Wayne Flynt

Published on July 25, 2017

Photo of Wayne Flynt "I remember...breaking off one inch square sections of Alabama hard clay...at that point I decided not only that I had to go [to college] because I wanted to be a minister, but because I was not going to spend the rest of my life terracing yards."

Chapters

Transcript

EVAN MUSGRAVES: So, we’ll just start off with your early life. When
and where you were born.

WAYNE FLYNT: Yeah. It’s hard to say because people always ask where
you’re from which is a classically southern question sort of like, “What is
your sign?” in California. In the, my parents were Alabama people. My mom was
just from Pinson, north of Birmingham. My dad was from a little community called
Shady Glen on the Coosa River. And after they married, Dad had not finished high
school; Mom had eloped the night, the night after she finished high school. So
she was working at a five and dime store. Dad was selling coffee and sold
various things and had worked in a steel mill before that. And they were looking
for a better place to live. And 1940 was, Dad was angry at his job and wanted to
go someplace else and he made a really bad mistake and went to Pontotoc,
Mississippi which is near Tupelo up in the north Mississippi hill country. And
it was a terrible choice because they didn't even know the Depression was over
there.  They were still just basically tenant farming, white tenant farming. So
I was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi on October 4, 1940, but they left six months
after I was born so if I tell people I am from Pontotoc, Mississippi they say,
"Oh, do you know so and so" and I say we, I was not really precocious in the way
of knowing anybody at the age of six months. So we moved back to Birmingham and
dad went to work here with an insurance company and went to Sheffield and from
Sheffield to Anniston and from Anniston to Birmingham and Birmingham back to
Anniston and Anniston to Gadsden, and between the ages of six and fourteen I
went to twelve different schools in two different states. We were really like
wisps in the wind, just being blown here and blown there. My dad lived in
thirty-six houses before they died in four different states. And so I had what
could kindly be called a transitory life. But I was born on fourth of October,
1940 right at the, in the crease of the Great Depression and the Great War.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What were your parents like?

WAYNE FLYNT: Mother, Mae Ellis Moore Flynt, was born in Pinson, Alabama in 1919. On
November 22--easy to remember, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. She
grew up, her father was an alcoholic, but the only college grad on either side
of my family. He had finished Howard College, curiously enough, in 1924 and had
become a school teacher and principal but his alcoholism basically kept him from
keeping a job for very long. So he changed from job to job but almost always
lived in Pinson in a rock house where my mother grew up--fieldstones picked up
out of Turkey Creek basically. Vernacular architecture of that region. She was
quite bright; went to Jefferson County High School in Tarrant City at that time.
Then my dad, who was two years older, had been born in Shady Glen, which is in
Calhoun County near the Coosa River, in the western part of Calhoun County. His
father was a sharecropper. My granddad, until late in his life, could not read
or write, so they were a white sharecropper family. His mother was one of
eighteen children; he was one of eight children. So, a very large, typical poor
white family, farm families. He farmed with his brothers and sister, his
younger--the youngest; dad was the youngest of eight so his two youngest
siblings, a sister and a brother, farmed until the 1930s. Dad left the farm when
he was basically kicked out of school for his temper and sassing a teacher and
decided that he didn't want to go back so he dropped out of school in 1937 and
went to work at Virginia Bridge Company here in Birmingham as a steel worker,
rivet catcher as they were called. Catch red hot rivets and put them in the
gauge that they were building for the Tennessee Valley Dam. And then he went
from there to a whole series of sales jobs selling coffee, insurance, biscuit
crackers, and ultimately, for most of his life, works for Swifting Company Meat
Packers as a salesman and manager in various places.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Did your grandfather ever tell stories from his time…

WAYNE FLYNT: He was a great, he was a great storyteller.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: …From his time at Howard/Samford? Your maternal grandfather?

WAYNE FLYNT: Not, not Samford. No, he did not. He almost never talked about Howard
College which was really interesting. For him, as for so many people in the
western part of Birmingham, Howard College was just a convenience. He was one of
seven brothers himself on a poor white farm in Clay, what is now Clay. He was
young, young, the youngest of the seven and FeMoore was his name. Felix Moore,
but they called him FeMoore. Very, very smart. Extremely smart. But his father
died when he was just a very, very young boy so he never knew his father very
much. And he worked on the farm. And the other six siblings never had any
ambition to go to college. And he caught a streetcar and rode it in from the
Pinson area and a bus and a streetcar to the East Lake Campus. And never talked
about Howard at all. And he would tell you he was the greatest storyteller so
that was unusual.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What kind of activities did you like to do growing up as a kid?

