design for the Crimson Tide helmets. It was no secret that Coach Bryant wanted his uniforms as simple as his wishbone playbook.
After I'd done a few designs, I took them to Memorial Coliseum and up to Coach Bryant's office. The assistant coach told me to go on in. I noticed he stayed outside.
I stood just inside the door, waiting for the legend to see me. I stood there for what seemed like a month.
Coach sat at his desk looking at something. The smoke from his unfiltered Chesterfields wafted up and hugged the fluorescent lights in a carcinogenic fog.
Finally I heard a grunt. The big man stood and looked at me.
I won't repeat exactly what he said. Let's just say that Bear Bryant didn't want any &%$#@! logos on his &$%# helmets and asked me did I think he should put $#@!! logos on those red "hats" (yes, he called them hats).
"No sir," I said, and promptly left.
A month later, my wife and I were seated next to the kitchen door in the back of Joe Namath’s restaurant in Tuscaloosa. The famous quarterback-restaurateur came bursting out of the kitchen, hitting me in the head with the swinging door.
"Sorry, man! You okay?" He turned that Joe Willie smile on me.
Susan got his autograph. I got a pop knot upside my head. Joe Willie paid the tab.
Later, I had a class with actress Sela Ward, who was a cheerleader at Alabama at the time. She sat next to me once. I never said a word to her.
Unlike Forrest, I never walked across the United States or went to Vietnam (although I was on the list when the war ended). Nor have I started a shrimp company or gotten into a fight at a Black Panther party.
But I have been threatened by the Klan and played H.O.R.S.E. with Michael Jordan. I nearly drowned within a mile of the U.S. Capitol, jumped from a hotel window in the L.A. Earthquake, and survived a near plane crash.
I don’t think life is like a box of chocolates. It’s more like a bag of Krystal hamburgers. And I’m not sure why.
You know, I worked at that restaurant for a while, and a lot of folks were pretty drunk in there. Maybe you too, because I think that kitchen door opened out to a coffee counter and the door to that good salad bar. Maybe you were fooling around back there, plenty of reason to be doing that, given the nature of the place. Hey, we were having a pretty good time in the back too. All the best.
Posted by: Doug Crow | May 02, 2008 at 10:27 PM