Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday three weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the fourth part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

In case you missed Chapter 1: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ’79
Or Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print

Chapter Three: The Crimson White

by Glynn Wilson

When I arrived in Tuscaloosa after an obligatory August trip to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, to hang out at the “Cave Bar” at the Ramada Inn on the beach and work on my tan like all the frat boys and sorority girls, I had placed my trust in a friend to find a place to live. It turned out to be an apartment way off campus in a small complex with no pool. Bummer.

But there was a pool in the larger complex next door we had no problem using, so that part worked out okay. I also won the coin toss and got the biggest bedroom in the three-bedroom apartment shared with two roommates, the one with its own bathroom and a balcony, so that part worked out well too.

The downside was the long drive to campus every day, which turned out to be a real pain in the ass, especially for early morning classes. I didn’t sign up for many classes at 8 a.m. anyway, but one of the classes I had to take was an advanced reporting class taught by a bulldog of a woman who I will not name. Many students loved her, but she hated me. She only taught the class at 8 a.m.

Even though I was the only person in the class to publish all eight of my stories required for the semester on the front page of The Crimson White student newspaper, she gave me a D for showing up late four times. She also claimed I didn’t turn in one of the eight stories to her, but when I protested, she pointed to a giant stack of papers against the wall that reminded me of the cartoon Shoe, and said if I could find it in there, she would be happy to reconsider the grade.

But that is getting ahead of the story, since it happened in the spring semester. But I do remember her giving me one good piece of advice. Instead of relying on The Birmingham News for information about the world, she told me I should go over to the library and start reading The New York Times and The Washington Post. I took her advice. And what a revelation that turned out to be.

The New York and Washington newspapers were not locally delivered in those days, and of course they did not have Web sites yet. To the best of my recollection, the library had only the Sunday editions, and they arrived three or four days late by bus or mail. They hung on wooden pegs on a special shelf designed specifically to hold newspapers for libraries. The papers were so fat you could not read an entire newspaper in an hour, so I started making daily vigils to the library in between classes to read the best news reporting and writing in the world at that time.

The editorials were almost shocking compared to what I had grown up reading in The Birmingham News, and I remember even having to use a dictionary at times to look up some of the words. I used a dictionary a lot as an undergraduate in college, especially for reading books by authors such as Henry Kissinger. You didn’t develop that kind of a vocabulary in the schools of Jefferson County, Alabama, in those days, and I doubt it’s much better now.

In my first month at the capstone, as it was affectionately called, I went over to the campus newsroom, then located in the basement of the Carmichael building on the quad, short for Quadrangle Park, and signed up as a reporter. I told the editor I was interested in covering politics.

Big News Afoot

That very day, for my first assignment, she sent me to cover a Faculty Senate meeting. And it turned out there was big news afoot.

The brand new university president, Joab Thomas, made a presentation in his first meeting with the faculty. And he obviously thought the address was off the record.

He was a Biology professor who had plans to turn Alabama into a research university. He let it slip that he was going to consider the Tuscaloosa campus the “flagship” campus, which would have involved certain privileges that would give the campus special consideration when it came to funding, over the newer satellite campuses in Birmingham and Huntsville.

When he said he wanted that little nugget of information to remain “in the room,” perhaps he didn’t realize I was sitting in the back, along with a reporter from The Tuscaloosa News. The broadcast media all waited outside with their cameras.

As it turned out, the Tuscaloosa News reporter honored the off the record request. But when I went back and told my editor about it, a woman who ended up working for the Alabama Public Television network for many years, Joanna Cleary, she said it was news.

So I wrote up the story and it ended up being the lead item in the next day’s newspaper. And what a shit storm it caused. The term “Flagship University” was never uttered again, as far as I know, in the history of Alabama. The calls must have been coming in for days from Birmingham and Huntsville.

That would be one of the first lessons I would learn over the years about “the power of the press.” Apparently President Thomas got over it, though, because he let me interview him in his office later on in the year. He was a controversial figure, for reasons I cannot remember, so he didn’t last long as president.

