- [Announcer] A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

(upbeat music) - Hello from Columbia, I'm Patti Just.

Our guest on this program is author and storyteller, William Price Fox.

Mr.

Fox was born in Waukegan, Illinois and has lived in South Carolina most of his life.

He graduated from the University of South Carolina.

He's been a Hollywood script writer.

He's taught at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is currently writer in residence at the University of South Carolina.

His books include, "Southern Fried Plus 6," "Dr.

Golf", and his latest, "Lunatic Wind: Surviving the Storm of the Century."

He's published numerous short stories and magazine articles and he and his wife Sarah Gilbert, live in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mr.

Fox, it's a pleasure to have you on the program.

- Nice being here.

- From considering the detail with which you write about South Carolina, it's hard to believe that you've ever lived anywhere else.

- It seems that way.

Dad is from Columbia.

He's from FoxTown, which is up near Samari Batesburg, Leesville area.

So they go way back, so they're all, we're natives.

My brothers were all born here.

- So you grew up in South Carolina?

- Yeah, right here in Columbia in LuGolf.

- So that's how you know all the stories and all the customs.

- Every one of 'em, yeah.

- Let's talk about your education a little bit.

You had a lot of majors in school.

You majored in history, philosophy and anthropology.

- But before that, I failed the ninth grade, took it again and then I quit and went off and joined the service and I came back and skipped high school and I went to college on a probational basis.

And so they watched me and let me do what I wanted.

So I tried engineering and couldn't do that.

And then I tried everything and I liked philosophy and medieval history very much.

The other course I didn't like, I didn't like English at all.

- When did the writing come into play All along or?

- No, I didn't think.

I finished here in the fifties, went down to Miami and Bellhop for a year.

So then I coached football and sports for academy down there.

And I hitch hiked to New York and got into sales and then gradually I got into writing.

This is kind of a hobby more than anything else, but I didn't wanna be a writer 'cause I wanted to make money.

There's no money in writing.

- Well what about your book?

"Southern Fried Plus 6," that's the one which you gained all the national prominence.

Was that your very first effort?

- Yeah, it came out, it was called Southern Fried originally and the cover was done by Jack Davis, it was one of those Erskine Caldwell covers of the, have lot of Decollete and a skinny chicken and a hound on the porch.

And so the Publishers, Faucet sent them all down south thinking they're all a Greyhound bus station type book.

And then it got a big review in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune.

So then everybody looked for this soft cover book and it wasn't around.

So it got a lot of publicity and it took off then.

And then I got a lot of contracts and kept writing.

- Well, how do you describe it?

- Good lord, I don't know.

Well, I guess I didn't think I was a writer, so I just did, I just tried to do everything that I found amusing and fun in that first book and thinking that would be the only book that I ever write.

So I did a lot of weird things.

I did first person monologue, I did third person, I did a face narrator.

All the tricks that I later learned, I knew that I didn't know, I tried out and I tried some stories that didn't even have a story, they just went along linearly.

This one guy talking, which I like very much.

And I was able to do a lot of rhythms and a lot of weird segues and a lot of stuff I wouldn't try now 'cause I'm too smart.

- Did it give you a lot of credibility?

- Yeah, yeah.

And then I got contracts with the, oh gosh, Atlantic monthly and Saturday Evening Post and Holiday, Sports Illustrated, everybody, about six magazines at once.

So then I kept my sales job, I was in sales at the time and I kept the job thinking it would all go away pretty soon or they'd come and arrest me.

And I tried to do both for a while, then I got a chance to go to Hollywood, so I jumped on that.

- How do you feel now it's in its fourth or, third or fourth printing now with Sandlapper's brought it out in hardcover?

- Yeah, it's doing pretty well there.

But it's got a long track record.

It was published by let's see, Faucet and then Valentine Lippincot and Harper and Mockingbird now the Sandlapper, so that's about six different companies, so it's been around a long time.

- You think it works today still now that it's 30 years old?

- I don't know.

I guess it does.

