Bill Garner’s famous last words

By DOLPH HONICKER

When I heard President George W. Bush tout nuclear power plants as his No. 1 solution to global warming and our energy problems, I thought about the late Bill Garner and the piece I wrote about him and his late wife, Mary Tex, that appeared Jan. 31, 1979 on the editorial page of The Nashville Tennessean.

Bush won’t read this; I hope you will:

“A man’s last words ‘have an aura about them if not a halo,’ according to Edward S. Le Comte, editor of the Dictionary of Last Words.

“Not Bill Garner’s. His had just a whiff of fire and brimstone. They were vented at TVA, a federal utility that appropriated part of his family land to build the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant. One of the giant, almost completed cooling towers now casts a shadow across the Garner property.

“Bill’s 11-year-old son William shoots baskets in the yard behind their modest ranch-style home. From that distance the cooling tower resembles a beer can someone had squeezed in the middle and tossed out of a car. William’s mother, Mary Tex, can look out the kitchen window and see the squeezed beer can sitting there.

“Bill Garner, a Scottsboro, Ala., lawyer and former assistant attorney general for the state, declared war against the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1970.

“‘Bill and I had just built our house. I was in the yard planting grass,’ said Mary Tex, a lawyer in her own right and a former Alabama state auditor, treasurer and secretary of state.

“‘The TVA agent came by and nonchalantly said he would like for me to sign this form, that he wanted to look over our property for educational, economical and scientific reasons,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know why I didn’t sign except that I’d been working in the grass and my hands were dirty.’

“Bill was out of town and the TVA agent pestered Mary Tex day after day, she said. ‘One Saturday night -- I remember it very well because I happened to have on a bathrobe and the children were running around -- the agent knocked on the door and I invited him in,’ Mary Tex said.

“‘He looked at my fireplace and said it must be wonderful to have all these logs to burn and what a shame we’d built our house there. I looked at him like he was crazy or I was crazy and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you this, Mrs. Garner, if you don’t sign this form the federal marshal will be here in two or three days to serve you.” ‘Sure enough, this tremendously large man showed up ... and served me with the papers.’

“Said Bill later, ‘In the beginning the fight was just to hold onto the land. That was before I knew anything about nuclear energy. As we got further into it, I realized nuclear energy was evil no matter whose land they took.’

“A shining amalgam of liberalism and conservatism, Bill was called everything from environmentalist to radical to fanatic and cared not a tinker’s damn. ‘We anarchists,’ he joked, ‘don’t always throw bombs.’

“He saw true liberals and true conservatives as ‘brothers under the skin’ who could unite to halt the spread of nuclear energy, which he called the ‘greatest moral issue of our time.’

“In his 54th year, Bill knew he was dying. But he fought on, he said, not for himself but for his children.

“‘Bill not only was close to Clarence Darrow in his philosophical bent, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance as well,’ said Leroy Ellis III, a Nashville lawyer whom Garner aided in an intervention against the Hartsville nuclear plant, the world’s largest. ‘This past year, Bill seemed to be living beyond and outside himself.’

“This was noted by other friends who urged the stubborn, chain-smoking Garner to quit the great god Nicotine and take it easy for awhile. But no, last fall at a gathering of the Catfish Alliance at Vanderbilt University, he stood puffing on a cigarette, eyes hollow, cheekbones stretching skin, and gasped out words of Jeffersonian wisdom, for it was Thomas Jefferson he most admired.

“Bill put himself into the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham Jan. 4, gave the nurses fits for hiding his cigarettes, and fought three heart attacks before dying at 4 a.m. on Jan. 17.

“Lord Byron uttered his last words in Greek. Schiller in Latin, and the Arkansas poet Albert Pike in Hebrew. According to family friend Tom Paul of Huntsville, Bill spoke his in Anglo-Saxon vernacular.

“Last words fascinate. Marie Antoinette’s were: ‘Monsieur, I beg your pardon.’ (She had stepped on the executioner’s foot).

“Bill had a love-hate relation with TVA. The early work, the potential, the promise, he loved. He also had a professional prize fighter’s respect for one of his adversaries, TVA lawyer David Powell. But TVA was subsidizing a dying industry, he said. Mushrooming electric rates, a rural North Alabama still downtrodden after four decades of TVA progress, and that atomic beer can in his front yard led to Bill’s last recorded words:

“‘I only wish I could take a dozen of those TVA bastards with me.’”