I continued covering politics for the paper, and ended up interviewing the winning candidate for president of the Student Government Association that year, a guy who went on to work for U.S. Senator Howell Heflin. He was the so-called “machine” candidate from one of the powerful fraternities on campus.

The next year, the independent candidate won — after we uncovered the scandal that the frat boys had bugged his apartment.

That year, the academic year 1982-83, was also Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant‘s last year as the head football coach for the University of Alabama. His last year on earth.

I went to all seven home games. For one game, I managed to finagle a press pass and got onto the field with a camera. I kept one print of The Bear leaning against the goal post in his hounds-tooth hat for many years, but it burned up in a fire when the anti-environmental Klan burned down my house in Knoxville, Tennessee, many years later.

While I had grown up in an Alabama household full of rabid Alabama football fans, the more education I got, the less I cared about the sport. But I was glad to have that experience in my life, to be a senior there in his last year.

It seems I have always been a controversial figure since I got myself involved in the news game. After the experience of being run off as editor of the paper I created at Jeff. State, I also nearly got the shit beat out of me for something I did the day Bear Bryant died.

Three weeks after the end of the season bowl game, The Bear was admitted to Druid City Hospital. Everyone was running around trying to get information about him, but somehow I managed to get the hospital public relations spokesperson on the phone not long after the news broke that he had died that day. The news took awhile to get out. It was almost like something you would hear about old leaders in the former Soviet Union. No one wanted to let the word out or admit that he was dead until all the arrangements had been made.

Now being the quintessential investigative reporter, not your conventional sports guy, I had to be the one to ask the tough question, right? I asked about his cause of death, which they listed officially as a heart attack. But I just had to probe.

It was widely known that Bryant was a heavy-duty whiskey drinker. So I opened my mouth and could hardly believe what came out. I asked, “What about sclerosis of the liver?” I think in her shock at the question, but being trained to tell the truth, the woman didn’t know what else to do but say, “Yes,” he had it, bad. So that fact made it into at least one newspaper the next day, although my name’s not on the clip. It was part of a team effort. But certain people knew I was the asshole to ask the question, so they really wanted to beat my butt good.

I high-tailed it out of there and disappeared for a while.

As the song goes, you are not supposed to spit into the wind, tug on Superman’s cape, look behind the mask of the old Lone Ranger — or ask impertinent questions about public heroes.

I’ve always figured that was a reporter’s job.

If you ever get a chance to watch the movie Inherit the Wind about the Scopes Monkey Trial, notice in the end when the H.L. Mencken character, played by Gene Kelly has a conversation with the Clarence Darrow character, played by Spencer Tracy. Notice what the lawyer says to the reporter and the reporter’s response about loneliness.

In any event, I will never forget Bear Bryant’s funeral. It was like a great head of state had died. It rained a drizzling rain that day, all day long, and I can still almost see the drops coming off the live oak trees I remember noticing while walking across the quad.

It was like God himself was crying.

The line of cars seemed to back up all the way from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery. The Crimson Tide would never be the same.

I did my share of partying in those years, but I also took my studies even more seriously than I did at Jeff. State In addition to majoring in journalism, I minored in political science, and studied Soviet Communism under one professor who had a degree from Columbia University in New York. She had studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, and Henry Kissinger, who held the same job under President Richard Nixon.

In other words, she was a real expert, and I loved her classes and shined in them. She loved my skeptical outlook on things, and often called on me to speak up in class. I found out much later that it was my conservative upbringing and libertarian views that she liked too, although those views were undergoing a radical shift at that time in part due to all the reading I was doing in the library and at home in my apartment off campus.

Just to give you a bit of the flavor of my life then, on October 15, 1981, the day I turned 24, my roommates conspired together and hid all my books in the trunk of a big white Chrysler Cordoba. I had no intention of partying on my birthday because I had serious studying to do. My roommates had a different plan. They bought me a big half-gallon bottle of Jack Daniels Black, and greeted me at the door with a loaded bong.