I don't like to look my stuff over too closely 'cause I see it how regular it is, but it still sells so I guess people out there like it.

- What about "Dixiana Moon" is another one.

You're gonna read a little bit from it.

- Okay.

- What's that about?

- That didn't do very well, it came out with Viking, this is when Viking was being bought by Penguin and the wasn't a PR with it.

But I like that book very much, it's got a nice structure to it.

I met a man down in Florida.

I was doing an article for, let's see, American Heritage about medicine shows.

I met this fellow in Florida named Bartock, who told me all the secrets that Oral Roberts had and Jimmy Swaggert, how to use copper wires under the, under the rugs when they healed you and gave 'em a little jolt of electricity and a lot of that stuff.

And he showed me how to, he showed me the famous lizard switch, how they could hit a guy on the back and say, you are healed and a lizard would pop out.

He had a lizard in his pocket and they would think that was a demon.

So I learned a lot of stuff from him, I used very little of it.

But what he wanted to do, he wanted to combine a religion with circus to avoid amusement text.

And the whole book is kind of built on that premise.

- Can you read that first page for us on that?

- Yeah.

I try to work with a lot of rhythms and it opens up, this guy's got a kind of a fringe or showbiz quality about him.

And I try to make the lines kind of match that particular character characteristic.

He starts off with some mornings, my old man would sit on the edge of the bed with so many plans and so much energy.

I'm sorry, some mornings, my old man would sit on the edge of the bed with so many plans and so much energy, he'd pick up the phone and dial seven numbers, any numbers.

Someone would answer, then he'd roll into his master of ceremonies delivery.

Okay, world Joe Mahaffey here, get your flat ass ready.

And mom would groan, "Jesus, Joe, knock it off.

When you gonna grow up?"

She might as well have been talking to a tornado.

We owned this nightclub in Lorraine, about an hour out from Pittsburgh.

Mom hopped the tables and did the salads.

And when dad went on stage, she handled the bar.

When she was younger, she'd sung a little and danced a little, she always said she'd peaked too early.

I remember one night she was up to her elbows in a sink full of beer glasses and dad was mopping down the duct boards and she said, there's no business like the fringe of show business, right Joe?

And she pushed her hair back with her wrist and took a long hard look at me.

My name's Joe too.

I hope you're smarter than this idiot.

Don't get me wrong, mom loved him and still loves him.

But back then, she definitely had other plans for me.

Dad took us through the Spanish period, Granada, where the walls were covered with bullfighters and dancing senoritas on black velvet.

He tried gay parade with red check tablecloths and Toulouse wallpaper and EDFPF on the juke.

Some Philadelphia hustler unloaded 144 salt and pepper shakers on a shape like the Eiffel Tower, they're still around.

Then it was Broadway Nights with the Manhattan skyline shot and the big band sound.

We ran through the Irish look, the Italian look, the Hollywood look.

If there had been an Eskimo troop or a group or a gypsy caravan coming through, he would've probably jumped on that too.

Everyone kept telling him to go straight country and western and keep it there.

But he hated country, he hated Western.

He'd load up the old juke with Sinatras, Benny Goodmans, Glen Millers.

If it was old enough and a disaster enough, we had it.

But through it all, our regular customers and the happy hour crowd stayed loyal.

To them, it didn't matter if it was Maurice Chevalier on the juke or Nanook of the north.

One time he had it set up like a Swiss village with the Matterhorn in the background.

We were all dressed up in Lederhosen.

There was this customer on the bar looking over and grimacing, "Joe, what in the hell goes on with you?

No one's paying good money to see this crap."

Dad winked at him.

Stick around cowboy, you just don't know class when you see it, you watch.

They're gonna love this concept.

Lemme tell you something, customers aren't stupid.

The guy finished his drink and he slid his glass back for a refill.

"The hell they ain't."

Okay.

- Do you know people like that?

Your characters?

- Well, dad's like that, was like that.

He had a lot of restaurants, now all folded because he had the higher concepts than Columbia can handle.

