Lewis Grizzard’s Chicago: Bad Memories
“Well, it’s on the New York Times goddamned best-seller list. How about that!” Grizzard reported. “I just went to Macon, Georgia, and signed 700 of the suckers.”
“Holtzman looked puzzled. Finally he said, ‘Lewis, you don’t understand. Those are my cliches.’ . . .
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Gleason, now at the Southtown Economist, and Holtzman, now with the Tribune, do not remember young Grizzard fondly. “He was terribly miscast as an editor,” says Gleason, dismissing him as one of a series of “insignificant snots” who ran the Sun-Times sports section back then.
A brief appearance is made in Grizzard’s book by a young columnist he hired named Tom Callahan. As the book tells it, “He wrote well. I liked his ideas. He said to me, ‘I want to play the Palace.’ He lasted a week. I edited a few lines of a couple of his columns, and he resigned and said, ‘This isn’t the Palace, it’s the Orpheum Circuit,’ and went back to Cincinnati.”
“Oh, it was. I had about 30 people on the staff. I had about 6 guys who liked me and 24 who hated me.”
“With that, Lacey J. Banks got out of his chair, walked over to me, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.”