Needless to say I didn’t study that night. We ended up later at Harry’s Bar drinking a Crazy Bucket, a one gallon paint can filled with just about every kind of hard liquor known to man, including gin, vodka, and tequila. They tossed in a little Seven-Up and some grenadine to make it drinkable. The deal was, you drank that crazy mix through a straw and, if you lived to tell about it, you were declared a man.

Actually, the word we used for it in those days was a dog. You could be a dog, a double dog, or if you were really a man, a BIG DAMN DOUBLE dog.

Well, somehow, I lived through it and proved to be a fine big damn double-dog drinker, in other words I lived through it, so I guess I passed into manhood that year.

One More Time

Near the end of my junior year, with the music business still not totally out of my mind for the future, I got a call from my old friend Dale Perkins. After the Crimson Tide band split up, Dale put another band together, without his brother Wayne, called The Mixx Band. I got the offer to be “the mixer,” the sound engineer, and manager. I also got to sit in on the drums from time to time. I did it for the money and the fun on the weekends until school let out in May. Then we went on a summer tour across the Southeast.

We played the Shy Anne Social Club in Pass Christian (French pronunciation), Mississippi, and the ladies there were about as friendly as anywhere I’d ever been, if you know what I mean.

We played this hot little club in Demopolis, Alabama, called The Gallery, and sometimes moved to this mansion in the middle of a field by a pool and played an outdoor concert on Sunday afternoons. The band didn’t get to stay over night in the mansion. We had a separate farmhouse set up as a band house nearby. To be honest, it was one of the most fun times of my life.

We played one-nighters all over the region, and near the end of the summer, we wound up staying a week at an Auburn frat house. It rained for a week, so we played inside every night. Then when the rain stopped, we set up outside on the weekend and held a mini-Woodstock, polishing off 99 cases of Schlitz.

We periodically played a club in Homewood, Alabama, called Flip’s Lounge, and it was there I fell in love.

By the time the tour ended, however, it was too late to get back into Alabama in Tuscaloosa for the fall semester. My last week of playing one-nighters from South Carolina to Tennessee to northern Mississippi and back to Auburn, Alabama, I had had it with the music biz again. I was so exhausted from catching a few hours sleep in the back of a white Lincoln Continental or the equipment truck, all I wanted was to sleep for three days — and get back to my senior year in college.

I enrolled at UAB, since it was still operating on the quarter system in those days and started later in September. It was there I was introduced to the subject of political economy and all kinds of philosophy. And it was there I first met Brooks Boliek, the editor of the Kaleidoscope, who would later become one of my best friends for life.

To my dismay then, however, the paper was still using typewriters and had no computers. I had been used to what we called Video Display Terminals in those days, or VDT’s for short, at the Crimson White, so I never wrote a story for the UAB paper. Plus, Boliek was an asshole. He had his feet propped up on a desk reading something when I came into the basement office on campus. And when I told him I had a story to write for the paper, he pointed at one of the typewriters and said: “Have at it.”

I walked out and never came back. I spent most of the semester hanging out on Southside, going on dates with my new love to all the area’s hot spots, including Joe Bar, the famous jazz club on the corner of 20th Street and 11th Avenue. Rowland Scherman, the photographer who shot the cover photo for one of Bob Dylan’s albums, owned it then. One of the regular customers was a writer and professor named Dennis Covington, who would later go on to write a fairly well-known book about snake handling. I also took Covington’s creative writing class at UAB and wrote my first three short stories of fiction.

As soon as the fall quarter was over, though, I transferred back to T-Town and got a cheap apartment very close to campus where I could walk to class, located in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium.

I resumed my place covering politics for The Crimson White and went to work on my grade-point average. Many newspapers required a B-average for a job interview, and I knew by then I wanted to work for a newspaper, if possible. It looked like honest work to me, and steady, compared to the music business. And I loved the action of it all, as Hunter S. Thompson, the doctor of Gonzo journalism, said about the business. It’s easy to get hooked on the action, the deadlines, the power of it all.