And during World War II, he had a place of North Maine.

He tried to serve French cooking to the soldiers.

All they wanted to listen to was Ernie Tubb and drink beer fight.

- So onto another theme then.

- Right, yeah.

- What about your other books, the golfing books, for example.

Dr.

Golf is a character you created.

- Well that's a interesting thing there.

When Southern Fried came out, I got real big reviews and they do that Mark Twain comparison, which is kind of silly, but they always do that.

They compare everybody to Mark Twain, Rush Limbaugh to Mark Twain.

Everybody's Mark Twain.

Anyhow, I didn't like being characterized as a southern writer 'cause I thought it was too regional.

And back then it was, back then you couldn't sell anything if you're from down south.

So then I would turn around and did something really exotic.

I did Dr.

Golf, which was this book here.

And it's letters from an old golfer to a golf old golfer and from an old golfer.

I wrote both letters of course.

And he's very exotic.

He runs long sentences together and a lot of curls and dips and a lot of literary devices and all.

So I was probably just showing off to see if I could go from Southern Fried to something different.

But it did very well, and it's been around for God, 25 years now.

Matter of fact, we're doing it in Charleston on the radio now as a spot commercials for a couple golf courses.

- Well, the thing about that character, wasn't he so real that people actually wrote to you?

- Yeah, I got letters a lot of times.

- Wrote to Dr.

Golf.

- Yeah, and I get a matter of fact, I did a syndicated column for the Golf Club magazine for years based on this.

And I'd make, do original letters.

And one time three years ago, I did a letter advertising a golf swing device.

If you put this thing on your club and swing properly, you get an E note and if it's wrong F or G flat would cut in.

And I got about 23 orders for it with checks.

So I had to write a, I had to resend it and say that they weren't available, blah, blah, blah.

But golfers are like fishermen, they'll buy anything, they're loopy.

- If they can help the game, right?

- Yeah.

- Read a little bit from that, gives us an idea.

- Let me show how the beginning, I'll give, I'll read you one, I'll read the beginning, the introduction and then I'll show you how the letters work.

Okay.

In the hallway, Eagle Hall is where Dr.

Golf lives.

It's kind of a monastery out in Arkansas of all places.

And people are asked to give up their worldly possessions.

Everything, the dogs, records, money and come live with him.

But they've gotta pass requirements.

They've gotta be a certain height, a certain temperament, certain golf, everything.

And they live out there and they die out there.

But he only has maybe 110 players, members.

And it's hard to get into this place.

And this is the beginning of, in the hallway at Eagle Hole across from the mural of Varden at Carnesty in the, in bust of Tom Myers, the elder lies the putter of Walter Travis.

To the left are the death masks of the great Scots.

To the right, the glass cases containing shoes, golf gloves, sculptured bronzes of classic grips, autographed balls, and the original leather bag of Bonnie Prince Charles.

And above all this, rising to the great dome ceiling is the giant bronze plaque with the words of the immortal Henry Leach, "Men who were innocent and have turned to golf do not give a reason why.

They do not, they're silent to the questioner.

They say that he too will see in time and then they golf exceedingly."

Well, the whole book has that kind of tone to it.

But in the middle of that tone, he does things that are, well, it's kind of funny anyway.

Here's a letter to Dr.

Golf.

Dear Dr.

Golf, I had been studying your book, "Golf for Stout People" for four years.

It was very helpful until recently.

I am five feet, seven and now weigh 290 pounds.

While I have large shoulders, arms and hands, unfortunately most of my weight is in my stomach.

Following your advice to stout people, I have opened my stance to correct this and allowed my hips and hands to open to enter the shot.

I now find I can open my stance only by standing 90 degrees to the direction of the intended flight of the ball.

Is there some way I can avoid this awkward and unsatisfactory method other than by severe and possibly debilitating dieting?

Then the answers is: Dear sir, if I may have a picture of you in profile, I believe I'll be able to help.

Often in cases like yours, we find that the stomach, if properly developed, can be substituted for the hips.

