daughterofthedelta

“One time when I received a letter from De La Beckwith, threatening to blow up or otherwise get rid of Frank Ahlgren, editor of the Commercial Appeal, if the paper ran a bad picture taken of him [De La] in the jail at Jackson, I sent the letter on to [Bill] Street [CA Assistant Tri-States Editor]. I asked that he show it to no one, but at least I would not be the only one who knew of the threat and asked that he try to locate the picture, which had been made when De La was arrested for the murder of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader. I knew if someone else at the paper got hold of the letter and printed it Frank Ahlgren and I would probably both go.

Byron De La Beckwith at a Klan rally near Greenwood. This is one of Sara's photos.

“Street probably knew more about Mississippi politics than any other person except Ken Toler in Jackson. He could tell some very funny stories on the politicians, and I was always glad when he came to see us. He and I covered some of the Freedom Schools being held here during the summer of 1964, and I remember some of those characters were so filthy that we rushed in when we got home and washed our hands before eating lunch.

“When Street dropped dead with a heart attack in his office in the early ’70s, I felt as if I had lost my best friend. He was only in his late forties, and it was a big loss for the Commercial Appeal.

“I continued to send stories to the Jackson Daily News until the teletype was put in, and then decided I had better not jeopardize my job with the Commercial since I wasn’t getting much out of the Jackson paper.”

Are you starting to get a feel for Sara’s precarious position as Greenwood correspondent for the Commercial Appeal? Through the dark years of the Civil Rights era, she walked a daily tightrope, trying to gather and report the news in an independent manner, always conscious of journalistic ethics and responsibility, while not drawing attention to herself and her family from people who were irrational at best, vicious at worst. She had grown up with De La Beckwith and knew that he was more than capable of slithering up to Memphis and blowing up her editor’s home. Beckwith was certain that Frank Ahlgren was Jewish and was only using the “bad photograph” story as a ploy, and he just refused to listen to Sara’s protestations that Mr. Ahlgren was an active Presbyterian. You cannot deal rationally with lunatics, and Sara kept her guard up where Beckwith was concerned until the day he died in jail.

She adored Bill Street, and I remember his visits to our house fondly. He was one of those very talented journalists who could hold his own with the national newsmen and broadcast correspondents who wound up in our teletype kitchen, but he would also sit down and have a serious conversation with a ten-year-old. I think his steady hand and faith in Sara got her through those challenging years in the ’60s, and much of the fun of newspaper work for her died with “Street” that day in his office.

I also remember a few trips up to the Commercial Appeal offices in Memphis. The paper was published out of a multi-story building somewhere downtown (it has since moved out a bit from downtown) and it was like a scene from that classic movie, The Front Page. A huge open newsroom was filled with dozens of desks and clattering typewriters and copy boys bustling out with the latest stories for the editors to look over. There was a low-hanging cloud of cigarette smoke above the desks and everyone had a cup of coffee going. I’m sure there were a few bottles of Jack Daniels in the side drawers, but I never saw that. It was such a vibrant, lively space and I longed for someone (who would have had to look like Spencer Tracy) to burst in and yell, “Stop the presses!” My husband and kids laugh at me because I remain, to this day, a newspaper junkie. There is nothing finer than to have a stack of clean papers just waiting to be read, pristine and chock full of good writing. I read a few on the internet but real newspapers must be held and folded, their ink leaking off onto your fingers and staining your clothes. When you are raised on the rhythms of a daily deadline and the clicking of teletype keys was the background music of your earliest days, you’re an addict forever. I will probably be the last person in America standing on my sidewalk in the dark, waiting for that rubber-banded gift to land at my feet each morning.

Cathy and an early kitchen teletype

“Sometime around 1960 Gene Rutland [Commercial Appeal Tri-States Edition editor] asked me if I would let them put a teletype in for me, and I agreed. It was then they began listing Greenwood as one of their bureaus and paying me a small salary. The first teletype they brought was big and bulky and took up so much room in the corner of the kitchen that we had to cut off part of the eating counter, which Russell said was his part. It sounded like a big machine in a newspaper office and had to be left on most of the time. You couldn’t even hear the phone ring when it was on. I resigned myself to not having a kitchen anymore but a newsroom instead. We didn’t have it long, however, and they brought in a smaller, quieter, more modern one. It stayed on and you could read all of the news going into Memphis from the other bureaus so we always knew what was going to be in the paper the next day.

