Alabama

Wayne Greenhaw's ALABAMA is a magical place. Its history is the author's avocation. He loves the state, its people, its rich history. In his book, MONTGOMERY: The River City, he tells about the place where he has lived for more than forty years.

A selection from
MONTGOMERY: The River City

Grover Cleveland Hall Jr., the flamboyant, debonair son of the Puliter Prize-winning editor, met George Wallace in 1946 when Wallace was in the state legislature. After Hall became editor of The Montgomery Advertiser, he and Wallace became close friends. An erudite dandy with a constant rosebud in his tailored lapel, Hall fed Wallace information, helped write some of his speeches, and often guided the politician through rough times. Wallace was many times taken aback by Hall's wry twist of humor. At one of Hall's irregular Saturday-morning brunches, Hall turned loose his pet parrots from their cages. One landed on Wallaces's shoulder and commenced to jabber away some high-pitched nonsense. For better than a quarter-hour Wallace stood paralyzed in the middle of Hall's living room and stared speechless at the multicolored bird. He was obviously frightened of the animal. Finally Hall, with a snicker, extended an arm to the bird and relieved Wallace's predicament.

In 1958 Hall talked his publisher into allowing hin to spport Wallace editorially. Hall, whose father had won a Pulitzer for his hard-hitting editorials criticizing Ku Klux Klan activities, wrote a number of Wallace's anti-Klan speeches.

During the four years between governor's races Wallace spent much time with Hall. Hall traveled with Wallace from one end of Alabama to the other. Hall became more enamored with Wallace's belief that he had to be the spokesman for the South. "You and I together will be able to make this nation see that it's not just the South that's so terrible," Wallace would tell him. "We know that the north commits the same sins against its people. But who chastises the north?"

Hall saw in Wallace an embodiment of the great southern childhood myths of the warrior astride a great white charger doing battle for the love of his people. Hall had been born into a grand family, steeped in tradition and clothed in style and grace. Hall was realistic enough to know that political knights did not come from aristocratic background. Wallace was the knight: emotional, energetic, single-minded, and appealing to the masses.

When Wallace suggested to Hall in 1963 that he was planning to enter some presidential primaries the next year, the editor's first reaction was, "Wallace, you're out of your mind." But later he thought it was a good idea that Wallace carry the Alabama story to the nation. When Wallace was invited to appear on Meet the Press, his first nationally televised interview, he told Hall about the invitation, adding, "You've got to go with me. I'll need your help up there."

Hall agreed, and two days later they flew to Washington, D.C., in the governor's new Lockheed Lodestar. As soon as they were airborne, Wallace began nervously to point out features of the plane. "Look here, Grover, It's even got a built-in coffeepot. You want a cup?"

With characteristic wit, Hall asked if the plane had a bar.

Wallace only stared at him and let the words pass. Hall was aware that Wallace had quit drinking whiskey several years before and had promised the voters of Alabama he would never serve alcoholic beverages in the Governor's Mansion--a promise he intended to keep.

Halfway to the capital, Wallace began to squirm in his seat. The governor's nervousness was nothing unusual. He hated to sit still behind a desk very long. He liked to be up and moving about. And he despised flying. It was merely a convenience, he told friends.

After a few minutes of shifting his shoulders, twisting in his seat, he finally leaned forward and said, "I've got to have a foreign policy."

Grover looked at the governor incredulously.

"Those boys are going to question me about my beliefs tomorrow. They're going to want to know about what I think about things in this nation. And they're going to want to know about my foreign policy. If I'm going to run for the presidency next year I've got to have a foreign policy."

Hall, decked out in his customary tailored suit with a fresh rose in his lapel, crossed his legs, saying nothing. He oftentimes appeared bemused at his friend's seeming political naivete as well as his political brilliance.

Wallace went on about what he assumed the media reporters would ask. His speech did not dwindle until the plane landed. All the way to their hotel Wallace talked about and verbally worried about what he would answer when asked to explain his foreign policy.

The next morning a knock interrupted Hall's sleep at an early hour. Wallace entered his room, his teeth gripping a cigar, and he paced the floor, saying over and over that he had to have "a foreign policy to tell'em about."

Finally Hall told him not to worry. On the way to the studio Hall ripped a news column from the Wall Street Journal. "That's a perfect foreign policy." Hall assured Wallace, who began immediately to read the type. He read the story a half-dozen times. Before going on the air, he stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

After the show Wallace strutted into the lobby, where Hall was waiting. He lighted another cigar. He wadded the Wall Street Journal clipping and threw it into the waste can. "I don't need a foreign policy, Grover. All they wanted to know about was niggers, and I'm the expert."

The next year Hall joined the governor on many trips into yankee land.

