Editor's Note: Lewis McDonald Grizzard, Jr. (October 20, 1946 - March 20, 1994) was an American writer and humorist, known for his Southern demeanor and commentary on the American South. Republished with permission.
MACON,GA- Alex Hopkins died in his hometown of Jesup, Ga., the other day. He was 57 and he had a heart attack.
He was a burly bear of a man. The only time I ever met him, he shook my hand, grinned and then pulled a pistol out of one pocket and a pair of brass knuckles out of the other.
"I don't go nowhere without these," he said.
The man made me a little nervous.
"He acts tough, and he can be tough," somebody told me later, "but that's just the way he was raised.
"His daddy had 25,000 acres of prime timberland and he knew Alex couldn't be a silkshirt and run that business.
"But deep down, ol' Alex had a heart of gold."
Characters - real ones - always have intrigued me, and there aren't, it seems, many left these days.
Stories about Alex
Everybody in Jesup had an Alex Hopkins story.
- "When he got a divorce he gave his wife 1,000 acres of his timberland, but he didn't tell her where it was."
- "He had a boy he wanted to be a fullback on the football team, so he made him run over plowed ground with a sack of fertilizer on his shoulders to build up his legs.
"All the boy could do after that was take little choppy steps, though, and he wound up at guard."
- "The school athletic director knew about Alex's pine trees so he asked if he would donate the poles for the lights on the baseball diamond.
"Alex said he wouldn't donate the poles but he would rassle the athletic director, who played football at Georgia, for 'em.
"It was a big event. The athletic director wound up winning, and that's how we got a lighted baseball field."
- "The IRS came to investigate Alex because he had claimed so much depreciation on his logging equipment.
Shooing the IRS
"Alex disassembled his equipment into 1,000 pieces. He showed all that to the IRS boys and they agreed he had a mess on his hands. What they didn't know was after they left, Alex went back out there and put all the equipment back together again and it was good as new.
"Before they left, though, Alex invited his visitors to lunch. He put his gun and brass knuckles on the kitchen table and then pulled out his pocketknife and then started slicing the ham.
"Then, he reached in the mayonnaise jar with his hand and smeared mayonnaise on everybody's bread. Then, he asked the blessing.
" `Lord,' he said, `you know these fellers done come all the way down here to investigate me and you know I got 25,000 acres and I could kill 'em all and hide 'em in the swamps and nobody would ever find 'em . . . .'
"When Alex finished his blessing, the IRS boys were halfway out of the county."
I heard Tuesday Alex had spent a year in the Savannah jail recently, after getting into a fight and biting a man's ear off.
"Ol' Alex sort of reminded me of a Georgia version of Crocodile Dundee," somebody was saying.
With one obvious difference, please. Ol' Alex was damn sure real.
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Fri Jul 9, 2010 11:31am EST
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