MOBILE, Alabama — At the very end of the novel bearing his name, the character Forrest Gump says, “At least I ain’t lived no hum-drum life.”
Gump’s creator, Winston Groom, certainly could say the same. Groom, the journalist-novelist-historian who died on Thursday at age 77, was a tall man with a very big personality. He leaves behind a massive body of work and an indelible imprint on the memory of those who knew him.
Groom, of course, knew that it was Gump who made him famous when the movie became a cultural touchstone, and he certainly appreciated it, but Groom also thought that novel was literarily among his slighter contrivances. He wrote seven other novels and 14 nonfiction books, including superb histories related to the War of 1812, the Civil War (three of them), World War I, World War II (three), the Vietnam War, the opening of the American West, the early heroes of human flight — and the history of the University of Alabama football, to boot.
Groom’s histories were tremendously accessible works, briskly paced and with a storyteller’s flair. His novels varied in style and tone, but most were irreverent in some ways, with flashes of humor ranging from sly to picaresque. And, before he decided to became a full-time book author, he was a well-regarded reporter for the great old Washington Star newspaper, making marks both with vivid reportage and through a yen for large-living escapades that spawned tales other journalists recounted to young reporters decades later.
“Winston was just an incredible character,” said my Washington Examiner colleague Fred Barnes, another Star veteran and longtime friend of Groom. “He was very interested in writing and in writing well. More than that, Winston made friends like crazy all over the newsroom, even with people as different as one could imagine.”
Here in the two counties of coastal Alabama, where he grew up and where he returned for the last 35 years of his life, Groom was a living legend for local journalists and writers, sometimes gruff (even pretending to be cantankerous) but often generously accessible and prone to sending notes of encouragement when he particularly liked a report or column. (He could also send notes when he was not of the same mind as the columnist, but with a tone exemplified by his opening line: “I respectfully disagree.”) A thoughtful, practical-minded conservative with no patience for puffery, folderol, or demagoguery, Groom could be pithy or even blunt — but always insightful.
As might be expected from Forrest Gump, he also had an appreciation for wit. Witness a little joke he emailed to a group of acquaintances out of the blue: “To help save the economy, the Government will announce next month that the Immigration Department will start deporting seniors (instead of illegals) in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs. Older people are easier to catch and will not remember how to get back home.”
In social settings, Groom could vary from caustic to charming, sometimes within a single minute, but always with the outer bearing of a consummate Southern gentleman. A Vietnam veteran and deeply patriotic, Groom revered those military men about whom he wrote, in the final words of his book The Generals, that “when they died their memory enriched the national trust.”
As literary as was his bent, however, the newsman in him never entirely vanished, showing up in the way even his histories had an air of immediacy. His novel Gone the Sun had as its protagonist a newsman who returns from New York to Mobile to run the bay coastal town’s fictional paper. Its closing words (apart from an epilogue) were these: “The press run was finished. The edition was closed.”
But oh, what a richly readable edition Groom produced.