WAYNE FLYNT: It was a fairly solitary life. And solitary in the sense that most of the
places we lived, my maternal cousins were not anywhere near. They were all
centered at, in fact, I had seven cousins that lived within 100 yards of each
other, in Pinson. And we infrequently came home to visit them because Mother was
alienated from her grandfather and her dad was sort of an embarrassment to her
all of her life. So we did not come home a whole lot. And Dad very seldom took
me to my paternal cousins. We lived in Georgia, we lived in Atlanta. Two or
three times we lived in Augusta, Georgia. So it was not easy to negotiate the
roads in that time in Alabama, so we didn't come home a whole lot. And being an
only child and having moved constantly so that almost every year you were at a
different school, and in the first grade I was in three schools for instance, in
different states. I was in three schools in two states.  You did not know
anybody. And kids being kids, they were cliquish and so you sort of ate by
yourself which I think probably turned me into, I think that affect
psychologically, either turns you into sort of a recluse or it turns you into a
garrulous and, you know, you intrude on other people’s table if they do not
come sit with you. And I tended to go the other way rather than be a recluse; I
became extremely social in a pushier way in conversations. I always had friends
at churches which is where I derived most of my friendships. So, I would say
that I was very solitary and in fact, I have often, when I was doing my doctoral
work on American politics in the 20th century, I was fascinated that FDR's
childhood was so much like mine. Certainly he was considered a very affluent
family and I was in a lower middle class family. But on the other hand, he was
an only child and he did not have lots of jobs. And though he was stable and I
was mobile and transitory, he was really into stamp collecting. So was I. And
stamp collecting is sort of, the absolute ultimate in solitary kind of
childhood. So I collected stamps and early on, my mother and dad had a really
strong work ethic. I do not think I have ever known two people who worked as
hard as they did. And, so early on, there was an understanding that if you are
ever going to amount to anything in life you’re going to have to start working
really early. So when I was, I guess, about eleven, I was, I got newspaper
route, delivering the Augusta Chronicle in Augusta, Georgia. So I had a lot of
responsibility. You had to be there every morning, and you, had--or every
afternoon, it was an afternoon paper. Every afternoon after school I would
deliver the paper. I do not remember any friends at all in Augusta. It was a
solitary, pay attention to your stamps and deliver your newspaper route. When we
moved back to Atlanta in about 1953 I guess, yeah 1952 or 1953, I had a lawn
mower business. And I still shudder to think of that brand new subdivision with
lush lawns, basically fertilized with chicken manure and how thick the lawns
were and I had a push mower and I charged a quarter a yard. A quarter for a
small yard and seventy-five cents for a large yard. I had all the business I
could handle. That was partly because I was way too cheap. I needed to take a
course in marketing and economy philosophy because I would have died a poor man
if I had gone into the lawn mower business. Then we moved to Dothan, Alabama and
I had a, again, I had a paper route, The Dothan Eagle and delivered that. And
that was when I was about fourteen. But interestingly, I, they gave me a route
that people did not want to have because it was a working class white
neighborhood and people would move off without paying you. It was not a
responsible group of people. So I had to pay attention, for instance, I
collected weekly rather than monthly because I knew they were so transitory that
they would be gone within a week. So I managed that route so well that the
circulation director for the Dothan Eagle asked if I like to be the route
supervisor for the entire newspaper. And that meant I was responsible for making
sure all the papers were delivered. I was responsible for the supervision for
all of the paper boys. I was responsible for going around on a Cushman motor
scooter, of which I was quite proud, and taking all paper racks where they had
coin machines and you had, you had a key that opened the coin machine, you
collected the money and hoped that nobody had broke open the machine and stole
all the papers. But I had to do all of that. So, basically, there was not much
time for any, you know. I went to church pretty much every time the door opened.
And I still have my stamp collection. And I was route supervisor for the
newspaper. And I was pretty much, once again, a pretty solitary life except for
the kids at church, Calvary Baptist Church. But other than that, and I did not
have much social relation with them. We did not live there about two years, less
than two years. High school was a different matter. We went back to Anniston
where we had lived three or four times before. And in Anniston, I had what, I
guess what I would describe as more normal teenage years. You know, playing ping
pong with people at church and really being able to form friendships for the
first time in my life because the people at Parker Memorial were wonderfully
engaging and open. They accepted my mother and father even though they were not
as well educated as other members of the church. So I would say that there I had
a more socialized adolescence than I had had up until that time. My years before
Anniston, before I was, I guess I was there, I graduated when I was seventeen so
I must have been late fourteen just before my birthday because actually I would
not have been allowed to start in Alabama but Georgia allowed you to start
school if you were born in October so long as a doctor approved your maturity
you could start first grade so luckily I was not held back a year as I would
have been if we had been in Georgia when I started first grade.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Did you grow up in Baptist churches?