In other words, instead of rotating hips to bring in the power and allow arms and hands to enter the shot, one merely rotates the stomach.

On the surface, this may seem like an easy remedy.

It is not.

You will need coaching, diagrams and apparatus.

But if you pursue this method seriously, I see no reason why you cannot eventually enjoy a normal stance.

Well, all the letters are like that.

Some people like that, or people they wanna get married and they wanna know how to choose a mate.

He recommends women that are broad boned and thick wrists and armed and silent.

So it's a terribly chauvinistic book, but it did very well.

- Just like, dear Abby has an answer for everything.

- Yeah, exactly, and most of 'em just full of, you know what, but you know, it goes on with it.

- Right.

You've been able to combine your two loves, the golfing and the writing very successfully over the years.

- Yeah, 'cause most golfers, most writers don't play golf because if you play golf, you don't write.

That's about.

John Updike plays a lot of golf, and so, and he was good, he's a very good golf writer.

So was Alistair Cook.

- What about the "Golfing in the Carolinas" book?

That was a lot of fun too, I'm sure getting to travel about and write about the 50 best courses in the Carolinas.

- Yeah, that was, it was harder than it looked, but it was a lot of fun, I played a lot of golf in a lot of great courses and I get to choose the one I played at, which is a lot of fun.

I went from Linville Ridge up in North Carolina, well in the western borders, all the way to Hilton Head.

What's fascinating is South Carolina, North Carolina probably have more, more better courses than any states in the country because there's so much variety here.

You go from the Sandhills of Pinehurst then the mountains and then the coast, so you got three different kinds of land.

Florida has basically the same kind of flat terrain.

California is interesting, but not quite as neat as the Carolinas.

- Your golfing has taken you to some pretty exotic places, you've just gotten back from Indonesia.

- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

We belong to a group called International Golf Writers, we have a t-shirt that says, "Sign it and see what happens."

So we go around everywhere, just getting everything free.

But this is the, this is called the Golf Writer's Writer's Cup.

And it's put on by a fellow in Columbia named Parker Smith of all places.

And we went to 10 of us, American golf writers, played 10 Japanese golf writers in Bali, Indonesia now.

And the Sheridan Hotel picked up the tab along with Garuda Airlines.

And we played nine days, the Ryder Cup format, which is the same way they played down at the Kiawah last year.

And we lost, we had a lot of fun though.

And out of that, we'll write a lot of articles about it and generate a tourist business for Bali, which is a beautiful place.

We played golf in a extinct volcano and monkeys running around, these macaque monkeys and some Cobra I'm told, and a few years back, some tigers.

So it was wild.

It was just beautiful country and it's all laid out like rice patties, all the courses are built like the terrace things.

And we bought a lot of clothes and stuff.

Had a lot of fun.

- Let's move on to one of your other books, the Chitlin Strut book.

That has a lot of stories too.

Let's talk a little bit about now about your storytelling and your writing.

Are you a storyteller first?

- I used to tell a lot of jokes, but the jokes ran out.

I don't know what I am.

I've never really, it's really hard to know what you're all about.

I don't think I wanna know too much.

I'm a constant surprise to myself 'cause I can't quite decide what I'm gonna do next.

I don't know, I don't know if I am, I guess I can tell a story.

No, I'm not a standup storyteller, I don't wanna do that.

Had a couple beers, I'll tell a story, but I'm not that kind of person, I don't think.

I think if you do that, you tend to not write because you talk it out of your system.

Matter of fact, I talk real fast and that may be why I don't talk a lot, but I guess, but I do talk a lot, I'm talking now a lot, right?

Yeah, I don't know.

- What about the Chitlin Strut book?

Read us a little passage from that, you've got it right beside you.

- This is a lot of fun.

But these are all articles from Esquire and where else?

Travel and Leisure Holiday, Saturday Post, all collected.

It didn't do very well because books that are collections never do well.

But there's some, this is, there's a real good thing in here I wanna read to you.

This is about Doug Broome from Columbia here.

He used to own that chain of Hamburger around town.

