From grits to UGA football to the Atlanta Opera, legendary humorist and columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote about it all. On Nov. 7, 2019, Grizzard, one of Atlanta’s most beloved columnists, will be inducted into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame.
As a special gift to readers, we’re sharing some of Grizzard’s most memorable columns, published many years ago on the pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We hope you enjoy Grizzard’s work — whether you’ve savored them before or are just reading them for the first time.
Check out the Nov. 10 print edition of the AJC for a special section collecting these columns; you can also view the section online in the AJC ePaper on Nov. 10.
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It never occurred to me Melissa Segars might die. Of course, she wouldn’t die. I didn’t die.
When I was there on the operating table at Emory Hospital last spring bleeding to death during a heart operation, I needed a miracle, and I got one. Melissa would get a miracle, too, if she needed one. How could I get one and this precious child (she was 25 and looked 13) not.
Melissa and her family got the call. There was a donor heart and lung waiting for her at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital. In the wee hours of Sunday morning the family boarded a private jet and flew to St. Louis.
Melissa would receive both a heart and lung transplant. She would not live much longer if she did not have the transplant.
She had said to me two weeks ago, “When this is over, I want to go on a cruise.”
When she smiled, she lit up the room. When she spoke, she gave it music.
Jim Minter and Furman Bisher, two men who helped my career a hundred years ago in the Atlanta Journal sports department, first told me about Melissa Segars.
She was this young woman down in Fayette County, where they both lived, who was dying and desperately needed the operation. But there was no money to pay for it and maybe if I would write something it would help.
I wrote a column. It helped.
The Fayette community had already been trying to raise the $1 million necessary. And it had already responded with over half of the total.
I had lunch with Melissa at Furman Bisher’s house. We exchanged a few heart surgery war stories. Melissa, like myself, had been born with heart problems.
She hit me squarely between my eyes, as she did anyone who met her.
She was so tiny. She might have weighed 65 pounds.
She had that godawful oxygen tank she had to carry around and she had those tubes in her nostrils.
Furman’s wife wanted me to see his library. We had to go down some stairs. Melissa could get down the stairs, but she was afraid she couldn’t get back up them.
“We can go back out through the basement,” said Furman’s wife.
Her life was like that. Obstacles everywhere.
Jim Minter called me Sunday morning to tell me Melissa and her family had flown to St. Louis and that the operation would be Sunday afternoon.
“She wanted your home number so she could call you sometime and thank you for your help,” Jim said. “OK if I gave it to her?”
“Of course,” I said, “but she already wrote me a thank you letter.”
Your contributions following my column were running, Jim said, as much as $8,000 a day. God bless you for that.
Gerrie Ferris called me from the paper Sunday afternoon. I was watching the Ryder Cup. She told me Melissa had bled to death on the operating table. She said the paper wanted a quote from me.
I rambled around and then said, “It’s not fair.”
The 6 o’clock news had all the details and they put Melissa’s face on the screen. They interviewed a man in Fayette County who said, “Maybe she’s in a better place.”
She leaves her legacy of courage. She leaves a community that responded to her need in such an overwhelming manner that it reminds us when we so need reminding, points of light do yet shine in the midst of so much darkness in the human soul.
She leaves me wondering what on Earth I ever did to deserve the miracle she didn’t get. Fairness.
Melissa is gone. For the rest of us, the dice roll on.
Sept. 29, 1993
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