Drive-in Theaters

The drive-in movie theater—synonymous with the Fabulous Fifties, poodle skirts, rock and roll, and the golden age of American car culture—was the creation of a New Jersey inventor and automotive soap salesman named Richard Hollingshead Jr. In 1933 Hollingshead opened the first drive-in theater in Camden, N.J. Three years later he sold the business and turned his attention to collecting royalties from the patent. This proved useless, as a patent court ruled that Hollingshead’s invention—essentially an amphitheater for cars—was unpatentable. The result was a financial setback for Hollingshead, but it ultimately led to the widespread appearance of drive-ins across the United States, particularly in the South, where they proliferated in greater numbers than in any other region of the country.

The earliest drive-in to be built in the South was the Drive-in Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Tex. It opened in July 1934 and operated for less than one month before it was destroyed in a storm. (It was not rebuilt.) Florida saw its first drive-in open in 1938, and other southern states followed soon after. Nevertheless, drive-ins were not as popular with the movie-going public when they first appeared as they would be later on. It would be almost two decades before every state in the nation had one, let alone every sizable town.

The earliest drive-ins were generally regarded as novelties, met with amusement but low expectations. Outdoor theaters were nothing new, certainly not in the South. In the days before air-conditioning, when many indoor theaters closed down during the stifling summer months, film exhibitors experimented with temporary outdoor screens in parks, on beaches, and even in the middle of towns. The addition of automobiles to the seating arrangement was certainly novel, but it did not necessarily improve the experience. Technical difficulties (particularly with sound equipment) plagued drive-ins from the start, and economic conditions in the 1930s made their initial prospects for success unfavorable. This situation, combined with a nationwide moratorium on new theater construction during World War II, meant that drive-ins had to wait until after the war was over to attract significant audiences and investors.

The prosperous postwar era created the perfect set of circumstances that allowed the drive-in to flourish. Employment was up, the rush to the suburbs was on, and American families had disposable income to spend. The statistics on drive-in theater construction are revealing. As of 1946, there were just over 100 drive-ins scattered throughout the United States. Two years later, census data shows that figure leaping to 820; six years after that, 3,775. The upward trend was especially noticeable in the South. In Georgia, the number of drive-ins climbed from 13 in 1948 to 128 in 1954. In the same six-year period, Florida saw a rise from 22 to 158 drive-ins; North Carolina, from 66 to 209; and Texas, from 88 to 388, surpassing every other state. By 1958 an all-time high of 4,063 drive-ins across the country accounted for more than 20 percent of all ticket sales in the American motion picture industry.

The drive-in theater embodied something of the spirit of America in the 1950s—it represented expansion, indulgence, consumption, and an intense love of the automobile. In the comfort of their success, drive-in owners began to exhibit a kind of gaudy showmanship, not only in their flashy neon marquees but in their creative appeals to local or regional identity. The Cedar Valley Drive-In in Rome, Ga., disguised itself as a southern plantation, with the screen tower concealed behind a neoclassical facade, complete with Greek columns. Other drive-ins adopted names and marketing schemes designed around hometown sports teams, industries, and allegiances. There were the Razorback in Little Rock, Ark.; the Varsity in Tuscaloosa, Ala.; the Bourbon in Paris, Ky.; the Battlefield in Vicksburg, Miss.; as well as numerous Rebels, Magnolias, Azaleas, and Dixies.

Of course, not all southern audiences experienced a night at the drive-in equally. Just as most indoor movie houses were segregated, many southern drive-ins had separate entrances, restrooms, concession facilities, and parking areas for African Americans. Some drive-ins, such as the Lariat in Fort Worth, Tex., catered to blacks only, while others excluded them altogether.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, attendance at drive-ins began to trail off, as television rapidly changed the way Americans thought of an evening’s entertainment. The quality of the moviegoing experience also worsened, as drive-ins were often stuck screening low-rent films on their second or third run, while indoor theaters (many owned and operated by Hollywood production companies) showed newer and better fare.

In a last-ditch effort to stay open, many drive-ins resorted to screening pornographic “skin flicks,” a practice that actually did more to hurt their chances of survival. In 1969 Alabama governor Albert Brewer made national headlines by ordering state troopers to shut down six different drive-ins for violating the state’s antiobscenity law. Other states around the country pursued a similar course, forcing scores of drive-ins out of business.

By the 1970s, indoor film houses were adding screens and turning into multiplexes capable of housing six, seven, and eight screens in a building and running films throughout the day and night. Drive-ins, open only at night, could hardly compete. Moreover, as cities expanded toward the suburbs and land values rose, many drive-in owners sold out. All of these factors and more signaled the beginning of the end for the drive-in. By the 1990s, the number of drive-ins in the United States had dwindled to a few hundred.

Recently, however, the decline has actually started to reverse, if only gradually in a few pockets around the country. The trend is most noticeable in sparsely populated rural areas in the South, where land is cheap and the nearest multiplex is a considerable distance down the road. With few exceptions, these new drive-ins are more toned-down affairs than their predecessors. Gone are the colonial mansions, elaborate marquees, and ostentatious displays of yesterday. Construction tends to be simple and functional, while sound and projection technology has vastly improved. Film quality has also improved, as distributors hustle to get new releases on every available screen before the DVD release. As a result, drive-ins no longer have to run second-rate fare. Now they screen the same blockbusters playing at multiplexes with stadium seating. Although they will probably never reach their former numbers again, drive-ins have found a niche in the modern South by adapting to suit modern tastes.

AARON WELBORN

Washington University in St. Louis

Elizabeth McKeon and Linda Everett, Cinema under the Stars: America’s Love Affair with the Drive-in Movie Theater (1998); Don Sanders and Susan Sanders, The American Drive-in Movie Theatre (1997); Kerry Segrave, Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933 (1992).

 

Earnhardt, Dale

(1951–2001) NASCAR DRIVER.

A seven-time Winston Cup champion, Dale Earnhardt was one of the most successful, popular, and unpopular drivers in NASCAR history. For many people Dale Earnhardt epitomized the rough-edged Piedmont working-class roots of the sport with his hard-charging, win-at-all costs style of driving. At the same time, however, he transcended those roots to become one of the wealthiest and most influential athletes in the history of American sport.

Earnhardt was born in the Piedmont mill town of Kannapolis, N.C. His father, Ralph Earnhardt, was a stock car racing legend on small dirt tracks and asphalt “bullrings” in the Carolinas and won the 1956 NASCAR sportsman championship. Dale served as a virtual apprentice with his father as he traveled with him learning the art and craft of both racing and stock car mechanics. He dropped out of school at 16 and went to work in a local cotton mill, was married at 17, a father at 18, and divorced at 19.

Earnhardt began his racing career in 1970 in a pink 1956 Ford Club Sedan owned by his brother-in-law. He soon became a fixture on local Piedmont tracks and quickly moved up through the ranks, occasionally securing a chance to drive underfunded cars at Winston Cup races. Racing, however, put him deeply in debt, brought him little fame outside a narrow circle, and even helped cause a second divorce.

His luck changed in 1979 when, on the verge of bankruptcy, he impressed car owner Rod Osterlund enough to secure a full-season ride in a well-financed car. He won his first race in NASCAR’S top division that year and rookie-of-the-year honors. The next year brought five wins, his first Winston Cup championship, and $671,990 in winnings. In little over a year and a half, Earnhardt had gone from being virtually destitute to standing at the top of the racing world. However, long-term success did not come easily for him. Osterlund sold the team in the middle of the 1981 season and Earnhardt was again consigned to inferior equipment.

Earnhardt’s career took off once again in 1984 when he returned to drive for one of his earlier car owners, Richard Childress. The pairing with Childress proved magical as over the next 17 years Earnhardt won 67 Winston Cup races and six championships in the number 3 Chevrolet. Along the way his stubbornness and his penchant for rough and aggressive driving—“I didn’t mean to wreck him, I just meant to rattle his cage”—earned him the nicknames of “Ironhead,” “The Intimidator,” and, after adopting a black paint scheme, “The Man in Black.” Earnhardt’s style and his success on the track made him both the most beloved driver on the NASCAR circuit—particularly to working-class fans—and the most hated, and he seemed to revel in both roles.

Earnhardt became almost as important to the sport as a pioneer in the marketing of his image. His business savvy, and that of third wife, Teresa, helped make him one of the wealthiest celebrities in the United States through souvenir sales, endorsement contracts, and solid investments. The once shy, uncouth, ninth-grade dropout even became a smooth celebrity spokesperson and helped to solidify the place of NASCAR in the national consciousness as an up-and-coming national pastime and not just a redneck sport for southern “good old boys.”

Earnhardt defied the odds late in his career and continued to be a consistent winner even in his late 40s. Indeed, his rivalry with the polar opposite, California-born Jeff Gordon gave NASCAR one of its most compelling story lines in the 1990s and helped to further boost the sport’s popularity. His career and life ended, however, on 18 February 2001 when he was killed in a last-lap wreck at the Daytona 500. While the outpouring of grief was most intense around his Piedmont North Carolina home, the cover photos and major tribute pieces in every major news and entertainment venue in the nation dramatically testified to Dale Earnhardt’s, and NASCAR’S, national popularity and influence. There was a silver lining to Earnhardt’s death in a renewed emphasis on safety in NASCAR. In the aftermath of his accident, NASCAR mandated a number of safety features—ironically, some resisted by Earnhardt during his life—that have made the sport notably less dangerous.

Dale Earnhardt’s death ended an important era of NASCAR history. He would prove to be the last of the southern Piedmont-born, high-school-dropout, tough-as-nails, working-class NASCAR heroes that had been so important to the sport’s origins and growth. At the same time, Earnhardt had helped transform the sport through his extraordinary talent and business savvy into an increasingly popular national pastime.

DANIEL S. PIERCE

University of North Carolina at Asheville

Charlotte Observer Editors, Dale Earnhardt: Rear View Mirror (2001); Kevin Mayne, 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story (2004); Leigh Montville, At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt (2001).

 

Easter

Easter is a Christian religious holiday celebrating Christ’s victory over death, an occasion that has especially resonated in the South with its large evangelical Protestant population that highlights the centrality of rebirth. Christian groups of all varieties make it a joyous day, the Sunday when more people typically attend church than any other. It is also a spring ritual that marks a seasonal turn toward earthly renewal.

Southerners enjoy the traditional symbols of Easter. The Bermuda lily (or simply, Easter lily) is widely displayed in churches, homes, and businesses. Families decorate colored Easter eggs; Easter morning finds Easter baskets filled with candy and fruit; and public parks and home yards are sites for Easter egg hunts—all highlighting the importance of children to the day. Easter bunnies are associated with the holiday, a symbol of fertility like the egg. Some families give baby chicks as a seasonal gift at Easter. Chocolate eggs, bunnies, and chicks represent only one example of commercial use of the season’s symbols. Southerners have long bought or made new clothes, “Easter finery.” Other Americans might wait until Memorial Day to wear white shoes or clothes, but southerners knew that Easter was the correct time for that display. Ham is the typical food that anchors Easter dinners, but the growing popularity of lamb is seen in food writer Damon Lee Fowler’s Savannah Easter Dinner menu that includes roast lamb with bourbon and mint. Since the 1950s, television has structured many families experience of the holiday, as they gather on Easter night to watch religious-themed films like The Ten Commandments or The Robe.

Americans in general mark Easter with parades, and southerners are no exception. The parade in St. Augustine, Fla., makes much of that city’s historic role as the oldest permanent settlement in the nation. Its Parada de los Caballos y Coches is a picturesque event that includes horse-driven Spanish carriages, decorated floats, beauty queens, military drill units, men on horseback, and women marching in antique costumes. The parade is part of the city’s Easter week festival that began in 1958.

Religious activities are central, though, to Easter. Some faiths have clergy wearing white vestments, with most having special music for the day, whether “Christ the Lord Is Ris’n Today, Alleluia!” in liturgical churches, or “Up from the Grave He Arose” in evangelical tradition. Late morning Sunday congregational services are preceded by early “sunrise services” at dawn. These services are often interdenominational and began in outdoor locales of special beauty or significance—on mountaintops or hillsides, in parks, in cemeteries, on ocean beaches or riversides, or at historical landmarks. Probably the first Easter sunrise service was held by the Moravians in 1771 at Salem, N.C. The preliminary activities began as early as 1:30 A.M. with a Moravian band awakening townspeople. The service formally began at dawn on Salem Square in front of Old Salem’s Home Moravian Church. Other older sunrise services took place at scenic Natural Bridge, Va., Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the Stephen Foster Memorial on the Suwannee River at White Springs, Fla., and Cypress Gardens’ Lake Eloise. Today, many southern cities host nonsectarian sunrise services.

Easter Rock is an Easter vigil ritual that has been documented in rural Louisiana African American churches since before the Civil War. It ceremonially goes through Jesus’s time in the tomb and his resurrection. Participants gather at ten o’clock on Saturday night and hear singing. The culmination is a procession of people dressed in white entering the church, led by a man carrying a “banner” representing Christ symbolism. Twelve women, known as “sancts,” follow the leader, carrying kerosene lamps as they move. Devotionals and homilies are given, and a table is set up filled with cakes, punch, and lamps. The “rock” ceremony is the syncopated marching around the table, accompanied by the congregation’s call-and-response acapella singing and the sound of the steps of the rockers. One participant in the ceremony in the early 20th century said the name “Easter rocks” came from the fact that “everything rocks.”

Perhaps the most famous literary portrayal of Easter reflects the spirit of Easter Rock. William Faulkner, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), writes of the black woman Dilsey, servant of the decaying Compson family, who attends an Easter morning worship conducted by the Reverend Shegog. Dilsey takes the idiot child Benjy to the black church, despite complaints from blacks and whites about this violation of segregation. Shegog preaches of the Egyptian bondage and the children of God. He preaches of the Crucifixion of Jesus and the Resurrection. The congregation sways to the emotional rhythms of the sermon, Benjy sits “rapt in his sweet blue gaze,” and Dilsey “sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb.”

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Hennig Cohen and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds., The Folklore of American Holidays (3rd ed., 1999); Jane M. Hatch, ed., The American Book of Days (3rd ed., 1978).

 

Everglades National Park

Dedicated in 1947, Everglades National Park was the first park within the national system founded to protect an area’s biological endowments. In the view of policy makers and wilderness advocates, the tabletop flat terrain of the Everglades lacked an awe-inspiring natural monument—a cascading waterfall, a looming mountaintop, an incredible geyser—that had been a prerequisite for other national parks. Yet the Everglades had considerable recreational possibilities, another important standard required for national park status.

The men and women who spent nearly 20 years campaigning for the establishment of an Everglades national park recognized they were trying to sell to the public a place most Americans regarded as a swamp and wasteland. Although the park proponents worked hard to convince others to see unique beauty in the region, they leaned heavily on the recreational benefits the great expanse offered. For several decades before the founding of the park, the Everglades were popular for hiking, camping, boating, fishing, and hunting (an activity later prohibited in the park) opportunities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of the country’s best-known ornithologists, including Harold H. Bailey, found great leisure in bird watching in the Everglades. It was by way of this activity that Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a park founder who in the late 20th century emerged as a central figure in the campaign to restore the beleaguered Everglades ecosystem, first became intimate with the Everglades. Ernest Coe, a semiretired landscape architect who in the 1920s launched the campaign to establish a national park, spent countless sublime hours hiking and camping in the Everglades. When parks in the North closed during cold months, Coe argued, the subtropic park in South Florida would serve as a prime recreational spot during the winter season.

Boosters in the state who supported the park believed Everglades would attract one million tourists a year (a number not reached until decades later). Governor Spessard Holland, who was instrumental in the final push for the park’s creation, envisioned motor tourists driving down through the long state and stopping to spend their money at filling stations, restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions before reaching Everglades National Park at the tip of the peninsula.

In the 21st century, the recreational attractions in the approximately 1.4-million-acre Everglades National Park remain largely unchanged. Most of the park’s roughly one million visitors are daytime sightseers, although a significant number of tourists overnight in the park’s lodge or campground at Flamingo or boat out to and rough it on a remote chickee (a thatched-roof platform on stilts) in the mangrove forests. For birders, the area’s 300 avian species, from pink flamingoes to the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow, are one of the park’s most striking features, with numbers reaching into the tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands during the winter–early spring nesting season. This also is the most popular season, with mosquitoes at a minimum, for tourists, who are eager to catch a glimpse of alligators and American crocodiles, the latter of which are unique to Everglades National Park. Everglades has 156 miles of canoe and hiking trails and a 15-mile biking trail leading to an observation tower on the Shark Valley tram road. Visitors tour the waters primarily in canoes, kayaks, and captained pontoon motorboats. Sport fishing ranges from salt to fresh to brackish water and concentrates among the thousands of acres of shallow-water flats, mangrove islands, and channels. During open state season, recreational crabbing is allowed, offering stone crabs and blue crabs. Hiking trails wend through the park’s diverse landscape, including sawgrass marshlands, wet prairies, pine flatlands, palmetto scrubland, and hardwood hammocks, where tourists can see wild orchids, bromeliads, the smooth-barked gumbo limbo tree, and the large golden silk orb-weavers (the largest nontarantula spiders in North America). Popular recreations in the larger Everglades, airboating and swamp-buggy rides are prohibited activities in the park.

JACK E. DAVIS

University of Florida

Ernest F. Coe, Landscape Architecture (October 1936); Jack E. Davis, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009); Everglades National Park, www.nps.gov/ever; Everglades National Park Information Page, www.everglades.national-park.com/info.htm.

 

Evert, Chris

(b. 1954) TENNIS PLAYER.

Chris Evert is the most successful woman tennis player to come from the South, and during a two-decade career she established herself as one of the greatest women athletes of the 20th century. In 1985 the Women’s Sports Foundation honored her as the Greatest Woman Athlete of the previous quarter century. When she retired from professional competition in 1989, she had 157 singles titles and 8 doubles titles.

Born 21 December 1954 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Christine Marie Evert was the daughter of James Evert, a professional tennis teacher at Holiday Park Tennis Center in Fort Lauderdale. She began hitting tennis balls against the walls at age six, and her father was soon giving her intense lessons as part of a middle-class family where tennis was an everyday affair. Evert and her sister became professional tennis players, and her brother played intercollegiate college tennis at Auburn. Chris Evert won her first competitive play at age 10, and at age 15, at the Carolinas Tournament in 1970, she upset Margaret Court, then the top-ranked women’s tennis player. Within a year she had won the Virginia Slims Master’s Tournament, become the youngest woman selected for the U.S. Wightman Cup team, and competed in her first U.S. Open tournament. After graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale in 1972, she declared her professional status as she turned 18. By 1974 she had claimed the top ranking in women’s tennis.

Evert had more than 1,300 match wins. Her career doubles record was 117–39. Evert won her first Grand Slam singles title in 1974 and won 55 consecutive matches that year. In her career, she won 18 Grand Slam singles championships. She captured the French Open seven times (1974, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986), the U.S. Open six times (1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982), Wimbledon three times (1974, 1976, 1981), and the Australian Open twice (1982, 1984). She was the world’s top ranked player from 1974 to 1979. With her great success, she gained the nickname “Ice Maiden of Tennis” for her domination of the sport and her calm, focused manner while playing. The Associated Press named Evert female athlete of the year four times and Sports Illustrated honored her as sportswoman of the year in 1976. She served as president of the Women’s Tennis Association from 1975 to 1976 and from 1983 to 1991.

Evert’s success paralleled the rise of women’s tennis in the late 20th century. Television regularly broadcast woman’s tennis, making her a well-known celebrity and popularizing her baseline game and two-handed backhand for the next generation of women players.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Johnette Howard, The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova: Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship (2006); Chris Evert Lloyd, with Neil Amdur, Chrissy: My Own Story (1982); Betty Lou Phillips, Chris Evert: First Lady of Tennis (1977).

 

Favre, Brett

(b. 1969) FOOTBALL PLAYER.

Brett was widely thought to be the most accomplished quarterback in professional football in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. While playing for the University of Southern Mississippi in 1990 Brett Favre was involved in a terrible auto crash after which a large section of his intestine had to be removed. Five weeks later he returned to the lineup to defeat heavily favored Alabama. Crimson Tide Coach Gene Stallings declared, “You can call it a miracle or a legend or whatever you want to, I just know that on that day, Brett Favre was larger than life.” It would not be the last time that would be said.

Brett was born in 1969 to a family in Kiln, Miss., with a Cajun and Choctaw background. Coached in high school by his father, he played quarterback in a run-dominated offense that saw him passing very little. This probably contributed to the fact that he was offered only one scholarship to a Division I school, the University of Southern Mississippi—and that was to play defensive back. Though he was deep in the quarterback depth chart, he was brought in during a 1987 game against Tulane. He threw two touchdown passes and led the team to a win, all the while nursing a massive hangover.

Favre partied extremely hard in college and had a child with his then-girlfriend Deanna (whom he met in Catholic Sunday school when he was seven and later married). He did manage to earn a degree in special education, and his aptitude in that field later demonstrated itself in his charitable foundations and in the time he takes with children.

He was not highly sought after in the NFL draft, even given his college success. Eventually the Atlanta Falcons picked him up, but they had no real use for a hard-drinking Cajun with a laser gun for an arm. They traded him in 1992 to Green Bay, where general manager Ron Wolf and coach Mike Holmgren saw something, although they were not quite sure what.

During his first several seasons, Favre infuriated fans and coaches with his passes that regularly broke fingers—often those of the opposing team. Gradually Holmgren calmed Favre down and built a team around him that was able to win Super Bowl XXXI (1997), while his quarterback garnered three consecutive MVP awards. During this time Favre went into voluntary rehabilitation for an addiction to prescription painkillers. This was highly successful and the addiction never returned. In 1996 he married his college girlfriend, Deanna, and the couple has two daughters.

Mike Holmgren departed in 1998, and, though the Packers were never able to duplicate their success under him, Favre went on to have a career as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history and the holder of nearly every major record that a quarterback can possess. Most notable among these are more than 460 touchdowns, 64,000 yards passing, 5,600 pass completions, and, in true Favre style, more than 300 interceptions. Most astonishing, however, is his record of more than 287 consecutive games started, a statistic that compares to Cal Ripken’s streak in baseball, especially at one of the most demanding positions in sports.

Perhaps his most special game came in Oakland in 2003. One day after his father was killed in an auto crash, and with his family’s encouragement, he decided that he could not let his team down and that his father would have wanted him to play. Before a nationwide audience on Monday Night Football, Favre threw for 4 touchdowns and 399 yards, winning 41–7. There was not a dry eye in the country after that game, and even the Raider Nation gave him a standing ovation.

