When you write a column you get all sorts of suggestions regarding publicity. Such as plugs for French Camp, or Coffee Day, or Boy Scout expositions and so on. Many of these on the surface are impersonal, just leave my name out of it, says Mr. So-and-so but, for the life of you, you cannot be sure he's serious.
There need be no conjecture however concerning the tenor of a letter from Monroe, La., which reached us on Friday of last week. There is no finesse, no diplomacy, no double-talk in the proposition it contained. Herewith, instead, the very last word in the direct approach, quote:
"Dear Mr. Brodie Crump:
I have a friend her name Is Sally Ann Howell. She Is nine years old. I would like for you to write a column about us, I am nine too.
Think of something good!
We want to put it in our scrapbook. We want two copies.
Marianne Walker" end quote.
It is difficult to realize Marianne (or "Sister" as we know her) is nine years old. Readers may recall when she and her brother Charles Jr. were stricken with polio, and how they were blessed with immediate diagnosis, prompt treatment and no ill effects. That was several years ago, when Dean and Charles Walker lived just off Eureka Street in Azar Court, and he was a credit-man at Sears.
They transferred to Monroe when Charles Sr. received a promotion with the company.
Since that time, Sister has become a godmother to Pat and Riley Arrington Davis's girl-child, who is named Marianne Elizabeth. And now, Marianne and Sally Ann, who are going to relate a parable which we trust you will take to heart.
Once upon a time, there were three little girls in Hollandale, Mississippi. Their names were Floy Edna Cope, Malona Treadway and Evelyn Turner, and they were about the same age then that you girls are now. They too wrote us a letter, In which they very proudly told how they had raised $13.58 for the March of Dimes.
We reprinted that letter, and are sure it helped bring in further funds for one of the noblest causes of all time, namely the conquest of poliomyelitis.
In case the moral to this parable has gone astray, Marianne and Sally Ann, just let Old Stuff know and he will spell it out for you.
Our old friend Lawrence Lipscomb Paxton, squire of Osceola Plantation and once a member in good standing of the 13th Marine Regiment, takes Old Stuff to task regarding who was the proprietor of Greenville's first automobile. We were not conscious of having stuck our neck out, but Lawrence says we did, then insists that Jack Wyche owned the first car in town, a Brush.
It so happens, Lipscomb, that our authority on early automobiliana, is Leroy Wall, czar of the parking-meters on and off the main-drag, who first drove a gasoline-machine in 1907. And this Is the way Leroy lists owners, cars and manufacturers of same, in the approximate order of their appearance here, quote;
Edmund Taylor Sr. owned a Pope-Toledo (chain-drive); E. H. Taylor (druggist) owned a Model M Ford; Bales (for Bayliss P.) Shelby purchased (2nd hand) a one-cylinder chain-drive Oldsmobile; Warren Smith had a cylinder Orient Buckboard (it looked like a buggy) made in Waltham, Mass.; and Dr. E. P. Odeneal owned a brand-new Haynes Apperson (2 cylinders) which he sold to Jack Wyche and thankfully returned to horse-and-buggy status. During that same era, across the river, the Italian tenant-farmers newly arrived at Sunny Side Plantation from the old country, presented their priest, Father Galloni, with a Kritz four cylinder job. In recalling the presentation years afterward, the late Capt. Koch of Lyon Packet Co. told us the Krltz soon suffered burnt-out bearings for want of oil. Though the distinction is dubious, this may have been the first such casualty along the internal-combustion front in the Greenville area, And Leroy Wall remember! also that most all these early numbers wound up Junk in his father's foundry on Central Avenue.
Meanwhile, just when was it that Hugh Foote and Charlie P. Williams drove the latter's Kisset Kar cross-country to St. Louis? That too Is ancient history.
