daughterofthedelta

One of Sara's original dolls

“I have rarely been bored because I always have a project or two just waiting for me to find time to enjoy. Sewing has been my favorite hobby, and I have spent countless hours at the sewing machine. When the girls were growing up I made nearly all of their clothes and was my happiest when I had a new piece of fabric and a new pattern. In fact, I acquired so much fabric there was no place to keep it all.

“My love for sewing and pretty fabrics paid off in 1975 when I decided to make bottle dolls and sell them. I had read an article in Decorating and Crafts magazine describing how to make a doll using a throw-away drink bottle. I tried making one and thought it was so cute I would make a few and give them for gifts. After I had made about eight or ten, using different fabrics, and showed them to friends, everyone bragged on them and said they thought I might be able to sell them.

“So I got busy and started turning them out and in April when the Carrollton Pilgrimage was held I decided I would take some of them over to see if they would sell at the crafts show on the Court House lawn. I decided I would ask $10 for each of them, to which Russell said, ‘You’ll never get $10, maybe $5.’ He agreed to go with me, however, to help me set up a table and see what I could do. I went back on Sunday afternoon and in the two days sold fifteen dolls for $150, and thus started the doll venture which lasted nearly eight years.

Sara and Liz Williams at that first Carrollton crafts show, 1975

“From there we went to Moorhead, Cleveland, Yazoo City, Kosciusko, Canton, Columbus, Germantown, Northport (Alabama), Memphis, Greenville, Bastrop (Louisiana), Forrest City (Arkansas), Calhoun City, Batesville, Hernando, Marks, Grenada, Belzoni, Vicksburg, Leland and some other places I can’t even remember.”

For those of you who don’t know all of Sara’s story, you’ve now entered one of her most fulfilling periods. By 1975, Cathy was married and living in Birmingham, I was starting medical school and in a Jackson apartment, and Sara’s newspaper career was simply not enough to keep her boundless energy contained. She had always gleaned ideas from craft magazines, turning odds and ends into the most amazing creations, but this particular idea truly struck a chord. When she put together the first little doll, we all patted her on the back and said something like “Really cute. What’s for supper?” She was used to our indifference to her talents, so she forged ahead and gradually turned 409 East Adams into a bottle doll factory. Each one required a glass Coke bottle, and has her early flea market successes began to pile up, family, neighbors and friends were increasingly challenged to consume enough carbonated beverages to keep her supplied.

You’ll see over the next few days that this hobby turned into a money-making machine, but it wasn’t the cash that kept Sara going (although she certainly enjoyed that aspect of it). With Russell’s help and (usually) whole-hearted support, she invented a brand-new career as the Doll Lady of Mississippi. And you wonder why I often feel like a worthless good-for-nothing if I have a non-productive day? She’s a hard act to follow, even after all these years.

Sara in middle row, second from left.

“The most interesting phase of my whole newspaper career, which lasted altogether for 29 years, was the period of the ’60s and the civil rights struggle and I will try to recall some of this period in more detail.

“There were many hectic times while I worked for the paper, and sometimes I would threaten to quit, but today I would not take anything for the experiences I had, and the things I learned, and the contacts I made during those years. With no journalism background other than my short stint as editor of the high school newspaper, it took a lot of nerve to cover some of the events I did, but I bluffed my way through a lot of them and used the good English background I had received in the Greenwood schools.

“Russell chauffeured me on many of the assignments and stood with me in dangerous situations and encouraged me. Using his sales ability he convinced me that I should not ask people something and add, ‘I’m sure you probably don’t want to tell me’ but should be more positive. I never did get good at asking people embarrassing or personal questions because I always thought about how I would have felt in their position.

“I am sure I had as many stories and pictures as any of the other correspondents and more than most used in the paper. I was invited every year to the editor’s luncheon during the Mid-South Fair in Memphis and recognized as one of their top correspondents.”