Though Green Bay is in the heart of the Northwoods, Brett Favre never lost his southern manners and appeal. Green Bay and Wisconsin took him in as a favorite son. In a place where the average temperature high is below freezing for several months at a time, Brett from Kiln, Miss., was known for winning the cold-weather games. He said he did not like the cold much, but his play always seemed to give lie to the statement. In the off-season he would return to his farm in Mississippi with his family and every season be right back in Green Bay. That is, until 2008. After 16 seasons in, Favre retired and, like many high-level athletes today, subsequently unretired. Management, it seemed, was unimpressed. What happened next was unthinkable to many Packers fans. Brett Favre was traded to the New York Jets.

Now, if Brett Favre in Green Bay seemed strange (though it appeared the most natural thing in the world after a few years), the Kiln native under the scrutiny of the New York fans and press seemed more than incongruous. Nevertheless, he succeeded there as well, taking a team that was 4–12 in 2007 to the brink of the playoffs, while the Packers, whom he took to the NFC championship game that year, finished below .500 in 2008. Favre retired again after the 2008 season, but then came out of retirement in 2009 to lead the Minnesota Vikings to the NFC championship game, where they lost to the New Orleans Saints 31–28 in overtime.

Favre has exported his southern bonhomie on a national scale, though on a quieter level than Terry Bradshaw, and with less commercial savvy than Peyton Manning. He comes across to people as genuine, and his work ethic and endurance under trying conditions are things that can be embraced all over the country, from southern Mississippi to the frozen tundra of Green Bay, from the media center of New York City to, perhaps finally, Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

DONALD S. PRUDLO

Jacksonville State University

Deanna Favre, Don’t Bet Against Me (2007); Sam Lucero, Catholic News Service (25 October 2007); Bonita Favre and Brett Favre, Favre (2004); Gary D’Amato, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (17 October 2005); Jimmy Traina, Sports Illustrated (5 October 2002).

 

Flora-Bama Lounge and Package

It is not often that a bar becomes a cultural attraction beyond the distance one of its patrons can (or should) safely drive after closing time, but the Flora-Bama Lounge and Package is one bar that has become just that. Billed as “The Last American Roadhouse,” it has been featured on local and national television, written up in a variety of publications, and immortalized in the music of Jimmy Buffet. It is dear to the hearts of the many who have enjoyed its hospitality and an imagined destination in the minds of those who leave their recliners only for trips to the refrigerator.

To have a roadhouse one needs a road, so there was no Flora-Bama until the highway between Orange Beach, Ala., and Perdido Key, Fla., was completed in 1962. Two years later the bar and package store was built, just on the Florida side of the border, to take advantage of the Sunshine State’s more liberal liquor laws. But because the establishment butted right up against Alabama, the motto “Let’s do it on the line” was a natural.

The early days were rough. A suspicious fire burned down the first Flora-Bama, but it was rebuilt and, being almost the only place to get a beer on that lonely stretch, it became a popular watering hole for locals and visitors.

In 1978 two events coincided to make the Flora-Bama what it is today. Joe Gilchrist and Pat McClellan bought the place and made music an essential part of the “Bama” entertainment. That same year an article in the New York Times (“Todd and Stabler Offseason Game: Living It Up on ‘Redneck Riviera’”) highlighted the Flora-Bama as the home of the “midnight rambler and honky-tonk rounder.” The rest, as they say, is history.

With Gilchrist tending bar and musicians making their music, the Flora-Bama evolved into a go-to place and the epicenter of the Redneck Riviera. Eventually it grew into a sprawling complex of bars and stages where bands played to packed audiences that consisted of bankers, bikers, and all the variety in between. It is a place where, according to one observer, “you can holler ‘Bubba’ and 15 people will respond.” University of Alabama football hero and All-Pro quarterback Kenny Stabler called it “the best watering hole in the country,” and so far no one has challenged him or argued otherwise.

As beach communities grew up around it, the Flora-Bama became a major tourist attraction, though one where attractions were typically Flora-Bama. The year kicks off in January with the Polar Bear Dip, where alcohol-insulated patrons take to the frigid Gulf. Spring is brought in with the Annual Interstate Mullet Toss, and in the fall there is the Frank Brown International Songwriter’s Festival, which honors a legendary bouncer and celebrates the Bama’s reputation as a place where entertainers can play their own compositions and not be forced to cover “popular” hits.

In September 2004 the Flora-Bama was almost lost when Hurricane Ivan roared ashore, destroying or damaging most of the building and sweeping away scores of bras that hung from the ceiling and classic inscriptions that decorated the restroom walls. For nearly a year, fans waited patiently while temporary structures, many of them trailers, were brought in and set up in a fashion reminiscent of the warrenlike arrangement of the original complex. When all was in place (and, in some cases, even before), the Flora-Bama was open for business.

And what a business it is. Events like the Mullet Toss yearly break attendance records, beer sales continue to climb, while legends and lies about what was done on the line are passed about as the gospel truth.

Meanwhile, after a lot of legal wrangling, the Escambia (Fla.) County Board of Adjustments agreed to a variance that would allow the Flora-Bama to be rebuilt in a way that the owners promised would be true to “the style, structure and mystique of the pre-Ivan Flora-Bama for generations to come.” The management warned friends that “it will be tricky to rebuild, because you have been keeping us as busy as ever,” but no one complained. That’s what is to be expected if you are “the Last American Roadhouse.”

HARVEY H. JACKSON III

Jacksonville State University

Alan West Brockman and Joe Gilchrist, The Last American Roadhouse: The Documentary of the Flora-Bama (film, 2006); Ryan Dezember, Mobile Press-Register (27 April 2008); Robert F. Jones, Sports Illustrated (19 September 1979); Harris Mendheim, director, Mullet Men: Second Place Is the First Loser (film, 2000); Howell Raines, New York Times (21 June 1978); Ken Stabler and Berry Stainback, Snake: The Candid Autobiography of Football’s Most Outrageous Renegade (1986); Michael Swindle, Mulletheads: The Legends, Lore, Magic, and Mania Surrounding the Humble but Celebrated Mullet (1998), Village Voice (13 May 1997).

 

Fourth of July

The Fourth of July celebrates the independence of the United States and has been an important holiday in the South since the American Revolution. Typical activities have included parades, picnics, patriotic speeches, baseball games, ceremonies honoring veterans, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and assorted community events. As elsewhere in the nation, fireworks have long been a part of the celebration, both in community-sponsored large fireworks shows and privately, among individuals. City ordinances control fireworks in most cities, but the familiar roadside fireworks stands pop up on edges of cities in early summer. Williamsburg, Va., with its pronounced colonial history focus, sponsors its Prelude to Independence beginning in May, with 18th-century cannons fired and bells rung at the College of William and Mary and at historic Bruton Parish Church. In addition to these historic spots, independence activities take place at special sporting events, such as stock races, including Daytona’s Firecracker 400 in Florida.

The history of the Fourth of July in the South reveals it to have long been a contested holiday, focusing on issues of sectionalism and race relations. In the early 19th century, the Fourth of July was a vital commemoration that promoted national feeling in the young republic. A Raleigh, N.C., orator in 1851 praised the Union on the holiday and its “importance to the maintenance of our liberties, and the safety, peace and prosperity of the whole country.” This nationalist spirit was expressed, though, in local and regional contexts. For antebellum white southerners, the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July did not relate to issues of slavery but of compromise and union. With the beginning of the Civil War, few southern communities marked the day, but the Confederacy continued to lay claim to the heritage and heroes of the American Revolution and saw the South as the champion of the legacy associated with the Fourth. After the war, southern states rejoined the Union, but white southerners until the turn of the 20th century refused to commemorate the Independence Day. A Wilmington, N.C., newspaper said the Fourth “should be passed by our people in dignified silence.”

Black southerners, however, embraced the Fourth of July and its key document of the Declaration of Independence as symbols of their new freedom. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes that southern blacks “virtually laid claim to Independence Day.” African American memoirist Mamie Garvin Fields recalled of her Charleston childhood in the 1890s that “the oldtime Southerners,” meaning whites, saw the Fourth as a “Yankee holiday and ignored it.” For her and other blacks, though, she said, “Oh, my, but the Fourth was a big day.” During Reconstruction, blacks occupied the South’s public spaces for their joyous celebrations of American nationalism. Parades, military bands, and African Americans in militia uniforms proclaimed the new power and position of African Americans in the postwar South. But these rituals stirred white anxieties and sometimes led to white violence against blacks. As late as the 1890s, though, blacks in Richmond, Va., celebrated the holiday with parades and military musters at the state Capitol and even staged events at the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue.

The centennial celebration of American Independence in 1876 was a notable event in North-South reconciliation that would lead to diminished African American participation in civic celebrations of the holiday. Northern celebrations often omitted a role for blacks—thus denying a fundamental meaning of the Civil War and the extension of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence—but highlighting the white South’s historic role in founding the nation. White southerners fought in the Spanish American War, reviving a sense of American patriotism in the region and leading to their increased honoring of the Fourth. Patriotic organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution were active in the South from the Progressive Era onward, promoting the rise of a new patriotism that emphasized the common Revolutionary heritage of North and South. Whites now held whites-only civic ceremonies, with black commemorations moved to separate locations in black neighborhoods. Historian Fletcher M. Green could still observe, though, that as late as the 1950s, “little attention is paid to July Fourth by the people of North Carolina,” although he referred only to whites in that conclusion.

The bicentennial celebration of American independence in 1976 led to a new embrace of the Fourth of July by southern communities. The desegregation of southern public facilities in the 1960s promoted the most integrated and enthusiastic celebration in the region’s history. Bicentennial events, programs, and projects included restoration of historic districts and downtown areas, the commissioning of musical events with patriotic themes, construction or expansion of civic buildings and museums, and the staging of festivals and exhibits around historical themes. The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration provided public funding and general coordination, with state commissions active throughout the South.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005); Hennig Cohen and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds., The Folklore of American Holidays (3rd ed., 1997); Matthew Dennis, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (2002); Jane M. Hatch, The American Book of Days (3rd ed., 1978).

 

Gibson, Althea

(1927–2003) TENNIS PLAYER.

Althea Gibson was the first African American to win a Grand Slam major tennis tournament, becoming known as “the Jackie Robinson of tennis” for her achievement. Born to sharecropping parents in Silver, S.C., Gibson grew up in Harlem, beset by poverty and behavioral difficulties but excelling in athletics. Walter Johnson, a Virginia physician who had long worked to develop young black tennis players, became her mentor. After further training in Wilmington, N.C., she won the first of her 10 national championships in American Tennis Association all-black tournaments. In the segregated world of tennis then, she was kept out of tournament competition with whites until breaking the color barrier in 1950, playing in the U.S. championship at Forest Hills, N.Y. In the same year, she graduated from Florida A&M University, having played basketball as well as tennis.

Althea Gibson, “the Jackie Robinson of tennis,” 1956 (Fred Palumbo, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-114745], Washington, D.C.)

Gibson won the Italian championship (1955), the French championship in singles and doubles (1956), and the Wimbledon championship in doubles (1956) and singles (1957). The latter prestigious win earned her a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and in her breakout year of 1957 she was ranked No. 1 in world tennis and the Associated Press named her female athlete of the year. She won the Wimbledon singles and doubles titles in 1958 and defended her singles title at the U.S. championship the same year. Women’s tennis was entirely amateur in Gibson’s era, and she retired in 1958, playing in exhibition tours thereafter, including working with the Harlem Globetrotters. Gibson recorded an album, Althea Gibson Sings (1958), and published an autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (1958).

The International Tennis Hall of Fame inducted Althea Gibson in 1971. Four years later she became the New Jersey Commissioner of Athletics. She worked in other government positions as well but suffered a stroke in 1992. She died in 2003 in East Orange, N.J. She had long remembered receiving the Wimbledon trophy and shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth II, thinking that experience “was a long way from being forced to sit down in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, N.C.”

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Althea Gibson, with Richard Curtis, So Much to Live For (1968); Billie Jean King, with Cynthia Starr, We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women’s Tennis (1988); George Vecsey, New York Times (29 September 2003).

 

Gilley’s

Gilley’s, in Pasadena, Tex., was founded by Sherwood Cryer as “Shelly’s.” Its success, like its present name, dates from 1971, when Cryer went into partnership with Mickey Gilley, a country music singer and piano player once probably best known as Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin. Billed at one time as “the World’s Largest Saloon” (it could accommodate 4,500 customers), it eventually offered, besides the traditional drinking and dancing, such challenging entertainments as a punching-bag machine and “El Toro,” a mechanical bull for customers to ride. Dancing at the club was to music supplied by Gilley, by the house band (the Bayou City Beats), or by visiting country music entertainers, and it included group dances such as the Cotton-Eyed Joe (punctuated with rhythmic chants of “Bullshit!”) and the schottische.

Despite these attractions, Gilley’s was little known outside the Houston area, except in country music circles, before 1978, when Esquire published an article by Aaron Latham on the club and some of its patrons. Latham’s article was accompanied by a photographic feature on designer Ralph Lauren’s new line, “embracing the rugged natural look of the American cowboy.” When the movie Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta, was actually filmed in Gilley’s, scores of more or less frankly imitative establishments sprang up across the country. These “cowboy” bars sometimes replaced discos that had been inspired by Travolta’s performance in Saturday Night Fever and catered to much the same clientele, even more urban and less plausibly cowboy than the young oil workers Latham had chronicled. The most bravura of these new establishments was also in Texas, a Fort Worth club called “Billy Bob’s” that offered live bull riding in place of Gilley’s machine-simulated version. (Rumors that a patron had been stomped and gored did not hurt at all.) Billy Bob’s was even larger than Gilley’s, and on one occasion Merle Haggard treated all 5,095 customers to drinks.

The era of “Texas chic” soon faded, but not before Gilley’s had become a major tourist attraction with its own magazine, its own brand of beer, and complete line of souvenirs. Mickey Gilley himself had become a major country music singer with a number of hits to his credit, including “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time”—a traditional number at the club.

Southerners themselves have often collaborated in—and occasionally profited from—the marketing of the South. But the story of Gilley’s reflected a new development in the nation’s old, on-again/off-again love affair with the South. Gilley’s represented, and Esquire and Hollywood marketed, a blue-collar South newly popular in the 1970s, populated by the same good old boys (and girls) whom the mass media had generally portrayed a decade earlier (in such movies as Easy Rider and Deliverance, for instance) as vicious rednecks. The increasing national respectability of their music, the popularity of Burt Reynolds and the Dukes of Hazzard, and, not least, the “Urban Cowboy” phenomenon—all attest to a metamorphosis that was one of the stranger aspects of a strange decade. This attention presaged a rising popular culture interest since then in rednecks and other varieties of white working-class southern culture. The original Gilley’s, meanwhile, was demolished in 2006, but a new Gilley’s—with 91,000 square feet of entertainment and meeting space—opened in 2003, complete with “El Toro.”

JOHN SHELTON REED

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bob Claypool, Saturday Night at Gilley’s (1980); Robert Crowe and Gregory Curtis, Texas Monthly (November 1998); Aaron Latham, Esquire (September 1978).

 

Graceland

Graceland, formerly the estate of an aristocratic Memphis family, became the home of the rock and country icon Elvis Presley from 1957 until his death in 1977. Graceland has since ceased to be a private residence and now enshrines the memory and meaning of Elvis. Located off Highway 51, about eight miles from downtown Memphis, Tenn., Elvis’s former home is a favored destination for thousands of fans every year. The largest single gathering takes place on August 18, the anniversary of Elvis’s death. Thousands of the curious, the contemptuous, and the utterly worshipful make a pilgrimage that involves tours of the home, candlelight vigils, and a slow procession by the grave of the King of Rock and Roll.

Elvis purchased the estate for himself and his parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley. Frequent renovations completely transformed the colonial-style estate. Elvis had wanted, first, an enlarged bedroom and living area for his mother and, secondly, requested that a soda fountain, “a real soda fountain with cokes and an ice cream thing,” be installed in the kitchen.

Ironically, Elvis purchased Graceland to find relief from the constant attention of his persistent fans. The mansion sat on a little over 13 acres with a lush, forested park stretching from the front door down to the iron gates and stone wall that surrounded the property. Graceland, however, became so closely identified with its owner in large part because fans, and Elvis himself, worked to prevent the home from becoming a truly “private” residence. The large stone wall offered devoted fans the opportunity to mark, stencil, and chalk their love to Graceland’s owner. Presley himself seemed to invite such attention, at one point stringing bright blue Christmas lights from Highway 51 all the way up to the mansion’s front steps. Presley also made it a practice to dramatically leap the walls and sign autographs at least once a day. During his frequent absences, the gates opened between 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. and fans were allowed to walk the grounds and even look in the windows.

Elvis, and his heirs, emphasized the rural past of Graceland, hoping to play on both Presley’s southern roots and the “cowboy” imagery he dearly loved. Elvis himself attempted to build on this mythic image in 1967 when he purchased more than 160 acres south of Memphis off of Highway 51. Purchasing innumerable pickup trucks, horses, and cattle, as well a trailer for himself and Priscilla, he named the spread “The Flying G Ranch” (the “G” maintaining the connection to Graceland).

Following Elvis’s death, Graceland underwent extensive renovations in 1980–81 under the guidance of Priscilla Presley. A restaurant and hotel complex now sits across the highway from the mansion, boasting an enormous gift shop containing Elvis memorabilia of every description. Today, a bus carries visitors from the hotel-restaurant complex, through the front gates and up to the very steps of the mansion, much as lucky fans who crowded outside the gates in the 1950s and 1960s would occasionally be taken in a large hot pink jeep to the house to have dinner with Elvis, his family, and friends.

W. SCOTT POOLE

College of Charleston

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994), Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1998); Karal Anne Marling, Graceland: Going Home with Elvis (1996).

 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Federally mandated in 1934 to be one of three major units of the National Park Service in southern Appalachia, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park incorporates 814 square miles and encompasses most of the Great Smoky Mountains on the North Carolina–Tennessee border. The park incorporates the high-elevation ridgeline as well as the side ridges and valleys of the Smokies, a spur range of the Blue Ridge (the latter courses in a southwestward direction from south-central Pennsylvania to northern Georgia). Great Smoky Mountains National Park was linked with Shenandoah National Park, located in a section of the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia, by means of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469-mile federal scenic road that traverses southward along the crest of the Blue Ridge and various spur ranges before ending in the Smokies. These three units of the National Park Service were initially promoted in the 1920s by the automobile and tourism industries, and all three would receive extensive federal support during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. While the various properties acquired for the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park were purchased with financial donations from the citizens of North Carolina and Tennessee and by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., infrastructural projects within the park were primarily funded by the New Deal programs of the Roosevelt administration.

The park offers numerous recreational activities. Most popular is auto touring, owing in part to the fact that the park has never charged an entrance fee. Each year millions of visitors drive on the Newfound Gap Road (U.S. Highway 441), which bisects the park, and on the Little River Road and the Cades Cove Loop Road to experience panoramic vistas of mountains and forests and to access high elevation sites (such as Clingman’s Dome, at 6,643 feet above sea level). Additionally, the park offers numerous opportunities for nature observation—of wildflowers, wildlife (especially black bear, white-tailed deer, and elk—the last-named species having recently been reintroduced into the Smokies), and other natural entities (such as the phenomenon of the synchronous fireflies at Elkmont). Other recreational activities within the park are bicycling (particularly in Cades Cove), fishing (in approximately 700 miles of streams, for native brook trout as well as for introduced brown and rainbow trout), hiking (on more than 800 miles of trails, including a 70-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail), horseback riding (on more than 500 miles of trails allowable for horses), picnicking (at 11 maintained picnic areas), and camping (at more than 100 backcountry campsites or shelters accessed via hiking or horseback as well as at 10 developed campgrounds established for tents and recreational vehicles). Some people opt to make the steep trek up Mount LeConte to stay overnight at LeConte Lodge, originally built in the 1920s.

The park operates several historical exhibitions, most notably the Mountain Farm Museum (behind the Oconaluftee Visitor Center) in North Carolina, and, in Tennessee, the collection of 19th-century buildings in Cades Cove (including log and frame houses, two churches, and a mill). Structures that predate the park are also preserved, on the North Carolina side of the park, in Cataloochee Valley (which features, among other buildings, a church, a log cabin, and a frame house), and, in Tennessee, along the Old Settlers Trail (which is routed past numerous old home sites). The park maintains a total of 80 historical buildings in all.

Information or assistance from park rangers and other park staff may be obtained at campgrounds, at certain historical exhibits, as well as at three visitor centers (Sugarlands and Cades Cove Visitor Centers in Tennessee and Oconaluftee Visitor Center in North Carolina).

For the unparalleled ecological diversity it harbors within its boundaries, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was designated an International Biosphere Reserve in 1976, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, and a Southern Appalachian Biosphere Reserve in 1988. The Great Smoky Mountains Association, a nonprofit educational organization, cosponsors the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, which is operated inside the park to foster wider public appreciation for the park’s natural and cultural history.

TED OLSON

East Tennessee State University

Michael Frome, Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains (1994); Great Smoky Mountains Association, Hiking Trails of the Smokies (2003); Daniel S. Pierce, The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park (2000); Michael Ann Williams, Great Smoky Mountains Folklife (1995).

 

Hamm, Mia

(b. 1972) SOCCER PLAYER.

Mariel Margaret “Mia” Hamm was a crystallizing figure in the growth of women’s soccer in the United States. Born 17 March 1972 in Selma, Ala., Hamm was the daughter of an Air Force officer and played soccer while growing up on military bases in Texas, Virginia, and Italy. She played for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Tar Heels won four National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s soccer championship titles in five years while she played there, earning Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) female-athlete-of-the-year honors in 1993 and 1994. When she graduated, she held ACC records in goals (103), assists (72), and total points (278).

Hamm began playing on the United States women’s national soccer team at age 15, and at age 19 she was the youngest American woman to win a World Cup championship. She competed for the women’s national team for 17 years, and the team won the gold medal at the 1996 and 2004 Summer Olympics. The Federation Internationale de Football Association named her world player of the year in 2001 and 2002. Soccer USA named her female athlete of the year five times (1994–98). Hamm retired from soccer competition after the 2004 Olympics, having scored 158 goals in international competition, a record for the sport of soccer. In 2007 she was voted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Hamm grew up in the aftermath of Title IX’s mandate for gender equality in sports, and she made use of new resources that enabled her to train and play competitively in route to becoming a world-class athlete. She then embodied the possibilities of athletic achievement for young women and spurred interest in soccer throughout the nation.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Mia Hamm, Go for the Goal: A Champion’s Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life (2007); Charles Maher, in Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader, ed. Jean O’Reilly and Susan K. Cahn (2007), USA Today (18 January 2008).

 

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

As forested refuge for nomadic Indian tribes, as the site for 17th-century Spanish and French fortifications, and as the location of antebellum Sea Island cotton plantations, Hilton Head Island has lured people through its climate and its geographic diversity.