The Commercial Appeal gang. Once again, Sara is smack in the middle. I believe that is Bill Street leaning on the typewriter.

“We would send little notes back and forth to each other and could converse with folks in the office. Rutland was like a little Caesar and very hard to work for, so I tried to have most of my contacts with Bill Street, who was assistant tri-state editor and later political editor. He and I were very close, and I knew I could relay things to him that I did not want to go in the paper and that he would honor my request.”

I thought I had a normal childhood until I went off to college and found out that no one, no one, grew up with a clattering wire service teletype in their kitchen except me. And Cathy. There was a series of teletypes, each one a bit wider and bulkier than the previous model, and they sat in the corner of Sara’s kitchen, wedged between the built-in table and the window with the air conditioner. It was a tight squeeze, and poor Russell came home one evening from a long day on the road to find a small mound of sawdust where his place at the table had been that morning. He looked at the table, looked at the teletype, shook his head and ate his supper standing up by the stove. We all squeezed in a bit tighter and made room for him somehow.

For all its weird presence, the teletype was our window to the world. Way before anyone had ever dreamed of the internet, this magic machine chugged away on its own, its yellow paper scrolling out with notes and news from all over the Mid-South. Some of it was serious; much was just banter between Sara and her cohorts in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. They were a tight-knit bunch, united in their dislike for Gene Rutland, a tyrannical editor who laid impossible demands on their shoulders. Bill Street was more of a Perry White type, who understood what it took to motivate his writers and made them feel appreciated and valued.

I have hundreds of pages of teletype chatter which Sara saved, and these informal notes provide invaluable insight into her mindset as she covered the news of the area. And I wonder if there are others of my generation, other children of the Commercial Appeal’s lost legion of correspondents and bureau chiefs, who are also sitting on such a treasure?

A typical teletype page

Unidentified congressmen with Elizabeth Saunders, Kat Williams and J.B. Williams at Cotesworth, 1961

“One time Congressman Frank Smith invited me to accompany a group on a watershed tour. There were nine Congressmen, some high-ranking engineers and others on the bus with us as we rode around the hills and curves of Carroll County. We ended up at Cotesworth, home of the late Senator J.Z.George, near Carrollton, where the Carroll County Garden Club members were waiting to serve us mint juleps in silver cups. We were invited to a party for the group that night at the Greenwood Country Club but did not have a babysitter so could not go.

“The paper carried a feature every Monday titled ‘Our Home Town’ featuring some small town in the tri-state area. This feature ran on the front of the second section of the paper and was usually good for three and sometimes four pictures. So Russell and I visited nearly every little town around and wrote them up for this page. They also ran a series of ‘Our Home Folks’ features and I sent in a lot of those.”

One of Sara's "Our Home Town" photos

Looking through Sara’s scrapbooks of 30+ years with the Commercial Appeal is like peering through a mirror into Mississippi’s recent past. She could put the spin on tiny towns like Sumner or Shelby or Merigold and make you want to pack your bags and relocate. Her years of Chamber of Commerce apple polishing stood her in good stead in those hamlets, most of which have dried up to fly specks on the map now. But not everything has changed; I spent a spectacular fall day today out at Cotesworth with Kat Williams and her cows, and the old house is just as inviting and majestic as it was when Sara’s Congressional entourage pulled up out there fifty years ago. It’s comforting to know that some things never change.

These are the Dionne Quintuplets. They were not born in Memphis.

“One of the most interesting stories I covered was that of a woman from Drew who claimed Dr. Lucas had told her that she was expecting quintuplets (at that time the Dionne were the only quintuplets who had survived). She apparently was a mental case and a stringer for the Memphis Press-Scimitar from Drew thought that she had an exclusive story.