Remember the very first blog title, way back in April? “She was interesting, because she was interested.” Who would have ever dreamed that the third little Evans girl on Strong  Avenue would grow up to do what Sara did? With no formal training and no journalistic pedigree, she talked her way onto the staff of one of the South’s premier newspapers and built a stellar career that lasted almost 30 years. What she has shared in the pages of her memoir is just the barest tip of the iceberg. I remember very few days that she wasn’t out with her notebook and her camera, checking on trouble or stirring up trouble or turning over stones for tidbits. Afternoons were devoted to pulling it all together, developing photographs to go on the last Greyhound to Memphis and typing up stories to be transferred over to the teletype. And all the while she was tending to every need that Russell, Cathy and I had, generally with equanimity and patience. We all lived by the deadline, but we were also proud as punch when her byline appeared in the Commercial. It was just a wonderful way to grow up, watching our world interpreted for the newspaper’s readers through the eyes of someone we loved.

She didn’t pat herself on the back very often, but she does just a bit in this section of the memoir. I think occasionally she looked back at what she had accomplished and thought, “How on Earth did that happen?” Some blind luck, a whole lot of talent and sheer grit.

Barrett's Drug Store fire

“I guess the most traumatic times for me as a reporter were the fires which destroyed or badly damaged so many of the familiar landmarks which were a part of my memories. Watching Woolworth’s burn, and Davis School, and the Paramount Theatre (which was all over when I knew about it) and the old building on Howard Street across from Deposit Guaranty Bank [more recently Planter’s Bank, corner of Howard and Market], brought tears to my eyes.

Davis School fire, December 1980

“It was early one morning when I stood across the street and watched Barrett’s Drug Store burning. It had caught fire from the building next door which houses ‘Evelyn’s Britches.’ I could remember it as it was when I was a little girl (it was much smaller then) and remembered the many times I had stood at the front of the store and sipped a Coke while talking to Garrard Barrett and Pat Hemphill and Mr. Burks. Daddy bought us candy there and we walked up there after movies at the Paramount.

“Woolworth’s and Barrett’s were built back, but they were never the same to me. The old Woolworth’s had counters of beautiful dark wood which held what I thought must have been all the treasures of the world. I knew every counter and what it held by heart. I still miss Woolworth’s when I want some small item and cannot find it in today’s big discount stores. They just do not take the place of an old fashioned ten cent store.”

The nature of Sara’s job found us often at the scene of fires and we shared a deep love and appreciation for old buildings, which made it that much harder to see them go down in ashes. I’m glad I wasn’t in town when Davis School and Barrett’s and Woolworth burned, as there are some things you just don’t want to see. I was around on that very cold winter night when the pool hall on Market Street caught fire, sending the flames into Staplcotn’s warehouse in the middle of a heavy snow shower. Sara and I stood in front of Gray Evans’ law office and watched those blazing cotton samples explode out of the warehouse and land on neighboring roofs along Howard Street. The fire chief told Sara that if there hadn’t been heavy snow on the roofs, they could have lost whole blocks of Howard Street. That’s just too close for comfort.

“The Delta Band Festival and Winter Carnival were always a big event, with 110 bands participating one year. Thousands of people attended this annual event, which was held in early December. I took pictures at both the morning and night parades, standing on a ladder at the end of Howard Street or running up and down the street. We usually went down by the Red Cross where Mama worked so the children would have chairs to sit in. After the morning parade Russell would have to rush the film over to Cleveland to put it on a Greyhound bus so that it would get to Memphis in time for the next morning’s paper.”

Sara’s second favorite day of the year was the second Friday after Thanksgiving (her favorite? Christmas, of course). Her old buddy, Roy Martin, had enshrined that traditionally rainless December day as the time for Delta Band Festival and Winter Carnival, a beloved Greenwood tradition that celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. During her heyday with the Commercial Appeal, Band Festival had grown into a monster of an event, pulling in what seemed like thousands of yellow school busses from Pass Christian to Iuka. They would be lined up all around the old high school on Cotton Street, discharging spiffily outfitted flutists and tuba players and drummers and majorettes and baton twirlers. Somehow, every year, out of this chaos and confusion, two parades, morning and evening, full of high school students and elaborate floats and that man among men, Santa Claus, lined up and marched and played and heralded the real arrival of the season. And Sara was, as usual, smack in the middle of the action, lining up photos and jotting down names and soaking it all in. Which meant Cathy and I got to soak it all in as well. Schools were out that day and Greenwood kids were the luckiest in Mississippi. It was like a giant house party and we were turned loose for the whole day downtown. The morning parade stepped off from the old high school campus and wound its way south on Howard Street. That was fine, but it was just a dim warmup for the real show, the night parade.