Now one of the South’s most famous resort areas, Hilton Head had historic significance in the 19th century. On 7 November 1861, 17 Union warships blocked South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, capturing the Confederate stronghold of Fort Walker on the island. The Port Royal anchorage remained the principal base of federal naval operations for the duration of the war, and Hilton Head’s Port Royal Plantation, quartering some 30,000 troops, was transformed into a boomtown, complete with hotels and a theater. Along with other southern sea islands, Hilton Head became the focus for a social and agrarian experiment, in which large plantations and town property were claimed by the federal Treasury Department and redistributed to freedmen.

Called a “dress rehearsal for Reconstruction,” the Port Royal experiment influenced the formation of federal policy concerning the status of emancipated slaves. Its schools, military training, and wage labor programs acted as a proving ground for freedmen and provided experience for postwar Reconstruction leaders such as General O. O. Howard, head of the Freedman’s Bureau, and Congressman Robert Smalls. Many of the freed slaves who remained on Hilton Head Island were of Gullah descent and maintained their existence on the island with subsistence farming.

Soon, however, prosperous northern investors were attracted to the Sound. Huge tracts of land, and sometimes whole islands, were purchased for use as hunting preserves and winter havens. The largest of South Carolina’s barrier islands—12 miles long and covering about 42 square miles—Hilton Head escaped sole proprietorship and became instead a popular combination of resort and residential development.

Gulf breezes keep temperatures on the island at a semitropical 60° to 80° range throughout the year. Many visitors to the island are attracted by its pristine beaches and ocean activities, such as waterskiing, parasailing, surfing, sailing, scuba diving, fishing and crabbing, and dolphin cruises. But Hilton Head’s attractions are not just along the shoreline; nature lovers go to enjoy the island’s numerous nature preserves. The ocean and networks of freshwater lagoons, meadows, forest area, and marshland support some 260 varieties of birds, as well as bream, bass, and blue marlin. Sea oats and palmetto share the landscape with magnolia, pine, and live oak. These nature preserves offer visitors and residents opportunities for fishing, canoeing, kayaking, hiking, biking, bird watching, and horseback riding.

Cultural activities and events also abound at Hilton Head; historic tours and Gullah heritage tours are popular, and numerous art galleries and cultural exhibits attract museum-goers. The island also has its own orchestra, which performs regularly. Avid shoppers enjoy frequenting plentiful boutiques and art galleries (more than 200) and both indoor and outlet malls.

Hilton Head offers its more than 2.5 million annual visitors an abundance of recreational diversity. There are 8 marinas, 23 golf courses, and more than 300 tennis courts on the island. Seafood restaurants are popular among visitors and residents alike. Accommodations range from hotel rooms to oceanfront villas with names like Bay-berry Dune and Xanadu. Abounding in secluded white sand beaches and quiet nature trails but only hours from the urbane charm of Charleston, Hilton Head represents a fusion of society and serenity that has a characteristically southern flavor.

ELIZABETH M. MAKOWSKI MARY AMELIA TAYLOR

University of Mississippi

Michael Danielson and Patricia Danielson, Profits and Politics in Paradise: The Development of Hilton Head Island (1995); Guion Griffis Johnson, A Social History of the Sea Islands (1930); Hilton Head Island Chamber of Commerce, www.hiltonhead island.org; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964); Southern Living (April 1982); David D. Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History, 1520–1948 (1961).

 

Hooters

Ask most males why they eat at a Hooters restaurant and they will likely tell you that the chicken wings are delicious. Although that certainly may be true, others would contend that the siren call that attracts large numbers of men to Hooters is not related to the food. Established in 1983 in Clearwater, Fla., Hooters of America, Inc. has grown from a single establishment in the Sunshine State to a chain of some 450 locations throughout the world, including international branches in Greece, Singapore, Korea, England, and Australia, to name a few. According to Hooters’ corporate history, more than 68 percent of Hooters patrons are male and between the ages of 25 and 54. While the restaurant does not cater to families, it admits that some 10 percent of its patrons are children.

The original Hooters Restaurant in Clearwater was the brainchild of Alisa Lamellae, who found cheap land on which to build—a former dumpster-washing facility. The original concept for Hooters was more of a bar than a full-service restaurant. The scantily clad servers were always part of the equation, though. In 1984 Robert H. Brooks and a group of Atlanta investors bought franchise rights outside of the six-county Tampa area. Brooks and his investors often clashed over leadership of the chain until they bought out the original owners with $60 million and limited franchising rights in exchange for the Hooters trademark.

Under Brooks’s leadership, Hooters grew exponentially (corporately speaking), establishing a presence in every state and in 20 countries. He explained Hooters’ success as “Good food, cold beer, and pretty girls never go out of style.” Brooks did, however, assert that he never realized what the owl symbolized in the Hooters logo. In 2004 Hooters Airline tried to offer air travelers the same wholesome goodness that Brooks asserted one could find in the restaurants. Flight attendants wore the now familiar short orange shorts and snug fitting white tank tops. But the airline ceased operations in 2006, citing the high cost of jet fuel.

In 1991 the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) accused Hooters of sexual discrimination against men because all of the company’s servers were women. Hooters had made no claim to the contrary, but the company addressed the accusations by organizing a “100 Hooter girl march” on Washington, D.C., while encouraging Hooters patrons to conduct a postcard campaign in support of the chain to Congress. The EEOC never brought suit on the matter. Six years later, in 1997, men in Chicago and Maryland filed class action lawsuits against Hooters, claiming that the restaurant chain discriminated against men in hiring servers. The matter was settled out of court. Hooters vigorously defends the use of the female form in restaurants, asserting without a hint of irony on its corporate Web site that “the Hooters girl is as socially acceptable as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, or a Radio City Rockette.”

Hooters maintains, however, a strong presence in the male-oriented, sports bar, chicken wings restaurant scene and has increased that role by sponsoring NASCAR racing teams and hosting the Annual Hooters International Swimsuit Pageant, which chooses Miss Hooters International from among the chain’s Hooters Girl employee population.

For all its assertions of a wholesome, All-American, atmosphere, Hooters remains a point of contention between those who support the chain and its image and those who feel that it is an exploitation of the female form.

GORDON E. HARVEY

Jacksonville State University

Dean Foust, Business Week (13 June 2005); Hooters Corporate History, www.hooters.com/about; Douglas Martin, New York Times (18 July 2006).

 

Hot Springs National Park

Forty-seven hot springs flowing from the slope of Hot Springs Mountain in the foothills of Arkansas’s Ouachita Mountains gained much attention in the early 19th century as a treatment for rheumatism and other ailments. Today, these naturally occurring springs serve as the centerpiece of Hot Springs National Park, one of the state’s most popular tourist destinations.

Archaeological and other historical evidence suggests that Native Americans bathed in Hot Springs Creek prior to the arrival of Europeans. Before the Louisiana Purchase, the area surrounding the springs remained a virtually uninhabited wilderness; after that time, the thermal waters gained a widespread reputation for their healing, therapeutic qualities.

Early on, visitors flocked to the area in search of a cure. For example, in the 1820s the Arkansas Gazette reported 61 people representing seven different states at the springs “for health and pleasure.” Belief in the thermal waters’ efficacy in treating rheumatism and paralytic afflictions caused the valley’s popularity to grow with each passing year.

In 1820 the Arkansas Territorial Assembly requested that Congress grant the site to the newly established Arkansas Territory, but Congress refused. Instead, on 20 April 1832, Congress created the Hot Springs Reservation by setting aside “four Sections of land including said Springs” for future use of the United States, making it the oldest area in the National Park System. This act intended to deny private landowner-ship within a mile of the springs, but the government failed to enforce the measure so the town continued to grow within the federally reserved area.

The uncertainty surrounding landownership in the area hindered progress. Hot Springs’ population increased little from the time of Arkansas statehood until the Civil War, reaching only 201 by 1860, but its fame as a health resort grew steadily. While the land dispute discouraged large investments or improvements for residents or visitors, a number of structures sprang up in the narrow valley alongside Hot Springs Creek. Bathing procedures remained primitive and visitors utilized crude facilities throughout the antebellum period.

Following the Civil War, the place took on an entirely different character. Numbers of tourists increased dramatically as patrons from all parts of the country poured in to spend their money. After 1869 the number of visitors grew by about 50 percent each year, and by the early 1870s Hot Springs enjoyed widespread popularity across the nation as a health resort. When Garland County was established in 1873, the city of Hot Springs became the county seat. The town included 24 commercial hotels and boardinghouses, with capacity of 1,500 to 2,000 visitors per day. After the U.S. Supreme Court finally vested title to the springs in the federal government in 1877 and allowed private ownership in the surrounding area, bathing facilities and services enjoyed even further expansion. The once sleepy little village rapidly acquired characteristics of a wide-open boomtown.

Vintage postcard of Hot Springs National Park (Charles Reagan Wilson Collection, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi)

The government took an active interest in its Hot Springs Reservation in the late 19th century. Federal improvements helped transform the frontier town to a cosmopolitan spa: construction of a grand entrance to the Reservation, mountain drives, elaborate fountains, and an arch covering Hot Springs Creek along Central Avenue, all contributed to a more pleasing appearance. And government officials regulated activity involving the springs by establishing standards for bathing prices and related services.

For decades to follow, growth and development within the bathing industry paralleled growth and development of the city itself. Bathing reached a peak by the end of World War II, when over one million baths per year were provided to patrons. As the industry reached its zenith during the first half of the 20th century, luxury accommodations dominated the town’s landscape, and the city bristled with activity. The town gained a reputation as an entertainment-rich destination, complete with illegal gambling, thoroughbred racing, and an assortment of amusement parks. Everyone—movie stars, politicians, rich, poor, and even gangsters—frequented “The American Spa.” The town’s slogan, “We Bathe the World,” rang true.

In 1916 Congress established the National Park Service, and the Park Service assumed control of the Hot Springs Reservation. The reservation officially became Hot Springs National Park on 4 March 1921. A combination of factors resulted in the sharp decline of Central Avenue and its bathing industry by the 1960s: improved medical techniques, a general trend away from downtown shopping, and the elimination of gambling, all contributed to the downturn.

Hot Springs’ Bath House Row was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on 13 November 1974. The most ornate of the Central Avenue structures, the Fordyce Bath House, became the National Park’s visitor center, and only one of the of eight existing bathhouses continues to offer baths today. The remaining six facilities sit vacant. Now, as the reservation approaches its 175th anniversary, park officials plan to offer leases of the other structures to the private sector for renovation and development in an attempt to revitalize Hot Springs National Park’s world famous Bath House Row.

WENDY RICHTER

Ouachita Baptist University

Orval Allbritton, Leo & Verne: The Spa’s Heyday (2003); Dee Brown, The American Spa: Hot Springs, Arkansas (1982); Francis J. Scully, Hot Springs, Arkansas and Hot Springs National Park: The Story of a City and the Nation’s Health Resort (1966).

 

Johnson, Junior

(b. 1931) SPORTS CAR DRIVER AND MOONSHINER.

Robert Glenn “Junior” Johnson is the most famous resident of Ingle Hollow in Wilkes County, N.C. Neighbors used to admire him for his adeptness at outwitting and outmaneuvering tax agents on moonshine runs. Now they and fans throughout the South and the nation revere him for his accomplishments as a stock car driver.

Johnson’s father operated a still in Wilkes County, one of the most productive moonshine regions in the country. The size of his profit often depended on whether Junior could deliver the product to customers in nearby cities and towns without getting caught; so Junior learned to drive fast and skillfully, often evading would-be captors by implementing his “bootleg turn,” a technique that evolved into the “power slide” he later used as a stock car driver to maintain and accelerate speed coming out of turns on the racetrack. In 1955 agents caught him, not on a delivery, but standing in front of the still. He served just over 10 months in a Chillicothe, Ohio, prison.

At the time of his arrest, Johnson was already well on his way to becoming a successful stock car driver. He had won championships in the Sportsman and Modified classifications and, in 1955, captured the first of his seven Grand National victories. Ten years later he retired as a driver, having won the Daytona 500 and 49 other races. He was one of the sport’s most popular figures.

Beginning in 1965, Johnson hired drivers for his cars and, with employees like Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, and Darrell Waltrip, his success continued, with his drivers winning 139 races. Recognized as a master mechanic, Johnson worked as a consultant to General Motors while still operating from his home in Ingle Hollow, where he and his staff built parts, made repairs, and worked to keep the team’s cars among the fastest on the track. In 2007 Johnson teamed up with Piedmont Distillers in Madison, N.C., to begin making Midnight Moon, a small-batch moonshine made in the Johnson-family tradition.

Success has not separated Johnson from his heritage in the rural South. He is a prototypical good old boy who likes coon hunting and chicken farming. He even helped found the Holly Farms Chicken company in North Wilkesboro, N.C. Writer Tom Wolfe called him the “Last American Hero,” and Johnson’s neighbors would probably agree. His bootlegging days may be well past—even if his moonshining days are not.

JESSICA FOY

Cooperstown Graduate Programs Cooperstown, New York

Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000); Larry Griffin, Car and Driver (April 1982); Charles Leerhsen, Newsweek (16 November 1981); Neal Thompson, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR (2006); Tom Wolfe, Esquire (March 1965).

 

Jones, Bobby

(1902–1971) GOLFER.

Born on 17 March 1902 in Atlanta, Ga., Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones Jr. was a child prodigy at golf, studying under Stewart Maiden, a Scottish pro who worked at Atlanta’s East Lake course. Jones played in the 1916 U.S. Amateur Tournament when he was only 14 years old. He went on to win 13 major championships, culminating in 1930 with his sweep in a single season of the “Grand Slam of Golf,” which was then the championships of the British Amateur, the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the U.S. Amateur. New York City treated him to an enormous ticker tape parade that year, appropriate to one who had become a national hero. Later, he received a similar outpouring of affection from his hometown in Atlanta. At the height of his fame, at age 28, Jones announced his retirement. He returned to his law practice and business endeavors in Atlanta, starting a long involvement with the A. G. Spalding Company, making a series of instructional film shorts for Warner Brothers studios, and conceiving and assisting in the design of the Augusta National Golf Course in Augusta, Ga., home of the Masters Tournament.

Jones’s career reflected the rise of spectator sports in the South and the nation during the 1920s. Although golf was not as popular in the South as in the Northeast and on the West Coast, Jones nonetheless consciously worked to increase its popularity in his home region. He conceived the idea of the Augusta course, because “my native Southland, especially my own neighborhood, had very few, if any, golf courses of championship quality.” He regarded it “as an opportunity to make a contribution to golf in my own section of the country.”

Jones was frequently referred to as the embodiment of the southern gentleman. Journalist and commentator Alistair Cooke wrote that Jones was “a gentleman, a combination of goodness and grace, an unwavering courtesy, self-deprecation, and consideration for other people.” Graceful in his athletic performance, poised at all times, modest in his success, and self-consciously “southern” in his attitudes, Jones symbolized a transitional figure—the traditional regional image of the gentleman in a new 20th-century mass culture context. Through the press and radio in the 1920s, the exploits of “The Emperor Jones” were publicized, and he thereby helped popularize golf with southerners and others who had once dismissed it as an effete game for the wealthy.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Mark Frost, The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America, and the Story of Golf (2004); Stephen Lowe, Georgia Historical Quarterly (Winter 1999); Robert Tyre Jones Jr., Golf Is My Game (1959).

 

Jordan, Michael

(b. 1963) BASKETBALL PLAYER.

It would surprise most basketball fans—who associate Michael Jordan so closely with the Tar Heel State—that he was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. But his family moved to Wilmington, N.C., when he was a child, and it was there that his basketball prowess first became obvious. But he became nationally famous in 1982 when, as a freshman at the University of North Carolina, he hit a 17-foot jump shot to give his team the NCAA championship. Jordan remained in Chapel Hill two years after that, receiving All-American and national player-of-the-year honors, and then, in 1984, joined the professional Chicago Bulls. During his National Basketball Association career, he led his team to six NBA titles and was named NBA player of the year five times. A tremendous competitor, a great shooter, a tenacious defender, and—most famously—a spectacular leaper, he soon became known by the name “Air Jordan.” Often called the greatest basketball player of all time, he was also named by ESPN in 1999 the greatest North American athlete of the 20th century. By the end of his career—partly because of his superiority on the court, partly because of his visibility as a pitchman for numerous products—he may also have become the most recognizable athlete in the world.

FRED HOBSON

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (2000); Michael Jordan, Mark Vancil, and Sandro Miller, I Can’t Accept Not Trying: Michael Jordan on the Pursuit of Excellence (1994); David L. Porter, Michael Jordan: A Biography (2007).

 

Jubilees

The word “jubilee” means a season or occasion of joyful celebration. The term comes from the Hebrew yobel which was a ram’s horn used as a trumpet. Along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in Baldwin County, Ala., the cry of “Jubilee!” has, for over a century, trumpeted one of nature’s strangest natural occurrences. During a jubilee, large numbers (in various combinations) of flounder, crabs, shrimp, eels, catfish, stingrays, needlefish, and other bay creatures come into shallow water seemingly offering themselves to anyone alert enough to witness the event. During a large jubilee, scores of people can be seen gathering, netting, or gigging hundreds of pounds of seafood in a short period of time. A “jubilee network”—in which friends have contact lists that they have pledged to alert in the event of a jubilee—can assume an almost cultlike secrecy and organization.

Although jubilees have been reported in other parts of the world, none occur with the frequency as those found in Mobile Bay. Although unpredictable, the bay jubilees usually occur between June and September and can last from about 20 minutes to several hours—almost always between midnight and sunrise. Some summers will see no jubilees while others have experienced up to 15. In 1959 there were eight reported jubilees in the month of July. The prime area of the Jubilee is on the eastern shore of the bay along 15 miles of shoreline stretching from Daphne (“Jubilee City”) south to Mullet Point. In rare cases, jubilees have occurred as far south as the northern tip of the Fort Morgan Peninsula. Even more rare is a jubilee on the western side of Mobile Bay, but these have been documented near Deer River and Dog River. Although the term jubilee was not used until the early 20th century (the earliest known written use of the term was in 1912), reports of jubilee-like events go back to just after the Civil War. On 17 July 1867 the Mobile Daily Register reported “EXCITEMENT AMONG THE FISH—Yesterday all the fish in the Bay seemed to be making for the Eastern Shore. Large numbers of crabs, flounders, and other fish were found at the water’s edge and taken in out of the wet. They were counted by the bushel.”

Decades ago, jubilees were attributed to everything from phosphorescent sparks in the water, to springs or gas vents in the bay, to minerals washed from the inland river systems. Many newspaper accounts in the late 1800s credited the odd marine happenings to excessive levels of salt water coming into the Bay from the adjacent Gulf of Mexico. More recent scientific study has determined that jubilees are actually caused by decaying organic matter that is washed south into the bay from the Mobile Delta. As this matter decomposes, there is a large increase in oxygen-consuming microorganisms. Pockets of oxygen-depleted water move to the shore producing a “corralling” effect on bottom-dwelling bay inhabitants. Starved of oxygen, the creatures lose their normal muscular abilities—appearing reluctant to swim or even to escape their human predators. The typical jubilee will last no more than a few hours. When water conditions improve, the fish will recover and ease back into deeper waters, none worse for the wear—except for the many that will soon appear on south Alabama tables.

Predicting jubilees has become a cottage industry on the eastern shore. In late summer, jubilee enthusiasts look for an easterly wind coinciding with an incoming tide. The wind blows surface water out into the middle of the bay while the tide directs the stagnant water to the shore. Some observe that on the day before a jubilee the weather will be cloudy or overcast and the bay will be calm or slick. These conditions help prevent the replenishing of oxygen in the water. Veteran jubilee watchers will say that, just before a jubilee, the water “looks funny” with perhaps a brownish or yellowish brown tint. If these conditions appear, a designated person might assume a night watch—checking along the shore every hour for signs that a jubilee has commenced. The social network is then activated and the normally tranquil shoreline suddenly takes on a partylike atmosphere as the aroused human scavengers harvest the bounty.

LONNIE A. BURNETT

University of Mobile

Auburn University Marine Extension and Research Center, The Jubilee Phenomenon (2003); Jack C. Gallalee, Jubilees (1973); Edwin B. May, Limnology and Oceanography (May 1973); David Rainer, Outdoor Alabama (2008).

 

Juneteenth

Juneteenth is the popular name among black people in Texas for their emancipation day, which they celebrate on 19 June. On that day in 1865 Major General Gordon Granger officially announced the freedom of slaves when he arrived at Galveston to command the District of Texas following the Civil War.

Three black folktales provide other explanations of the date. In one version, Texas landowners refused to announce emancipation until the 1865 harvest had been gathered by the slaves. According to a second story, a black man journeyed by mule from Washington to Texas and arrived in June 1865 with word of the abolition of slavery. The other legend has the end of slavery declared as late as June because an earlier messenger was killed on the way to Texas.

The celebration of 19 June as emancipation day spread to the neighboring states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and later to California as black Texans migrated west. It has appeared occasionally in Alabama and Florida, also as a result of migration.

Large celebrations began in 1866 and continued to be held regularly into the early 20th century, although blacks in some Texas towns honored emancipation on 1 January or 4 July—days favored in some other states. Observations of Juneteenth declined in the 1940s during World War II but revived with 70,000 black people on the Texas State Fair grounds at Dallas during 1950. As school desegregation and the civil rights movement focused attention on the expansion of freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Juneteenth celebrations declined again, although small towns still observed Texas’s emancipation day. In the 1970s Juneteenth was revived in some communities, especially after two black members convinced the Texas Legislature to declare Juneteenth an unofficial “holiday of significance . . . particularly to the blacks of Texas.”

Typical celebrations over the years included parades, picnics, baseball games or other competitive contests, speeches on freedom and future goals, and dances. Leaders in the black community normally organized the events, although occasionally in the 20th century a business or a black fraternal group assumed that role.

ALWYN BARR

Texas Tech University

Randolph B. Campbell, Southwestern Historical Quarterly (July 1984); Ebony (June 1951); Doris Hollis Pemberton, Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing (1983); Wendy Watriss, Southern Exposure (no. 1, 1977); William H. Wiggins Jr., O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations (1987).

 

Kentucky Derby

The Kentucky Derby, America’s premier race classic for three-year-old thoroughbreds, showcases some of the South’s most established traditions: honorable sporting competition, high fashion, and the love of pageantry. This mile-and-a-quarter test has been run at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., since May 1875. The race originally was proposed as a match between Kentucky’s and Tennessee’s best three-year-old horses. However, its founder, Colonel M. Lewis Clark of Louisville, after visiting the racecourses of Europe, changed the inaugural to a derby patterned after England’s one-and-a-half-mile Epsom Derby.