“So the day she entered the hospital in Memphis, the Press Scimitar filled the paper with huge headlines and pictures saying that the birth was imminent and quoting her as saying Dr. Lucas had told her she would have five babies. I stayed on the phone all day trying to get a statement out of Dr. Lucas and finally that night they called from his office and Russell went down and picked up a statement from him and his lawyer, Hardy Lott, saying that there was no truth to the story and that she was only expecting one baby. It was one of the biggest newspaper blunders ever, and the Commercial Appeal enjoyed it immensely since they competed all the time with the Press Scimitar for fast breaking news.”

Sara spent many of her later days glued to Fox News. I think she got a charge out of their incessant “Fox News Alerts,” complete with dramatic music and graphics. She loved tracking down stories and never wanted to run up on deadline without all the facts. Fox (and all the other networks) could use a few Saras.

Robert Mitchum in "Home from the Hill"

“I covered everything from track meets to debutante parties, from murder trials to street demonstrations, and truly my newspaper job was an education worth as much as all the years I attended school. There were many exciting times and I was in a position to meet a number of celebrities and important people. Movies, or parts of movies, such as Ode to Billy Joe, The Reivers, The Music Man and Home from the Hills were made in or around Greenwood, and I got to take pictures and talk to some of the actors and actresses including Robert Mitchum, George Hamilton, Ralph Bellamy, George Peppard and director Vincent Minelli.

George Hamilton in Greenwood

One of my biggest thrills came from being able to introduce Mama to Mark Rydell, who was directing The Reivers. He had played the role of Jeff Baker in As The World Turns.

“I also got a chance to talk with Steve McQueen, the lead actor in The Reivers. One big disappointment was when some of the crew filming Home from the Hills with Robert Mitchum out at one of the cotton compresses one Sunday morning invited me to share a box lunch with them and I declined because I knew Russell was at home with Cathy and Mary Carol and they would have to have lunch.”

Gosh. To think Sara gave up lunch with Robert Mitchum and George Hamilton to come home and make me a grilled cheese. That’s maternal dedication. She loved having those movie companies in town, whether it was the upscale crews for The Reivers, with its big-name stars like Steve McQueen and Will Gear, or the fly-by-night cheesy B-movies like Ode to Billy Joe.  There was just something about all that acitivity and energy and stardust that thrilled her, and I wished over and over again last year that she had lived long enough to see The Help take over Greenwood. She did read the book and was surprisingly noncommittal about it. I think she was of the generation that had lived that life and she found the fictionalization (and to some degree, sensationalization) of it off-putting.

The incident she mentions with Mark Rydell begs expanding on. Sara, Jessie, Big and other women in our family were riveted to As the World Turns for decades, from the first day that Chris and Nancy Hughes walked into their lives in 1955 or so, courtesy of CBS, until they could no longer follow the plots (or lack of plots). If you were hungry or bored or bleeding to death on a weekday between 12:30 and 1:00, that was just your bad luck. You could not raise an adult female in this family to tend to your crisis for all the tea in China. And “Jeff” was a much beloved character, somebody-or-other’s husband, who slammed his car into a concrete embankment when actor Mark Rydell decided to ditch that job for directing. So here he is, Jeff resurrected and in-the-flesh, right there in Greenwood, trying to direct The Reivers, and Sara dragged the poor man over to meet Jessie and Big. They were like starstruck teenagers swooning over the Beatles, and Big kept lapsing into calling him “Jeff.” He was the sole of kindness and patience, and that is a lovely, enjoyable movie.

One of several articles which Sara wrote on "The Reivers"

Commercial Appeal Tri-State correspondents, late 1950s. How did Sara always wind up in the middle? There she is, fourth from the left, middle row. The one who isn't dowdy.

“Another time shortly after I started covering news I was asked to go to a habeus corpus hearing in Circuit Court for a fifteen year old boy from Lucedale who had been sentenced to Parchman for rape. This was my first court case, and again I wasn’t at all sure what a habeus corpus hearing was all about. The boy’s lawyer asked me to take a picture after the hearing with the boy’s parents hugging him. So I sent Russell to the car for my camera and started snapping away. In a minute the sheriff, John Ed Cothran, walked over and told me that the judge, R.A. Jordan, wanted to see me at the bench. I was petrified.