When I helped the Chamber of Commerce’s Young Leadership class put together the 75th anniversary book last year, I tried to explain to them the atmosphere of those December nights in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was hard to convey just what this tradition meant for our generation. The anticipation began in mid-November as city crews strung the colored lights on the wires lacing back and forth across Howard Street and Carrollton Avenue. Garlands and candy canes and reindeer went up on the lightposts. Thanksgiving came and went, a necessary hurdle to jump before the real holiday kickoff began, promptly at 5pm on that second Friday. We would be huddled in mounds of sweaters and coats and mittens and hats, little excited lumps in lawn chairs in front of the Red Cross building at the south end of Howard Street. That was the ultimate location, as the bands and floats had to slow down to make the turn from Carrollton onto Howard. It seemed to always be bitterly cold, although I doubt it was ever much lower than the mid-40s.

As the skies over Greenwood darkened, it was as if the whole city and thousands of visitors were lined up on every sidewalk and hanging out of every downtown upstairs window, every breath held.  Right at 5 o’clock, not a second before or a second after, the Greenwood Utilities whistle split the night and the Christmas lights seemed to explode in a blaze of color. Back across the tracks on Johnson Street, the Greenwood High School drum major’s baton dropped and sent the Bulldog Band marching off into the first notes of “Jingle Bells,” their cadence setting the pace for 60 or 70 or 100 bands to follow. Float after float after float made that tight turn onto Howard Street, sporting miles of wadded crepe paper and bundled-up Brownies or waving pageant queens or papier mache fireplaces. And the grand finale, the culmination of all this revelry, was the arrival of Santa Claus, on his own float with prancing reindeer, very definitely the real Santa, not one of these imposters that sad towns without Band Festivals had to hire as substitutes.

When it finally ended, we would make our way slowly back across the river to North Greenwood, watching the fireworks light up the dark skies and silhouette the bravest band members, those who had scaled the steel girders of the Keesler Bridge like young squirrels. Through the years I have met so many people who, when they find out I’m from Greenwood, pause just a bit, laugh, and say, “You know, one of the most fun things I ever did was come to Greenwood in [name the year] and march in the Christmas parade. And I climbed the bridge!” That night had remained seared in their minds, a night when, just for awhile, they experienced the magic that those of us lucky enough to grow up in Greenwood take for granted.

Sara was there for the very first Band Festival parade, way back in 1935. And she went to every one until her health made it tricky to navigate the crowds. She didn’t like it when they changed the route to bring the bands across the bridge to North Greenwood and down Grand Boulevard to Park Avenue. That was heresy. But she would call me, in those years when we were living in Jackson or Tupelo or Scotland, on those early December nights, and whistfully say, “I can hear the parade. They’re playing Winter Wonderland.” It always made me homesick in the worst sort of way.

“Two years later (1973) the county was again declared a major disaster area when what they called a ‘100 year flood’ covered the county and did millions of dollars damage. Many houses just outside of Greenwood to the north and south were in water up to their eaves, and a good part of the farm land was under water. I would ride around with the supervisors in their pickups to view the situation and one day rode the levees with the U.S. Engineer Paul Hughes. Since they were worried about Greenwood proper they decided to put a fence around the whole town [on top of the levees]. Jane Biggers at the Commonwealth suggested that people paint designs on the fences, so they ended up with all this colorful artwork on them. I wonder if the engineers have ever done something like that, the building of all those fences, anywhere else before or since. It really seemed like a big waste of money.

