Seriously, Effingham? That's all the news in the county?

The internet, as soon as it went mainstream, became a news junkie's ultimate hit.  Some of us, though, still get a buzz by reading news from a paper product - a newspaper or a magazine, though there are fewer of us each day judging by how many people the newspapers are firing.  So imagine the glee at opening my mailbox to find a newspaper I didn't order accompanied by a letter stating that I now have a free, FREE, four-week trial subscription to that paper.  It happened yesterday, a gratis trial of my hometown semiweekly, the Effingham Herald.  This Herald, though, was more flea circus marching band than trumpet fanfare because, if you believe the paper's thin pages, there is hardly any news happening here.  Really?  No news in a rural but rapidly growing area of Georgia?

Sure, we in The Ham like to think of ourselves as small, but we have more than 52,000 people according to the 2010 Census.  We are one of the fastest growing counties in the state - for a few years, one of the fastest in the whole dang country.   How can there be only ten pages of news content in the Herald and its competitor, the Savannah Morning News's Effingham Now?  Calling it ten pages of news is also generous since many of those pages were consumed by advertising.  There has to be much more happening here, and I believe a lot of news, or even "news", isn't making it into the paper.  (Disclosure: I write all this lovingly since I have contributed to both papers in the past.)

First of all, where are the church service reports?  Growing up in Dade County, Georgia, which at the time was five-times smaller than Effingham, virtually every church had a blurb about the previous Sunday's services - Saturday for the Adventists - in the Dade County Sentinel (or, as my family called it, The Weekly Wipe).  But the greatest church report section of all time was just across the state line at The Sand Mountain Reporter.  "On a cloudless Sunday morning, Brother Cotton Tishaw preached a stirring message of damnation, interrupted only by a call to the outhouse.  The Lord then blessed us with a hamburger fry on the grounds, and Brother Tishaw was highly complimentary of Mable Sue Spurgin's pimento cheese burgers, which he says went perfectly with the salsa he keeps in the breast pocket of his sport coat."  Are there no churches in The Ham willing to even say "Brother Bob preached about the evils of alcohol.....for the 34th consecutive week"?

The front page of the Effingham Herald makes mention of the major cities within the county - Guyton, Rincon, and Springfield.  But where is the community news from Sand Hill?  From Marlow, Ebenezer, Booger Holler (surely there's a Booger Holler somewhere) and a host of other small communities?  One of my high school friends used to write the weekly news from Wildwood, Georgia for our local paper.  "Went to visit Mr. Moss the other day, and am happy to report that his gout is much better, and that his neighbors came together to help clean up the toilet paper left in his trees by the naughty neighborhood teens", even though the naughty teens included my friend and yours truly.  Are there no Mrs. Zipperer's in The Ham whose house got t-p'd while she suffered from 'the gout?'  How about Paw Paw Shearouse's tulips or the beginning of hunting season on Low Ground Road? 

Finally, the big boys of the big city newspapers make a killing by spreading gossip, but anyone who grew up in the South knows that Yankees are amateurs when it comes to spreading rumors and malicious lies to the point to where they become the gospel.  Why doesn't the Effingham Herald take the bold step of adding an anonymous gossip columnist?  Better yet, add two of them - The Reb (as in Effingham High School Rebel) for the northern half of the county and The 'Tang (as in Mustang - where is your mind?) for the southern half.  You don't even have to be specific.  Imagine opening The Reb's column to read, "Is Farmer Bucky's filly harvesting to a different tiller these days?"  That sentence alone could refer to half the county in half a dozen different ways.  Everyone would be talking and, therefore, buying the paper.

I don't fault the folks at the Effingham Herald or Effingham Now.  They probably have only one person writing the stories, taking the pictures, laying everything out, and doing the website.  But the reason newspapers don't make enough money to pay more people is that they didn't follow the prospective news consumer to the areas in which they get their news and because many of them forgot that news is much more than handouts from police departments and government agencies.  News is talking about the folks with the folks.  I haven't given up on small town newspapers.  I just hope they don't give up, first.

Ernie, Bobby, and August 1st, 1978

In1978, I would turn seven years old in September, but that is not why the year was significant.  It was the year of three Popes, the shooting of Larry Flynt.  Pfffft, ho hum.  The Jonestown massacre, The Bee Gees taking over radio and record players via "Saturday Night Fever"; big whoop.  1978 was truly meaningful for one reason: cable TV finally made its way to my home in tiny Trenton, Georgia.  Arriving via cable was a multitude of goodies designed just for me; cartoons from decades prior with loads of goofy violence, Three Stooges shorts with loads of goofy violence, Georgia Championship Wrestling with, well, you know.  Most importantly, it was the first time I witnessed with a clear picture, free of UHF antenna snow, my Atlanta Braves, and my first clear memory of a Braves game just happened to involve a rare blowout win, a jerk who happened to be a great ballplayer, and one of the funkiest pitchers of the last four decades.