“Fortunately he had known me a long time and knew that I was new at this game, so he laughed and told me that you didn’t take pictures in the court room without the judge’s permission. He did let me keep my film though, and I don’t remember whether the paper used the picture or not, but the lawyer asked me to send him a copy. He obviously wanted it to gain sympathy for the boy.”

Sara had exactly one semester of college, plus a few post-Christmas weeks before she convinced Jessie that this money was going down a drain. She never took a law course, never ran for office, knew nothing of police procedurals or emergency management. And yet by hook and crook and just keeping her eyes and ears open and gaining the trust of most everybody in authority, she wrote detailed, accurate articles on public corruption, murders, elections, scandals, you name it. She wasn’t scared of the devil himself and she absolutely loathed anyone who shamed Greenwood or cast her and her neighbors in a bad light. And Russell? He was often in the background somewhere, keeping an eye on developments, living vicariously through this interesting woman who he knew to be a terrible driver and above-average cook and dedicated mother and crackerjack newswoman. I asked him once, not long before he died, if he had ever considered a career other than the one he chose, stocking baby food and pickles and ketchup. Without hesitation, he told me he wished he could have been a newspaper editor. Who knew?

Sara in her early newspaper days

“After starting to work for the Commercial Appeal in August, 1956, as their Greenwood correspondent, I spent most of those early years involved in routine coverage of news, society, sports, obits and doing feature writing. I tried to write as many feature articles as I could because there was more money in those when they used pictures, and sometimes they would use three or four pictures. I guess I took pictures of half the people in Greenwood at one time or another, and children provided me with all kinds of photographic opportunities. I much preferred a session with the kids rather than a garden club group where all the ladies expected me to make them look glamorous.

Leflore County Court House. Photo courtesy of Mary Rose Carter

“My first assignment was to cover a District Democratic Caucus at the Court House. I did not dare admit that my knowledge of caucuses was very limited, so I just knew I would ‘blow it’ before I ever got started. Russell said he would go with me, but he didn’t know a bit more about what was going on than I did. It seemed this caucus was considered very important because Governor J.P.Coleman was trying to swing it a certain way. The press was sitting up in the jury box, so Russell and I went up to take our place there. Coleman took his seat on one side of us and Congressman Will Whittington on the other side, and they talked over us the whole time.

Governor J.P.Coleman

“When it was over I was just as ignorant as I had been when I entered the court room. Jay Milner, a reporter for the Greenville Delta Democrat Times, asked if he could come by our house to type his story, so I figured I could get him to tell me what really happened. I took his facts and sent them in, but a short time later I got a call from Ken Toler, the bureau chief in Jackson, asking me how I came to those conclusions about the outcome of the caucus. Apparently, Milner didn’t know much more than I did.”

Sara went into this with no clue about what she was getting herself into. She could handle debutantes (although she dreaded that yearly ordeal more than any other) and garden clubs and wedding announcements, and she got to be quite a pro at crafting readable obituaries. If you think it’s easy writing a decent obituary, pick a random local personality and try to do one. There’s an art to it. Anyhow, Sara was up to the challenge of local tidbit news, but the Commercial wanted more. So she gamely packed up her steno pad and her pencils and her camera and slipped into that courtroom, where she had likely not been since Dr. Dean went on trial for Dr. Kennedy’s murder, twenty years before. Then they put her in the jury box, between two of the most powerful men in the state, and what must she have been thinking? Political intrigue was thick enough to stir in that old high-ceilinged room and she couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but she stuck it out. I’m sure Russell was just sitting there wishing he could get out and smoke, but he stuck it out as well.