“But I got scared one Saturday morning when I was at a meeting with some of the top engineers from Vicksburg and one of them said a four inch rain might get North Greenwood, and the clouds were already building up. I came home and got all of my photographs, which were stored in a low cabinet, and put them in a higher spot. I guess the pictures were all I planned to save, but I had always said in case of a fire I would grab those first.

“Another time the big old iron bridge spanning the Tallahatchie River at Money had partially collapsed and fallen into the river, and the U.S. Corps of Engineers were going to blow the rest of it up. Paul Hughes, the engineer, invited me to ride up there with him to take pictures of the bridge being blown up. That was the only time I ever wore a hard hat but even then I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that close by, so we went down the road to Money and stood in front of the famous store where Emmett Till, the fourteen year old Chicago Negro, got in trouble for which he was later murdered, starting a lot of our civil rights problems.”

I was in college when the waters rose across the Delta in 1973, and I was really oblivious to what Sara was telling me about this slowly developing disaster. I had no idea just how bad it was until I tried to get home from Clinton one weekend. Russell had sketched me a roundabout route which would take me through Jackson, up I-55 and down to Greenwood through Vaiden and Carrollton. Being a cocky 19-year-old know-it-all, I ignored his paternal advice and came barreling right up Highway 49, which was just fine until somewhere around Cruger. At that point, the roadside lakes which had replaced the familiar cotton fields merged in the middle of the highway and I was skidding along with no clear sign of where road ended and fields began. And it wasn’t much better in Greenwood, where the Yazoo seemed to be ready to leap right across Front Street and down Howard. Needless to say, my return route was what Russell had recommended all along.

And the plywood “fence.” Good heavens, what were they thinking? That was a notorious eyesore for what seemed like decades, although I’m sure it stood for only a few years. It might have kept the water back for a few hours, if that, but it was certainly not a reassuring structure. Sara thought it was one of the most hideous insults to ever descend on Greenwood, and it didn’t help that her old newspaper nemesis, Jane Biggers, promoted the idea of painting the panels.

“There were many interesting experiences associated with the newspaper job. One time we went up to Philipp to cover a story where a man had fallen into a huge tank of beans and only his head was sticking out. They were afraid he would suffocate, and firemen and others worked for hours before they finally rescued him that night. We stayed until they got him out.

“I had to work sometimes twelve or fourteen hours a day when we had catastrophes like the flood in 1973 and the tornadoes in 1971. Those were the times when I was exhausted, but they were also the most exciting times to be a reporter. It was the society, the sports and the obits that became so boring.

“We had taken Cathy back to Ole Miss in February, 1971. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was hating to see her go because she had a flu-like illness. The clouds had been boiling and the pavement sweating all day. Just before we left to go to Oxford, Ed McCafferty, the Civil Defense direcctor, called me and told me that there were storm warnings out all over the state. He had never called to tell me this before even though I always checked with his office when we were under a watch or warning. Just as we approached Greenwood coming home the sky became almost black and it was obvious we were getting ready to have bad weather.

“We had just walked in the house when Elmer Gwin next door called and said he had heard that Inverness had been almost blown away. Since Inverness was not far from here we really began to worry. I had just told Russell I thought we might be smart to get under a table or something when we decided to go to the Court House where the Civil Defense office was located in the basement. When we arrived there the Court House was full of people who had left their homes to come there because the basement had been designated as a shelter. It was utter bedlam and calls were coming in from all over the county saying tornadoes had struck and people were killed and hurt. A highway patrolman and his wife from Grenada had been blown off the road in their car at Fort Pemberton and killed. The storms had struck just west of Greenwood and throughout the whole county.

“I was trying to get information to call in to the paper and could not get through to the hospital to see how many injured had been brought in, so Russell suggested I go with two fellows who worked for the radio station to the hospital to get information while he would stay at the Court House. They had a small Volkswagen, and I had never seen either one of them before, but we headed out together. We had had torrential rains, and River Road was under water.

