Matthews family remembers Lewis Grizzard

ALBANY — Dee Matthews, who is acknowledged as Albany’s No. 1 University of Georgia fan — hands down — was forlorn last week. And not just because her beloved Bulldogs had somehow lost to Vanderbilt.

“Today would have been Lewis Grizzard’s 70th birthday,” Matthews said. “I can’t help but wonder what he’d be writing about today if he was still with us. I miss him so much.”

Dee Matthews, her late husband, Jimmy, and their son, Mike, became close friends with former syndicated columnist/author Grizzard after the noted writer spoke at an event in Albany. By the time he died on March 20, 1994, from heart complications associated with infected wisdom teeth, Grizzard had become something of a regular at the Matthews household.

When he had a speaking engagement anywhere in south Georgia, he usually stayed with Dee and Jimmy, or with Mike and his wife, JoAnn.

“JoAnn really liked Lewis … she just didn’t like for him to come and stay with me,” Mike Matthews said as he shared stories — only a few of which can be repeated here — about the Georgia legend with an enthralled visitor. “We’d go out and play golf every chance we got, and we were known to have a couple of cocktails when we got together.

“I remember one time when Lewis came to the house, and JoAnn had put out 20 or so of these hand-painted decorative towels in the guest bathroom. He came into the living room and said, ‘I’m going to buy you people some towels for your wedding.’ He didn’t use the bath towel that was in the bathroom closet after taking a shower, he used all 20 of those little hand towels to dry off.”

That Dee Matthews and her family would bond with Grizzard over their shared love of the University of Georgia is not unusual. What is unique is the way the relationship between the writer and the Matthews family developed.

“Lewis was giving a speech at a civic club here, and there was dancing afterward,” Dee Matthews said. “He loved to shag, so he stayed to dance a while. Jimmy went up to him and said, ‘Why don’t you come on over to our house and drink some cold beers?’ Lewis, (Brandon) ‘Bugar’ Seely and a little group came over and we had such a good time. It got to where every time Lewis was anywhere around here, he’d call and ask if he could come stay with us.”

Mike Matthews interrupts his mother’s story to offer his own take on why the writer made Albany and his parents’ home his south Georgia getaway.

“Mother waited on him hand and foot,” Matthews teased. “She became his mom.”

“I prefer to think of it more as brother/sister,” Dee Matthews responds with a smile. “We were too close in age for me to be his mother.”

Framed photos, drawings and other autographed memorabilia bearing Grizzard’s likeness adorn one corner of the Matthews home’s impressive UGA shrine, the most prominent wall of which is all but covered with any and all things UGA. Dee and Mike pass a good portion of a recent Wednesday afternoon remembering the man whose columns were a Southern staple and whose books — “Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself,” “Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You,” “Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else but Me” and “If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About a Quart Low” among them — helped indoctrinate the rest of the country on true Dixie living.

“A group of us were coming back from the Auburn-Georgia game in a rented Winnebago — Auburn had just killed us for about the fourth year in a row — and Lewis kept saying he couldn’t understand why Auburn kept beating us,” Mike Matthews said. “He writes his Sunday column asking that same question, and about 8 o’clock that night the phone rings.

“Well, Lewis listens for a minute and says, ‘Sure it is … kiss my ass.’ He looked at us and said, ‘Some Auburn fan called me pretending to be (Auburn head coach) Pat Dye.’ Well, it turns out the caller was Pat Dye. And Lewis had just cussed him out.”

Dee Matthews said she won Grizzard’s undying affection the way Southern women have been winning over their men for time eternal: She cooked for him.

“He loved coming here to get some good, country cooking,” she said with a smile. “If he wasn’t eating with us, we’d all load up and go to Aunt Fannie’s. He loved the food there.

“Lewis would write something about us in one of his columns and people from all over would call to say, ‘I read about you.’ They didn’t realize that Lewis was just a down-to-earth person. I remember when his dog Catfish died; he called me and just cried and cried.”

Mike Matthews had a different kind of relationship with Grizzard, obviously.

“Yeah, there are a lot of stories you can’t print,” Matthews said. “But I can tell you that Lewis was really actually kind of shy. He would always say, ‘Pardner, I don’t get why these people would want to talk to me’ when folks would come up and ask him for an autograph. He didn’t know how to handle being a celebrity.

“Lewis loved to sit around and listen to my Willie Nelson collection. And he loved to play golf and tennis. We’d play mixed doubles with mom sometimes, and I’d drop-shot her. Lewis wrote in one of his columns that someone was ‘so bad he’d drop-shot his mama.’”

Grizzard wrote another column that has a special place in Mike Matthews’ heart. When JoAnn consented to naming their oldest son Michael Lewis Matthews, Grizzard was extremely pleased — not only that he had a namesake, but also that the Matthewses had not spelled Lewis “the sissy way, Louis.” Mike has that column mounted and framed.

When Grizzard, who’d had heart trouble through much of his adult life, decided to wait until he returned from a vacation overseas to have his aching wisdom teeth looked at, the infection in those teeth eventually spread. He would die a short while later.

“I couldn’t bring myself to go see him at the hospital,” Mike Matthews said. “I didn’t want my final view of him to be the way he was just before he died.”

“I’d go sit with him,” Dee Matthews said. “He looked so bad. (Former Georgia head coach) Ray Goff would get off football practice and come sit with him every night.”

Adds Mike, “He told me one of the last times I saw him, ‘Pardner, if they’d told me when I was on the operating table that I was going to feel this way, I would have told them to just let me go.’”

But, Grizzard’s friend says, he’s never lost his amazement at the writer’s talent.

“I’d go and visit him, and he’d be drinking a cup of coffee,” Mike Matthews said. “All of a sudden, he’d sit down at his typewriter and start typing. Five minutes later he’d say, ‘OK, Pardner, let’s go play golf.’ He’d finish off one of his columns just that quick. He was amazing.”

Adds Dee Matthews, wistfully, “And he died way too soon.”