The names and traditions associated with the Kentucky Derby are a tapestry of American racing history. There was Matt Winn (1861–1949), the colorful track president who had seen every Derby and whose flair for showmanship transformed the race into a national and world event. There was Isaac Murphy (1871–96), the legendary black jockey with three winning rides. And Colonel E. R. “Bet-a-Million” Bradley, whose four winners—Behave Yourself (1921), Bubbling Over (1926), Burgoo King (1932), and Brokers Tip (1933)—like all his horses, began their names with the letter B. The year 1919 produced Sir Barton, the first Triple Crown winner, and 1941, Whirlaway, the chestnut speedster with the flying tail. Then, too, there were “R-r-r-racing fans, this is Clem McCarthy” calling the race on national radio (1928–50); Citation (1948), one of eight horses to carry the devil’s red silks of Calumet Stables to victory; and Penny Tweedy’s wonder horse, Secretariat, the race record holder (1.592/5, 1973). And, of course, there were Done-rail (1913) and Mine That Bird (2009), the shocking come-from-behind winners that provided the biggest upsets in the Derby’s history.

Churchill Downs, Louisville, Ky. (Kentucky Department of Travel)

The Derby is not just about the horses, jockeys, and placing bets, however; it is steeped in traditions that reinforce southern ideals of community entertainment, social interaction, and fashion. During the two weeks before Derby Day, the Louisville community celebrates the Kentucky Derby Festival, which offers events such as fireworks, steamboat and hot-air balloon races, parades, concerts, and even a marathon. Since 1972, the governor of Kentucky has been hosting a Derby Day breakfast at the capitol for all Kentuckians and their Derby guests. At the Derby, numerous traditions emerge to make the race unique. The mint julep, closely associated with southern cuisine, has long been considered the traditional beverage of the Kentucky Derby; the combination of sugar, ice, mint, and bourbon is served at the Derby in traditional silver julep cups and commemorative glasses. One Kentucky distiller said that drinking mint juleps is like wearing the Derby’s fashionable hats: both traditions are usually symbolically observed only at the Derby.

Hats are indeed one of the most iconic traditions of the Derby. The large, elaborate, stylish hats complement the fashionable outfits worn by people who dress the part of traditional Derby-goers, who take their appreciation of high fashion from the Royal Ascot race in England and from the antebellum South. The most elaborate outfits are often found in Millionaire Row, the expensive box seats in the stands around the track. Many celebrities are often in attendance—even royal figures; Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip of England attended the Derby in 2007. The Infield is crowded with less auspicious crowds, many of whom make their own “wacky” hats and bring picnic coolers and beer, ready to enjoy the infield’s light-hearted revelry. Even people who do not attend the race have an opportunity to experience the Derby’s traditions. Many watch the race and practice southern hospitality at elegant house parties as they entertain guests with typical southern cuisine and, of course, mint juleps.

Run on the first Saturday in May, the Derby is an American tradition, an unofficial holiday that focuses on the spectacle of finely conditioned animals competing in the ultimate two-minute test. For the winner, there is racing immortality, the traditional blanket of roses, a purse in excess of $100,000, and the chance to win America’s racing Triple Crown. For the audience, there is an opportunity to enjoy the traditions and to savor a flavoring of timeless culture. When the familiar strains of “My Old Kentucky Home” are sung as the horses are led onto the track, everyone becomes both a Kentuckian and a southerner. In this sense, the Kentucky Derby is more than a race; it is, instead, an expression of national heritage.

JAMES C. CLAYPOOL

Northern Kentucky University

MARY AMELIA TAYLOR

University of Mississippi

James Barron, New York Times (5 May 1990); Peter Chew, The Kentucky Derby: The First 100 Years (1974); Joe Drape, New York Times (2 May 2009); Annie Harrison, The Kentucky Derby: Its Traditions and Triumphs (1980); Laura Hillenbrand, American Heritage (January 1999); Chuck Martin, Cincinnati Enquirer (30 April 2003).

 

Lambert’s Café

Lambert’s Café opened during the Second World War in a small town in the heart of southeast Missouri. Claiming to be the only home of “Throw’d Rolls,” the establishment takes its slogan from its peculiarly raucous system of serving hot, dinner rolls. This family-owned operation began with one restaurant in Sikeston, Mo., located between St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., but has since opened Lambert’s II in Ozark, Mo., in 1994 and Lambert’s III in Foley, Ala., in 1996.

Earl and Agnes Lambert entered the restaurant business on 13 March 1942 after borrowing $1,500 dollars from a friend. The café soon became popular with local residents, but hungry travelers have increasingly provided Lambert’s with a steady stream of customers from outside the southeast Missouri region since the opening of Interstate 55.

After Earl’s death in 1976, his son, Norman Lambert, and wife, Patti, became part owners alongside Earl’s widow, Agnes. That same year, Lambert’s Café assumed its famous moniker as the “Home of Throw’d Rolls.” Norman, who had heretofore passed out rolls to customers from a pushcart, was unable to navigate through the thick lunch-hour crowd. When a customer became irritated with the slow pace, he yelled at Norman to “throw the [expletive] thing.” Norman Lambert obliged, and Lambert’s servers have been throwing fresh, hot rolls to customers ever since.

Lambert’s Café serves traditional southern dishes such as fried chicken, catfish, chicken-fried steak, and country ham. Servers—wearing the bow ties and suspenders made famous by Norman—offer customers unlimited servings of side items (known as pass-arounds) with their meal. According to Lambert’s, they serve 48,960 pounds of white beans, 8,496 gallons of red pepper relish, over 73,000 pounds of fried Arkansas okra as well as 23,760 large cans of sorghum molasses to go along with 2,246,000 “throw’d rolls” each year.

In addition to creating the restaurant’s claim to fame, Norman Lambert lent his distinctive personality to the restaurant’s décor during his 20-year stint as owner. Walls covered with various antiques and portraits of Missouri mules surround patrons who sit at unadorned tables and drink from plastic mugs and fruit jars while tunes stream loudly from a player piano. As Norman Lambert, who passed away in 1996, once told the Associated Press, “It’s a ‘hey bud,’ ‘hey dude’ place. Bottom line, there’s a lot more Chevy’s out there than is Cadillacs.”

Ben Lambert has operated Lambert’s Café alongside his mother, Patti, since Norman’s death. The family continues to display Norman’s “13 Golden Rules” with prominence. The first of these is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and the last is to do “simple things, but in exceptional ways.” These rules add to the bucolic charm that draws customers by the tour busload to Lambert’s Café.

Highly rated food and service, along with the novelty of flying dinner rolls, also drew many famous patrons, including Clint Eastwood, Stan Musial, Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, and Tammy Wynette. Another famous face pitched the restaurant in an early 1990s commercial sponsored by the Missouri Department of Tourism. Actor and St. Louis native John Goodman encouraged tourists to visit Lambert’s for an unpretentious eating experience. The café’s massive portions and endless pass-arounds led the Travel Channel to name Lambert’s the best place to “pig out” in the United States, and Southern Living magazine named the family eatery the “Best Small Town Restaurant” in 1996.

ASHTON ELLETT

University of Georgia

Harry Cline, Western Farm Press (1 December 2007); Jerry Shriver, USA Today (25 May 2007); Michael Stern and Jane Stern, St. Petersburg Times (8 October 1987).

 

Louisiana State Lottery Company

The Louisiana State Lottery Company had its genesis in 1866 when the legislature, controlled by Confederate veterans, passed an act permitting lottery vending in the state. Two years later a Republican-dominated legislature assisted by Charles T. Howard, a skilled lobbyist, pushed through a bill chartering the Louisiana State Lottery Company. The 25-year charter gave the company a monopoly on the sale of lottery tickets and exempted the organization from state taxes, except for an annual license fee of $40,000. Its capital stock was set at $1 million with 10,000 shares valued at $100 each. Operations began on 31 December 1868.

By the time the Republican government fell in 1877 the company was a lucrative and politically powerful enterprise. Anxious to maintain its privileges and to foil opposition from Louisiana’s Redeemers, lotterymen in 1879 allied themselves with the reactionary Bourbon faction of the Democratic Party, wrote a new state constitution that ousted unfriendly state officials, installed lottery supporters in key government positions, and gave legal sanction to lotteries until 1 January 1895.

With opposition temporarily stayed, lotterymen improved the image of the organization by undertaking philanthropic endeavors and enshrining their enterprise in the sacrosanct shroud of the Lost Cause. Two ex-Confederate generals, P. G. T. Beauregard and Jubal Early, presided over drawings, thereby ensuring honesty. Yet, with 47 percent of its gross receipts retained as profit, there was little need for chicanery. Conservative estimates of profits accrued in the 1880s range from $8 million to $14 million annually, and by 1890 the company reportedly took in from $20 million to $30 million.

At the peak of its economic and political power, opposition to the company increased locally and nationally. From 1890 to 1892, debates over the renewal of the company’s charter raged throughout the state, split both major parties, divided the Populists, and submerged all other issues. The antilottery forces won the battle in Louisiana, but the U.S. Congress, taking direct aim at the Louisiana Lottery, delivered the fatal blow by passing a bill denying the use of the mails to lotteries. Because 90 percent of the Louisiana Lottery’s proceeds came from states other than Louisiana, this legislation dried up profits and closed down operations in the state in December 1893. In January diehard lotterymen transferred the company to Honduras, and for some years they sponsored illegal activities in the United States. Federal law enforcement authorities checked these operations, and the company collapsed in 1907.

CAROLYN DELATTE

McNeese State University

Berthold C. Alwes, Louisiana Historical Quarterly (October 1944); Henry C. Dethloff, Louisiana History (Spring 1965); William I. Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877–1900 (1969).

 

Mammoth Cave National Park

Located in south-central Kentucky, Mammoth Cave National Park is the longest recorded cave system in the world, officially identified as the Mammoth Cave System. The national park was established in 1941, now encompassing 52,830 acres above ground and 360 miles of mapped tunnels and passageways below, with newly found tunnels adding to that number yearly.

The history of the Mammoth Cave region extends across several millennia—perhaps as far back as the Paleo-Indians, who roamed the Mississippi Valley more than 11,000 years ago—but it is uncertain when modern man began exploring the cave. Legend has it that John Houchins first “discovered” the cave in 1797 when giving chase to a wounded bear while hunting, yet other accounts place its discovery before then. The first person to map the cave system and give name to many of its features was Stephen Bishop. By the War of 1812, Mammoth Cave was mined for bat guano, which contains calcium nitrate, an ingredient used to make gunpowder. In the decades following the war, after the price of gunpowder had significantly fallen, the cave became one of America’s first and most popular tourist attractions, and ownership of the cave changed hands a number of times, eventually being purchased by Franklin Gorin in 1838. Gorin, a slave owner, used his slaves as guides for tourists who wanted to explore the increasingly famous cave. Stephen Bishop, one of Gorin’s slaves, was sold in October 1839, along with Mammoth Cave, to Dr. John Croghan. Through the 1840s and into the 1850s, Bishop explored, mapped out, and guided visitors through Mammoth Cave. Today, many features of the cave still bear the names that Bishop gave them, such as Pensacola Avenue, the Snowball Room, Bunyan’s Way, Winding Way, Bottomless Pit, Great Relief Hall, and the River Styx.

Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky (Kentucky Department of Travel)

In 1849 Dr. Croghan died, but not before attempting to turn portions of the cave into a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, believing the vapors within the cave contained healing powers. Some of his patients died shortly after relocating to the cave; all the rest grew progressively worse. Within a year he had abandoned his sanitarium experiment. Croghan died, incidentally, of the disease he was attempting to cure, and Bishop, one year after his manumission in 1856, also died of tuberculosis at the age of 36.

By 1926 advocacy for the preservation of Mammoth Cave had grown among wealthy Kentuckians. Private citizens donated funds to purchase much of the land within the proposed park, and the right of eminent domain secured the remaining tracts. On 1 July 1941 Mammoth Cave National Park was officially dedicated, and the cave system below the park continues to grow. As recently as 2005 a connection linking the Mammoth system to another cave system, Roppel Cave, was discovered east of the park. It is generally accepted that explorers will continue to discover unexplored pathways in the coming years and that thousands of yet-to-be-discovered animal species exist in the cave system.

Today the wondrous subterranean world of Mammoth Cave is visited by nearly 2 million visitors annually. Tourists travel from all over the world to explore Mammoth Cave’s labyrinthine passageways. Features of particular interest within these caverns are the 192-foot-high Mammoth Dome, the 105-foot-deep Bottomless Pit, walls sprinkled with sparkling white gypsum crystals, conical stalagmites and stalactites, giant vertical shafts, the underground Echo and Styx rivers, and rare and endangered animal species such as the southeastern bat, the eyeless crayfish, and the Mammoth Cave shrimp. But while most visitors are attracted to the park to venture below ground, above ground the 52,830-acre park contains lakes and rivers, a 300-acre old-growth forest, rolling hills, miles of hiking trails, and a complex and diverse ecosystem.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

James D. Borden and Roger W. Brucker, Beyond Mammoth Cave: A Tale of Obsession in the World’s Longest Cave (2000); Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson, The Longest Cave (1976); Horace Carter Hovey, One Hundred Miles in Mammoth Cave in 1880: An Early Exploration of America’s Most Famous Cavern (1982); Johnny Molloy, A Falcon Guide to Mammoth Cave National Park (2006); Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker, Trapped!: The Story of Floyd Collins (1979); Bob Thompson and Judi Thompson, Mammoth Cave and the Kentucky Cave Region (2003); William B. White and Elizabeth L. White, eds., Karst Hydrology: Concepts from the Mammoth Cave Area (1989).

 

Manning Family

ARCHIE MANNING (B. 1949), PEYTON MANNING (B. 1976), AND ELI MANNING (B. 1981) FOOTBALL PLAYERS.

Archie Manning, patriarch of the first family of southern football, arrived at the University of Mississippi in 1967. The red-haired, gangly, and relatively unheralded recruit from Drew, Miss., took over at quarterback as a sophomore under legendary coach John Vaught. Manning soon gained regional and national renown as a superb passer as well as a talented runner. He led the Rebels to three bowl games, including a Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas. Archie’s stature grew to heroic proportions in the South during the 1969 Sugar Bowl campaign, in which he was the Rebels’ leading rusher. He produced two unforgettable games during that eight-win season. The first came in a losing effort against Alabama in the first nationally televised college football night game. He amassed an SEC record 540 yards of total offense against the victorious Crimson Tide.

Later in the season, he led the Rebels to a 38–0 upset of first-ranked Tennessee, a game known as the Jackson Massacre. Some Volunteer fans had worn “Archie Who?” buttons to the game, and afterward, an exultant Ole Miss fan recorded “The Ballad of Archie Who,” which sold 35,000 copies and featured the line, “That’s All-American Archie / You know Archie Who.” Today, Archie Manning’s number 18 is both the speed limit on campus and one of the football program’s two retired jersey numbers.

Shortly after Archie married his college sweetheart, Ole Miss Homecoming Queen Olivia Williams, the New Orleans Saints drafted Archie. He was the second overall pick in the 1971 NFL draft. He played there for 12 seasons. He completed his 14-year career with season-long stints with the Houston Oilers and the Minnesota Vikings. Despite never having a winning season in the pros, he went to two Pro Bowls and was the NFC’S MVP in 1979. He is a member of the college football and New Orleans Saints halls of fame.

The Mannings remained in New Orleans after Archie’s retirement, and all three of his sons lettered in multiple sports at Isidore Newman High, a private school near the Garden District. The oldest, Cooper, signed with Ole Miss as a wide receiver, but a spinal cord disorder ended his career. Peyton, the most intense and serious brother, bucked the family trend and offended many Rebel fans when he decided to sign with the University of Tennessee. He later said he would have signed with Ole Miss if Cooper had still been playing. Peyton started eight games as a freshman and every game of the next three seasons. He led the Vols to four bowl appearances, three top-10 finishes, and an SEC title. He was the MVP of Tennessee’s victory over Auburn in the 1997 SEC championship game. He fared well against Alabama, beating the Vols’ traditional rival three consecutive years. He led the “Pride of the Southland” band in “Rocky Top” to celebrate the 1997 victory, one of the most memorable moments of his collegiate career.

The Indianapolis Colts drafted Peyton with the first overall pick in 1998, and he started every game of his rookie season. He became known as league’s most devoted student of the game and quickly became one of the league’s elite quarterbacks. Despite stellar play throughout his career, he drew criticism for his perceived inability to win the big one. After all, Tennessee never beat Florida with Peyton at the helm, and the Colts always seemed to come up short to the New England Patriots in the playoffs. But he finally got past the Patriots in the 2006 AFC championship game, and the Colts went on to win the Super Bowl. Peyton engineered an 80-yard drive in the final minutes of Super Bowl XLI that produced the go-ahead touchdown and earned him the game’s MVP award. Peyton has also won the league MVP award a record-tying three times and has made nine Pro Bowl appearances.

Following his prep career at Isidore Newman, Eli signed with Ole Miss, where Peyton’s former offensive coordinator and mentor, David Cutcliffe, was head coach. In spite of the intense pressure of living up to the Manning name at his father’s alma mater, the soft-spoken and undemonstrative youngest Manning kept a characteristically even keel at Ole Miss. The Rebels enjoyed winning seasons in each of the three years Eli started at quarterback, and his senior campaign netted 10 wins, an SEC West co-championship, and a 31–28 Cotton Bowl victory over Oklahoma State. Eli set or matched 47 Ole Miss records, including career completions (829) and career passing yards (10,119).

The San Diego Chargers selected Eli Manning with the first overall pick of the 2004 NFL draft, but he threatened to sit out if not traded to another team. The New York Giants landed the youngest Manning. Eli took over the starting job late in his rookie season, and he led the Giants to the playoffs in 2005 and 2006. But critics—including some of his teammates—questioned his leadership ability. In 2007 he overcame these criticisms by leading the Giants to a 10–6 season that culminated in a Super Bowl victory. To beat the undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, he made one of the most dramatic plays in the game’s history late in the fourth quarter. On a critical third down, he twisted out of the grasp of a defender, bailed out of a collapsed pocket, and completed a 32-yard pass into traffic. With less than a minute remaining, Eli completed the drive with a 13-yard touchdown pass. Just a year after Peyton was the Super Bowl’s MVP, Eli earned the same honor, and both played in that year’s Pro Bowl.

The first family of southern football gets a great deal of exposure off the field as well. The quarterbacking Mannings are featured on dozens of national commercials, and an ESPN commercial featured the whole family. Peyton has hosted Saturday Night Live, and Eli has been on the cover of Men’s Vogue magazine. The Mannings are also known for tremendous charitable contributions. In 1999 Peyton created the Peyback Foundation to help disadvantaged children in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Indiana, and in 2007, as a result of Peyton’s charitable contributions to the hospital, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis renamed its children’s hospital Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent’s. In December 2008 Eli helped raise funds to open the Eli Manning Children’s Clinics at the Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children in Jackson, Miss.

MILES LASETER

University of Mississippi

Archie Manning and Peyton Manning with John Underwood, Manning (2000); Ralph Vacchiano, Eli Manning: The Making of a Quarterback (2008).

 

Maravich, Pete

(1947–1988) BASKETBALL PLAYER.

Peter Press Maravich was born on 22 June 1947 in Aliquippa, Pa., near Pittsburgh. He learned the fundamentals of basketball from his father, “Press,” and spent hours each day developing his shooting, dribbling, and passing artistry. When his father became head coach at Clemson University in 1956, Pete played at high schools in South Carolina and North Carolina, where he earned the nickname “The Pistol” because he shot accurately from his hip.

Pete took a scholarship to LSU when his father became head coach there in 1966. In three years with the varsity (1967–70), “Pistol Pete” scored 3,667 points, averaging 44.2 points per game. In 83 games for the Tigers, he scored 50 points or more 28 times. He set every scoring record at LSU, as well as 34 SEC records, and 11 NCAA marks. In 1970 he led LSU to a 20–8 record and was named All-American and U.S. Basketball Writers Association player of the year and won the Naismith Award. Although he raised the quality of basketball at LSU, Pete never played in the NCAA tournament.

In 1970 the 6′5″ Maravich was the third pick in the NBA draft and signed a five-year, $1.9 million contract with the Atlanta Hawks, making him the highest paid athlete in the United States. After four seasons with the Hawks, including two selections to the NBA All-Star team, Maravich was traded to the New Orleans Jazz in 1974. He prospered with the Jazz, making the All-Star team in 1977, 1978, and 1979, and leading the NBA in scoring with 31.1 points per game during the 76–77 season.

In 1979 Maravich moved with the Jazz to Utah, but he was waived in January 1980 and was acquired by the Boston Celtics as a free agent. He spent the rest of the season as a bench player supporting a rising star, Larry Bird. As the next season approached, Maravich announced his early retirement.

Maravich suffered from nagging knee injuries since 1978. In the NBA, the five-time All-Star had scored 15,948 points in 658 games (24.2 points per game). He became a recluse for two years, struggling with depression and alcoholism. He reemerged in 1982 as a born-again Christian, determined to use his celebrity to promote his new faith around the country. He and his family moved to Covington, La.

In 1986 “Pistol Pete” was inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame. Eight years after his retirement, while working with James Dobson’s ministry in Pasadena, Calif., the 40-year-old Maravich collapsed during a pickup basketball game. The heart attack that claimed his life on 5 January 1988 was determined to have resulted from a congenital heart defect. He was buried at Resthaven Garden of Memory in Baton Rouge, La.

Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer named the LSU home court the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in 1988. LSU retired his number 23 in 2007. “Pistol” Pete Maravich left a legacy to basketball that is found in every lanky, bushy-haired youngster with droopy socks who devotes countless hours, after practice ends, to honing his skills.

LLEWELLYN D. COOK

Jacksonville State University

Mark Kriegel, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich (2007); Tom Saladino, Pistol Pete Maravich: The Louisiana Purchase (1974).

 

Mid-South Wrestling

Former professional wrestling star “Cowboy” Bill Watts bought out his former employer, Tri-State Wrestling, in 1979 and redubbed it the Mid-South Wrestling Association, which covered territory in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and eventually Arkansas and parts of eastern Texas. At the time, Watts was seen as a very savvy promoter in the professional wrestling world, backing shows that garnered high ratings and that sported a large fan base. Mid-South Wrestling focused on high-energy matches featuring a more physical style and episodic format than some of his competition.

