“Lewis Grizzard in the Southern Quote”

He was born on Oct. 20th, 1946 in Fort Benning, Georgia. He spent a life time making us laugh and we responded by making him famous. We laughed at his jokes and bought his books. Although he first worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, it was his humor columns that endeared him to his countrymen. Like Mark Twain before him, he took scenes from his youth and spun tales with a lot of fact and a little fiction. We embraced them because they were our own. We may have known the people he described by other names but our lives were populated with his characters. Lewis Grizzard often told interviewers he was raised “poor, proud, and patriotic.” We understood.

Once, during Mr. Grizzard’s most prolific writing years, Hollywood came calling, looking for someone to play a “very southern role”. When they turned him down because he was “too Southern” we took it personally and adamantly agreed when Lewis told the world, “Too Southern? Why, that’s an oxymoron. There’s no such thing as being TOO Southern.”

Lewis Grizzard was conservative, eccentric, hilarious, controversial, sentimental, kind, testy, gifted, troubled, and brilliant. In short, he was family. Born with a faulty heart valve, Mr. Grizzard died on March 20, 1994, at 10:45am, a little more than a year and a half after his third open heart surgery. I’ve read that fans still drive to Moreland looking for him, leaving notes or flags or little toy bulldogs by the stone, which reads, “A Great American.” We’ll never know what Mr. Lewis would have said about such a serious homage— but I have an idea that it would leave us laughing.

In today’s Southern Quote we honor the sharp wit of the late southerner who became a wildly popular standup comedian and lecturer. It was Lewis Grizzard who once said, “Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.”

Hugs,
Shellie