Thanks, PG!:Memoirs of a Tabloid Reporter

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

We are all born with a predetermined destiny. Unfortunately, many people are never quite capable of identifying their life purpose and end up accepting only what fickle fate decides to provide them. Then there are those who successfully identify their purpose and spend their entire life trying to achieve those goals, only to fail miserably. Finally, there are the lucky ones who not only identify their assigned destiny, but achieve it beyond their wildest dreams. I was one of the lucky ones. This is my story.

*****

In southwest Tennessee, the mighty Tennessee River struts strong and blue due southward through the Appalachian foothills to Chattanooga, then turns eastward and winds into the heart of North Central Alabama past Huntsville, Decatur, and finally, Guntersville, where its tributaries fan out into a smaller web of rivers with Indian names like Etowah, Tomoka, and Okaloosa. One of these tributaries, the Coosa, then snakes its way southward into Jackson County, Alabama, where it makes a sharp bend near the town of Hamilton. There, directly at the bend, rests a white, six-story structure called the Holy Name of Jesus Hospital. It was in that hospital, on the banks of the Coosa River, that I was born William Donald Johnson on National Newspaper Reporters Day, April 20, 1942.

My mother later recalled that, as the attending physician slapped my lily-white behind, she heard over the radio piped in to the delivery room that newspaper editors and reporters were celebrating in New York.

My earliest memories of life were looking into my mother's eyes. In my mother's face, I could see the sun, the moon, and the stars. Here, I always sensed peace and tranquility and, when she smiled, I saw the warm glow of the rising sun. If I was sick, hurt, or in trouble, I always knew that I could count on my mother. In later years, even if I was in the wrong, my mother was always there to support me. I couldn't have asked for a more devoted, loving mother. I truly believe that my mother's nursing profession strengthened her sense of motherhood.

The first few years of my life were spent on a farm. I remember being dragged by a calf when I was three, maybe four years old. My father had a young calf grazing in a field behind our house. He told me to go out and move the calf to another area where there was fresher, green grass. As soon as I had the calf untied, it launched into a full run and dragged me more than a hundred yards across the grassy field. When I finally released the rope, I was a crying, helpless clump of scratches and bruises.

When my parents saw what had happened, they came racing to my rescue.

He's bleeding, my mother said urgently, noting the small cuts on my face and forehead. I've got to get him inside.

Instantly, she swept me up in her arms and took me into the kitchen, where she carefully cleaned and dressed my wounds.

He's not hurt, my father said solemnly. Just a few little scratches and bruises. Those will make a man out of him.

When I was four, my father bought a big blackboard that had all of the numbers and letters stamped along the top. I would spend countless hours writing and spelling words on that blackboard. Nothing pleased me more than finding long words like encyclopedia and geography and spelling them over and over on the blackboard until I mastered them. The king of all long words was antidisestablishmentarianism. I didn't know what it meant when I was four, but I could spell it, and it was the longest word I knew at the time. Soon I could read the comic strips in the local newspapers. I knew Dagwood and Blondie was one of my father's favorites, and the moment the newspaper arrived, I would read it and be prepared to discuss it with my father that night at the dinner table.

From my earliest days, I felt there was nothing more beautiful than books, those little repositories of information that contained all knowledge mankind had amassed through the ages. I remember collecting books and magazines and making a crude bookcase out of three pieces of wood. Then I placed my books inside and admired the beauty of all that knowledge within those little slats of thin wood.

For me, the printed word was the equivalent of happiness. I remember one day being at a neighbor's house and rummaging through an old barn, where we found boxes upon boxes of old comic books. I looked down at the boxes of neatly stacked Lash Larue and Gene Autry comic books and I felt my heart soar with gladness at all the happiness contained therein.

Although my name was William Donald, my mother told everyone in the family that she wanted me to be called Billy.

I don't want him to be called 'Bill,' she said. That's too plain and it reminds people of a bird's beak. 'Billy' has a soft sound and it's easy to remember.

Call that child 'Billy Don,' my grandmother countered. Boys named Billy are a dime a dozen.

During the early years, my mother always referred to me as Billy, but as the years rolled past, my grandmother, my father, and my cousins called me Billy Don and, by the time I was five or six, my mother relented and the entire world referred to me as Billy Don.

In elementary school, I was a good student, but I was always in trouble. In the second grade, I only missed two spelling words the entire year. I spelled the word white as wite and the word coming as comeing. My teacher, Mrs. Sarah Williams, caught me trying to sneak a Roy Rogers comic book into class hidden inside my coloring book.

Billy Don, this is nothing more than trash, she said, holding the Roy Rogers comic book up for all the class to see. All it will do is lead you to a life of crime.

She gave me ten licks with a paddle and threw the comic book into the fires of the coal stove the classroom used for heat.