Watts’s Mid-South brand gained in popularity during the early 1980s, in large part because of his dynamic and exotic cast of (primarily southern) wrestlers, which included the Junkyard Dog, the One Man Gang, Kamala the Ugandan Giant, King Kong Bundy, the Fabulous Freebirds, Dusty Rhodes, the Great Kabuki, and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan. Mid-South Wrestling’s success led Ted Turner to ask Watts to air the matches on the TBS cable channel in 1985 as an alternative to the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) show that aired on Saturday nights. With increased popularity, Watts positioned himself to take over the two-hour Saturday night block occupied by the WWF, but his luck ran out when National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) promoter Jim Crockett Jr. bought the slot from the WWF’S Vince McMahon and became the exclusive wrestling promotion for TBS. The deal forced the removal of the Mid-South Wrestling program from the TBS schedule.

In March 1986 Mid-South Wrestling went national and was renamed again as the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF). Many newcomers, including Steve Williams, D. J. Peterson, and Scott Hall, joined Universal. But despite the federation’s success, it could not compete against Jim Crockett Promotions and the WWF. Watts sold the UWF to Jim Crockett in the spring of 1987, and many of the federation’s top names went on to either the NWA, WWF, or World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). Crockett’s circuit was sold to Ted Turner and eventually became World Championship Wrestling (WCW). In the early 1990s, Watts found himself back in the spotlight as WCW president.

MARK COLTRAIN

Central Piedmont Community College

Scott Beekman, Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America (2006); Carolyn Kolb, New Orleans Magazine (November 2004); Kristian Pope and Ray Whebbe, The Encyclopedia of Professional Wrestling: 100 Years of History, Headlines, and Hitmakers (2003).

 

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Myrtle Beach is a popular tourist destination in South Carolina known for its beaches, entertainment venues, seafood restaurants, golf courses, and shopping. The city, which draws 10 million tourists per year, is the main attraction along the Grand Strand.

Myrtle Beach, currently the largest city in Horry County, was not developed until the early 20th century. The sparsely populated area was isolated by rivers and swamps and had generally poor soil for farming. The local economy was based primarily on aspects of the timber industry, fishing, and subsistence farming.

Franklin G. Burroughs, a prominent businessman who settled in the area in the mid-19th century, saw the coast as a potential resort. Burroughs and Benjamin Grier Collins formed the Burroughs & Collins Company in 1895. The company built the first railroad line from Conway, the county seat, to the coast; opened the first motel, the Seaside Inn; and built a simple pavilion and boardwalk in the first years of the 20th century. Burroughs & Collins began to sell small beachfront lots to individuals from Conway for vacation cottages. In 1912 the land-rich Burroughs & Collins Company was in need of capital and partnered with Simeon B. Chapin, a northern businessman. They formed the Myrtle Beach Farms Company to develop a resort along the coast. The Great Depression was devastating for America, but Myrtle Beach grew and prospered.

In 1926 John T. Woodside bought 65,000 acres from Myrtle Beach Farms and contributed greatly to the infrastructure, planning, and development of Myrtle Beach. Woodside built the first golf course—today there are more than 100—and the Ocean Forrest Hotel, a lavish structure referred to as the “million dollar hotel.” The hotel’s grand opening was a few months after the stock market crash of 1929. Wood-side ended up defaulting, and the land reverted back to Myrtle Beach Farms with many improvements. In the late 1930s, the city of Myrtle Beach received its charter; however, World War II soon disrupted the developing tourism industry. The war effort bought a strong military presence to the area. The Myrtle Beach Air Force Base became a social and economic force from 1940 until it closed in 1993.

With increased leisure time, the development of better roads, and a strong economy, tourism flourished in postwar America. In 1950 Burroughs & Collins opened the Myrtle Beach Pavilion Amusement Park, which became a local institution and center of socialization. Mom-and-pop tourist courts, motels, restaurants, and amusements flourished alongside the white, sandy beaches. As a southern resort, Myrtle Beach’s amusements were for whites only until the late 1960s. Blacks were instrumental to Myrtle Beach’s development, including building and working in the tourism industry. Strong, tight-knit African American communities existed in the resort town.

The devastation of Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and the subsequent rebuilding efforts contributed to Myrtle Beach’s transition from quaint seaside resort to the national tourist destination it is today. Low-cost flood insurance became available in 1968 and facilitated bigger developments along the shore. The 1970s brought the first high-rise hotel, the Yachtsman, and by the end of the decade overdevelopment had become a problem. In 1990 Myrtle Beach Farms Company joined with Burroughs & Collins Company to form Burroughs & Chapin Company, Inc. In the late 20th century, Myrtle Beach suffered from poor planning, lack of ecological conservation, and complaints about the dominance of Burroughs & Chapin.

Burroughs & Chapin closed the Pavilion Amusement Park in 2006. The resulting hole left in the center of the city was representative of the changes and challenges facing Myrtle Beach in the 21st century. Burroughs & Chapin plan to build condos to replace the amusement park. Many of the park’s historic artifacts have moved to the Pavilion Nostalgia Park at Broadway at the Beach, a 350-acre Burroughs & Chapin entertainment compound with chain stores, restaurants, bars, theaters, and a miniature golf course.

Today, Myrtle Beach still has the beautiful beaches that originally drew people to its shores. The buildings alongside the coast are much taller, the natural environment is less pure, and the development is under a corporate rather than a family model. Yet one of the South’s most popular and democratic tourist destinations continues to grow and change with the tides.

NICOLE KING

University of Maryland at Baltimore County

Catherine H. Lewis, Horry County, South Carolina, 1730–1993 (1998); Barbara F. Stokes, Myrtle Beach: A History, 1900–1980 (2007); Will Moredock, Banana Republic: A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach (2003).

 

NASCAR

Daytona Beach, Florida–based NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) is the largest and most important sanctioning body for auto racing in the United States. It is best known for its premier stock car series, currently known as Nextel Cup. Like Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, NASCAR is a southern born-and-bred brand that has grown to have national and even international significance and influence. At the same time, its management style and many of its major features retain a uniquely southern character.

Stories of the origins of NASCAR generally revolve around two key components: “good old boy” illegal liquor haulers and Daytona Beach mechanic/ auto racer/promoter William Henry Getty “Big Bill” France. To be sure, illegal liquor haulers, primarily from the Piedmont South, had a significant impact on the origins of NASCAR as the majority of the early stars of southern stock car racing had their first highspeed driving experiences behind the wheels of late 1930s Ford V-8s loaded down with white liquor.

The move from high-speed evasion of law enforcement on the back roads of the Piedmont and its foothills to racing on red-clay fairgrounds tracks was a natural one for the liquor haulers. In the early years of southern stock car racing, these wild individuals generally dominated the regional racing scene as they possessed more disposable income than the average southerner, superior equipment, mechanical know-how, and extensive high-speed driving experience. The outlaw image of many of the drivers helped to attract working-class fans to the tracks to cheer on these individuals who defied both law and convention.

Bill France became friends with many of these liquor-hauling racers as he both competed against them in stock car races in the late 1930s and early 1940s and promoted some of the largest and most important pre–World War II races on Daytona Beach. After World War II, France focused his energies on building a stock car racing empire. In addition to the drivers, France used the financial capital provided by other southerners who were deeply involved in the illegal liquor business. Most of the key early car owners, mechanics, and track owners in the Piedmont had deep ties to moonshining and bootlegging. Indeed, the very financial foundation of Bill France’s empire was built on the proceeds of the manufacture, transport, and sale of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cases of white liquor and bonded “red” liquor.

In 1947 France sought to expand what was essentially a regional enterprise and brought together promoters from the Northeast and Midwest to found NASCAR. From the start, its organization was unique to any other professional sport’s sanctioning body as it was almost solely owned and controlled by France, who possessed dictatorial powers. At the same time, however, France had a paternalistic side and gained the trust of most important stock car drivers, car owners, and promoters.

In the 1950s the sport experienced tremendous growth as France and his associates expanded NASCAR’S reach across the nation, sanctioning races in its top division in 28 different states in every major region of the country, and even beyond, in Ontario, Canada. In the same period drivers from 38 states and 3 Canadian provinces competed in these races. While NASCAR’S reach did expand, the Piedmont South was still the home of most of its star drivers and its most significant races. Perhaps NASCAR’S most important innovation during the period was the creation of lower divisions of weekly racing on the burgeoning number of Piedmont short tracks. This expansion enabled working-class individuals to start racing for little cost and move up through the ranks. Indeed, most of the second generation of NASCAR stars got their start in this manner, rather than at the wheel of a liquor car.

NASCAR’S increasing connections to the American auto industry also helped to facilitate this growth. In the early 1950s, car dealers began to note the rise in sales when a particular make of automobile was successful in stock car racing. Bill France and others in NASCAR successfully promoted the notion of “win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” and Detroit began to provide significant technical and financial support to top car owners and drivers.

NASCAR entered a new era of expansion in the late 1950s and 1960s, as new, paved superspeedways were built, older dirt tracks were paved, and new stars came on the scene. Bill France led the way by constructing NASCAR’S most important showcase in 1959, the Daytona International Speedway. The construction of Daytona put France in the enviable position of owning not only the sanctioning body but also its most important venue. Other high-speed paved tracks followed at Charlotte and Rockingham, N.C., Atlanta, Ga., Bristol, Tenn., the Irish Hills near Detroit, and Talladega, Ala.

During the early 1960s, Detroit played an even greater role in NASCAR, pouring millions of dollars into the sport. Competition between the automakers became intense, and Bill France had to walk a fine line to appease the automakers while preventing one make from winning all of the races. France alternately banned the Chrysler Hemi engine in 1965 and then the Ford overhead-cam engine in 1966. In each year, the factory teams boycotted, leaving France with dominance by a single make and without the attraction of some of his top drivers, including Richard Petty, who joined the Chrysler boycott in 1965.

France also encountered problems from his drivers in the 1960s. The more powerful automobiles and the high-speed tracks combined to produce a dangerous mix for drivers, especially when tire technology failed to keep pace. A number of NASCAR’S top stars lost their lives during the period, including two-time champion Joe Weatherly and the most popular driver in NASCAR, Glen “Fireball” Roberts. Drivers also noted that while their expenses and NASCAR’S revenues were increasing, prize money remained static. In 1961, and again in 1969, drivers attempted to unionize. Although both efforts were led by some of the most successful and popular drivers in NASCAR, Bill France adeptly crushed both movements. Indeed, one of the most southern aspects of NASCAR is the way France defeated the union movements using every tried and true tactic employed by Piedmont mill owners to defeat the United Textile Workers of America.

Having successfully handled these controversies, France turned the reins of power over to his son William Clifton France—generally known as Bill Jr.—in 1972. Before he left, however, he helped NASCAR take its most significant step into the modern era when he secured sponsorship for his flagship Grand National series from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Flush with dollars it could no longer spend on television advertising because of a new federal ban, R. J. Reynolds poured millions into the series—now named the Winston Cup—transforming it from a sport of small dirt track and paved bullrings to large superspeedways. In the same year, Richard Petty wooed STP to sponsor his race car and the sport entered a new era of corporate sponsorship.

Television also began to have a greater and greater impact on the sport and helped Bill France Jr. promote its growing popularity. Incredibly exciting finishes in nationally televised Daytona 500s in both 1976 and 1979 brought greater exposure to the sport and created hordes of new fans. Increasing numbers of live broadcasts soon followed, especially when the fledgling cable network ESPN began making NASCAR broadcasts one of its staples in 1981.

In the 1980s and 1990s, NASCAR experienced explosive growth owing to its greater television exposure and a bevy of talented and attractive new stars. Growth in the sport was heightened even more by the rivalry in the 1990s of the polar opposites Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon. Earnhardt was the epitome of the NASCAR “good old boy,” a native of a Piedmont mill town who dropped out of high school at 16, worked in a cotton mill, and moved up through the ranks of local drivers at area short tracks. In contrast, native Californian Gordon was the face of the new NASCAR, seemed to be the All-American boy, became a go-kart champion before he entered elementary school, and was as talented as a spokesperson for his sponsors as he was as a driver. Their rivalry could not have been better scripted in Hollywood and brought millions of new fans to the sport.

As the sport grew in popularity its image changed dramatically. Increasingly, new tracks were built outside the Piedmont South and the majority of new fans and drivers came from outside the region. Tracks began to pop up near Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Chicago, even in New Hampshire. Fortune 500 companies noticed the sport’s national appeal and the loyalty of its fans to products endorsed by their favorite driver. Companies including DuPont, Proctor and Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, Coors, McDonalds, Kodak, and Kellogg’s joined the auto-related companies such as Texaco, Valvoline, GM Goodwrench, and Ford Quality Care to pour millions into the sport in sponsorship dollars. It soon became as important for drivers to be effective celebrity spokespersons for their myriad sponsors as it was for them to have the courage and skill to handle a 3,400-pound stock car in a battle with 42 other drivers.

While the sport did change dramatically in the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, it still retains significant evidences of its roots in the Piedmont South. The center of the NASCAR universe is the area around Charlotte, N.C., where the vast majority of its drivers live and most of the race shops are located. NASCAR is also the most overtly evangelical Christian sport on the American scene and not only holds regular chapel services for its drivers but opens every race with a public prayer, generally one ending with “in Jesus’s name.” Pre-race festivities are also very patriotic and often include tributes to American troops and flyovers of military aircraft. In a reflection of its connections to the Piedmont, where African Americans were not allowed to work in cotton mills until the late 1960s, NASCAR is also the whitest professional sport in the United States. Indeed, in its almost 60 years of existence, NASCAR has had only one African American driver—Wendell Scott in the 1960s and early 1970s—compete in its top series on a consistent basis. NASCAR has recently instituted an aggressive diversity program to bring both minority and female drivers into the sport.

Perhaps the most strikingly southern aspect of NASCAR is the unprecedented control over the sport still exercised by the France family. Indeed, its hegemony over the sport is nothing if not reminiscent of the control exercised by Piedmont cotton mill owners through their ownership of both factory and mill town. NASCAR drivers are still the only major professional athletes without union representation. Not only does the France family own NASCAR itself, but it also owns 12 of the 22 tracks that host races in its top division through the publicly traded, but France-family controlled, International Speedway Corporation. This control has made the France family incredibly wealthy. Forbes Magazine estimated in 2006 the wealth of Bill France’s two sons—Bill Jr. and Jim—at $1.5 billion each.

Today, races in NASCAR’S top division regularly attract 150,000 or more fans to tracks featuring luxury corporate skyboxes and valet parking. Millions more watch the live broadcasts on network television. Indeed, NASCAR racing consistently draws a larger television audience than any other sport with the exception of the NFL. While the sport has come a long way from its roots as a blue-collar spectacle acted out on the dirt tracks of the Piedmont South by a bunch of “good old boy” liquor haulers, it is still the most characteristically southern sport in the nation.

DANIEL S. PIERCE

University of North Carolina at Asheville

Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000); Greg Fielden, Forty Years of Stock Car Racing, 5 vols. (1988); Peter Golenbock, American Zoom (1993); Paul Hemphill, Wheels: A Season on NASCAR’s Winston Cup Circuit (1997); Tom Higgins and Steve Waid, Brave in Life: Junior Johnson (1999); Ed Hinton, Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black (2001); Mark Howell, From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series (1997); Daniel S. Pierce, Atlanta History (no. 2, 2004), Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France (2010), Southern Cultures (Summer 2001); Sylvia Wilkinson, Dirt Tracks to Glory: The Early Years of Stock Car Racing as Told by Its Participants (1983).

 

Negro Baseball Leagues

Under segregation, by custom and sometimes by law, interracial sports encounters were prohibited in the South. As a direct result, black southerners developed their own sports world, and baseball was by far the most popular sport of the period.

Each town or rural area had a black baseball team that competed against other local black teams in games that had great cultural importance and entertainment value in those communities. The larger towns had better teams, and the very best players became professionals. The top of the black baseball hierarchy was the Negro League—sometimes called the Negro Major Leagues.

Though headquartered in the North for economic reasons, the Negro League had a distinctly southern accent. The league’s founder, Rube Foster, was an expatriate Texan; and the majority of players, always southerners, were recruited from southern teams during spring training or during regular Negro League barnstorming forays into the South. In addition, the Negro League contained a smattering of southern teams at various times including the Birmingham Black Barons, Memphis Red Sox, Atlanta Black Crackers, Jacksonville Red Caps, and Nashville Elite Giants. A Southern Negro League functioned as the strongest Negro minor league. Supplementing the professional and semiprofessional teams of the South were church teams and teams organized around the workplace.

The movement of black athletic talent from South to North mirrored the migration of blacks in general from the South during segregation. Yet the visibility of the black baseball stars and their association with the communities from whence they came provided a unifying influence for all black Americans. Southern blacks were able to follow their baseball heroes through the national black newspapers that circulated throughout the South, and northern black teams appealed to the still strong southern loyalties of the black fans through promotions such as “Texas Day,” “Alabama Day,” or “North Carolina Day.”

The life of the traveling black ballplayer was difficult. Players were on the road constantly seeking a ball game and a payday, and they augmented the league schedule with exhibitions whenever possible. Sometimes they played three or four games in a single day. At the same time, in an age before television and air-conditioning, the ballplayers provided eagerly sought entertainment and were treated as bona fide celebrities in the black community. When the black players competed against and frequently defeated white major league players during postseason exhibitions in the North and West, they became genuine heroes in black America.

After Jackie Robinson became the first black to enter the major leagues in the 1947 season, black baseball rapidly declined as the black fans deserted their teams to watch integrated baseball. Southern-born Negro Leaguers who achieved prominence in the major leagues after integration include Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Satchel Paige; but as recounted in the rich folklore that sprang up about Negro baseball, many of the greatest black players never played in the major leagues.

DONN ROGOSIN

Beckley, West Virginia

John Holway, Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (1975); Neil Lanctot, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (2004); Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams (1992); Donn Rogosin, Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues (1983); Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (1983; 2nd ed., 2008).

 

Paige, Satchel

(1906–1982) BASEBALL PLAYER.

LeRoy “Satchel” Paige was born in Mobile, Ala., on 7 July 1906. As a youngster he was a porter at the railroad station, where he was given the nickname “Satchel” because he built a device that enabled him to carry many more bags than normal. He was in trouble early in life and spent over five years at the Industrial School for Negro Children at Mount Meig, Ala.

As a teenager he attracted attention for his baseball pitching, and he began playing professionally in 1924 for the Mobile Tigers, a black semipro club. By 1928 he had risen to the highest level of black baseball, playing with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro National League. He achieved his greatest fame in the Negro Leagues pitching for the Pittsburg Crawfords during the 1930s and the Kansas City Monarchs during the 1940s, but he pitched for as many as 250 independent ball clubs, usually on a one-game exhibition basis.

His fastball was virtually impossible to hit, and his reputation spread well beyond the world of black baseball, aided by his enormous showmanship and inexhaustible energy. In exhibition games he was frequently advertised as “guaranteed to strike out the first six men,” and he was known to call in the outfield or instruct his infielders to sit down.

His reputation was enhanced by a series of historic encounters with white major league players that followed the major league World Series. These games, during the era of segregation, enabled black and white ballplayers to assess each other’s skills. Dizzy Dean called Paige the greatest pitcher of his era, and major league testimony to Paige’s ability is abundant. Paige’s many victories over white major leaguers gave him a symbolic importance to blacks during segregation, and black baseball fans everywhere followed Paige’s exploits through the highly developed sports pages of the national black newspapers.

Shortly after the integration of baseball by Jackie Robinson, Paige became the first black pitcher in the American League with the Cleveland Indians in 1948. He pitched for Cleveland in 1948 and 1949, with the St. Louis Browns in 1951–53, and briefly with the Kansas City Athletics in 1965, all of which helped qualify him for a major league pension.

Paige was the ultimate barnstorming baseball player, pitching virtually every day. His talent was extraordinary, and his success was coupled with a flamboyant, comic style that augmented his reputation. Paige’s career illustrated the typical Negro League history of southern roots and northern achievement. In 1971 Paige was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first Negro Leaguer admitted under a new admissions policy. Paige died in 1982 in Kansas City, Mo.

DONN ROGOSIN

Beckley, West Virginia

William Price Fox, Satchel Paige’s America (2005); Donn Rogosin, Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues (1983); Edna Rust and Art Rust Jr., Art Rust’s Illustrated History of the Black Athlete (1985).

 

Petty, Richard

(b. 1937) SPORTS CAR DRIVER.

Among modern southern sports legends, few have had as sustained and dedicated a following as Richard Petty, often dubbed “King of the Road” in stock car racing. Petty’s dominance of the asphalt ovals in the South has created a following that adores him as much for his traditional lifestyle as for his driving exploits.

His racing record has been impressive. In his first 25 seasons (1958–83), Petty won 198 races, far more than any of his competitors. His earnings exceeded $4.5 million. Although slow to gain prominence—he went winless his first two seasons—Petty dominated the tracks from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. His peak performances came from 1967 through 1971, when the familiar Petty blue Plymouth was driven into victory lane in 40 percent of the 233 races he entered. Over the course of his career, Petty accumulated 200 career wins, including winning the prestigious Daytona 500 seven times, receiving seven Winston Cups for the best seasonal performance among drivers, and finishing among the first 10 drivers in 70 percent of the 900 races he entered.

Yet more than simple performance explains the hold of the Petty legend on so many southerners. Intensely personal and familial traits exist in stock car racing. Fans become attached to a particular driver and espouse his cause as if he were kin. Petty’s career style has been both an extension of and a reaction to such traits. He frequently spends hours after races signing autographs. He has been known, when eliminated early in competition, to use public restrooms to change his clothes. When a movie was made about his life, Petty himself played the lead role. Such closeness to his fans has bred deep loyalties. Through the years those who become Petty fans remain Petty fans.

The depth of such attachments can be best explained by the common origins Petty shares with most of his fans. His background, like theirs, is deeply rooted in the rural South. Petty grew up in the Uwharrie hills of Randolph County, N.C. He remained there until late in his career. Racing has been a hereditary trait among the Pettys. Richard succeeded his father, Lee, and Richard’s own son, Kyle, became a professional NASCAR driver himself. Kyle’s son, Adam, the fourth in a long line of race-car-driving Pettys, was an up-and-coming driver until 2000, when he died in a crash while practicing for an upcoming event. Much like traditional rural skills such as weaving and smithing, racing is passed along through generations.

Petty fans remained loyal because the racer remained just like them, even though he achieved uncommon financial success. The Pettys have lived “like folks,” even though they are co-owners of the NASCAR racing team Richard Petty Motorsports. They reinforce the ambitions of their fans, who through stock car racing have striven to hold on to the identities of their impoverished, rural past as they seek the urbane riches of the Sunbelt.

Held each year in October, the Angola Rodeo, which began in 1965, is the longest-running prison rodeo in the nation. (Photograph courtesy of the State Library of Louisiana)

GARY FREEZE

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ed Hinton, ed., Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black (2001); Bill Libby with Richard Petty, “King Richard”: The Richard Petty Story (1977).

