Lewis Grizzard; Southern Humorist and Columnist

Lewis Grizzard, whose down-home humor in columns and books such as “My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun” delighted and sometimes enraged readers, died Sunday. He was 47.

Grizzard had a history of heart trouble, including four operations, the most recent one Friday at Emory University Hospital. He never regained consciousness before he died in the intensive care unit, a hospital statement said. The surgery led to extensive brain damage, hospital officials said.

Grizzard--pronounced griz-ZARD--wrote a column four days a week for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was syndicated in 450 newspapers nationwide.

A fiercely proud Southerner whose columns played redneck humor to the hilt, Grizzard took special delight in attacking Yankees, draft evaders and feminists. He often devoted his column to letters from readers he had enraged.

His greatest ire was directed at Georgia Tech, the football rival of his beloved alma mater, the University of Georgia.

He also poked fun at his marital problems, and wrote, often movingly, about his late parents. He married Dedra Kyle, his fourth wife, in a hospital room Wednesday.

His third wife, Kathy Schmook, retaliated for his barbs in her own book in 1988, “How to Tame a Wild Bore,” in which she tattled that Grizzard wore the same underwear for weeks, hated kids, snored and was such a hypochondriac that he feared a popcorn kernel was a tumor on his gum.

Although his female followers considered him cute, even Grizzard conceded that as a kid he was so homely that his nickname was “D.U.” for “Doubly Ugly.”

Grizzard was hailed as a “Faulkner for plain folks” and “this generation’s Mark Twain.”

His book “My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun,” a memoir of his father, was his favorite of his 20 books.

Other books, many of them collections of his columns, had similarly beguiling titles, such as “Elvis is Dead And I Don’t Feel So Good Myself” and “Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes.” Total sales ran into the millions.

Grizzard even poked fun at his health problems. “They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat,” about his first heart operation in 1982, became his highest-selling book.

He was a popular figure on the lecture circuit, commanding up to $20,000 a speech. He would occasionally appear on television, including guest spots on the “Tonight Show” and “Designing Women.”

Grizzard was born in Ft. Benning, Ga., and grew up in Moreland, about 45 miles southwest of Atlanta, after his father left his mother when he was 6.

Before launching his humor column in 1978, Grizzard was sports editor with the Athens (Ga.) Daily News, executive sports editor with the Atlanta Journal, assistant city editor with the Atlanta Journal and executive sports editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

He chronicled his newspaper career in a book whose title summed up his feelings about the South: “If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground.”