“I could see other cars stalled and kept telling them they should not head down there in that little car, but they ignored my warnings and went right ahead. Mr. Gillette and his son, both crazy, who lived on River Road were standing in the water waving to cars to turn back. By this  time we were stalled in water which was up to the floorboard, and Mr. Gillette was beating on the car and cursing and telling us to go back. I didn’t know whether I was going to drown or be killed by a crazy man. Anyway, I decided it was time to abandon the car and head back to the Court House about a block away. All the time the men were telling me that if I opened the car door the water would ruin their camera equipment, but at this stage I didn’t care. I got out, held my dress up, and waded through the water which was over my knees. Some of the neighbors shouted for me to come on over to their house, which I did and called the police and told them to come calm the Gillettes down.

“I walked on over to the Court House barefooted and holding my ruined shoes in my hand. Russell said he was glad I had at least taken my girdle and stockings off when we got home from Oxford. Anyway, I worked the rest of the night barefooted and with a wet dress. In fact, when Russell and I finally got to the hospital by another route. I walked in in that shape and I think they thought I was one of the victims.

“It was a hairy night to say the least. Thirty-nine people in the county were killed and hundreds injured and dozens of houses in the rural areas destroyed.”

Teletype copy for a tornado-related storyLetter of thanks to Sara from Senator James Eastland

So many of Sara’s escapades run together in my mind now: Fires, civic unrest, political rallies, board meetings, it’s hard to differentiate one particular event from another. But the night of the tornadoes in February, 1971, stands out clearly. I was under the kitchen table when Sara and Russell returned from Oxford, and I remember clearly voicing my concern over their sanity when they said we were heading across town to the Court House. It was one of those late afternoons when the sky was a color not normally found in nature and the concrete was puddling with sweat. You knew something very, very bad was coming over the horizon, but radio and TV weather coverage was so limited then that it would be almost on you before you knew it. My vote to stay home was overruled and we bundled into the car for the trip across the Yazoo. Russell drove, Sara scribbled notes to herself and I got down on the back floorboard. As we came across the new bridge, I looked west out the back seat window and saw the funnel cloud lifting up over the river out by the hospital and the Buckeye. It was becoming quite apparent that this was not going to be one of Sara’s adventures that was in and out and over quickly. We were in for a long night.

The Civil Defense department in the basement of the Court House was familiar territory to me. In those days of the Cold War, it was the storage site for huge cans of beans and cases of Spam, our disturbing culinary fate if the Russians dropped the Big One on us (which, of course, we were sure they were planning, given the crucial strategic importance of Leflore County, with its vital grain elevators and access across three rivers). On a normal day, the CD rooms were quiet and fun to explore, but on that winter night there was barely controlled chaos. Reports were filtering in that several small Leflore County plantation communities had all but disappeared and no one seemed to know how many were dead or injured. I remember Sara heading out for the hospital, but I don’t recall whether I wanted to go with her. It would have been better if I had, as I could at least swim; she never learned. What I do remember is her return to the Court House, looking for all the world like a sheepdog that had been caught in the pasture during a thunderstorm. Russell was sympathetic but trying to hold back his laughter, and she didn’t appreciate that one bit.

We made it through that night, and many folks didn’t. To this day, that ominous funnel cloud is the only one I’ve ever witnessed, and I harbor a healthy respect for bad weather. Sara spent weeks covering the aftermath of the storms and got several front page bylines in the Commercial Appeal. Her River Road ordeal was probably the most dangerous situation she ever got herself into, between the flooding car and the local loonies, and I just have to admire her courage and determination to get the story at whatever cost.

“I got very interested in politics after covering City Council meetings and Board of Supervisors’ meetings, and I kept up with everything that was going on. I also attended a lot of meetings and enjoyed being in on the day-t0-day happenings of Greenwood and Leflore County.

“Some of the trials I covered were quite interesting, especially the murder trials, the last one I covered being that of three youths charged with murdering two men at the Leflore County Country Club. That was the last big story I covered, and I got a byline on the front page several days straight. Of course, I always liked those bylines.

“Another interesting case was that of the mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter charged with planning the murder of the woman’s husband by the daughter’s boyfriend. I had already covered his trial when he was sentenced to the state penitentiary. Both them were sentenced amid much dramatics when the girl pretended to faint, etc. Other big trials included the one in which two men were charged with killing a policeman’s son and putting his body on the railroad tracks and one when two black men murdered a highway patrolman.”