But that was still at a time when the luster of Watergate had not completely worn off the news game, before Ronald Reagan’s mandarins came along and killed it and the corporate chains took it over and turned newspapers into giant public-relations machines for the moneyed interests. You could still write a story in those days about the plight of the downtrodden and the poor and get away with it. You don’t see that much anymore.

I also took an advanced reporting class that year from a fine man and professor named Ed Mullins. When Malcolm Galdwell talks in his book about how successful people get help in their lives from significant others, in my case that would include Edward Mullins. By the end of my senior year, he was named the new dean for the College of Communications and began his 11-year tenure in which he transformed the school into a full-blown research department with a master’s and a Ph.D. program — under one roof in the old Union building on University Boulevard.

I made an A in his class, as well as every class that semester, and wound up on the Dean’s List. That made up for my C in the Rock ‘n’ Roll class from the year before, as well as my D in that other reporting class, so I ended up with a solid B average, 3.14 out of 4.

Since I know you hesitated when I said I made a C in Rock ‘n’ Roll, after all my music experience, an explanation is obviously in order. There was a very popular professor at the capstone in those days named Jim Salem. He had actually played a roll in the Locust Fork Band early on, oddly enough. I don’t know if he is still around or not. Everybody wanted to take his class, so it was very hard to get into. I had some connections and got a seat.

As it turned out, it was no crib course. He gave hard tests with a bunch of trivia questions, and remembering details was not my strong suit. But I did learn an interesting life lesson in his class that is pertinent for this story. Like many a great teacher, he sometimes told stories that could be considered modern-day parables. For those who have an ear, let them hear. You get the picture.

So many college students were like I was in that encounter with the drummer for Little Feat, searching for “the answer” or “the secret.” Believe me when I tell you this is true. I know it is after nine years of teaching myself.

To deal with that question, this experienced and wonderful professor told this story about how to succeed in life.

In business school they learn the mathematical formula that success comes when preparedness and opportunity meet. It is expressed like this:

Preparation+Opportunity=Success

He said to be successful in the music business or in life, yes you have to prepare yourself by studying and learning. But when the opportunity bus pulls up to the street corner, you best have the suitcase packed — and take that first step onto the bus.

I may have only passed his class with a C, but I learned that lesson well. I have always had my suitcase packed and been fully prepared and willing to jump on the bus and go.

When the national editor of The New York Times calls you in New Orleans and says, “How soon can you be in Hattiesburg?” you say, “About an hour and a half.” But, that’s a story for another chapter…

After leaving Tuscaloosa in the spring of 1983, I moved back to Birmingham and popped the question to my fiancée. She said yes.

I worked briefly for her parents on 20th Street after college, and had a blast as a banquet bartender at the old Hyatt Hotel, now The Sheraton, in downtown Birmingham. One side of her family owned a quaint little florist shop and a second-hand store, and I got to know every inch of every alley on Southside. It was a heady time in a way, and at least for once in my life, I got to know what it was like to be in love.

As the poet Robert Frost once said, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I know exactly what he meant.

I spent some of those days sending out resumes to newspapers, but I didn’t seem to have the connections or the experience to interest the big dailies in Birmingham. And the mobility across state lines was far more limited then than it is today. Years later when I taught tenure-track at Loyola University New Orleans, I would marvel at the ability of my students to land jobs in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Back in the day in my time coming out of college, the expectation centered on a getting a job at a smaller paper, learning the trade, and then moving up to a larger paper in a year or two. So that was the plan.

The telephone rang one December day in 1983. It was Rod Duren, a fellow graduate from the University of Alabama journalism program. He was the editor of The Baldwin Times newspaper in Bay Minette, Alabama. He offered me a position as the political reporter covering the Baldwin County Courthouse for a chain of six newspapers published twice a week on the Alabama Gulf Coast, across the bay from Mobile, for a grand total of $215 a week.

I jumped on the bus and said yes.

Tags: Chapter Three: The Crimson White

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