 

Prison Rodeos

Convicts riding bulls and broncos is quite a sight, and spectators can watch the phenomenon in only two places—McAlester, Okla., and Angola, La. The rodeo at the penitentiary in Huntsville, Tex., ended in 1986 after a 55-year run.

Angola Prison is a huge 18,000-acre complex where inmates raise much of the food they consume. The prison rodeo started in 1965 as a diversion for convicts and employees, but it was not opened to the public until two years later. It grew steadily in popularity so that now the public flocks to Angola twice a year to see inmates compete in seven rodeo events. The rodeo became so large that a new 7,500-seat arena was constructed in 2000. Organizations consisting of trusted prisoners are allowed to set up booths to sell handmade crafts and food such as peanuts, sausages, and fried onions to the spectators. Shopping the booths is a key part of the festival-like atmosphere that visitors enjoy.

The rodeo at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary started in the 1940s—some say in imitation of the already famous Texas Prison Rodeo. It features convict cowboys not just from the “big house” in McAlester in the eastern part of the state but also from other institutions in the Oklahoma correctional system. Unlike Louisiana’s, Oklahoma’s “Outlaw Rodeo” also includes events open to nonconvicts and sanctioned by the International Professional Rodeo Association (IPRA). Staged in August in a usually full arena with 14,000 seats, it is billed as the only rodeo “behind prison walls.”

BRADLEY R. RICE

Clayton State University

Angola Prison Rodeo, www.angolarodeo.com; Texas Prison Rodeo History, www.txprisonmuseum.org.

 

Redneck Riviera

Although the name has been used to identify everything from a failed real estate venture in central Florida to a cluster of upscale houseboats on Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland, “Redneck Riviera” is most often used to describe a stretch of south Alabama beach running from the mouth of Mobile Bay east to just past the Alabama-Florida line. (Some include the Florida Panhandle, but purists don’t.)

The ’Bama beach was what Howell Raines wrote about in the New York Times back in 1978, when he may have been the first to use the term in print. Raines was describing the place where former University of Alabama, then pro-football quarterbacks Kenny Stabler and Richard Todd played during the off-season. From Gulf Shores to past Orange Beach was as fine a collection of bars and roadhouses as there was anywhere on the Gulf Coast—the Pink Pony, the L.A. (“Lower Alabama”) Pub & Grub, the Bear Point Marina, and the Seagull, all capped off by the Flora-Bama Lounge and Package. The Flora-Bama, located mostly in Florida to take advantage of more liberal liquor laws, was where “Let’s Do It on the Line” was said to be more than a slogan.

When asked about the life he led down there, Stabler reportedly replied, “I live the way I want to live and don’t give a damn if anybody likes it or not. I run hard as hell and don’t sleep. I’m just here for the beer.” So were a lot of other people.

Although the term “redneck” often conjures images of white-trash racists, race was not much of an issue for folks down on the “Riviera” because there were so few African Americans—in 1990, Orange Beach had two black residents. Gulf Shores had only one. As a result, without race in the equation, visitors and residents could and did concentrate on those other aspects of redneck culture that Stabler so eloquently described.

The people who did this, the creators of the Redneck Riviera, were, for the most part, members of the rising post–World War II Lower South middle-class, who came to the coast to fish a little, swim a little, drink a little, eat seafood, and generally do what they could not do back home—at least publicly. Many of the visitors came with their families, helping to calm more excessive urges.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, a younger, more raucous crowd appeared on the scene, and as these newcomers mingled with the older residents, Robert F. Jones, writing for Sports Illustrated, noticed two categories emerging: the “upper-crust, matronly, Rotarian with cash register eyeballs,” and those like “the Stabler gang, raffish, sunburnt, hard of hand and piratical of glance.” But the two were not as different as one might think. Indeed, given the opportunity they were ready to merge into what historian Emory Thomas described as “a new generation of raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard handed matrons.”

That opportunity came with Hurricane Frederic. On 12 September 1979 the storm hit the Alabama coast with 120-mile-per-hour winds and a record storm surge. Vacation cottages and “mom and pop” businesses were washed away, and in the recovery the “raffish Rotarians” discovered that there were baby boomers with money to invest. So they bought up and built up, and the Redneck Riviera became a condo row.

Today, much of that stretch of coast is lined with high-rise, upscale condominiums, most absentee owned, that rent to college kids at spring break, “snowbirds” in the winter, and anyone who has the money in the summer. But still tucked in among this new construction, not yet squeezed out by trendy restaurants and sports bars, are a few of the roadhouses and the seafood joints that gave the Riviera its “redneck” character. The Pink Pony is still there. So is the Flora-Bama, where the Annual Interstate Mullet Toss recaptures some of the “redneckery” for which the strip was once famous—though more controlled and calculated than when local road-houses were described as “beer-and-a-black-eye places.” And there were the Gulf and bayous to fish in and the beach to lie out on, though access to both continues to cause controversy.

But more than anything, there is the legacy of a more freewheeling time and a reputation for antisocial behavior that continues to inspire visitors to cut loose and be a redneck, if only for a little while. So long as the folks back home don’t find out.

HARVEY H. JACKSON III

Jacksonville State University

Robert F. Jones, Sports Illustrated (19 September 1979); Alan West Brockman and Joe Gilchrist, producers, The Last American Roadhouse: The Documentary of the Flora-Bama (film, 2006); Harris Mendheim, director, Mullet Men: Second Place Is the First Loser (film, 2000); Howell Raines, New York Times (21 June 1978); Ken Stabler and Barry Stainback, Snake: The Candid Autobiography of Football’s Most Outrageous Renegade (1986); Michael Swindle, Mullet-heads: The Legends, Lore, Magic, and Mania Surrounding the Humble but Celebrated Mullet (1998); Emory M. Thomas, Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War (1987).

 

Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail

The Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA), a $32 billion pension fund for state employees and teachers in Alabama, financed the largest golf course construction project at one time in history. The $255 million project was conceived, according to Dr. David G. Bronner, CEO of RSA, to stimulate economic development in Alabama by attracting industrial development, tourists, and retirees. It is called the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, otherwise known as simply “the Trail,” and consists of 468 holes on 26 courses at 11 distinct sites.

These sites run from the mountains in north Alabama to the coast in south Alabama and are located no more than 15 minutes from a major interstate and are less than two hours apart. There are five 54-hole complexes, five 36-hole complexes, and one 18-hole resort course. Each course has distinctive geographical features, which, as a group, highlight the natural beauty of Alabama’s diverse landscape. The RSA has also developed upscale hotels adjacent to the golf complexes on the trail.

Huntsville’s complex is built in a natural bowl with a river, creeks, and ponds against a panoramic mountain backdrop. Birmingham’s complex is nestled around Red Mountain and Shades Mountain with hills and has many downhill shots between mountains, creeks, and lakes. Auburn/ Opelika’s complex is located on a 600-acre lake with gently rolling terrain and majestic woodlands. Mobile’s complex carves through wetlands with a jungle environment and surprising elevations for a course on the Gulf Coast. Dothan’s complex accents rolling hills with creeks, ponds, and large moss-covered oaks. Greenville’s complex is located on the highest point for miles around with a beautiful lake, hills, and valleys wooded with forests of pine and hardwood. Anniston/Gadsden’s complex is on a series of spring-fed lakes in rolling topography with pretty forests surrounded by gorgeous mountains. Pratt-ville’s complex has courses that play along the Alabama River and Cooter’s Pond, which offer more than 1,500 acres of natural beauty and spectacular views overlooking Montgomery. The Shoals complex offers a spectacular view from a bluff overlooking Lake Wilson and the Tennessee River. Point Clear’s complex on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay has some of the most beautiful live oak trees on the Gulf Coast. The Ross Bridge complex is carved into the rolling terrain of Shannon Valley and meanders through indigenous landscape along the banks of two significant lakes connected by a spectacular waterfall dropping 80 feet.

The hotels in historic Mobile and Montgomery have sparked downtown revitalization efforts, including new businesses, entertainment, and restaurants. These golf complexes were designed to accommodate large corporate golf outings, as well as charity fund-raising events. They have excellent meeting facilities, and the adjacent hotels have spas and complete state-of-the-art conference facilities. The quality of these golf courses is exceptional. The golf courses, hotels, and housing and the associated advertising and publicity have helped to enhance the image of the state of Alabama. There have been more than 5,000 positive articles written in the media about this project. There have been many hours of worldwide television coverage of professional golf tournaments at the golf complexes. Ross Bridge hosts the PGA Champions Tour, and Mobile and Prattville host the LPGA Tour for weekly tournaments. Other collegiate and professional tours have been hosted on the Trail sites.

The courses, hotels, and adjacent housing developed in phases. Phase one of this development was the construction of the golf courses. Phase two was the construction of the hotels and phase three (just beginning) is the construction of resort/retirement housing adjacent to three of the complexes (Ross Bridge, Grand Hotel, and Grand National).

People from all over the world have visited Alabama to play golf on the Trail. The Trail has helped to increase tourism revenue in Alabama from $1.8 billion in 1992 to more than $9 billion in 2008, significantly changing the recreational culture and economy in Alabama.

MARK FAGAN

Jacksonville State University

David Anderson, New York Times (17 June 2000); Michael O’Neal, New York Times (13 September 2002).

 

Robinson, Eddie

(1919–2007) FOOTBALL COACH.

Eddie Robinson was born 12 February 1919 in Jackson, La., to sharecropper parents. At age eight he moved with his parents to Baton Rouge, where, according to Robinson, he watched a high school football team practice and decided he wanted to be a coach. Robinson played football at McKinley High School in Baton Rouge and at Leland College. After graduating in 1940, he worked during the day at a Baton Rouge feed mill and at night on an ice truck. In 1941 Grambling hired Robinson as head football coach, and he began his legendary career.

Robinson’s success in developing the football program at Grambling was phenomenal. When he first arrived on campus, Robinson assumed chores assigned to support staffs at larger schools, such as mowing the playing field, taping ankles, and even writing game stories for the newspapers. With the support of the Grambling administration, Robinson built the fledgling program into one of the most respected collegiate programs in the country. Robinson was always a popular figure in the world of black college football, but broader fame came in the late 1960s after sports commentator Howard Co-sell did a television documentary on the success of Grambling football. More than 200 of Robinson’s Grambling players went on to play on professional teams, a record that testified to Robinson’s success as a coach. Robinson’s coaching style changed little during his years at Grambling. His teams used the wing-T formation on offense and a prostyle 4–3 on defense.

During the fall 1985 season, Robinson won his 324th game, surpassing the record previously held by Paul (Bear) Bryant of Alabama. Although some observers charge that Robinson’s record meant less than Bryant’s because most of his victories came against Division I-AA-caliber teams, others point out that Robinson has had to overcome difficulties Bryant never faced at Alabama, such as low recruitment and operating budgets and racial discrimination. Robinson retired in 1997 with 408 wins, the most of any head coach in Division I-AA.

KAREN M. MCDEARMAN

University of Mississippi

Paul Hemphill, Southern Magazine (December 1986); Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated (14 October 1985); William C. Rhoden, New York Times (16 September 1985); Eddie Robinson, Never Before, Never Again: The Stirring Autobiography of Eddie Robinson, the Winningest Coach in the History of College Football (1997).

 

Rupp, Adolph Frederick

(1901–1977) COLLEGE BASKETBALL COACH.

A generation after Adolph Rupp’s death, he remains one of the most successful and best-remembered college basketball coaches. In a college career that spanned 41 years, all of them spent at the University of Kentucky, he compiled a record of 876 wins and a .822 winning percentage. Rupp’s name joins his college coach, Forrest “Phog” Allen of Kansas University, as a titan in the history of the sport.

Rupp’s businesslike seriousness about the game brought success immediately upon his arrival at Kentucky. He coached UK to near total supremacy in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), winning the regular season 27 times and taking the conference tournament 13 times. In six Final Four appearances, his teams won four championships, including a streak of three in a row between 1948 and 1951. Rupp, along with other coaches like Everett Case, brought real innovation to the college game. Pairing an up-tempo offense with a tight man-to-man defense quickened the game and changed the style of play permanently. This fast-paced and exciting style quickly won over legions of fans and helped to make college basketball one of the most popular sports in the country.

Several controversies arose over the course of Rupp’s long and successful career. Despite Rupp’s assurances that his players were above reproach, Kentucky was caught up in the national cheating scandal of 1951, leading to the cancellation of the 1951–52 season. Rival coaches felt Rupp exercised undue influence over the NCAA Tournament, particularly in the selection and seeding of teams. He never pretended to be a father figure to his players, and his demand for militaristic discipline left many players feeling alienated from the coach. He demanded perfection from his teams, and he got it. However, it was Rupp’s failure to integrate the team that remains the most significant blemish to his reputation.

Rupp was well aware of the changing racial situation of the 1960s. Unlike many other southern colleges, Kentucky regularly played integrated teams. As one of the most prominent coaches in the country, many people believe he was in a position to recruit African Americans, and hasten the change. While he faced tremendous pressure to integrate his team, from both outsiders and the president of the university, he also felt the pressure from conservative alumni and boosters, plus the reality of playing throughout the South. Rupp’s personal resistance to change, and his total confidence in his own righteousness, also hindered the move. Kentucky’s first African American player joined the team in 1970, making it one of the last two schools in the SEC to integrate its basketball team.

Rupp died on 10 December 1977 at age 76. That night Kentucky played at his alma mater, Kansas, in a game dedicated to him.

PAUL R. BEEZLEY

Jacksonville State University

Dan Chandler and Vern Hatton, Rupp: From Both Ends of the Bench (1972); Russell Rich, Adolph Rupp: Kentucky’s Basketball Baron (1994).

 

St. Cecilia Ball

A private, exclusive subscription ball, the St. Cecilia is an outgrowth of the oldest musical society in the United States. One of a variety of social, charitable, cultural, and educational organizations in antebellum Charleston, the St. Cecilia Society was founded in 1762. Gentlemen amateurs came together “to indulge a common taste and to pass an agreeable hour” and organized two concerts each month for members, featuring talented musicians both within the city and nationally.

By 1773, when visiting Bostonian Josiah Quincy decreed its first violinist “incomparably better” than any he had ever heard, the society had a membership of 120 and a professional orchestra comparable in size to European ensembles of the period. Though carefully managed by its officers—the peerage of Charleston—difficulties in obtaining musicians and the increased popularity of dancing led to a gradual change in emphasis. After 1822 subscription balls entirely replaced the concerts.

There were three St. Cecilias during the winter “gay” season: one in January and two in February, the latter cautiously arranged to avoid interfering with Lent. The balls were held on Thursdays (St. Cecilia’s day) in St. Andrew’s Hall, Broad Street, and, after that hall was destroyed in the fire of 1861, in the Hibernian. Invitations were hand delivered to members, and new membership in the society was strictly limited, typically, to the sons or grandsons of current members. When a man was elected, the names of the ladies of his household were added to “the list.” Their names were removed only upon death or departure from the city, “change of fortune affecting them not at all.”

When invited as guests, visiting strangers were expected to follow the traditions of the ball, designed to ensure “the greatest decorum.” Young ladies always arrived and returned home with chaperons who, during the course of the ball, sat on a slightly raised platform surrounding the dance floor. Men engaged girls for dances by signing a card. Before each dance, the orchestra signaled ladies to return to their chaperons to await the next partner.

At midnight the president of the society led the march to supper with the newest bride in the group on his arm. Replete with fine food and wine, silver and monogrammed Irish linen, the elegant suppers were capped by a “scramble of the men for a sugar figure placed on the top of a huge fancy structure of spun sugar,” which each tried to secure as a souvenir for his partner.

Still held yearly, the St. Cecilia balls have changed little since the 1800s. In an effort to preserve social distinctions and traditions without, in the words of a former society president, “stirring up jealousies and animosities which seriously impair the goodwill normally existing between members and non-members,” secrecy continues to surround both rules for admission and customs of the ball, leading outsiders to view the affairs with a mix of awe and incredulity. “It is remarkable,” wrote one early 20th-century journalist, “that such exclusive and elective balls, bound by such rigid rules, and so opposed to new members, should exist so long in the whirling change of American life.”

ELIZABETH M. MAKOWSKI

University of Mississippi

Ainslee’s Magazine (October 1905); Frederick P. Bowes, The Culture of Early Charleston (1942); Nicolas Michael Butler, Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1820 (2007); John J. Hindman, “Concert Life in Ante Bellum Charleston” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1971); James Hutchisson, Charleston Magazine (March 2006); Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, Charleston: The Place and the People (1907).

 

Seaside, Florida

Although Seaside, Fla., has become an award-winning prototype for the much-hyped New Urbanism movement, that was not what Robert Davis, its developer-founder, wanted it to be at the start. Davis’s vision—shaped by 1950s beach nostalgia, 1960s communal romanticism, and 1970s neighborhood preservation experience—inspired him to take the 80 Gulf of Mexico–fronted acres between Panama City and Destin that he had inherited from his grandfather and create “an old-fashioned town.” He envisioned that there neighbors of all classes, occupations, and circumstances would live in “cracker cottages” with wide front porches and picket fences all tightly packed and neatly arranged so that “a mother with a baby carriage can walk from one side of town to the other in 15 minutes.”

What he created instead was what Time magazine called “the most astounding design achievement of its era,” a collection of unique houses built along brick streets laid out to draw people to the convenient town center and make automobiles unnecessary. Even before it was finished it had become “the most celebrated new American town of the decade” and had garnered some of architecture’s most prestigious awards. So complete was the scheme and so total was the package that it was easy to believe that it had all been planned that way from the start—but it had not.

Davis had hoped that his development would become a “real town,” with growth governed by a code so simple that anyone “handy with tools” could design and build his own house. The town center would include a small grocery for necessities, a hardware store for the handyperson, and other small shops to meet the needs of residents. And it began that way, with a weekend market, a “Dog Days Festival,” and the “Shrimp Shack,” a bar and grill created out of a “sharecropper shack” brought in for the purpose. But while Davis liked what he called “the seedy, vigorous quality” of what he was creating, local folks complained of its “slung up” appearance and expressed a hope that the developer would built something “with a bit of distinction and class.”

Distinction and class soon arrived. First a cover article in Southern Living called attention to the town, and baby boomers, with Reagan-era money, decided to spend it there. Snapping up lots, investors built architect-designed houses in colors so vivid that neighbors began to call it “pastel hell.” And to help them make the mortgage payments, Davis opened a rental agency.

When the houses became rental units the whole nature of the town changed. Talk of making it a place where people lived ceased, and Seaside became a “holiday town,” like the ones Davis had seen in Europe. The hardware store became a designer shop, the market became a place where recreational chefs could shop, and the other stores were transformed into upscale tourist attractions. All of it, according to the New York Times, was “as restlessly tasteful as any place on the planet.”

But not everyone was happy. Looking at the increasingly trendy designs and the “populist prettify” of the town, one of Davis’s early collaborators complained that they set out to “build Kansas” and ended up “building Oz.” Indeed, this very unreal quality led producers of the 1998 movie The Truman Show to select it as the setting for the town that was nothing more than a TV set.

Yet Davis accepted each element in the evolution of Seaside and found a way to make it appear as if he had planned it that way from the start. And perhaps he had. For despite the fact that the town had become a tourist attraction and “a horizontal condominium,” the design remained to attract attention of New Urbanists.

It is hard to say whether Seaside inspired the New Urban Movement or was inspired by it, but the fact remains that Davis’s creation, with its compact, pedestrian friendly design fit neatly into the ideas advanced by those theorists. Hoping to break the pattern of suburban sprawl with its “numbing sameness” and wean modern man of his dependence on the automobile, New Urban planners advocated small communities, just like Seaside, and Davis’s plan for educational facilities, a church, even a cemetery, to go with the market center and residences seemed to create the sort of living space the reformers wanted. What did it matter if only a few people lived there year round, Seaside could become the model for others to follow.

So, at the beginning of the 21st century, Seaside is part resort, part laboratory, and part prototype for development along the Florida Gulf Coast. It is also a reflection of the hopes and dreams, foibles and fantasias, of the southerners who visit and spend their money.

HARVEY H. JACKSON III

Jacksonville State University

Harvey H. Jackson III, in Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South, ed. Richard D. Starnes (2003), Atlanta History (Fall 1998); Stephen Brooke, Seaside (1995); Davis Mohney and Keller Easterling, eds., Seaside: Making a Town in America (1991).

 

“See Rock City”

The imperative “See Rock City” became an icon of roadside advertising beginning in the late 1930s. Hand-painted “See Rock City” signs, along with folksy and extravagant claims about Rock City Gardens, a small tourist park near Chattanooga, Tenn., graced some 900 structures, mostly barns, along rural roads and highways in 19 states. Many of the barn signs survive and have been repainted in recent years, but they are less visible to tourists who have migrated away to the interstate highway system.

The “See Rock City” ad campaign transcended the tourist attraction it was designed to support. A Chattanooga developer and promotional whiz, Garnet Carter, opened Rock City Gardens in 1932 on Lookout Mountain. The park features walkways through unusual and impressive limestone formations, plus a cliff-top viewing area where visitors are said to be able to see parts of seven states. Carter collaborated with Fred Maxwell, of the Southern Advertising Company of Chattanooga, on an idea to paint signs on barns and other structures with good exposure to motorists. The technique had been used before. Beginning in 1897, the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company paid farmers for the right to paint Mail Pouch chewing tobacco ads on barn sides, and eventually thousands of them dotted the landscape from New York to Kentucky.

Clark Byers, a painter for the Southern Advertising Company, was the man most responsible for executing the “See Rock City” campaign. Between 1937 and 1968 Byers painted Rock City ads in big, white, blocky letters set against a black background on the plank sides and tin tops of barns. He and his helpers also painted ads on other structures with good roadside visibility: silos, country stores, garages, even post offices. To persuade farmers to turn their barns into billboards, Byers offered free paint jobs, nailed down loose tin, and handed out Rock City thermometers. Later, after imitators got into barn signs, many farmers received rent, usually $3 a year to start. Byers searched for suitable structures along the main routes of the day such as US 41, the old Michigan-to-Miami Dixie Highway. He made up ad slogans on the spot, fitting words to barn space using a yardstick, chalk, and some string. The ads touted Rock City Gardens as a wondrous place no tourist should miss. Among his slogans:

“When you see Rock City, you see the best.”

“Bring your camera to Rock City, photographer’s paradise.”

“See beautiful Rock City, world’s 8th wonder.”

