On Main Street

Practically everything that happens in Yazoo City--parades, flirtations, business deals--happens on Main Street. It is the only real street in town and if you are looking for someone, you just stand on Main Street and wait. Soon or late he will come along.

One afternoon last week two well-known Yazooans stood talking near the corner of Jefferson and Main, in front of the flyspecked window of Nector's Restaurant, where the town's bachelors go to drink their breakfast Coca-Cola. One was Mayor John T. Stricklin, oldtime politician. The other was Dentist R. E. Hawkins whom white-thatched, bespectacled Frank R. Birdsall, member of the State tax commission, editor & publisher of three-times-a-week Sentinel had supported in February's mayoralty election. Dentist Hawkins lost the election but through no fault of Editor Birdsall. The Sentinel had bitterly attacked Mayor Stricklin, alluding to cattle thieving, a charge for which the Mayor was indicted but exonerated last year. Among these three there was the kind of bad blood peculiar to a Mississippi political feud.

The Main Street bystanders suddenly became uneasy when Editor Birdsall turned the corner, making his way toward the dentist and the Mayor. The Mayor was known to handle a gun as accurately as he spat tobacco juice. The bystanders' uneasiness changed to fright when he said quietly: "Well, I might as well have it out with you fellows now."

He drew a .38 calibre revolver; there were four reports. As the dentist fled into his office, one slug tore through his coat tail. The 65-year-old publisher was struck down, riddled three times, the last shot tearing into him as he lay on the ground.

Mayor Stricklin got into his automobile, drove out Main Street to his son's undertaking parlors. There, surrounded by shrouds and coffins, police found him, with one of his own bullets through his head, dead.

At the hospital, a newsman to the last, Editor Birdsall called for his star reporter, gave instruction for his own death story. "Don't get scooped," he said at the end. "Tell the story impartially. Tell the truth and fear nothing."

Yazoo citizens knew that during his own 35 years of stormy local journalism, Editor Birdsall had certainly feared nothing. A few years after he bought the Sentinel (1895), he and his in-laws shot it out with the Kelly boys from Benton, Miss., because of an article which he had printed. In that affray he lost a brother-in-law, D. D. Dorsey. T. A. Kelly was also killed. Governor James Kimble Vardaman had to send troops to protect the jail that lodged Editor Birdsall. Now that he was dead, feud-wise Yazoo City talked it over quietly on Main Street, waited to see who would be next to fall.

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