One of Sara's earliest murder trials

It wasn’t all debutantes and football games and little boys fishing on a lake bank. Like any community, Greenwood had its share of lowlifes and knuckleheads and there were many tough trials to cover. Most involved people that Sara didn’t know, but on occasion it could get very personal up there in that grand old Leflore County courtroom. I’m sure Sara discussed the sordid details with Russell, after Cathy and I were put to bed and delicate ears were asleep. And I’m sure she was upset at what she saw and heard, not only in legal matters but at City Council and Board of Supervisors and anywhere that folks given a bit of power forgot about decency and good judgement. She had her favorites on those panels, but none that she admired like Jimmy Green, Bill Kellum and James Hooper, all supervisors in the ’60s and ’70s. All of them, Sara included, must be restless spirits when today’s Board starts its usual circus routine.

I do recall one trial in the big courtroom upstairs at the Court House, when I was probably about 10. Sara was covering it, a rape case involving someone from (I believe) Grenada. She had left me at the library and I decided to wander over and see how things were going. I slipped into the back of the courtroom, took a seat and started hearing a lot of details that I simply didn’t understand. Sara left the press area, rushing to meet a deadline, and spotted me as she was coming down the aisle. I will never, never forget the look of abject horror on her face as she realized what I had just been exposed to. She practically pulled my arm out of its socket getting me out of there, propelling me down the stairs and off to the car. I had a bucket full of questions to ask her but the timing was obviously not optimal. All I recall of her explanation was that there were bad people in the world and everyone connected with that trial was low down and untrustworthy. And we left it at that. I never pulled that stunt again.

1971 Greenwood Bulldogs

“I learned a lot about sports, which had never been my favorite interest, but on things like golf tournaments I had to depend on someone more knowledgeable to tell me what was going on. I got pretty good at covering track meets, coming home and typing up all those statistics and sending them on to the paper for the next morning’s edition. Criss [Russell] helped me with football games.

A Commercial Appeal high school press pass, circa 1965

“Bill Street asked me if I would like to handle sports schedules and scores for all of North Mississippi and make a little extra money, so I agreed. I lined up student reporters in some 150-200 schools who called in their football and basketball scores right after the game. The paper paid for us to have an extra telephone put in so that Criss and I could both be taking scores at the same time. On Friday nights during football season and nearly every night during basketball season we sat in the kitchen taking calls until around eleven o’clock.”

Those were fun nights during football and basketball seasons. During the summer, there would be an assembly line on the kitchen and dining room tables as Sara and Cathy and I stuffed envelopes with press passes and instructions for student reporters. Sara paid us by the hour, much as she had with Tricia at her old Chamber of Commerce job. On Friday nights, we’d leave Bulldog Stadium in the third quarter so we could be home in time for the first phone calls. For a couple of hours, both phones would be ringing non-stop and we’d speak with each student reporter (some of whom signed up year after year), their voices betraying their school’s victory or defeat. Sara would be feeding the scores into the teletype and zipping them off to Memphis, and the next morning you could find out at the crack of dawn just how well Indianola or Pontotoc or Myrtle or West Tallahatchie had performed the night before. Now I suppose you just check the internet or have the scores zapped into your Iphone with an app, but something is lost in the process.

I tagged along with Sara to golf tournaments and track meets, helping her keep up with the results and marvelling at all those big high school kids who seemed so talented. I do remember one golf event at the Greenwood Country Club when Cathy and her friend, Sandra Spencer, told me that two of the participants were Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and I should go get their autographs. So, of course, I went up and said, “Mr. Palmer, Mr. Nicklaus, could I have your autograph?” The golfers (who were probably from Yazoo City or some such) stared at me for a minute and then just fell apart laughing. Sara jerked Cathy and Sandra into knots for being such little smart alecks, but I thought the whole episode was pretty funny myself. Those two old duffers are probably still telling that tale in the clubhouse.

