It was Mr. Minter, his mentor and professional father figure, who first encouraged him to write a column. "What the hell would I write about?" he asked. But one day, he tried it. He rolled the paper into his old manual clunker and he hit a key and wrote a column.  It was a task he would repeat afterwards for upwards of two decades.  Steve Enoch, his friend and manager in later years, tells a story about a lady of the evening who approached Grizzard in a bar in Mexico. "I make you very happy," she is supposed to have said, "for one hundred American dollars I do anything you want!," whereupon Grizzard shouts, "Thank you Jesus! It's a miracle!" pulls out a hundred dollar bill and says "Here. Go upstairs and write my next column." Grizzard likened the pressure to top oneself day after day in print to "being married to a nymphomaniac... it's a whole lot of fun for the first week."'

But the work paid off. The 1980's and early 1990's were the glory years of Lewis Grizzard Enterprises. He became a business, and things got, he would later admit, "a little crazy." It was a wild ride, but Lewis' particular genius was that he always took his readers along. Sure, he was famous, but he was also the friend in the paper each morning. He let us in on the joke of celebrity. He sat with Johnny Carson ("Johnny wears a lot of makeup."). He acted with Delta Burke ("she don't sweat much for a fat girl..."). He did "Larry King Live," "Designing Women," "Tonight," "Today," "Tomorrow." He was everywhere, even in his own TV special, "Love, Sex, and Romance." Steve Enoch tells how Lewis, at the height of his reign as a cultural phenomenon, was approached by Hollywood executives to be a regular in a sitcom. "We need someone very Southern" they had said. So he and Grizzard flew to L.A. and power-brunched and met the TV guys. They called back. "Sorry, but Lewis is TOO Southern," they said. The column wrote itself that day. "Too Southern?" Lewis wrote with mock indignation, "Why, that's an oxymoron. There's no such thing as being "TOO Southern." He ticked off a lot of people during the glory years, writing what he thought and becoming increasingly loved and/or hated. Southerners of all stripes could not