And I worked, I was a grill cook for him for years when I was in oh, junior high school and I was, I did the curb and I worked the soda fountain.

And this is a long article I'm not gonna read.

Let's see.

I'll read you the first paragraph then I'll read you a scene within it.

How's that?

Because that'll give you a good idea what's going on there.

Out under the red and green, in the yellow fast food neon that circles Columbia, like Mexican Ball fringe, Doug Broome was always famous.

As an 8-year-old curb hop, he carried a pair of pliers for turning down the edges of license plates on the non tipping cars.

He was already planning ahead.

By that I mean when a car didn't tip, you take his pliers and turn it down, so when that guy comes back again, he gets very slow service, if any.

Anyhow, Doug grew up during the depression in the kerosene lit bottom, one block from the cotton mill and two from the state penitentiary.

When he was nine, his father went out for a loaf of bread and in storybook fashion, returned 18 years later.

Doug left school in the fourth grade, worked his way up from Curb Boy at the Pig Trail out on the Broad River Road to bakers on Main Street and finally to his own restaurants all over town.

There was a Doug's on Lady Street and while I was still in junior high, he hired me on the sandwich board and the big grill.

He taught me how to stay on the duck boards to keep from getting shin splints, how to make an omelet and a hundred things behind the counter that made life easier.

I copied his freewheeling moves with a spatula and the French knife and his chopping technique on onions.

And his big takeaway when he sliced a grilled cheese or buttered toast.

He also introduced a lot of us to the 10 hour day, the 12 hour split shift and the killer 24 hour rollover.

Somehow, he thought we all had his energy.

Now reaching the scene here where I come back and interview him and I ask him about, well it's pretty obvious I guess.

Doug has energy, incredible energy and may be the kind you see in skinny kids playing tag in a rainstorm or the kind that comes with holy roller madness.

He had black curly hair, bright blue eyes, wore outrageous clothes.

And every year, had the first strawberry Cadillac convertible in Columbia.

When he was young, he won the jitterbug contest all over town, taking shots at everything Gene Kelly was doing in the movies.

He was wild with clothes, with cars, with women.

Some of his checks may still be bouncing.

To investors coming to town to do business with him, Doug was a mystery, a threat.

His pink pipe matching shirt and slacks and his lightning weight of money scared them off.

To them, a bounced check or a bankruptcy judgment or a stack of subpoenas was like the neck barrel and the tin plate of the leper.

But in Doug's empire, this was only his way of doing business.

And Doug had an empire.

He became the father he never had for his family, his help and his friends.

He worked them, loved them, punished them.

Sometimes he would sit down and list the problems he was having with them.

Someone was getting married before they were divorced or divorced without benefit of attorney.

Some couple would leave for a stone mountain honeymoon with a backseat stacked to the window level with Doug's beer and the trunk loaded down with Virginia hams and cigarettes.

Someone was always running off with a friend's wife or husband getting drunk, wrecking the wrong car and getting locked up.

And a few of the more spectacular cases managed to do everything at once.

But Doug would just go and say, we're just one great big old family out here, mashing out hamburgers and making friends.

When they were in jail, Doug bailed them out.

When drunk, sobered them up and when in trouble or sick, he gave him his lawyer and his doctor.

He never took them off the payroll.

They stole a little but Doug, with some sixth sense knew about how much and made them work longer hours.

It was a good relationship.

And when the unions came around to organize, Doug would just laugh and say they were already organized.

A little bit more?

- Yeah, just tiny bit.

- Okay.

One day he told me, "Billy, these chain operations are ruining the hamburger, ruining it.

Most of them come from up north to begin with, so what in the hell they know about cooking?"

Any fool off the street will tell you the minute you freeze hamburger, you ain't got nothing.

God, I might each slide one of those three ounces out of a bun and throw it across the room and it will sail.

I ain't lying, that's how thin that thing is.

He was eating his own Doug Broome double burger.

Now you take this half pound baby, I don't care what you think you can do to it, there ain't no way in the world he can make it any better.