WAYNE FLYNT: Altogether. My, my maternal grandmother had been a Presbyterian. But my
alcoholic father had been a Baptist and fairly well known in Pinson Baptist
Church. And that was where my mother was baptized. Dad was not terribly
institutionally religious. And to the degree he was anything, he had been Church
of Christ. His family had been . But even then it was more like a community
church. And it was only when his sister married a Church of Christ minister that
his father and mother joined the Church of Christ. So Dad was not terribly
institutionally religious. Mother was more religious and so we wound up going to
Baptist churches everywhere.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: How did you end up at Howard College?

WAYNE FLYNT: That is a, that is a sort of involved story. By the time I was at Parker
Memorial Baptist Church in Anniston I felt very distinctly called to preach. And
I had been active in Dothan Crusade for Christ and various revivals, tent
meeting revivals. Helping put up tents and that kind of thing. So I was really,
really involved in the church. At Calvary Baptist Church--first time I was
really involved in a church was Calvary Baptist Church in Dothan. Then Parker
Memorial Baptist Church in Anniston. And at Parker Memorial, we had a remarkable
pastor named B. Locke Davis. In fact, I did an oral history with him which is in
the archives here at Samford. And Locke really, he was, he became my mentor. He
wanted me to go to, he had gone to Southwestern Seminary, but he didn't care
whether I wanted Southwestern or Southern, he just wanted me to go to seminary.
He wanted me to go to a Baptist college. But money was a real issue in our
family. So, and I really was not real keen on going to college anyway. I was a
terrible student. I hated school. I had been jerked around so much that I missed
whole chunks of critical skills especially math and science and things like
that. In addition to that, schools in Alabama were terrible. Schools in Georgia
were not much better. But I was woefully unprepared for college. If there was a
guidance counselor at Anniston High I don't remember a guidance counselor.
Nobody in my family could actually advise me about college. My granddad never
talked about college. My other grandfather had not even finished high school.
And my dad ended up finished high school. So, it was just, sort of, it was like
an amorphous kind of "Well, there is college" but what does that mean? It was an
abstraction that no one could talk about it except B. Locke Davis, my pastor.
But I knew I had to go because, if I was gonna be a preacher, I had to go. And I
remember Dad putting me in the backyard-terracing the backyard with a pick and
shovel and a terribly hot summer and breaking off one inch square sections of
Alabama hard clay with that pick. And at that point I decided not only that I
had to go because I wanted to be a minister but go because I was not going to
spend the rest of my life terracing yards in the back of Appalachian houses. So
then it just became, where do you go? I had three amazing teachers in high
school. The school was not good and I was woefully unprepared for what was there
anyway. Well, actually had four good teachers. I had Billy Bancroft who was a
graduate of Howard College. Billy had been a little all-American football player
before the era of Bobby Bowden. But he was a legendary player. He was also a
great baseball player. In fact, had beaten Dizzy Dean, the legendary baseball
player and later announcer on national television for syndicated baseball
announcer. And Dizzy Dean had played in the Dixie World Series in Birmingham and
Billy Bancroft was playing for the Birmingham Barons and he got a hit and 1-0
game and beat Dizzy Dean. He also had been a pre-min at Auburn, I mean at
Howard. Which is kind of unusual for a football player. But he was really smart
and taught biology, zoology, and geometry and algebra in high school. An unusual
combination for the head football coach to teach those classes. But he was
really good and, so, to the degree that I learned any science or math in school,
I learned it from Billy Bancroft, a Howard grad. Then I had Janet LeFevre, who
was a Pennsylvania native who had gone to Cornell and was the wife of an officer
at Fort McClellan who had retired to Anniston after the Second World War and
Janet was definitely not from these parts. She was very demanding. She was very
frank and not soft-spoken at all. Very brittle, abrasive. A no-nonsense type of
person. And when I transferred from Dothan to Anniston, in Dothan they had had
Latin. I had taken the first year of Latin. When I transferred to Anniston, they
barely had French and Spanish. And nobody would stay there for the salaries they
paid anyway. So, I could not take Latin anymore and I had this blank spot in
this schedule. And so they looked at my schedule and I think they probably were,
saw it as a hopeless mishmash and not much of anything and deficient in every
way. So what they did is put me in this speech class. Well, I had, did not want
to take speech class. I had no interest in this speech class. But this woman,
Janet LeFevre became another mentor of mine like B. Lock Davis. Billy Bancroft
was too busy coaching baseball and football to be a mentor to me. But Janet
LeFevre was a wonderful mentor. And she decided she was going to make an actor
out of me. And I hated acting. And worse than that, she put me in a role in a
play which involved me kissing this girl. I had never kissed a girl in my life
and I was not about to start in front of my 700 classmates at Anniston High
School which suggests that I was not very precocious in the way of dating
either. Which was true. So, I refused to do that and we had a sparkling argument
about the play. And I finally retreated to my religious values and said I was
not going to do it because I didn't think it was appropriate since I didn't know