I have no clue whatever became of Jay Milner, but I suspect his journalistic career was not nearly as exciting as Sara’s turned out to be. Within just a few years, she was a familiar sight in the halls of the Leflore County Court House and Greenwood City Hall. I would often be tagging along and even as a child I knew she carried some weight when those big, swaggering men, the supervisors and police chiefs and city councilmen, would spot her and immediately go into something like “Now, Sara, we don’t need to put this in the paper…..” or “Let me give you my side of the story, Sara…” Didn’t do them a whole lot of good, but it sure was fun to watch.

Bunny Hopping through 2nd grade, Miss Eubanks' class.

“While the children were growing up there were swimming lessons at the city pool, a short stint on the swim team, fun at the city playground at Little Red School House. There were school programs where Cathy was the Queen of Hearts one time and Gretel another and Mary Carol had the lead in a second grade program about a lollipop and another where she played an Eskimo, wearing one of Melanie’s coats with a big fur collar.

Cathy as Gretel, center

“I was often a room mother, a job I like and which most mamas didn’t, so it was really no honor for me. I always took cookies and cupcakes on special occasions, and I am sure was called ‘pushy’ by some of the other mamas. We were always proud of the girls when they won honors, and to us a history medal or a good citizen’s award was just as important as a gold medal in the Olympics would have been and later, when they were both awarded college scholarships, we were especially proud.

“We made trips to Pensacola and Columbus, Ohio, to see Mary and Howard and on to Pittsburgh to go through the Heinz plant.

Howard Bartling and Russell, 1957, in Columbus, Ohio

We went every summer to Lewis Grocery Company conventions at the Broadwater Beach Hotel on the coast.

The Broadwater Beach train, Biloxi

On one of our trips to Ohio, Son and Betty Jane called to tell us that Susan had arrived and we could hardly wait to get home to see her. Two years later Trey was born.

Jessie and Susan

Jessie and Trey

“In 1959 Claude died of Hodgkins Disease, for which there was no cure at the time. He was sick most of the time he and Tricia were married but kept on trying to work.

Russell and Claude, Christmas Eve, probably 1957

After he died, Tricia decided to build her duplex and move Mama in one side. Several years later, she married Gray Evans, who had been working in Washington as an aide to Congressman Frank Smith, and in 1969 [their son] David arrived.”

Gray, Tricia and David, November 1969

Have you noticed that images of Sara have disappeared from these postings? Her voice is there, but her face isn’t. That’s because she was always, always the one with the camera, behind the lens, snapping away at swim meets and school parties and family get-togethers and joyous occasions. She was the mother who always made the best party favors and the best treats and managed to do it all with a heavyweight camera around her neck. Just amazing.

Susan and Russell, no doubt up to no good

With the arrival of David in 1969, that generation of the Evans clan was complete. It stretched all the way back to Bill Roberson in 1941, so it took us more than the average amount of time to complete the circle. And that’s OK. It just gave Sara more years and more subjects to work with, a total of three nieces and three nephews that she adored. And for those of my cousins who are plugged into this blog, please know that I have by and large protected you from dissemination of the most embarrassing photographs.

Melanie, me, Cathy, in Ohio, 1957

Brownie

“When Mary Carol was about five and Cathy eight we got Brownie. Cathy was afraid of dogs and we decided it would help if she had one at home. So one Sunday afternoon we rode over to Sunflower where Rudy [Russell’s half-brother] was farming because he had told us that he had some puppies to give away. When we spotted Brownie we knew right away that she was the one we wanted. Flipper [Rudy’s son], who was about two years old, would soon have done away with her if we had not arrived when we did because he was squeezing them too hard and had already let one or two of them drown in some nearby water.

Cathy and me with Brownie, the "Brown Bebe"

“Brownie’s mother was a mongrel but she had been courting with a boxer down the road, so we were always sure that Brownie had some good blood in her. She was put in the fenced backyard the first year so that she would not run off or get run over, and then we let her out. Everyone in the neighborhood knew her, and she did not bark or chase anyone except Mr. Poland, the mean postman.

Who needs cats?