The barn signs, while quaint today, were part of a trend some derided. Historian Thomas D. Clark, in his 1961 book The Emerging South, observed that “the Southern landscape has been sacrificed in many places to this mad campaign to snatch the tourist dollar. Scarcely a roadside post, tree, fence, or barn has escaped the signmaker.” Ads beckoned tourists to Civil War battlefields, Ruby Falls, Silver Springs, Dog-patch, various caverns, and other attractions. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, championed by Lady Bird Johnson, changed the landscape by restricting the placement of outdoor ads, particularly billboards, along U.S. highways and interstates. Signs along these routes had to meet new zoning, spacing, lighting, and size requirements. Many Rock City barn signs had to be blacked out, but some were allowed as special “landmark” signs. Other Rock City barns persist along sleepy back roads.

Whether icon or eyesore, the Rock City barn has earned affection. Rock City Gardens annually sells tens of thousands of birdhouses modeled after the old barns. “We beautified the highways with these signs,” Clark Byers said in a 1996 interview. He even painted “See Rock City” on the roof of his own house. Byers, who lived near Rising Fawn in northwest Georgia, died in February 2004 at age 89.

WESLEY LOY

Anchorage, Alaska

Thomas D. Clark, The Emerging South (1961); Wesley Loy, Reckon (Winter 1996); Associated Press, “Clark Byers, Painter of ‘See Rock City’” (21 February 2004).

 

Showboats

Beginning in the 1830s and reaching a peak from 1870 to 1910, showboats steamed the waterways of the Atlantic Coast and the Mississippi River Valley, bringing spectacular entertainment to people in communities along the way. Some showboats were little more than flatboats with primitive structures on top, but the most elaborate were floating palaces, which had fancy decor and comfortable quarters. Among the most famous showboats were Edwin Price’s Water Queen, William Chapman’s Floating Theatre, Norman Thom’s Princess, Spaulding and Rogers’s Floating Circus Palace, John McNair’s New Era, and Augustus French’s New Sensation. Loud calliopes and brightly colored flags announced the coming of the showboats, and a parade and free concert would be held if the community was big enough. The showboats presented family fare, including musical performances, sentimental melodramas, minstrel routines, acrobatics, fiddlers’ contests, humorous speeches, and magic shows. Thousands of people in isolated river towns and on plantations turned out enthusiastically, and uncritically, to see the shows.

In the 20th century, showboats declined because of competition from other forms of mass culture, especially the movies. In the early 1900s, though, even more elaborate showboats than before were built, such as the Cotton Blossom, the Goldenrod, and the Sunny South. They were large, sometimes seating almost 1,000 people, and they began specializing in dramatic performances and stage plays from the New York theater. This did not reverse the decline, though, as the number of showboats on the Mississippi fell from 22 in 1910 to 4 in 1938.

Showboats have become so identified with southern entertainment history that contemporary southerners have shown a renewed interest in them. In 1948 Vicksburg, Miss., for example, purchased the Sprague, a huge tow-boat built in 1901, and converted it into a showboat of sorts. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios used it in 1950 for the musical film Showboat. It then housed a river museum in Vicksburg and served as the stage for a Gay Nineties melodrama, Gold in the Hills.

Moonlight on “the Old Man River,” Mississippi River, Greenville, Miss., postcard, c. 1900 (Ann Rayburn Paper Americana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Library, Oxford)

The Delta Queen became the most famous paddle-wheel steamer cruising the Mississippi in the 20th century. The 285-foot-long, 58-foot-wide steamer regularly made the trip from Cincinnati to New Orleans as well as numerous shorter trips. Its sister ship, the Mississippi Queen, was a larger, more modern vessel. Those on their cruises were entertained with presentations of shows such as The Mississippi Gambler and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. The sound of the calliope playing “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Are You from Dixie?,” or “Way Down in New Orleans” summoned people to river towns to greet the boat as it steamed into port, seemingly recreating the 19th-century showboat experience. Amusement parks such as Nashville’s Opryland used steamboats (the Andrew Jackson) as stages for musical entertainment, and museums such as Memphis’s Mud Island have used riverboat replicas—all evoking memories of an earlier southern form of amusement. The Delta Queen docked in Chattanooga, Tenn., in February 2009 and became a boutique hotel there, complete with a lounge, live music, and theatrical performances that evoked an older river culture. Louisiana and Mississippi have old-style riverboats that offer gaming and entertainment in a setting that evokes the Old South showboats.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Philip Graham, Georgia Review (Summer 1958), Showboats: The History of an American Institution (1951); Jacquette White, New Orleans Times-Picayune (30 January 2009).

 

Silver Dollar City

Silver Dollar City is a modern theme park with roots in one of the Ozark region’s earliest tourist attractions. Though today just one part of an entertainment megacorporation, Silver Dollar City remains one of the most popular theme parks in the Upper South and one of the primary catalysts for the transformation of the Branson, Mo., area into a leading American tourist destination.

Silver Dollar City was established in 1960, but its roots stretch back to the late 19th century when a Canadian entrepreneur opened Marble (later renamed Marvel) Cave to tours in rural Stone County, Mo., some five miles west of Branson. In the early 20th century with the almost simultaneous arrival of the railroad and publication of Harold Bell Wright’s best-selling novel, The Shepherd of the Hills—set in the Branson vicinity—the cave became a popular summer tourist destination. Among the thousands who visited the cave were Chicago engineer Hugo Herschend and his family. In 1950 Herschend and his wife, Mary, began operating Marvel Cave and buying hundreds of acres surrounding it.

A decade later, after Hugo’s death, Mary Herschend and her two sons, Jack and Peter, built Silver Dollar City at the entrance to Marvel Cave. Originally conceived as a sideline to the cave—a place for visitors to mill around while waiting for their tour—Silver Dollar City opened on 1 May 1960, with five late 19th-century, frontier-style buildings (general store, inn, ice cream parlor, and blacksmith and doll shops) and two reconstructed log buildings. The theme park combined elements of the Wild West mythology sweeping American popular culture at the time with popular imagery of the highland South. The original park was designed by the planner of Oklahoma City’s Frontier City USA, and within a couple of years the western touch at Silver Dollar City included two stage coaches and a park railroad, the Frisco Silver Dollar Line. The earliest visitors were serenaded by the bluegrass-picking Mabe Brothers, local performers who would later open Branson’s first music theater, and park employees performed a Hatfield-McCoy feud/shootout on the city’s main street.

Through aggressive and novel marketing, such as the theme park’s practice of giving customers change in silver dollars, by the mid-1960s Silver Dollar City was the leading tourist attraction in southwestern Missouri. An event at the end of the decade would give it national publicity. In 1969 Paul Henning, a Missouri native who had vacationed in the Branson area as a boy, agreed to film a few episodes of his hit television sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies, at Silver Dollar City. Though the name “Silver Dollar City” was not used in the episodes, which featured the Clampetts’ journey back to the Ozarks to find Elly May a husband, the media exposure generated record crowds in the growing frontier town, and the momentum continued into the following decade. By the mid-1970s Silver Dollar City employed 260 full-time and 1,200 seasonal workers and attracted 1.4 million visitors annually.

As Silver Dollar City’s attractions multiplied—roller coasters, water-rafting rides, annual craft festivals, a permanent hillbilly vaudeville troupe—the Herschends looked to expand into other entertainment venues. In 1976 Silver Dollar City’s founders purchased Gold Rush Junction Park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and renamed the renovated park Silver Dollar City (now Dollywood). The Herschends also partnered with Dolly Parton to create the Dixie Stampede dinner theater in Pigeon Forge in 1988, with subsequent openings in Myrtle Beach and Branson. Over the past three decades, the Silver Dollar City Corporation (now known as Herschend Family Entertainment [HFE] and headquartered in Atlanta) has developed or purchased water parks, music theaters, shopping malls, amphibious tours, and urban aquariums in widely scattered locales from Branson to Camden, N.J.

Tourists who visited the little cluster of faux-frontier buildings in 1960 would not recognize Silver Dollar City today. Thousands of visitors daily spend hours in the park without realizing there is a cave underneath it—and still open for tours. By the early 21st century, Silver Dollar City had expanded into a sprawling minicity with its own neighborhoods, dozens of rides, 100 craftspeople, four in-park music and performance theaters, and one of the world’s largest Christmas light displays. Though Silver Dollar City has adopted many of the trappings of other modern, successful theme parks, its craftspeople, such traditions as the Hatfield and McCoy feud and the train robbery, and the active role of the Herschend brothers in HFE provide a link to its genesis in the rural Ozarks half a century ago.

BROOKS BLEVINS

Missouri State University

Aaron Ketchell, Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (2007); Crystal Payton, The Story of Silver Dollar City: A Pictorial History of Branson’s Famous Ozark Mountain Theme Park (1997).

 

Smith, Dean

(b. 1931) BASKETBALL COACH.

Dean Edwards Smith, named in 1997 by ESPN as one of the five greatest American college coaches of any sport, was born in Emporia, Kan., on 8 February 1931. The son of teachers (his father was also a coach), he excelled in all sports on the high school level and attended the University of Kansas as a serious math student and a solid though hardly spectacular basketball player who filled a reserve role on a Jay-hawks’ national championship team. After serving as an assistant coach at the Air Force Academy, in 1958 he became an assistant at the University of North Carolina to Frank McGuire, the dapper New Yorker who had led the Tar Heels to the 1957 NCAA basketball championship (against Smith’s own Jayhawks, led by Wilt Chamberlain). When McGuire, a lavish spender loath to abide by the Chapel Hill ethos of high thinking and plain living, resigned under some fire in 1961, Smith was elevated to head coach.

Not winning but cleaning up the Carolina program was his primary assignment in the beginning, a fortunate turn for him because his first four teams were only marginally over .500, and none challenged for supremacy in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But in the mid-1960s he broke through with a number of high-profile recruits, and in 1967, 1968, and 1969 he won the ACC tournament and went to the NCAA’S Final Four. This was the beginning of a nearly unprecedented run in college basketball, one that resulted in 13 ACC regular season championships, 17 regular season championships, 11 Final Fours, and 2 national championships, in 1982 and 1993. In 1976 he coached the U.S. Olympic basketball team to a gold medal. Smith was named national coach of the year four times and ACC coach of the year nine times. He coached 26 All-Americans, among them Billy Cunningham, James Worthy, and Michael Jordan, all later included among the top 50 NBA players of all time. Jordan came to be considered the greatest basketball player ever. When Smith retired in 1997, he was the winningest major college coach in history, having posted 879 victories.

But Smith’s significance went beyond victories and championships. A staunch advocate of civil rights in the segregated South of the early and mid-1960s, he brought black players into his basketball program and helped to integrate the town of Chapel Hill. He took a number of stands—unpopular in a conservative South—on other social and political issues. He demanded that his athletes be students first, and over his 36-year career they graduated at a 96 percent rate. In 1983 Smith was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2000 to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

FRED HOBSON

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Art Chansky, Blue Blood: Duke-Carolina: Inside the Most Storied Rivalry in College Hoops (2006); Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated (19 March 2003); Dean E. Smith, A Coach’s Life (2002).

 

South by Southwest

Held each March in Austin, Tex., the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (SXSW) was organized to bring together aspiring musicians and entertainment industry representatives from around the country. Founded by four music enthusiasts, the first conference was held in 1987, showcasing 200 primarily unsigned, regional bands to 700 conference registrants at 15 venues around the city. Now an industry mainstay, the 20th annual festival in 2006 featured more than 1,800 bands, attracted 12,000 registrants, and included 80 official performance venues. In 1994 SXSW expanded to include the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival and South by Southwest Interactive, covering the technology industry. It is estimated that the combined conferences now generate as much as $110 million annually for the city of Austin.

The 10-day string of SXSW events hosts creators, industry personnel, and everyday aficionados. In addition to the presentation of new projects and products, a large portion of the festival consists of panel discussions, where professionals discuss developments, strategies, and other components of their respective fields. Though the three festivals do not occur simultaneously, SXSW promotes the intertwined nature of each platform, and many registrants attend multiple conferences.

Though Austin is widely noted as a robust film and tech location, the Music and Media Conference remains the centerpiece of South by Southwest. Deviating somewhat from its original mission to showcase the best unsigned bands in North America, the festival now hosts musicians and music-related enterprises from all over the world, both amateur and established. Though still branded an independent (“indie”) event, success has attracted mainstream sponsors, such as PepsiCo, Levi’s, and major tobacco and alcohol companies. Yet alongside showcases sponsored by major corporations or media entities, much of the festival remains devoted to bands in search of representation. In addition to official SXSW events, unaffiliated concerts take place throughout the city in spaces that range from traditional venues and converted small businesses to parking lots and backyards.

Austin’s demographic history, a hodgepodge of Mexican, Slavic, German, and other indigenous and colonial peoples, contributes to the musical landscape of a city long billed the “Live Music Capital of the World.” In popular music history, Austin was the epicenter of country music’s Outlaw or Cosmic Cowboy movement of the 1970s, attracting generations of musicians and fans to the city. Establishments such as the Armadillo World Headquarters (1970–81) gained a national reputation with performers from a spectrum of popular genres because of eclectic crowds and show billing. Though this era faded in the early 1980s, the associated aesthetic of promoting diverse music and culture continues to serve as model for the conferences.

ODIE LINDSEY

Austin, Texas

Austin Business Journal (27 February 2008); David Carr, New York Times (17 March 2009); Handbook of Texas Online Web site, www.tshaonline.org; South by Southwest Web site, www.sxsw.com.

 

South of the Border

The South of the Border roadside attraction stretches for over 300 acres along Interstate 95 right across the South Carolina border. The kitschy tourist stop with a faux-Mexican border town theme consists of a variety of accommodations for the weary traveler, including a miniature golf course, a truck stop, a campground, motel rooms, souvenir shops, various restaurants, amusement rides, and strange animal statues. The first sign of the bright neon complex, which lights up at night like a little Las Vegas of the South, is the looming Sombrero Tower. In addition to the “largest sombrero in the world,” the complex uses hundreds of flashy billboards to advertise its various attractions. The famous billboards, and the complex itself, disrupt the monotony of driving the interstate highway. The tourist complex is conveniently located midway between New York City and Miami, Florida.

Behind the sombrero lurk layers of controversy and intrigue. Jewish southerner and notorious businessman-politician Alan Schafer opened South of the Border in 1949. Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Schafer turned his family’s Dillon County general store into a successful beer distribution business. When neighboring Robeson County, N.C., went dry, Schafer bought a small cinderblock establishment located on the North Carolina–South Carolina border to lure consumers across the state line to purchase legal alcohol. The original South of the Border “beer depot” also benefited from its placement along Highway 301, which was developing a brisk tourist trade at the time. Owing to the success of the business and the social stigma associated with the sale of alcohol, Schafer expanded the beer depot into a diner. In the 1950s, South of the Border added its first motel rooms, convenience stores, and various other services both to lure tourists passing through and to serve the locals of Dillon County.

Schafer presented himself as an independent and progressive figure in the dicey local political scene in rural Dillon County. He registered African American voters in 1948 when a Supreme Court ruling forced primaries, the important elections during the period of the solidly Democratic South, to be open to all races. Furthermore, Schafer claimed South of the Border was open to all races from the start and that “we checked only the color of their money, not their skins.” However, the openness of South of the Border was not advertised and certainly was only under specific conditions, considering the racial strictures and the climate of the small-town South during the 1950s and 1960s.

While turning South of the Border from a small bar and diner into a 300-acre wonderland of consumer kitsch, Schafer also chaired the local Democratic Party from 1963 to 1981 and gave generously to local charities. His political power was diminished in the early 1980s following a vote-buying scandal during the local sheriff election, which resulted in Schafer’s serving time in federal prison. Schafer maintained he was fighting for the underdog and against the concentration of power in Dillon County. In 1998 he was also entangled in a contentious governor’s race in South Carolina centered on the legality of video gambling, which was a featured amusement at South of the Border. During the 1990s, South of the Border also came under attack for stereotypical and insulting depictions of Mexican culture. Pedro, the sombrero-and-serape-wearing mascot who abounds throughout the complex and its billboards, was a point of contention for consumers concerned with offensive advertising.

Through all of the changes in southern culture throughout the 20th century, Schafer built one of the most lasting and recognizable tourist stops in the South. Following his death in 2001, his family has continued to run South of the Border. The roadside attraction has not changed much in the last decade. Schafer’s innovative flair left a lasting and distinctive mark on the landscape of southern roadside culture and tourism.

NICOLE KING

University of Maryland at Baltimore County

Rudy Maxa, Washington Post (1979); Herbert Ravenel Sass, ed., The Story of the South Carolina Low Country (1956); Anthony J. Stanonis, ed., Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (2008); Durward T. Stokes, The History of Dillon County, South Carolina (1978).

 

Spoleto Festival USA

Spoleto Festival USA is the American equivalent to Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds, staged annually since 1957 in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, Italy.

With a long tradition of support for theater companies and music societies, such as the venerable St. Cecilia, and unique architectural beauty paralleling its Italian counterpart, Charleston, S.C., was selected in 1977 as the site for this interdisciplinary arts festival. For two-and-one-half weeks each spring, from the end of May to the first week in June, as many as a dozen events a day highlight both traditional and experimental forms in the visual arts, music, theater, and dance. Offerings range from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, Rachmaninoff concerts, and medieval liturgical drama to performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Pianist Misha Dichter, Dizzy Gillespie (a native South Carolinian), Yo-Yo Ma, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and members of such distinguished ensembles as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony have appeared on Spoleto stages.

Piccola Spoleto (Little Spoleto) supplements these paid-admission events. Emphasizing local and regional talent and children’s activities, Piccolo Spoleto holds performances in community centers, schools, and churches throughout Charleston.

Education is an important part of Spoleto. Each year hundreds of young musicians from conservatories and universities across the nation audition to join the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra. In 2007 the orchestra consisted of 113 musicians. Opportunities to work with international talents extend to administrators and technicians as well, because in addition to performance, apprentice programs cover most aspects of arts management and production.

More than a showcase for the arts, Spoleto Festival USA links the established polished performer with the innovative, young artist and European cultural traditions with those of the South.

ELIZABETH M. MAKOWSKI

University of Mississippi

John Ardoin, Opera News (October 1983); Andrew Porter, New Yorker (15 July 1985); Southern Living (May 1980); Harold Rosenthal, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, ed. Stanley Sadie (1980); www.spoletousa.com.

 

Stabler, Ken “Kenny” Michael (aka “Snake”)

(b. 1945) FOOTBALL PLAYER AND “RENEGADE.”

The South has produced its share (maybe more than its share) of athletes whose accomplishments off the field add as much to their reputations as the records set when suited up. But few have ever matched Kenny “Snake” Stabler. If he is not, as the subtitle of his autobiography proclaims, “Football’s Most Outrageous Renegade,” it would be hard to say who is.

Stabler came roaring out of Foley (Ala.) High School, where a twisting touchdown run got him the nickname “Snake,” and onto the campus of the University of Alabama, where he became Paul “Bear” Bryant’s star quarterback and the legendary coach’s burden to bear. In 1965, with fellow quarterback Steve Sloan, he led the Tide to a national championship. The next year, with Stabler the sole signal caller, Alabama finished off a perfect season beating Nebraska 34–7 in the Sugar Bowl. However, the team wound up third in the polls, behind Notre Dame and Michigan State—something that has rankled Tide fans ever since. During his senior year, Stabler was kicked off the team for, in his own words, “skipping practice, failing classes, and collecting speeding tickets as if they were chances in a raffle.” Bryant later let him return, but Alabama finished a disappointing 8–2–1. However, “Snake’s” redemption came with his famous “run in the mud,” a 47-yard scamper on a rain-soaked field to beat arch rival Auburn.

Drafted in the second round by the Oakland Raiders, Stabler signed a four-year contract—$16,000 the first year with $2,000 raises each of the next three seasons, plus a $50,000 signing bonus. With the money in hand, he dropped his classes and hung around campus until time to report for training camp. Though some thought a left-handed quarterback would not make it in the pros, once Stabler became a Raider he set out on a career that took his team to 100 wins in his first 150 starts (a record then) and to a Super Bowl victory in 1977. During his stay with the Raiders, he was twice named AFC player of the year and was the NFL’S passing champion in 1976.

In 1980, after a contract dispute, he was traded to the Houston Oilers, where he played one season. Then he was traded to the New Orleans Saints, where he finished his career three years later.

Two of the three quarterbacks from the NFL’S All-1970s team have been named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Terry Bradshaw has. Roger Staubach has. But despite all his accomplishments, Ken Stabler has not. In a recent listing of the top 10 players not in the Hall of Fame, Stabler was number six. Some say it is because of how his career ended, a journeyman quarterback with a losing team. Some say it is part of an NFL plot against the Oakland Raiders. But most believe it has more to do with what Stabler did off the field than on it.

As Snake, his “candid” autobiography reveals, Stabler was not far wrong when he reportedly told the press “I live the way I want to live and I don’t give a damn if anybody likes it or not. I run hard as hell and don’t sleep. I’m just here for the beer.” But though his off-field activities during the season may have soured the NFL brass to what he accomplished in the game, it was what he did when the season ended that has endeared him to many southerners and made him a legend along what is known as the “Redneck Riviera.” In a 1978 article in the New York Times and in a 1979 piece in Sports Illustrated, writers Howell Raines and Robert F. Jones told of how Stabler and friends lived it up on the Alabama Coast and in the process turned themselves into the prototype of what the “Redneck Riviera” was all about. With “Wickedly Wonderful Wanda” on his arm, this quintessential good ol’ boy lived as if tomorrow would never come.

University of Alabama star quarterback Kenny Stabler (number 12) in a game against the University of Tennessee, 1966 (Courtesy of the Paul W. Bryant Museum/University of Alabama)

Of course, tomorrow came. Once out of football, he eventually got into broadcasting and landed a job as a “color commentator” with “Alabama radio network,” which broadcasts Crimson Tide games. But personal problems continued to devil him. Messy divorces, the last of which also involved a dispute over a Gulf Coast house and back income taxes, made headlines. Then a DUI arrest (not his first) led to him voluntarily leave the broadcast booth for the 2008 season. But he was found not guilty of the drunken driving charge, and at last report, his divorce and tax problems seemed on the way to being settled. With those matters resolved, it was reported that “Snake” would be back on the radio, much to the delight of Alabama fans, most of whom overlook his indiscretions and remember instead the glory days.

HARVEY H. JACKSON III

Jacksonville State University

Robert F. Jones, Sports Illustrated (September 19, 1979); Howell Raines, New York Times (21 June 1978); Ken Stabler and Berry Stainback, Snake: The Candid Autobiography of Football’s Most Outrageous Renegade (1986).

 

Summitt, Pat

(b. 1952) BASKETBALL COACH.

Pat Head Summitt has been coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols since 1974 and is the winningest college basketball coach in history. Born in Clarksville, Tenn., Summitt played high school basketball in nearby Henrietta, later becoming an All American at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She won a silver medal as a member of the United States women’s national basketball team in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Summitt’s success as the Lady Vols coach mirrored the rise of women’s college basketball, as she won the first Southeastern Conference (SEC) Women’s Tournament at the end of the 1970s and made it to the Final Four in the first National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Women’s Tournament in 1982.

