biography

For a man who spent so much time recovering from so many operations; a man who had so many close calls before the last one, Lewis Grizzard never seemed very interested in 'The Great Beyond.' Oh, he wrote about illness and hospitals often enough in his books and columns; joked about it on hundreds of stages across the South. But the last sentence of his last book gives a better clue to his real passion than all those jokes. "Life," he wrote, "I do love that word." It was life that Lewis Grizzard loved. And how he did live: Four wives, 450 daily newspapers, Millions of fans, Hundreds of concerts, Oceans of vodka, Thousands of prayers, and at the beginning and the end of it all, Moreland. Always Moreland, the tiny town that time forgot and Lewis embellished. It was his Mayberry, his Lake Wobegon. Like Twain before him, Grizzard used the scenes of his youth to weave tales that were always truth, even when they weren't exactly fact.

And like Twain, he made us laugh and think at the same time. Indeed, during his lifetime, Lewis Grizzard heard himself described as "this generation's Mark Twain," "one of the foremost humorists in the country" and "a Faulkner for plain folks" by the national press.What he was, without a doubt, was a masterful storyteller, stand-up comedian, syndicated columnist and best selling author. "I am," he would say, "the only person from Moreland, Georgia who ever made the New York Times Bestseller List.... I am the only person in Moreland, Georgia who ever HEARD of the New York Times Bestseller List..." He could poke fun at his hometown and still be loved there. "Lewis is a good boy," they would say with toleration and affection.

Actually, he was born in Fort Benning, Georgia, and only moved to Moreland with his mother after his father left both the Army and his young bride in a fit of despair and mystery that would haunt Grizzard to his dying day. The tremendous love and frustration he felt for Captain Lewis McDonald Grizzard, Sr. finally overflowed,' typical Lewis style, in a book. "My Daddy Was A Pistol and I'm a Son of a Gun" remains one of his most remarkable works, evoking tears and laughter in such rapid succession that the reader finally understands that they are opposite sides of the single coin of parenthood. Years later he penned his homage to "Miss Christine," (his longsuffering, tough, school teacher mother), entitled "Don't Forget To Call Your Mama - I Wish I Could Call Mine." Together they form bookends to the entire Grizzard library, these sentimental melancholy, misty memories of the Mama and Daddy from which he came.

Lewis often told interviewers he was raised "poor, proud, and patriotic." Stories of his childhood in Moreland ring with American archetypes; the strong, quiet man (his maternal grandfather "Daddy Bun," a farmer and school janitor who was the inspiration for Grizzard's famous "Definition of a Redneck"), the strong Southern woman who bends but does not break (his mother, beginning life anew at age 40 after Lewis Sr.'s departure), the fearsome school authority figure (O.P. Evans, principal of Newnan High School), and of course the girls, always the girls (Kathy Sue Loudermilk and company).