I quit football and took up tennis and girls, and never for an instant regretted it. My school played its games on Saturday afternoons, so I was not baptized in the religion of Friday night football.
I happily became a later convert.
* * *
When the Cougars assembled for their first practice, Bigmouth and Wiley were there to cover it. We ran a large front page photo of four players, two white and two black, and another of the coaching staff, which included a black assistant. Bigmouth wrote columns about the team and its players and prospects, and this was only the first week of practice.
We covered the opening of school, including interviews with students, teachers, and administrators, and our slant was openly positive. In truth, Clanton had little of the racial unrest that was common throughout the Deep South when schools opened that August.
The Times did big stories about the cheerleaders, the band, the junior high teams - everything we could possibly think of. And every story had several photos. I don't know how many kids failed to make the pages of our paper, but there weren't many.
The first football game was an annual family brawl against Karaway, a much smaller town that had a much better coach. I sat with Harry Rex and we screamed until we were hoarse. The game was a sellout and the crowd was mostly white.
But those white folks who had been so adamantly opposed to accepting black students were suddenly transformed that Friday night. In the first quarter of the first game, a star was born when Ricky Patterson, a pint-size black kid who could fly, ran eighty yards the first time he touched the ball. The second time he went forty-five, and from then on whenever they tossed it to him the entire crowd stood and yelled. Six weeks after the desegregation order hit the town, I saw narrow-minded, intolerant rednecks screaming like maniacs and bouncing up and down whenever Ricky got the ball.
Clanton won 34 - 30 in a cliffhanger, and our coverage of the game was shameless. The entire front page was nothing but football. We immediately initated a Player-of-the-Week, with a $100 scholarship award that went into some vague fund that took us months to figure out. Ricky was our first honoree, and so that required yet another interview with another photo.
When Clanton won its first four games, the Times was there to stir up the frenzy. Our circulation reached fifty-five hundred.
* * *
One very hot day in early September, I was strolling around the square, going from my office to the bank. I was wearing my usual garb - faded jeans, rumpled cotton button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, loafers, no socks. I was then twenty-four years old and because I owned a business I was slowly turning my thoughts away from college and toward a career. Very slowly. I had long hair and still dressed like a student. I generally gave little thought to what I wore or what image I portrayed.
This lack of concern was not shared by all.
Mr. Mitlo grabbed me on the sidewalk and shoved me into his small haberdashery. "I been waiting for you," he said with a thick accent, one of the few in Clanton. He was a Hungarian and had some colorful history of escaping from Europe while leaving behind a child or two. He was on my list of human interest stories to pursue as soon as football season was over.
"Look at you!" he sneered as I stood just inside his door, by a rack of belts. But he was smiling and with foreigners it's easy to dismiss their bluntness due to translation problems.
I sort of looked at myself. What exactly was the problem?
Evidently, there were many. "You are a professional," he informed me. "A very important man in this town, and you are dressed like, uh, well..." He scratched his bearded chin as he searched for the proper insult.
I tried to help. "A student."
"No," he said, wagging an index finger back and forth as if no student had ever looked that bad. He gave up on the put-down and continued the lecture.
"You are unique - how many people own a newspaper? You are educated, which is rare around here. And from up North! You are young, but you shouldn't look so, so, immature. We must work on your image."
We went to work, not that I had a choice. He advertised heavily in the Times, so I certainly couldn't tell him to take a hike. Plus, he made sense. The student days were gone, the revolution was over. I had escaped Vietnam and the sixties and college, and, though I wasn't ready to settle down to a wife and parenthood, I was beginning to feel my age.
"You must wear suits," he decided as he went through racks of clothes. Mitlo had been known to walk up to the president of a bank and, in a crowd, comment on a faulty shirt and suit combo, or a drab tie. He and Harry Rex didn't get along at all.
I was not about to start wearing gray suits and wing tips. He pulled out a light blue seersucker suit, found a white shirt, then went straight for the tie rack where he picked out the perfect red-and-gold-striped bow tie. "Let's try this," he announced when his selections were finished. "Over there," he said, pointing to a dressing room. Thankfully, the store was empty. I had no choice.
I gave up on the bow tie. Mitlo reached up and in a skillful flourish had it fixed in a second. "Much better," he said, examining the finished product. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. I wasn't sure, but then I was intrigued by the transformation. It gave me character and individuality.
Whether I wanted it or not, the outfit was about to become mine. I had to wear it at least once.
To top it off, he found a white Panama hat that fit nicely on my shaggy head. As he adjusted it here and there, he tugged at a patch of hair over my ear and said, "Too much hair. You are a professional. Cut it."
He altered the slacks and jacket and pressed the shirt, and the following day I arrived to collect my new outfit. I planned to simply pick it up, take it home, then wait and wait until there was a slow day around town and wear it. I intended to walk straight to Mitlo's so he could see me in his creation.
He, of course, had other plans. He insisted I try it on, and when I did he then insisted that I walk around the entire square to collect my compliments.
"I'm really in a hurry," I said. Chancery court was in session and downtown was busy.
"I insist," he said dramatically, wagging the finger as if he would not negotiate for a second.
He adjusted the hat, and the final prop was a long black cigar which he cut, stuffed in my mouth, and lit with a match. "A powerful image," he said proudly. "The town's only publisher. Now off."
No one recognized me for the first half block. Two farmers in front of the feed store gave me a look, but then I didn't like the way they were dressed either. I felt like Harry Rex with the cigar. Mine was lit, though, and very strong. I sprinted by his office. Mrs. Gladys Wilkins ran her husband's insurance agency. She was about forty, very pretty and always well dressed. When she saw me she stopped dead in her tracks, then said, "Why Willie Traynor. Don't you look distinguished."
"Thank you."
"Sorta reminds me of Mark Twain."
I walked on, feeling better. Two secretaries did double-takes. "Love that bow tie," one of them called to me. Mrs. Clare Ruth Seagraves stopped me and talked on and on about something I'd written months earlier and had forgotten. As she talked she examined my suit and bow tie and hat and didn't even mind the cigar. "You look quite handsome, Mr. Traynor," she said finally, and seemed embarrassed by her candor. I walked slower and slower around the square and decided that Mitlo was right. I was a professional, a publisher, an important person in Clanton even if I didn't feel too important, and a new image was in order.