Some of the People Who Ate My Barbecue Didn't Vote for Me: The Life of Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin

6. The Left-Handed Pitcher

71 6 The Left-Handed Pitcher As Marvin Griffin settled back into Bainbridge, his weekly columns in the Post-Searchlight offered an indication of his mood. Since the late 1930s, Griffin had been an absentee publisher and editor of the paper as he was intimately involved in state politics and military service. When Griffin left for Atlanta in the 1930s, Cheney Griffin became managing editor and was left to see to the daily operations of the paper. During his time away, Griffin would occasionally write weekly editorials for the paper, but those pieces became less frequent once he joined the Georgia National Guard and left to serve in New Guinea. In one of his first columns upon returning from Atlanta, Griffin wrote that he did not know what he would do to occupy himself because his brother had told him his services were not needed around the paper. Naturally, this was a joke since Griffin owned the newspaper, but Cheney Griffin often cracked that his brother was not a very good businessman. Along those same lines, Griffin’s wife often stated that she knew more about the newspaper business than her husband did.1 Cheney Griffin would often quote advertising prices to merchants only to have the merchants approach his older brother, who would quote them a lower price.2 In some of his columns, Griffin stated that he did not make much money being in the newspaper business, but he enjoyed his work. Besides the paper , Griffin also owned the radio station WMGR, which stood for “Marvin Griffin Radio.” Griffin bought the license to operate the radio station soon after returning from New Guinea and owned the station through the early 1950s. It is another interesting parallel to Ed Rivers that Griffin owned a radio station, because Rivers’s fortune came from owning a number of radio stations. Most of the Post-Searchlight dealt exclusively with issues particular to 72 “Some of the People Who Ate My Barbecue Didn’t Vote for Me” Bainbridge and the surrounding area, including many gossip columns. Unlike many weekly newspapers, though, the Post-Searchlight did have an op-ed page that focused on national issues of the day. Still, Griffin’s columns after his return in the spring of 1947 displayed a relaxed, subdued tone, focusing less on politics and instead discussing his own life or events of the day in Bainbridge. In Griffin’s columns, one picks up a sense of his humor and outlook on life. Indeed, his friends and opponents universally commented on his wit and his ability to tell humorous stories—something on which southerners traditionally prided themselves. During 1947, Griffin’s columns covered a cornucopia of topics, including discussions of hunting and fishing, gardening, and home repairs; stories about his wife, “the Lady of the House,” as he always referred to her, and his son, Sam; the adventures of the family dog, Rags; and opinion pieces on the morality of raffles and the evils of teenage smoking. In fact, Griffin himself was a lifelong smoker, but he was adamant in his opposition to teenage smoking. Years later in another column, Griffin made a comment that smoking was not a very glamorous habit. Griffin also spent a great deal of time writing about his love for Virginia, where the family went for an annual visit to see his wife’s family. The way in which Griffin describes Virginia’s climate, apple crop, and people leaves one wondering whether he would have been happier if he had stayed at Randolph-Macon Academy in Front Royal. In other columns, Griffin condemned unclean restrooms and careless drivers. One column revealed Griffin scolding drivers who did not stop and allow ladies in Bainbridge to cross the street on rainy days. At another point, Griffin condemned the use of firecrackers and stated they should all return to “Hades where they belong, for they are the creation and invention of the devil.”3 At Griffin’s behest, Georgia later outlawed fireworks when he was governor. In another column, Griffin lamented the lack of “good old-fashioned” waffles served with creamed turkey and cooked on a wood stove like when he was a boy. An environmental issue accounts for one of Griffin’s more serious columns of 1947, in which he raised concerns about the use of the pesticide DDT. In the 1940s, DDT was commonly used to control mosquito populations . This was especially the case in rural southwest Georgia, where some malaria cases were still...