Though I am unsure, my guess is that I had seen the Braves before while attempting to manipulate the UHF contraption (I could waste a lot of time explaining UHF to the younger generation, but that would just make me feel 40).  I think we got a better picture using an ordinary wire clothes hanger on the back of the TV, which means Joan Crawford must have beaten the living daylights out of some TVs back in her day.  Then, one day, the Trenton Cable Company was founded bringing clarity to the vacuum tubes and some of the most fond moments of childhood.

It was, at best, primitive cable TV for a somewhat primitive part of the country - one time just after service was restored, the explanation for an outage appeared on the public access channel, a piece of poster board held in front of a black-and-white camera that read "We apologize for the interruption in service.  Someone shot the cable last night."  Like most everything else in Dade County, the cable company was probably owned by our version of Boss Hogg, the "elected" Commissioner of Roads and Revenue who, as they say, must have owned a Vaseline factory because his palms were so greased.  But little boys didn't care about stuff like that back then.  All that mattered was I got to see Gordon Solie call wrestling matches on Saturdays and the Braves just about every single day during the Summer.  It was heaven, though the Braves were utter hell.

Since the year of my birth, the Braves had been winners only once, 1974 - the last hurrah for Hank Aaron, traded to the Milwaukee Brewers less than seven months after breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record that season.  Atlanta was 88-74, good enough to tie for the lead in the National League East.  The only problem was that the league had presaged this generation's lack of geographical sense and had placed the Braves in the West Division when the league was divided in two in 1969.  That meant the Braves finished well behind the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati and the Dodgers, who would go to the World Series that year.

The Braves began 1978 from what had since become their natural habitat, 6th place in a six-team division - they had finished the previous two seasons there.  They also began the year with a brand new manager, a guy who at one time was the "third baseman of the future" for the Yankees, and who instead finished his two-year big league career with nine homers and an 87 OPS+ on some forgettable New York teams.  Bobby Cox was 37, two years younger than Knucksie - Braves star pitcher and, at the time, their only truly great player, Phil Niekro.  Cox had a nice record as a minor league manager in the Yankees system plus a World Series ring as first-base coach for the Yankees' '77 team.  Surely he couldn't have been any worse than Atlanta's skipper the year before - the year owner Ted Turner named himself manager for all of one game (a loss, of course) until National League president Chub Feeney banned The Ted from the dugout.  The Braves would indeed win eight more games in '78 than in '77, yet finish last again.  However, there was one glorious night at old Fulton County Stadium that summer.

Slightly more than 31,000 folks were at the ballpark on August 1, quite stunning since the Braves only averaged about 11,000 per game that ugly season.  Usually, it took outstanding promotions such as "Wet T-Shirt Night" and "Headlock and Wedlock Night" (weddings before the game, Mr. Wrestling II and his brethren in the squared circle after the game) to draw more than mosquitos.  The night before, the Braves had drawn an incredible 45,000 folks to watch Pete Rose extend his hitting streak to 44 games, still far away from Joe DiMaggio's 56-game record, but the closest anyone had ever come to Mr. Coffee.  There was no reason to think The Gambler would not extend the streak to what would have been a new National League record.  After all, starting for the Braves that night was a 24-year-old rookie left-hander; Larry McWilliams, making just his fourth start in the majors. 
 
Larry Mac opened the game by walking Rose who, as was customary after drawing a walk with his ligament-straining, super duper batting squat, ran full speed to first.  Rose would later score, and after Johnny Bench hit a two-run homer soon afterward., it looked like another typical night of viewing on WTCG, Channel 17.  That meant Skip Caray, Ernie Johnson, and Pete Van Wieren would spend a good chunk of their call of the game cracking jokes about whatever horrid movie was coming on afterward.  But the Braves' bats, which needed a Terminix treatment for much of the season, actually showed up that evening.  Barry Bonnell, who swung the stick of Mormon conversion better than a baseball bit (among his converts: Dale Murphy), hit his first home run of the year, and the Braves were hanging tough.

Rose was up again in the 2nd inning and lined a shot up the middle.  The hitting streak continued, except that it didn't.  In what was likely the best defensive play of his career, McWilliams leaned as far to his right as a left-handed pitcher following through could, stuck out his glove, and the ball magically went in for the final out of the inning.  Pete led off the 5th with a weak ground-out to short, and somehow, the Braves started to put the game out of reach in the bottom of the inning with a three-run bomb from Atlanta's answer to Gorgeous George in all his blond permed goodness, the man with less than two months in the bigs after refusing to play in the minors, Bob Horner.