Wallace thought Hall "one of the most fascinating people I knew, that's why I called him almost incessantly, sometimes I asked for advice, sometimes we fussed at each other. He was compassionate, he was concerned about black people, he was against big government, he was an individual, he influenced me in many ways."

Hall wrote of Wallace's "daring, dauntlessness, and imagination." Analyzing his own feelings, the editor wrote in a letter to a friend, "Part of my feeling [for Wallace] derives from love of Alabama and pride in the Kickapoo juice in the breed's blood. I can feel the same way about Hugo Black." And he continued, "I have sometimes been cowardly about Wallace, but I hope on balance it can be said I refused to deny him in Montgomery or Richmond, costly as it was."

Hall was fired as editor of The Advertiser because he went against the policy of new management. He fought his own battle in his own private world. Afterward he became the editorial page editor of The Richmond News-Leader and immediately began writing and talking about Wallace, perhaps with more verve than before. He arranged for Wallace to be interviewed by a panel of executives from the News-Leader prior to the primaries of 1968, and he urged the candidate to tone down his rhetoric for the Virginians. Wallace later told Tom Wicker of The New York Times that the group was "the most cultured, polite, well-dressed crowd I ever saw in my life and I gave'em a real cultured talk . . . And then I forgot and called the Supreme Court a 'sorry, lousy, no-count outfit,' and you ought to have heard that cultured crowd stand up and cheer. People are about the same everywhere, but ol' Grover here keeps trying to polish me up."

Although he was the ultimate southern gentleman with manners and bloodline to prove it, Hall quickly tired of Richmond. Also, Richmond quickly tired of his writings about the virtues of Wallace and Alabama.

After a stint writing from Washington for Publishers-Hall Syndicate, during which he called himself "an Alabamian exuding Alabama nationalism" and nicknamed Wallace "Beelzebub Alabammus" in many columns featuring the governor, Hall was offered the job as "resident intellectual" with the Wallace for President campaign back home in Montgomery. His duties were to include editing The Wallace Letter and writing a book extolling Wallace, doing another syndicated column and developing radio and television material for the candidate.

Troubled by fainting spells and nervous seizures, Hall prepared to leave Washington. His final column, entitled "Peck's Bad Boy," linked South Vietnamese Vice-President Ky and the Reverend Carly McIntyre. Hall delivered it to Western Union on the night of September 9, 1970, but Teletype operators found it impossible to decipher. At least three typewritten pages were badly garbled. He attempted to correct the copy after the telegraph company returned it, but the column was never sent. He left Washington by car, but he did not arrive in Montgomery when he was scheduled to make a return-home-victorious speech to the Kiwanis Club. Wallace, worried about his friend's disappearance, had state troopers put out a missing-persons report, notifying all states between Alabama and the District of Columbia.

For two weeks he did not turn up. The first week was apparently spent traveling very slowly southward. On the eighth day of his journey he was stopped by a Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, policeman at 2:45 A.M. near Charlotte. With half a fifth of Scotch next to him and alcohol on his breath, the patrolman arrested Hall and charged him with driving while under the influence of alcohol. He was given a breath test when he was jailed, and it showed he was sober. He was also charged with driving without a license.

During the next seven days the fifty-year-old journalist remained in the county jail, until a supervisor notified a medical officer that he thought Hall needed treatment. The officer, trained in first aid, examined Hall and told the jail attendant to watch for symptoms of alcoholic withdrawal. On the seventh day, after he had not complained once of feeling badly, a jailer said Hall claimed to be a newspaper writer. An editor at The Charlotte Observer was notified, came to the jail, recognized Hall, and Hall was taken immediately to Memorial Hospital. Diagnosis showed he had suffered a brain tumor, and his condition worsened quickly. He was transferred by special ambulance-airplane to Birminghamís University Hospital, where he underwent surgery for a cystic tumor in the right frontal area of the brain. It was highly malignant, and he remained in the Birmingham hospital afterward to undergo cobalt treatment.

Wheelchair-ridden, he came home to Montgomery to a quaint treesmothered home in the gracious garden district of Old Cloverdale. As wryly humorous as ever, he made the best of a bad physical situation, and among his most frequent callers were Wallace and his new bride, Cornelia, whom Hall suggested should become the cover girl of a Wallace brochure. He said she should pose in a red velvet gown for the photograph. Whenever the Wallaces visited, Hall asked them to hurry with the project. But it was never finalized.

Exactly one year after he had been found in the jail in North Carolina, Hall died. The New York Times eulogized the 1957 Headliner Award winner as "probing, wry, and capable of great courage." Wallace said, "We have lost one of the finest journalists Alabama has ever produced."

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