Summit’s team won its first national championship in 1987 and went on to win a total of eight national titles. Her 1997–98 team had an undefeated 39–0 record, and the Lady Vols went on from there to win three consecutive SEC titles and three SEC tournaments. During the 2004–5 NCAA tournament, Summitt reached 880 wins, breaking University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith’s record of 879, setting a new record in NCAA basketball history. The University of Tennessee honored the coach, naming the court at the Thompson Boling Arena, where the team plays, as “The Summitt” to commemorate win number 1,000 in February 2009.

Pat Summitt is a seven-time SEC coach of the year, has been NCAA coach of the year seven times, and was named the Naismith coach of the century. The HBO documentary, A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back (1997), chronicles the 1996–97 season, which ended with a 23–10 record and a second straight national title.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Christine Baker and Becky Hammond, Why She Plays: The World of Women’s Basketball (2008); Karen Crouse, New York Times (24 January 2009); Sally Jenkins and Pat Head Summitt, Raising the Roof: The Inspiring Story of the Tennessee Lady Vols’ Undefeated 1997–98 Season (1998).

 

Talladega Superspeedway

Just off Interstate 20 between Birmingham and Atlanta sits Talladega Superspeedway, a 2.66 mile asphalt tri-oval that is NASCAR’S longest racetrack. Opened in 1969, the track was built by NASCAR founder William “Big Bill” France and his International Speedway Corporation.

In the1960s the Talladega site was abandoned airport runways and soybean fields largely inaccessible from nearby cities. A major motorsports facility at the site would be feasible only if highway access could be arranged. Alabama governor George Corley Wallace agreed to get the necessary highways built, and in exchange France agreed to chair the Democrats for Wallace presidential campaign in Florida, France’s home state.

The track opened to controversy. Concerned about the excessive speeds made possible by the track’s length, width, and steep 33-degree banking, a drivers’ union led by Richard Petty went on strike the night before the inaugural race. Petty’s concerns were well founded. The qualifying speeds for that first race were near 200 miles per hour, and the available tires would hold up for only a few laps. In direct defiance of Petty’s Professional Drivers Association, France announced, “There will be a race, but if you want to go home, go home.” Petty and most of the other NASCAR regulars did so. The first 500-mile race at Talladega, run on 14 September 1969, was contested by a field of independents and won by the previously unknown and soon forgotten Richard Brickhouse (his only NASCAR victory). France’s decision broke the back of Petty’s union and left permanent ill feelings between the two NASCAR giants.

Because of the track geometry, NASCAR’S cars can run wide open all the way around the track with no need to decelerate in the corners. As such, the fastest competition lap ever achieved in NASCAR, a qualifying lap of almost 213 miles per hour, was turned in at Talladega by Bill Elliott in 1987. (Rusty Wallace turned a practice lap of 216 mph in 2004.) In all, nine drivers qualified for that race at speeds over 210 mph.

Early in the 1987 race, driver Bobby Allison blew an engine and then a tire, went airborne, and tore out an entire section of catch fence along the track’s front straightaway. Only dumb luck prevented 200-mph chunks of race car from killing dozens of spectators. Allison’s wreck made it obvious that slower speeds were necessary for the safety of both drivers and fans and this led to the much-despised “restrictor plates,” thin metal plates that sit between the carburetor and intake manifold, limit the flow of fuel and air, and dampen the horsepower down from about 750 to about 450. Since 1987, restrictor plates have been required at all Talladega and Daytona races.

Even with restrictor plates, today’s Talladega stock cars run at speeds over 190 miles per hour and often in thick packs three or four cars wide, the entire field of 43 bunched up nose-to-tail, bumper-to-bumper. This virtually guarantees at least one high-speed multicar crash at every Talladega event, a mishap known as the Big One. The Talladega Big Ones often take 15 or 20 cars out of competition at once.

Dale Earnhardt notched the most victories at Talladega (10), the last in 2000, four months before his death. Since Earnhardt’s death, his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., has won five races at the famed track. Other multirace Talladega winners include Richard Petty, David Pearson, Buddy Baker, Darrell Wal-trip, Bobby Allison, Bobby’s son Davey Allison (killed in a helicopter crash at Talladega in 1993), Cale Yarborough, Ernie Irvan, and Jeff Gordon.

JIM WRIGHT

University of Central Florida

Thomas Gillespie, Angel in Black: Remembering Dale Earnhardt (2008); Peter Golenbock, Miracle: Bobby Allison and the Saga of the Alabama Gang (2007); Bob Latford, Built for Speed: The Ultimate Guide to Stock Car Racetracks (2002); Talladega Super-speedway, www.talladegasuperspeedway.com; Jim Wright, Fixin’ to Git: One Fan’s Love Affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup (2002).

 

Texas Western vs. Kentucky

1966 NCAA NATIONAL BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP.

On 19 March 1966 Coach Don Haskins and his Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) squad defeated the No. 1 ranked University of Kentucky and legendary coach Adolph Rupp, 72 to 65, for the NCAA national basketball championship. Despite the lack of future NBA superstars or a miracle finish, this game remains remarkable as the first and only time an all-black starting five faced an all-white team for an intercollegiate championship. The victory by the young men of Texas Western, all of African descent, coming as it did in the midst of the Freedom Struggle, held tremendous symbolic and practical importance.

Texas Western did not pioneer the integration of college basketball. African Americans played ball at smaller universities from the 1920s forward. Bill Garrett integrated big-time college basketball when he began playing at Indiana University in 1947. The next two decades saw integrated teams spread throughout the North and West and produced some of the true superstars of basketball history, including Bill Russell at San Francisco State, Oscar Robinson at Cincinnati, and Lou Alcindor at UCLA. However, even integrated programs maintained unwritten racial quotas that largely prevented more than three black players on the court at one time. Loyola of Chicago broke this rule when it won the 1963 NCAA championship, starting four African Americans against Cincinnati, which started three black players itself. While most southern teams remained strictly white, at the national level the integrated squads were well established.

In the immediate aftermath of Texas Western’s victory over an all-white southern team considered one of the greatest basketball powerhouses in history, college basketball changed. Racial myths that believed an all-black team would descend into chaos without the steady guidance of at least one white player were shattered. That the victory came against Rupp, who was resisting the pressure to recruit black players, made it all the more significant. To remain competitive now required recruiting the best players regardless of race. The number of African Americans at major programs increased greatly over the next few years, and Vanderbilt integrated the SEC in 1967 when Perry Wallace joined the team. The players at Texas Western did not pioneer the integration of college basketball, but they did put the final nail in segregated basketball’s coffin.

PAUL R. BEEZLEY

Jacksonville State University

Rebecca Craver and Charles H. Martin, eds., Diamond Days: An Oral History of the University of Texas at El Paso (1992); Frank Fitzpatrick, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports (1999).

 

Toasts and Dozens

In Greenville, Atlanta, Memphis, or other towns and cities in the South, you might hear preadolescent, lower-class black boys playfully hurling rhymed insults at each other. The language is rough, and the themes are risqué, but the composition is creative. They are playing the “dozens,” as they often call it. “I fucked your momma on the levee,” a Greenville, Miss., youth told his playmate while others looked on. “She said, ‘get up baby, your dick’s getting too heavy.’” The onlookers roared with delight. After shouts of encouragement to the butt of the insult, he replied “I fucked your momma in New Orleans, her pussy started poppin’ like a sewing machine.” The challenge was put to the first boy to top the retort. He came back strongly with “I fucked your momma on a fence, selling her pussy for 15 cents; a bee come along and stung her on the ass, started selling her pussy for a dollar and a half.”

The dozens are social entertainment, a game to be played, but they have also sparked considerable sociopsychological comment. Folklorist Roger Abrahams observed, for example, that the dozens represent a striving for masculine identity by black boys. They try symbolically to cast off the woman’s world—indeed, the black world they see as run by the mother of the family—in favor of the gang existence of the black man’s world. In dozens playing, the black boy is honing the verbal and social skills he will need as an adult male. A form of dozens playing, usually called “ranking,” has also been collected among white boys, but most collections have stressed the black dozens, also called “woofing,” “sounding,” and “joning.”

Although Roger Abrahams did his classic study of black verbal contests and creativity in Philadelphia, his informants had deep roots in the South. Other southern connections to the dozens are found in a spate of southern blues songs popular from the 1920s on. “The Dirty Dozen” was first recorded by Georgia’s Rufus Perryman, known as Speckled Red, in 1929. Other versions quickly followed by southern artists including Tampa Red, Little Hat Jones, Ben Curry, Lonnie Johnson, and Kokomo Arnold. The content of the dozens was apparently in circulation even before these recordings; folksong collectors Howard W. Odum and Newman I. White found references in the field to the dozens before World War I. Alan Dundes and Donald C. Simmons have suggested an older existence of the dozens in Africa.

Also collected from lower-class blacks has been a form of narrative poetry called by their reciters “toasts.” Toasts use many of the rhyming and rhythmic schemes and the rough imagery of the dozens but are performed by young men as extended poetic recitations rather than ritualized insult. Indeed, Abrahams called toasts the “greatest flowering of Negro verbal talent” (although similar recitations are also known among whites).

The performance of toasts is intended to be dramatic. The settings are placed in barrooms and jungles; the characters are badmen, pimps, and street people; and the props are often drugs, strong drink, and guns. Here is an excerpt, for example, from a common toast, “The Signifying Monkey.”

Down in the jungle near a dried-up creek,

The signifying monkey hadn’t slept for a week

Remembering the ass-kicking he had got in the past

He had to find somebody to kick the lion’s ass.

Said the signifying monkey to the lion that very same day,

“There’s a bad motherfucker heading your way.

The way he talks about you it can’t be right,

And I know when you two meet there going to be a fight.

He said he fucked your cousin, your brother, and your niece,

And he had the nerve enough to ask your grandmom for a piece.”

The lion said, “Mr. Monkey, if what you say isn’t true about me,

Bitch, I’ll run your ass up the highest tree.”

The monkey said, “Now look, if you don’t believe what I say,

Go ask the elephant. He’s resting down the way.”

Other popular toasts in oral tradition include “Stackolee,” “The Titanic,” “Joe the Grinder,” and “The Freaks (or Junkers) Ball.”

The origin of the term and the tradition of toasts is uncertain. Bruce Jackson suggested roots in prison and hobo life. Roger Abrahams looked to the influence of recitations common on the blackface minstrel stage and in sub-literary comic forms. The name toasts may be derived from once-popular books of after-dinner speeches, jokes, and drinking toasts, or from underworld slang.

Several collections of toasts come from the South. In the North most texts come from the cities. Although some southern examples are reported in cities such as New Orleans and Austin, southern texts often come from the rural and small-town South. In Mississippi, David Evans, William Ferris, and Simon J. Bronner collected them in small towns. Bruce Jackson’s book on toasts, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (1974), had texts primarily collected from prisons in Texas and Missouri. The connection to southern life is usually passed up by interpreters of toasts in favor of links to the life of the underworld and the urban ghetto. Relations exist, however, between the themes and heroes of the toasts and those of southern black folksongs including “Stackolee” and “The Titanic.” The blues also are influenced by the erotic and violent verses of the toasts. Other connections are found between southern black animal folktales featuring the monkey and the toast “Signifying Monkey.” Indeed, Richard Dorson reported prose versions of “Signifying Monkey” in his classic collection American Negro Folktales (1967) taken from southern-born blacks.

Dozens and toasts stand out because they are framed as play or performance, and they contain strong themes and sounds. Dozens and toasts creatively manipulate imagery and metaphor to bring drama to words. The boy telling dozens may eventually tackle the more sophisticated toasts. Mastering the techniques in these traditional performances gives the teller an important sense of prestige and power that is reserved for the man of words in black society. Their dozens and toasts entertain friends and pass the time; they communicate values and feelings. The tellers of dozens and toasts are narrators of imagined scenes and cultural critics for the audiences to which they perform. The tellers also draw attention because they are themselves characters in the social drama of communication through folklore.

SIMON J. BRONNER

Pennsylvania State University Capitol Campus

Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1970), Positively Black (1970); Simon J. Bronner, Western Folklore (April 1978); Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales (1967); William Ferris, Jazzforschung (1974–75); Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (1974); William Labov, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (1973); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); Paul Oliver, Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1970); Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binder-man, Journal of American Folklore (July–September 1974).

 

Walker, Herschel

(b. 1962) FOOTBALL PLAYER.

In 1980 Herschel Walker began a three-year football career at the University of Georgia during which he established himself as the Deep South’s first universally acclaimed black collegiate superstar. Having set numerous high school records in the tiny south Georgia town of Wrightsville, Walker led his team to one national and three Southeastern Conference championships, claiming for himself not only statistical records and the Heisman trophy, but a unique place in the hearts of his region’s white football fanatics.

Despite the often-unpleasant experiences of his black predecessors in southern collegiate athletics, most white football fans refused to let several centuries of racial paranoia come between them and an athlete who could run like Herschel Walker. Walker received some racist hate mail, but even his controversial early departure from the University of Georgia for a lucrative contract with the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League and his challenge of the white South’s ultimate racial taboo—dating and marrying a white woman—did little to damage his overall popularity in Georgia and throughout the region. He joined the National Football League Dallas Cowboys in 1986 and went on to play for the Minnesota Vikings (1989–91), the Philadelphia Eagles, (1992–94), and the New York Giants (1995), only to return to the Cowboys for his final two seasons (1996–97).

Southern whites developed an affection for Walker because of both his physical prowess and the unassuming grace with which he wore their adulation. (Jack Armstrong, the “All-American boy,” was a smart-mouthed street punk by comparison.) Walker’s conservatism and reticence brought criticism from some black militants and white activists who felt that black athletic heroes should speak out on racial issues. Walker refused to become a social reformer, however, steering clear of civil rights demonstrations in his native Wrightsville and thwarting the efforts of the most determined interviewers to lead him into controversial areas.

Mature and intelligent, Walker realized it was in his best interest to watch what he said and did. He remained, despite his fame, a country boy, profoundly influenced by two determined, God-fearing parents. Walker’s mother and father instilled in their children courtesy and humility familiar in the rural and small-town South. The key to Herschel Walker’s identity and appeal was his down-to-earth southern upbringing. That upbringing, however, included no color-coded parental instructions to stay in his “place.” No one, black or white, doubted that Walker knew what he could do, and his interracial courtship and marriage indicated that he had no qualms about violating southern social norms that he did not accept.

It is difficult to determine whether Herschel Walker parted the waters of racism in the South or simply walked expertly across them. His miracle was primarily a personal one. A decade after Georgia’s “Redcoat” marching band had dropped “Dixie” from its title as well as its repertoire, many of the same fans who had lost their hearts to Herschel continued to demand that the band resume playing the song that black southerners saw as the anthem of slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. Across the football-mad South, racial epithets still reached the ears of black players and fans, and many whites still objected to starting lineups that were predominantly black. Such evidence suggested that the level of acceptance that Walker achieved would remain an exception until another uniquely “All-American on-and-off-the-field” black superhero came along to again strike white fans colorblind.

JAMES C. COBB

University of Georgia

Sue Burchard, Herschel Walker (1984); Pat Conroy, Southern Living (September 1983); Terry Todd, Sports Illustrated (4 October 1982); Herschel Walker, Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder (2008).

 

Womanless Weddings

From time to time, grown men hook themselves into bras, struggle into dresses, and perform a womanless wedding in front of family and neighbors. Deeply rooted in the community, a womanless wedding is a mock wedding performed by an all-male cast. Although womanless weddings have taken place throughout the United States, these folk plays are believed to occur most frequently in the Southeast, where they are staged by both whites and African Americans.

Mainstream organizations—such as churches, schools, fire departments, chambers of commerce, and various civic and fraternal clubs—sponsor the plays, which are typically organized and directed by women. They are performed in venues such as church halls and school auditoriums before a cross section of the community. Most frequently, a womanless wedding’s avowed purpose is to raise funds for a good cause; occasionally organizers include womanless weddings as entertainment at a social function, mainly to help create a sense of community. Casts feature prominent citizens: for example, mayors, ministers, coaches, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and police chiefs. Costumes range from reasonably realistic wedding attire to outlandish outfits such as hillbilly overalls or glaringly mismatched ensembles. The actors often play with male and female physical attributes by using huge balloons to represent breasts, for instance, or wearing off-the-shoulder frocks that reveal hairy chests.

Tracing the folk play’s history is difficult, although it seems reasonable to assume it is distantly related to European festival customs. Oral histories describe early 20th-century womanless weddings as ad-libbed affairs, with little plot and no formal script. However, shortly after World War I, companies began producing scripts for use in community theatricals. During this period, commercially published womanless wedding scripts appeared, both as booklets and in anthologies. For a fee, some companies furnished personnel to help stage local productions. One such company, the Sympson Levie Company of Bards-town, Ky., and Jackson, Mich., has been credited with “inventing” the womanless wedding, its best-selling offering, although the company most probably drew on existing traditions.

Womanless weddings were a particularly active tradition in southern towns and rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s. With increased mobility and more numerous entertainment options, however, performances became sporadic by the turn of the 21st century. Still to this day, communities and groups revive the folk play now and again. Although directors sometimes write an original script for such productions, usually they hunt up a published version at the local library or, more often, inherit from another group a script several generations removed from its original published source. Regardless, organizers freely make changes both out of respect for the community’s sensibilities and culture and because of practical circumstances, such as cast size.

Often hosted by a master of ceremonies, the play usually has two acts: the wedding processional and the ceremony. The attendees often include a weeping mother, a jilted sweetheart, and an out-of-control baby, sometimes accompanied in older versions by an actor in blackface playing a mammy. During the ceremony, the bride, played by the largest cast member, is joined in matrimony to the groom, the smallest available man. Their vows reflect a decidedly unromantic view of marriage as an institution that is frequently not in the groom’s best interests. Coerced to the altar by the bride’s father, sometimes armed with a shotgun, the groom contemplates escape routes. The bride is older, ugly, stupid, and desperate to marry, often because she is pregnant or has already had a child. Successful performances include a great deal of improvisation, with the interplay between the actors and the audience shaping the performance. Much of the humor springs from audience members’ seeing men they know well, often authority figures, behaving in raucous, ludicrous ways that contrast with their everyday roles. On occasion, a mock wedding reception follows, giving cast members and the audience a chance to mingle.

The main organizing principle, then, is inversion: men become women, adults become children, whites become blacks, the sacred turns into the profane. By breaking down customary boundaries and allowing normally taboo subjects out into the open, communities acknowledge and express their complicated, often ambivalent feelings about the social realities and forces that affect their everyday lives, especially marriage, gender roles, sex, religion, authority, social class, racial relations, and rural life.

Closely related variants include mock weddings where both males and females cross-dress; womanless beauty pageants and talent shows where all the contestants are men in drag; and Tom Thumb weddings, performed by children.

JANE HARRIS WOODSIDE

Johnson City, Tennessee

Arthur Depew, The Cokesbury Party Book (1932); Hubert Hayes, A Womanless Wedding (1936); Mrs. James W. Hunt, The Womanless Wedding (1918); Theodore Johnson, ed., Baker’s Stunt and Game Book (1928); Walt Larrimore, Bryson City Secrets (2006); Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (2000); Michael Taft, North Dakota History (Fall 1989); Brenda Veradi, Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore (Fall–Winter 2000); Jane Harris Woodside, “The Womanless Wedding: An American Folk Drama” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987).

 

Zaharias, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson

(1911–1956) GOLFER, BASKETBALL PLAYER, TRACK AND FIELD ATHLETE.

In 1950 the Associated Press proclaimed Babe Didrikson Zaharias the female athlete of the half century, and her achievements in golf, basketball, and track and field make her one of the most accomplished athletes to come out of the American South. Born 26 June 1911 in Port Arthur, Tex., and educated in nearby Beaumont, Zaharias was a product of Norwegian immigrant parents and the working-class culture of east Texas that was a turbulent and dynamic place at time when the area experienced a southwestern oil boom. She was athletic from childhood, a tomboy often playing roughhouse games with neighborhood boys. Her nickname “Babe” came from the playgrounds of Beaumont. She could throw a baseball harder than any boys around and hit home runs that seemed so towering as to evoke their hero Babe Ruth, so that when they started calling her Babe she had her lifelong nickname.

After the 1920s the American Athletic Union (AAU) regulated women’s sports, and Zaharias’s first major athletic accomplishments came when playing basketball for the Dallas Golden Cyclones, whom she led to a national championship (1931) and two other finals (1930, 1932). She worked as a typist for Employers Casualty Company in Dallas, whose owner encouraged her to compete not only in basketball but also in AAU track and field competitions. Between 1930 and 1932, she entered meets in seven different events. In the 1932 AAU nationals, she competed in 8 of 10 events staged, winning five of them (shot put, baseball toss, long jump, 80-meter hurdles, and javelin throw) within three hours. At the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, she earned gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin throw and a silver medal in the high jump. In December 1932 she became a professional athlete, playing on the Babe Didrikson All-American Basketball Team, and in 1934 she pitched at Major League Baseball spring training games.

Despite these achievements, and the celebrity that came with them, Zaharias gained greatest renown as a golfer. She played in her first golf tournament, the Fort Worth Women’s Invitational, in 1934, and in 1935 she won the Texas Women’s Golf Association amateur championship. The lack of professional opportunities for women in golf led her to do an exhibition tour with famed golfer Gene Sarazen, which brought her new wealth and more acclaim in the sports world. She married professional golfer George Zaharias in 1938. In the early 1940s she played in professional golf matches, but later regained her amateur status, winning the 1945 Western Open, Texas Open, and Broadmoor Invitational. The following season she won 17 tournaments in a row. She turned professional again after that and became a founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) in 1949. She won 31 LPGA events in her career, capturing three U.S. Women’s Open Titles (1948, 1950, 1954) and three Women’s Titleholders tournaments (1947, 1950, 1952). Cancer cut short her career, as she died 27 September 1956.

Zaharias was significant as a major force in popularizing women’s sports in American culture. When she began, many American sports leaders discouraged women’s involvement in competitive sports as unfeminine and even unhealthy; the U.S. Olympic Committee into the 1930s sanctioned women’s involvement in only a few sports. Commentators often tried to marginalize Zaharias as a “mannish” woman athlete, but she became friends with sports reporters who helped make her an admired sports hero for her genuine accomplishments. She was flamboyant, engaging, and reached a level of success in so many sports that she is recognized as one of the nation’s best all-around athletes.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Susan E. Cayleff, Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1996); R. R. Knudson, Babe Didrikson: Athlete of the Century (1985); Babe Didrikson Zaharias, The Life I’ve Led (1955).