Early on, my father taught me a strong work ethic. He always said the greatest pleasure life has to offer was work and, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing right. In the wintertime, when I turned six, my father announced my single chore was to bring in the coal and kindling every night for the morning fire. My father always got up early and built the fire in the coal heater. One afternoon, I came in from school, played all afternoon with my cousin, and failed to bring in the coal and kindling. My father woke me at 5:30 a.m. and made me go out into the morning cold and gather the coal and kindling. I was crying and angry at the time, but I learned my lesson. It never happened again!

When I was quite young, one of the main topics of conversation at family gatherings was deciding what profession I should follow as an adult. My mother had dreams of me becoming a doctor.

Doctors make lots of money, she said. And because they save lives, they're well-respected in the community.

No, I want Billy Don to become a preacher, said my deeply religious grandmother. I think he would make a fine preacher to spread the word of God.

When I was only seven or eight, she would dress me in a suit and tie and take me to the Old Harmony Baptist Church in Hamilton on Sundays. Before we entered the church, she would do a crosscheck: straight tie, hair neatly combed, Bible in my left hand so my right would be free to shake hands. She pointed out the pastor and deacons and explained that each had the look of the Lord. She said I should learn to develop that special look because it was the foundation of becoming a fine preacher.

Meanwhile, in my heart of hearts, I had a totally different profession in mind, although I dared not mention it to my mother or grandmother. I wanted to be a reporter, a person who attended major world events and wrote about them in newspapers and magazines. I had read books and seen movies about reporters, and I couldn't imagine a single profession that would be more exciting and rewarding. I felt a person could make a difference as a reporter. He could expose corruption, get a front row seat to the world's disasters, and meet the most powerful people on earth. A reporter could stand up for all the things that decent-minded people held near and dear... truth, justice, and the American way.

When I turned ten, my father briefly owned a barbecue restaurant in a Hamilton suburb called Glencoe. The Pig was a little roadside affair where couples and single men could go to eat barbecue, drink some beers, and meet members of the opposite sex. There was a Wurlitzer jukebox, a dance floor, and rooms out back. It was my first introduction to sin, as my grandmother put it.

Whores and whore-mongers are all that go into a place like that, she proclaimed when my mother announced that my father was opening the business.

On Saturday nights, I loved watching the free-spirited lifestyle of the restaurant's patrons. I sang along with the popular hits of the day like The Wayward Wind, Put another Nickel In, and Bonaparte's Retreat. As I watched the men kissing and fondling the women in the booths, I yearned to be an adult and be wild and free around women.

*****

In keeping with my love of words, I naturally migrated to the printed page. When I was thirteen, I answered an ad in a comic book that sought young boys to sell a small newspaper called The Grit. Published in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, it was a tabloid-sized weekly newspaper that had national news, human-interest stories, puzzles, comics, and an overall inspirational feel-good spirit. Once I was signed on, I would receive the new edition, read it thoroughly upon arrival, and point out to prospective customers my favorite stories.

Over some four months, sometimes bicycling six miles from my home, I built a route of twenty-eight customers. With each new edition, Grit publishers promised huge rewards to delivery agents who could enlarge their routes. One day at school, DeWayne Vaughn, a fellow student at Hamilton Junior High, said he was abandoning his Grit route of thirty-two customers because his family was moving. I told him I wanted to assume his route. After adding DeWayne's route, I had a grand total of seventy-two customers. One day, when I got off the school bus, I saw all of these packages stacked around the family mailbox. There was a baseball bat, two gloves, a watch, a New York Yankees jacket, a kaleidoscope, a replica of a Colt revolver, and many more gifts the publisher had sent for my gaining new customers. It was a solid lesson that hard work pays off.

*****

The next stop in my print destiny would take me to the Hamilton Motor Inn, the largest, ritziest hotel in Hamilton, where I got a job printing menus. From the first moment I saw that little hand-cranked press, I thought I was Gutenberg. The type was built by gathering individual letters on a spindle, then feeding them into grooves on the face of the press. Black ink was applied to the roller with a spatula, and I always had to run some test passes to be sure the ink was uniform across the type. There were never enough E's and U's, and the kitchen manager was too cheap to buy more.

Just do the best you can, he would say.

Since the letter E is the most frequently used vowel, I guarded and hoarded them as if they were gold. I dreaded seeing the word vegetable on the menu because there were three E's. Once, I was faced with spelling the word frankfurters at a time when I had no U's, but I had plenty of A's. I ended up spelling the word frankfarters and sent out the menus with that spelling. No one ever said anything.