One other story: I met several folks in college who had been Sara’s “student reporters” at their high school. It was a big deal to them, as they carried a press card and had to scoot off to find a pay phone as soon as their team’s game was over. One of these friends has his press card in his wallet to this day and has used it to get in college football games, rock concerts and across police lines at crime scenes. He just flashes the word “Press,” looks important and off he goes. Sara’s kind of guy.

“Every year I dreaded the time for the debutante activities because I knew the board members would start calling about publicity and complaining if the Greenville bunch got a better spot than they did. Finally, after many years of fooling with them, I stuck my neck out and told them I would not send anything else in and they could handle it themselves.

“I had one lady who wanted publicity regularly for the Phi Mu sorority of which she was one of the alumni. I was expected to cover every meeting, every luncheon of the local alumni, and the actives, especially at rush time. When I could not get everything I sent in used, she was sure it was because ‘there were Chi Omegas on the society desk at the Commercial Appeal.‘

“Today [1990] I have the utmost respect for the poor souls who are relegated to the society department of the newspaper, for I am sure they have earned their star.”

For the sake of peace in the extended Evans family, the less said about sororities, the better. I wasn’t in one (unless you count Nenamoosha Social Tribe at Mississippi College) so I am not qualified to comment.

“Society was the most unpleasant part of my job, since it was next to impossible to please all the ladies. At that time the paper picked out about seven of the girls they deemed to be the most socially prominent and used their engagement pictures in a larger size on the front page of the Sunday section. Of course, every mother had deemed her daughter as one of the chosen ones, but the paper often had a different idea. It kept me on the spot as the mothers gave me all the reasons their daughters should make front page.

“Every year when the debutante season began and again when the big ball was held in late December I received a barrage of phone calls from the old ladies who served on the board, most of whom were fourth and fifth generation Deltans. They insisted that I give the Southern Debutante Assembly just as good a spot as the Delta Debutante group, which was older and held their parties in Greenville. When I told them I had no say so about where the stories and pictures went, the Board president told me she would just ‘have to use my pipeline through the editor who plays golf with my brother.’ I promptly told her to go right ahead since I did not have a pipeline.

“There was much jealousy between the two groups because the Southern Debutante Assembly had been formed when some of the board members and parents of debutantes got mad at the Delta Debutante Club when they had newspaper editor Hodding Carter, as Master of Ceremonies. Mr. Carter had expressed views which at the time were considered very liberal in Mississippi and had made a speech up north which they felt was not consistent with the feelings of most Mississippians, so they asked that he not be allowed to serve as MC at the December ball. Since Carter was very much a part of Greenville society, they were not about to remove him, and so several of the board members resigned and started a new debutante club centered in Greenwood.

Hodding Carter, editor of the Delta Democrat Times

Our neighbor Kim McLean was making her debut that year. Her mother, being a Kimbrough, and her father, Hite, being a leader of the Citizens Council, were greatly disturbed about the MC but would not deny her the right to be a debutante, so they had someone else introduce her to society in place of Hodding Carter. Lenore, her mother, told me that we did not have to let our daughters be debutantes since she and I ‘were born into society.’ I told her if I was no one had ever told me about it.”

Debutante season peaks right after Christmas, and Sara would start wadding up before Thanksgiving. And wedding season, spring and summer, was almost as bad. There is something about mothers and college-age daughters and newspaper society pages that is a volatile brew, and Sara would get caught every year in the middle of unreasonable expectations. She actually lost some friends in the process, because she couldn’t magically turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse or elevate someone’s little princess into the upper echelons of Southern Society. She was not familiar with the term, “Get a life!” but I believe it would have come in handy more than once.

Lenore McLean was a dear neighbor and a memorable character, and she and Sara butted heads on occasion, over debutantes and ditch drainage and various East Adams incidents. She provided Sara one of her favorite stories with that comment about being “born into society,” a patently ridiculous observation that we enjoyed recalling for years. Sara found pretentious people boring and silly and she knew exactly where the Evans clan fit on the ladder of Delta families. Somewhere square on the middle rungs, holding up both the top and the bottom by just being decent.