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Hemphill: A master of 1000 words (7.11.09)
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The Atlanta Times was new to town and so was Paul Hemphill. The topics of his newspaper columns were different than other writers and so was the blunt, conversational language he used to tell the stories of everyday life that he shared with readers every afternoon.
Hemphill’s Atlanta wasn’t the Atlanta we were used to reading about in 1964.
His Atlanta wasn’t the one the chamber of commerce was selling. His Atlanta sat on a stool at Manuel’s Tavern, a neighborhood bar not far from the newspaper office and talked about subjects like race in the impolite way real people did. We met characters like Streetcar, a tipsy copy editor at the Times. Raymond Edmunds said things the columnist couldn’t get away with. Hemphill’s Atlanta knew how to find Peachtree Street but it also took us to sidestreets most people avoided.
The Times would fade away but Hemphill did the unthinkable. He went over to the enemy, becoming a popular Page 2 columnist at the Atlanta Journal.
In the years that followed, he studied at Harvard, taught writing, wrote for magazines, battled alcoholism and turned out 15 books. Subjects included country music, stock car racing and baseball.
At 73, he was still writing about what he knew.
This time the subject of his book was cancer and the Camels that he rode to a hospice center in Atlanta. That was the same cancer that took his life early Saturday. A beautiful obituary appears in Sunday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Hemphill turned out a few million words in more than 50 years as a writer. Years he spent writing newspaper columns in Augusta, Tampa, Atlanta and San Francisco compose only a fraction of his work. But his work in Atlanta — though no one understood it then — drew the blueprints for scores of writers and columnists that followed him.
I know. I’m one of them.
Paul Hemphill
He was a hero before he became a friend. He was the Times shining star. I was a 20-year-old kid they couldn’t get rid of. He left before the end. I stayed until the final day. Two weeks before that final edition I gave notice that I had taken a job at Georgia Tech.
Soon I added a part-time job rewriting high school football stories for the Saturday afternoon Journal. The shift started about 11 p.m. Friday night. I got paid but I would have worked for nothing just to hang out with Hemphill and novelist Terry Kay. They were escapees from the sports department, a path I’d follow years down the road.
Those nights were an education in writing. These men wrote like I wanted to write. As writers they told stories on paper in the same style they shared them as we sat around the office. I was thirsty and they owned the well.
I ended up at the Atlanta Constitution writing sports. A colleague told me about a former pitcher for the town baseball team in LaGrange. He had made Ripley’s Believe Or Not by pitching both games of a doubleheader — tossing a no-hitter in one game and a one-hitter in the other.
By the time I visited him in the old mill village in LaGrange, Scoopie Chappell’s baseball exploits were relegated to aging scrapbooks and stories he told at the beer joint down the hill. I wrote a feature story about him for the Sunday Journal-Constitution.
The article got me a phone call from Paul Hemphill. He wanted Scoopie’s phone number and directions to his house. Hemphill was researching a book about minor league baseball and he figured Scoopie was someone he wanted to visit.
The non-fiction book never materialized but Long Gone did. To me it is the quintessential baseball novel and equally good as an HBO film. It came out in 1987 and you'll find Bull Durham — as good as it is — is a ripoff of Hemphill's book.
Scoopie morphed into Stud Cantrell, played on the screen by CSI’s William Petersen. The character of Stud is as good as you’ll find in any work of fiction. In the movie, there’s even a speaking role for Teller — the small mute half of Penn & Teller.
If you haven’t read the book, do. If you haven’t seen the movie, find it.
Hemphill will be praised for his entire body of work but it is his time as a daily columnist that inspired so many. He was Lewis Grizzard before there was a Lewis Grizzard. He made the 1000-word essay an art form. In those 1000 words was a beginning, a middle and an end and people he wrote about became characters as developed as any novelist. He was a master.
Like so many, he was flawed. Alcohol was a column that took him years to finish. It slowed the flow of words and turned what should have been his peak years into a sluggish time in which his keyboard was stalled. One of his final books, a personal biography of Hank Williams in which he connected his own life to that of the country music legend. Published in 2005, Lovesick Blues was a book Hemphill was destined to write.
I’m a disciple of Paul Hemphill. When I’ve needed encouragement I’ve always turned to the Good Old Boys, a compilation of his columns and articles. When I read Hemphill, I’m able to relocate myself.
My friend is gone, but his words live. So I guess I’ll read the Good Old Boys one last time.
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