this girl and had no interest in her whatsoever so she said, "Okay, that's fine.
But you are going to build the scene, the scenery." And I said, "That's fine."
So I built the scenery which was okay. But she got me interested in debate. And
we had never had a debate team. But that was something she had learned at
Cornell and her high school in Pennsylvania and brought to Anniston. And my
debate partner was Don Stewart who would become not only president of the
Student government association at the University of Alabama when I was president
at Samford but went to the University of Alabama Law School, became well
connected through his fraternity to the machine that ran the University of
Alabama and from there, was appointed United States Senator when the US Senator
died so Don was a United States Senator for a term. And we were really good. We
were a really good debate team. We won every tournament we went to. We won the
state tournament. And I had also won, I had been runner up, in the Birmingham
News oratorical contest and that involved a scholarship to Birmingham Southern
which has now, was offering scholarships to everybody in the world because their
tuition was twice what it should have been. So they would discount tuition by
giving some modest scholarship. Well I didn't want to go to Birmingham Southern
first of all. And I thought it was a little bit too arrogant and high falutin.
And I felt more comfortable at Howard. When I visited here, and I was a Baptist
and I wanted to be a ministerial student so it all made sense. I had a
scholarship to the University of Alabama but there was no scholarship to Howard.
And though Howard was really inexpensive, tuition was $250 a semester ( I know
that's incomprehensible to you), and so B. Locke Davis writes Harwell Davis
(this was Harwell Davis' last year as president) and he said, "I have this young
ministerial student who really wants to go to Howard and he is a debater. Is
there anything you can do in terms of scholarship?" Well, they had just hired Al
Yeoman on the faculty here. Al had been here a couple of years and started a
debate team. And there were not many experienced debaters because very few high
schools in Alabama had a debate program. So to find somebody who has some
experience in debate and had actually done well just thrilled Al. And they
didn't have formal scholarships but they had what were called work scholarships
where you would do some sort of work: research for Al or you would sit in the
office when the secretary was gone on lunch. It was sort of ‘make work’ kind
of thing. Student welfare I guess you could call it. So, Harwell Davis wrote B.
Locke Davis that he was going to send the request to Al Yeoman to see if Al
could do anything to help. Well they gave me a partial work scholarship and with
the ministerial scholarship (which was half tuition so that was $75) and the
work scholarship covered pretty much the rest of it. So I could afford to come
here. And, of course, in a way it was very appropriate because the, at least of
my friends, the vast majority of them were first generation college students. So
they were like me, so I felt very comfortable here. I didn't feel at all
intimidated which I probably would have felt if I had gone to a fraternity
dominated school like Alabama. I certainly wouldn't fit. I didn't have any use
for fraternities anyway. I've never liked the social stratification that that
represents. And Birmingham Southern would have been an exaggerated form of the
same kind of socio-economic culture. So, I felt really good. The only thing I
lacked was I had absolutely no self-confidence. I really, I had fairly strong
feeling I would probably flunk out my first semester or so. I graduated on
Friday night, started college on Monday morning in June 1958 and went straight
through. Partly to save money and partly because, in the early days at least, I
was not sure I was going to make it. And also, I figured that if I flunked out
that summer nobody would really know because everybody else would be going off
to college in September rather than June and I'd be coming back and going to
work in one of the pipe shops after I flunked out. But I didn't. I did really
well. My summer, that first summer, of course there was nobody here and nobody
lived on campus during the summer those days. I think there was one other, Lewis
Lesson from Scottsboro, were the only two people on our entire hall. He was a
freshman, I was a freshman. He was doing the same thing I was, trying to go
through in a hurry. And so, we both graduated in three years.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: So you got to Howard right as the new campus...

WAYNE FLYNT: Yes, correct.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: ...was being completed?

WAYNE FLYNT: That's correct. My wife was here, she had a year on the old campus and a
year on the new campus which was 1957-1958. During that year, that was Harwell
Davis' last year so Leslie Wright and I were freshmen together. He was a
freshman president and I was a freshman student. And in 1958 my wife, who had
been two years ahead of me in school (and, of course, I made up one year by
going straight through for three years), but she was the one who bore the brunt
of it because that was when they didn't have any landscaping at all and every
time it rained there would be this sea of mud covering the sidewalks and you
would ruin shoes and ruin dresses. And for me, the next year, they had the grass
had been established and it was still a mess when it rained but nothing like
that first year. According to my wife, it was a nightmare.

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Date	2016-05-24
Interviewer	Evan Musgraves
Interviewee	Wayne Flynt
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Collection	STORI Collection
Accession	SUHist/Faculty/002

Wayne Flynt

Chapters

Bio and Early Life

Parents and Grandparents

Childhood Activities

Going to Howard

Transcript