Rose would next face the man who saw every part of the ballpark with every pitch, the underhanded Luis Tiant, and someone who had only been with the Braves as long as Bob Horner.  Gene Garber came to Atlanta in a June 15th trade, from a playoff contender in Philadelphia to baseball purgatory.  Gene was Atlanta's closer and came into the game to start the 7th inning.  If you are younger than 30, you read that correctly.  Most closers back then were real pitchers who pitched more than one inning unlike the vast majority of throwers masquerading as pitchers in today's closer world.  Dave Collins led off the inning with a single, and it looked as if Pete had extended his streak with a line shot a few pitches later.  But that line shot went directly into the glove of Horner at third base, who tossed to first a pre-center field Murphy to double off Collins.  Fortunately for the man who would later be choke-slammed by Kane at Wrestlemania, Ken Griffey and Dave Concepcion singled after the double play, meaning Pete would get one more turn at the plate.

The Braves had put the game away with eight runs in the 7th and 8th, leading 16-4, and Rose due up third in the 9th inning.  As any baseball fan knows, the gods (or, nowadays, Rupert Murdoch) always set up dramatic confrontations with an eye to detail, so we knew Mr. Parlay Sheet would potentially be the final out of the game.  In an atmosphere that wouldn't be replicated until the Braves opened the '82 season with 13 straight wins, the future chicken farmer struck out the giant turkey with a series of lollipop change ups. Van Wieren screamed into the mic "the hitting streak is over!", as animated as The Professor would ever be in the broadcast booth.  Rose and Reds manager Sparky Anderson would later complain that Garber didn't normally throw that many change ups, that he pitched Rose as if it were the seventh game of a World Series.  But as Garber accurately pointed out, for the Braves it might as well have been game seven, and, come on, Garber's fastball was slower than his herky-jerky motion, much less his change.

It may have been the highlight of Cox's first and mostly forgettable tenure as manager of the Atlanta Braves.  The memories, the championships, the reason his number 6 was retired and he was inducted into the Braves Hall of Fame wouldn't take place until many years later.  This past Friday, the day of Cox's induction, Ernie Johnson passed away.  It also would have been Skip Caray's 72nd birthday had we not lost him three years ago.  Good gracious, it wasn't that long ago, was it?

Ox should look for the Dade Co. cable TV shooter next time

News from my hometown. Someone in the hunting party of state insurance commissioner and Republican candidate for governor John Oxendine was sprayed by pellets from an accidental gunshot in Dade County. Ox and his sons were at a quail hunting preserve which I have never heard of, although to be fair, I haven't lived in Dade in some time. However, if Ox knew my home county at all, he should have known there are plenty of shootists there who could have prevented such an accident.

When cable TV arrived in Dade County around 1978, everyone was talking about it. Then, just a few weeks after it went on, cable TV was gone, snowy pictures for my family and all the other charter subscribers. Some had suspected it was the work of a church group who had lobbied against cable TV because the president of the cable company was Mephistopheles himself. You know the story, Mephistopheles greases the palm of the county commissioner (yes, there was a single commissioner in Dade County at the time, but his palm was never greased. It was slicker than K-Y 24/7). The county commissioner then talks about how Mephy is a fine upstanding member of the community even though Meph openly admits the only reason he wants to bring cable TV to Dade County is so boys don't have to sneak into theaters to see movies with cussing and nekkid women. Meph wins, and we got our cable.

Until, that is, it went out. It was gone for a few days, which felt like decades for a kid who had already become accustomed to watching the hapless Atlanta Braves and the Three Stooges every day (sometimes simultaneously). Then, like the prodigal son, cable was back. The explanation of where it went was given to us on the public access channel, which was a black and white channel where public service announcements on cards were held by hand (I'm not joking) in front of a camera. The announcement held up to the camera several times in the days after our Valhalla returned simply read, "We apologize for your cable TV being out. Someone shot the cable." We later learned from the rumor mill, which is Dade County is 100-percent true, that someone had repeatedly been using the wiring near the cable company's headquarters for target practice until they were finally caught.

So next time Ox is in Dade County, he should ask some locals about the cable TV shooter, and if that guy is still around, everyone in Ox's hunting party will take home a covey of quail or a bevy of squirrels, or whatever it is they are hunting. And if Ox is ever hunting in Covington, Georgia, he should avoid my beloved first cousin as if he were Glenn Richardson on Bourbon Street. Once when we were about 12, my cousin decided it would be a swell idea to hold a pellet gun to his left palm and pull the trigger. He then tried to talk his uncle (my dad) into cutting out the pellet with his pocket knife so his mother (my aunt) wouldn't find out. I will give you three guesses as to whether that line of persuasion worked.