“She was a wonderful pet and just like a member of the family. She and Mary Carol had a very special relationship. Cathy always wanted a kitten but did not get one until she was eighteen, when Gray picked up a little kitten by the bridge and brought him home. She named him Russell Grubbe for her daddy and her boyfriend, Mickey, but after she went to Mississippi State we left him out one night and never saw him again. Russell felt bad about his namesake and had one of his Heinz friends pick up a stray by the Crystal Grill one night. We named him Ed Moore for our friend Ed up at Ole Miss. He [the cat, not Ed Moore at Ole Miss] was covered with fleas and we put talcum powder on him to try to clean him up. Brownie was with us for thirteen years and Ed Moore for about as many years.”

A fine and noble dog

I remember that Sunday in Sunflower when we picked out Brownie, and how horrified I was that Flipper had been allowed to drown those puppies. And how excited I was as we drove home and I held that little fuzzy, fleabitten dog in my lap. I named her Brownie in a five-year-old’s homage to Hite McLean’s dog of the same name, who had died a few months before. She was buried in their backyard in a small side garden, and I knew even then that there is a bond between some dogs and some owners that is exceptional.

Brownie and I had that bond. I’ve had many, many more dogs through the years: Sam and Cinnamon and Wheezer and Princess and Spooky and Edgar and B.D. (briefly) and Peanut (even more briefly) and now Terry and Chester and Jack and Finis (on permanent loan) and Lucy (on temporary loan). And they’ve all been special in their own way, some more than others. But there’s something about the dog of your childhood, if you’re lucky enough to have one, that stands apart. Brownie was the one who saw me off to school each morning and greeted me each afternoon as if her whole existence had been on hold until I appeared again. She was the one who slept on my bed and chased my bike to Little Red playground and never quite accepted those two nuisance cats. And she was the one who made me cry when I left for college and who never took another bite of food after that September 1971 morning. Sara and Russell, who were just as devoted to her as I was, begged and cajoled and offered up every treat under the sun before finally giving in to the inevitable a few days later. It took them almost a month to break the news to me that Brownie was gone, and I sat in the hallway of my dorm and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. A friend that night gave me a short Reader’s Digest article by Eugene O’Neill, which I’ve kept for these forty years. When you lose your best friend, the one with the tail and the paws, I recommend it, but only after a bit of time has passed. Google “The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog.” It could have been written for Brownie.

Planning for the big back yard show

“One summer when Melanie [Bartling, Mamie’s daughter] was here she, Cathy, Mary Carol, Jeanne Young, Montine Young and Patricia Murphy decided to put on a show in the backyard. Melanie was the director. I helped them round up costumes (handed down recital costumes, Halloween costumes, and even old evening dresses). All the neighbors came to watch, sitting in yard chairs, even the McLean’s dog.

Standing Room Only. Brownie McLean is in the foreground.

“Cathy and Melanie held up a giant paper doll and sang the song ‘Paper Doll.’

Cathy and Melanie

Mary Carol, dressed up in a green frog suit left over from Halloween, sang ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’

Show Stopper Jeanne Young

Little fat Jeanne in a ballerina costume sang ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’ and Montine sang ‘Tea for Two.’ Patricia Murphy, who was living in Texas and visiting her grandmother [Mrs. Beaman], sang ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’

Patricia Murphy, AKA The Yellow Rose of Texas

Melanie was dressed in one of Pam’s old dance costumes had a lot of glitter on it. It was in July and hot as could be and we had a terrible time getting her out of it because it had stuck to her. She had glitter all over her and was crying and saying ‘I’ll never get it off.’

“After the show was over the girls had a meeting to decide what to do with the money. It was decided that they would contribute it to the March of Dimes (something over $2). They left it in Cathy’s trust but I’m afraid it never got to the March of Dimes.

Our star, Montine Young

“With the neighborhood full of children there was always some activity going on. Sadly, two of the neighborhood kids, Jeanne Young and Chris Eidman, were killed in separate automobile accidents while they were college students.”

Let’s be blunt here. Cathy absconded with the money. We should have given it to Montine for safekeeping. And yes, there is a photo of me in that green frog outfit, but it’s my blog and my negative and there are limits to what I will do to illustrate Sara’s memoirs.