No way, I used the finest ground meat there is, the finest lettuce, the finest tomatoes and onions.

And Billy, I fry this piece of meat in the finest grease money can buy.

These chains are getting, they're made out of Mexico, ain't no telling what's in it.

Hell, I read that in the government report.

He went on about how he had gunned down the big boy franchise when it rolled into South Carolina.

Everybody in town knows I always call my hamburger big boy.

He used to serve them, am I right or am I wrong?

He didn't wait for an answer.

Anyhow, they already steamrolled across everything west of the goddamn Mississippi.

And here they come heading across Tennessee, then across Alabama, then across Georgia.

But when they hit that South Carolina line, I said, whoa, now, you ain't franchising no big boy down in here because I'm already the big boy.

Gentlemen, you and me are going to the courts.

And that's what we did.

They brought in a wheelbarrow of money and eight or nine lawyers, Harvard lawyers.

And all I had was my, and all I had going for me was my good name.

And Billy, we beat them to death, I mean to death.

They had to pay me $60,000, all the court costs and everything.

He paused and sip his coffee.

Well you know I never liked to kick a man when he is down and those boys had all that money tied up in promos and big boy neon.

So I say, okay, y'all give me another 10,000 and you can have the franchise and I'll change Big Boy to Big Joy.

I knew a few of the facts and I said, come on Doug.

And he raised his, and then he raised his hand to heaven.

Boy, why would I tell a lie about something like that?

Part of the story was that was true.

Outside of North Maine, the old Big Boy read Big Joy, but eight or nine Harvard lawyers turned out to be one old retainer out of Charlotte.

The $60,000 was right, but it went the other way.

Doug had been the infringer and had to pay them.

- Oh no.

- The $10,000 never existed.

Doug was like that.

Like all great storytellers, he was a consummate liar.

A straight tale would be transformed into a richer, wilder mixture and the final version, while sometimes spellbinding and always logical, had nothing to do with the truth.

- Okay, great, that's great.

Bringing it to life that's the secret, how about your writing?

- I hope so.

- Let's finish with your last one, "Lunatic Wind" about Hugo.

Talk about bringing a story to life.

How would you describe that?

A docudrama about Hugo?

- I had a lot of trouble doing that book.

It took me a lot longer than I thought.

Maybe three years.

I kept trying to do it nonfiction to get all the information in, but that made it so dead.

And I know a lot of nonfiction writers and they're very clever people and they organize stuff beautifully and they sweep you along.

But I've never really been taken, I'd never really liked nonfiction because it doesn't give you the inside feeling that I wanted.

So then I tried it fictionally, and I couldn't get all the facts in because you can't have a character step out of character and tell you a lot of stuff about how hurricanes are formed off the coast of Africa.

And so I was kind of stuck and so that, and I tried what I finally wound up doing, which is pretty satisfying.

But I think I probably could have done it better, had a, I don't know, but this may be as good as I can do it.

But there's information about hurricanes, like how a fish will sense a hurricane coming and swallow stones and go to the bottom of the ocean, right?

To avoid it.

And horses will feel it, and dogs.

There's details like how in the Midwest when tornadoes came through, the saloons would all the churches would all blow down, but the saloons would stay intact.

And finally some old drunk told the churchmen should open your doors the way the saloons do and... But that kind of detail would not have fit into a fictional book.

So what I did was took these fictional characters, which are based on people I knew, except for Stan Salter the captain there, he's true.

And Jennings Austin, the principal of McClellanville High School.

And I used the them as kind of focal points.

The kids out on the island were other kids I knew about and I put them together.

So all the big scenes, McClellanville, Isle of Palms and Columbia, that's all based on True, yeah, that's all based on true.

- That's absolutely gripping.

- Well Salty was true, Jennings, Austin and the kids were true, that's the three main sequences, yeah.

- Terrific book, I wish we had more time.

- Yeah.

- Thank you for your time on this program.

- You're certainly welcome - From Columbia, I'm Patti Just.

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