In April of 1957, a month before I was to graduate from Hamilton Junior High, I and the other thirty-six students made our class trip to the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama. The objective was to tour the capital landmarks, gain some knowledge as to how state government works, and visit the governor's mansion. At the time, the state's governor was one Big Jim Folsom, a colorful giant of a man famous for wearing red suspenders and drinking a fifth of scotch a day. After we had toured the state legislature and listened to a boring, drawn-out explanation of how bills make it through the house and senate, we arrived at the governor's mansion.

Once the bus was parked, the school principal went inside and reappeared some twenty minutes later with the announcement that the governor would be out momentarily to greet us from the mansion's veranda. Moments later, the governor appeared and waved to us. As usual, he was wearing his trademark red suspenders and, as he was famous for, snapped the suspenders with his thumbs against his huge whiskey belly to the delight of the junior high students. Accompanying the governor was his sister Big Ruby and her daughter Cornelia, who, at the tender age of thirteen, was already a stunning beauty. On that day, as I sat in the bus with my fellow students and waved to the governor, his sister, and his niece, I never dreamed that, twenty years later, I would know the most intimate details of little Cornelia's sex life.

In high school, my mother was adamant that I should start making plans to become a physician, but I explained that I had neither the patience to spend ten years in school and she and my father didn't have the money to pay the tuition. She agreed, but she said she wanted me to stay in the medical field. As a result, to please my mother, I decided to become a pharmacist. In May of 1959, when I entered the eleventh grade at Hamilton High, I signed up for the work-study program.

In the program, I would work in the pharmacy at the local Baptist hospital for four hours in the morning, then attend my classes in the afternoon. The chief pharmacist was a deeply religious, well-meaning man who had always wanted a son. At the hospital, my job was to deliver filled prescriptions for patients to the nursing stations. When not making deliveries, I would perform menial chores in the pharmacy like preparing liquid soap, typing labels for prescriptions, and maintaining stock room records. The job was fun and paid fifty cents an hour.

In late May of 1960, I graduated from Hamilton High School. As I walked across the auditorium stage to receive my diploma, I wondered what my future had in store. I looked around me and saw my fellow students preparing for college, getting married and settling down, and starting low-paying jobs. I didn't know what my future held, but I knew I certainly wasn't going to follow the lives I saw around me.

*****

In keeping with my mother's wishes, I enrolled in the pre-pharmacy curriculum at a small community college. As in high school, I was a good student, and I dug into the disciplines of organic chemistry, biology, physics, and math. Over the next two years, I became well versed in molecular structures, human anatomy, and the scientific nomenclature necessary to identify the various forms of life. All the while I was attending classes, I was still working at the Baptist hospital. In the fall of 1962, I enrolled in the Pharmacy School at Auburn University. Upon enrollment, the chief pharmacist had arranged for the hospital to pay for my tuition and board with the stipulation that, upon graduation, I would return and work for the hospital for at least five years.

At Auburn University, I realized quickly that I was about to achieve a goal that, in my heart of hearts, I really didn't want. I knew I could never spend my lifetime counting pills out of a big bottle and putting them into a labeled smaller bottle. I had veered far away from my assigned destiny. On the other hand, I didn't know how to tell the people who had believed in and supported me that I wanted out.

As a result, I knew I had to be true to myself and do what I wanted, not what others expected of me. This meant I had to crush the dreams of my mother, my father, and the chief pharmacist at the hospital. I felt that the world was too big and too rich and too interesting to spend my life in such a confined, routine, humdrum environment. I knew that my life was destined to be spent around words, not pills. In my heart, I knew that my destiny lay with letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. In clear, precise language, fate had commanded me to go forth and write.

I stopped attending pharmacy classes and started spending all day in the university library. I would spend eight to ten hours a day reading anything and everything. I started with Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, and Freud. I read most of Hugo, Kafka, Hemingway, Dickens, and Faulkner. The love of poetry I discovered in high school exploded full bore during that period, and I read Byron, Keats, Shelly, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold. I memorized famous poems such as Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night and Fern Hill, and I spent endless hours reading Poe, Longfellow, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and the sonnets of Shakespeare. I dreamed of visiting the lake district of England and seeing the homes of the famous poets. I yearned to travel to Stratford and see where Shakespeare walked and talked, but, in my heart, I felt it would never come to pass.

One day, after I stopped attending class, I went to see a movie entitled Five Weeks in a Balloon. Based on a Jules Verne novel, it was the story of a professor and his minions traveling around the world in a hot-air balloon. One of the characters was a tall, slim, well-endowed Italian woman whom the credits listed as Francesca Monterrey. As I watched her flit about in her dark, sultry sexuality, I knew I was in love.

While walking back to my dorm room after the movie, I remember thinking, I would give anything on this earth to know a beautiful woman like that. Little did I know that seventeen years later, she would become one of my closest friends.

At the end of the semester, I had failed all of my pharmacy classes and returned to Hamilton to face the