Good Abode

STATES & CITIES

Whoooooo bellowed the steamboat whistles. "Hey, look!" yelled the crowd. "Looka yonder! Hyeh they come!" The big barge nosed across the yellow water toward the brown river bank at the edge of Jefferson Davis Park. "Great Lawd, look at the Niggers on those cotton bales." guffawed the crowd. "Naked as jay-birds. What they supposed to be, Egyptian slaves or something? It says here in the program: 'Egyptian Pageant, Memphis on the Nile in the Time of Menes, First Prince of Memphis."

Pageant King Frank Barton, ex-Culver, ex-Princeton, ex-president of the Cotton Exchange, rose with some misgivings from his gaudy throne atop a stack of cotton bales. "Frank Barton's got on tights!" the crowd sniggered. "Bet he's cool all right. Now he helpin' the Queen off the boat." Across an excited margin of sloppy river water stepped Queen Octavia Evans. "Ain't she pretty? Niece of Boss Eddie Crump's right hand man. She's supposed to be the Queen of Egypt. That's Gretta Garbo's own dress she's wearing--the one Gretta wo' when she was the Queen of Sweden. Well, where you wanta go now? Motorboat races? Golf tournament? Man, there's something doin' every minute!"

For five days and five nights last week the 250,000 citizens of loud, lusty Memphis, Tenn. knocked off all work, played host to the bankers and businessmen, the planters and politicians, the farmers and their field hands. Negroes, white trash and riffraff of the entire mid-Mississippi Valley in one grand, rip-snorting jubilee--the fourth annual Cotton Carnival.* Richmond, Atlanta and New Orleans had had their days, would have them again. But last week was Memphis's and on her was every eye in Dixie. Memphis, where De Soto built his river barges 79 years before anybody heard of Plymouth Rock. Memphis, the town that Andrew Jackson could have named after himself, but decided to stamp with the Greek derivation of an Egyptian word that meant "good abode." Memphis, where in 1865 1,450 Union prisoners were blown to bits with the steamboat Sultana in a maritime disaster surpassed only by the Titanic. Memphis, where in 1878 yellow fever took 200 lives a day, gutted the population. Memphis, whose homicide record usually tops that of every other city in the world. Memphis, bluff-built and brawling, perched at the points of three states, securely holding Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi by their commercial coat tails.

A lot of people were not feeling any too well when King Frank and Queen Octavia opened the civic celebration with their triumphal landing at Jefferson Davis Park. Unofficially, the "South's greatest party" had started night before. A host of otherwise solid citizens had dressed up in their dinner jackets and had taken their wives, sweethearts and daughters to a prize fight at Ellis Auditorium between somebody called Eddie Wolfe and a pug named Harry Dublinsky. To lend tone to the affair, Jack Dempsey was picking his nose in the ring and acting as referee. After Mr. Dublinsky and Mr. Wolfe had finished with each other, the celebrants moved en masse to the Hotel Peabody, a copy of which graces every U. S. town. Unhappily, the opening of the new Egyptian Nile Club on the roof had to be postponed.

Next night almost everybody with a clean shirt went to some kind of ball. The Elks Club gave a ball for Elks. The Catholic Club gave a ball for Catholics. The Rex-Ridgeway Club gave a ball for Jews. The Memphis Country Club and the Nineteenth Century Club gave balls for the elect.

Next morning there was a dog show in progress on Second Street and just before noon the Floral Parade started, reviewed by King Frank and Queen Octavia, who were holding up nicely. The procession was hardly over before the town's Big Businessmen staged a Chamber of Commerce luncheon back at the Peabody.

Best known Memphis Businessman is William Neely ("Memphis Bill") Mallory, All-America Yale footballer (1923), last man tapped for Skull & Bones in his year, vice president of Memphis Cotton Compress & Storage Co. and president of the Carnival Association. Then there is Abe Plough, whose Plough Inc. makes 240,000,000 aspirin tablets a year and Memphis a big U. S. aspirin centre. Snuff is ruddy-faced Martin J. Condon's line, and his American Snuff Co. is one of the world's three largest. Another big cotton broker is J. P. Norfleet. And the town's dry goods tycoon is William R. King of William R. Moore Dry Goods Co.

Their feast over, the merchants streaked off for the beauty contest in the Auditorium, where a Miss Tennessee, a Miss Mississippi and a Miss Arkansas won hands down. After that there was a socialite tea, a horse show, and at night the President's Ball at the Tennessee Club, in honor of "Memphis Bill" Mallory. Somewhere during the previous proceedings Mayor Overton had been presented with a basin billed as Cleopatra's authentic bathtub, "4,000 years old."

Everybody put on masks for the "Carnival of Fun." Corn whiskey was almost as free as Mississippi water and gamblers. secure in the knowledge that Memphis has always been a wide open town, plied a profitable trade. Nowhere was the music madder nor the moonshine stronger than in celebrated Beale Street.

Congressman Eddie Crump, "the Red Snapper of Tennessee." who "rode into town at the age of 18 on a bull calf." and remained to become the city's benevolent despot, absolutely controls all city and county offices. Negro Boss is big Bob Church, Oberlin and Harvard-educated with a college-graduate daughter now studying abroad. Church owns white-folks' houses as well as Beale Street property, and outside his offices at No. 392 Beale St. the Negroes staged their own carnival, "The Opening of the Gates of Ham." In and out of such resorts as the "Swreet Mamma," "Pee-Wee's Place" and the "Echo Pie Emporium" strutted blackamoors with "High Agnes" haircuts, trailed by admiring country cousins. Dicing, dancing and cutting went on hour after hour until the sun once more lit up the tall towers and gleamed on the broad river at Memphis. Thus ended, after 120 hours, the big annual bust of a municipality which Senator Nye of North Dakota once called "the Philadelphia of the South."

*An ancillary celebration to National Cotton Week, observed in 23 states by 30,000 merchants who hoped to sell $160,000,000 worth of cotton goods.

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