Southerners’ Club Gets Down to Nitty Grits : Breakfast Gatherings Revolve Around Plates of That Famous Staple

In their dreamier imaginings, they picture a South unsullied by cultural erosion, untouched by time.

It’s a vision of beautiful belles and handsome beaus, of gentility and manners and, most precious, of history. It’s Rhett and Scarlett and Robert E. Lee. It’s the Crimson Tide and the Vols and the Green Wave.

And then, of course, there’s the countryside itself. Whether it’s the tumbling hills of Tennessee or the shadowed, mossy lagoons of Bayou country, the South lives on for them, still speaks to them, in its way. Even now, years later, they say they’re “proud to be a Southerner” in ways that you never hear Yankees talk.

Without doubt, they love the South. They revere it.

So wouldn’t you know it, they all packed up and resettled in Southern California, where if belles and beaus ever become trendy, they probably won’t last for more than a month or so. And as for gentility and manners . . . well, any freeway will tell you.

For the most part, these Southern expatriates don’t want to go back to the Jacksons and Birminghams and Knoxvilles. They’re now stockbrokers and real estate agents and jewelers and consultants, and they live quite comfortably. Their kids are California kids; their dreams are California dreams.

But even though they left the South, they didn’t forsake it. They may have lost the twangs in their voices, but not the twinges in their hearts.

And they sure do miss that good ol’ Southern cooking.

“We moved here 14 years ago from New Orleans,” 44-year-old Randy Barsh was saying, “and we had stumbled around for about eight months without any grits. My wife said, ‘They don’t sell grits on the West Coast.’ But one day I was walking through the grocery store and I saw Alber’s Grits, made by Carnation. I bought a big bag, brought them home and said, ‘I found ‘em.’ ”

As Barsh talked, 31 other transplanted Southerners sat around a fancy table in the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, awaiting breakfast. But not just any breakfast. This was a menu of sausage, eggs, muffins and, almost as the centerpiece, grits.

Besides being the bill of fare, Grits for Breakfast also is the name of a social club that, for the last 10 years or so, has met the third Tuesday of every month--if for no other reason than to hear one another talk funny. “The most serious thing we do is conduct a football pool,” says Alice McCullough, who had brightened the December meeting by ordering napkins that said, “Deck the Halls, Y’all.”

The club’s first meeting was in a hotel coffee shop. With a mailing list that now has swelled to about 175, they’ve graduated to the swank Pacific Club, whose managing partner is a Kentuckian.

“This is a group where you don’t have to do anything,” says president Marion Halfacre, who owns a Newport Beach jewelry store. Then, smiling and lapsing into a po’ boy impression from his native Tennessee, Halfacre adds: “Or you don’t have to do nuthin’. Ain’t no reason for it. We just meet and have fun.”

As president, Halfacre is in charge of fun. At a recent meeting, he circulated a special edition of the Cookeville, Tenn., newspaper, to which he still subscribes. The paper’s big local news was the 37th Soil Conservation District Awards banquet. The front-page picture showed a barn and a couple of cows.

“I came from a town that was about 100 people when I was growing up,” Halfacre, 37, said. “Now, there’s 68. It’s not that they left; they just died off.”

Halfacre drove a sleek 1957 Bentley, with the steering wheel on the right side, to the breakfast. The real Marion Halfacre, he said, is “somewhere in between” the boy from Tennessee and the Bentley driver who owns a jewelry store. “It’s just an old ’57 car you drive on the right side,” he said, smiling. “Kinda like bein’ on the tractor seat. Makes me feel like I’m back home.”

John Caine, athletic director at UC Irvine, has been coming to Grits for Breakfast for about four years.

“The South has always been a bit romantic in people’s minds,” Caine said. “The culture there is unique.”

Caine, now 62, left the South for good 40 years ago after growing up in Ashland, Ky. “I don’t think you ever really leave your roots,” he said. “What’s fascinating to me is that most of these people love the area they came from but wouldn’t go back to live.”

Gail Love is a newcomer to the group. She heard about Grits from someone who picked up on her Alabama accent, still intact after more than 20 years away from the South.

‘Felt at Home Immediately’

“I was intrigued that people, all of us who are very busy and running around and who belong to more organizations than we have time for, would take time to meet once a month.”

But in an instant at the first breakfast, the 47-year-old Love found out. “I’ve walked into a dozen different organizations where I didn’t know a single person, and I’d often stand around by myself. It would take considerable time and effort on my part to integrate myself. But I walked in there this morning and had several people walk over with big smiles, and I felt at home immediately.”

At one meeting, the program was no more complicated than the introduction of new and old members. Halfacre collected business cards so members could draw names for door prizes.

“What’s your name again, please, darlin’?” he asked one striking, dark-haired woman before having her draw a name.

“JoJami,” she said.

“I knew that. I just like to hear her say that,” Halfacre said.

JoJami Tyler is a 26-year-old fashion representative who left Jackson, Miss., after high school. She wanted to go cosmopolitan. She got as far as Texas her first time. Then, four years ago, she moved to Southern California.

“I think Southern people have a camaraderie about them,” she said. “Southern people are very social. I sort of miss that in Southern California. People here seem to get together and throw a party. If they throw a party in the South, you don’t have to be invited to go.”

‘Good Times, Fond Memories’

Like others at the breakfast who have succumbed to the California life, Tyler still carries a torch. “I think of my friends,” she said. “I think of swimming in the lake and of the day that it snowed and people weren’t prepared. . . . I think of good times, fond memories and good people.”

Halfacre conceded that some in the group hadn’t ever eaten grits until they joined the club. For the uninitiated who might mistake grits for crystallized cream of wheat, be advised it is mere cornmeal.

And the Rebel can always spot the Yankee. He’s the one who doesn’t put anything on the grits. “You’ve got to put something on ‘em,” Beverly Brown said at the breakfast table. “Salt and pepper or butter. That’s all you taste, is the salt and pepper or butter. If you do, you don’t realize how bad they taste.”

That’s apparently not heresy when said by a Southerner. Halfacre concurred, noting, “You’ve got to cover up the taste somehow.” He suggested garlic and cheese.

The tradition of the breakfast club isn’t all that surprising, says a Fullerton psychologist.

“I think we all need to go back in time and get really in touch with a sense of our very basic roots,” said Pamela Scavio, who is not a club member. “All of us, every single living being, needs to feel linked and connected.”

‘Binding Kind of Culture’

People from the South, Scavio said, “have a very binding kind of culture.” Much of that, she says, is tied up in a strong sense of family.

“I think in the South and the Midwest, and even when you get into Pennsylvania and the Amish culture, there’s much more of a need for traditional family linkages from what it is in be-bopping California.”

Living in California may intensify those feelings, Scavio said. “Patients I have that come from back East or the Midwest say they find a shallowness in California that’s very different from their more solid traditional roots. . . . California may be a cultural environment that may actually foster the need for more traditional people to get together on a regular basis.”

Huntington Beach physician Julian Whitaker, a former Atlanta resident who runs a wellness clinic, hasn’t figured things out that precisely. He just knows he likes the breakfast group.

“None of us are still living there, so we’ve found a place we prefer to live and work,” he said. “But we still kind of cling to a bond that really is inherent in the Southern culture. I think that’s the only attraction. That’s the reason for going in the first place. And then we just go back for fun.”