Thoughts From the Front Porch

Kathleen Holding Her Nephew

Our town in 1951, like most American small towns in the middle of the twentieth century, was a place where very little out of the ordinary ever seemed to happen. The storefronts were occupied with thriving little businesses, and the sidewalks were busy with foot traffic then. Men in ties and fedoras or flannel and overalls went about their various occupations. And women in stockings and full-skirted dresses towed pre-schoolers along on housewifely errands. Our concerns would have seemed humdrum to some, being mostly about family, home, church, and community. But they were earnest concerns and important to us, however conventional.There was comfort in the mundane routine of our quotidian existence. Because we knew the disquiet of something happening, when that something was murder unresolved.

The double killing of 1948 had not yet slipped into the background of bygone days. People still whispered about the lingering mystery, running over old ground behind closed doors and reminding each other that danger might lurk anywhere. But the newspaper had nothing to say on the subject. It was not a case of no news being good news either. Because, quite frankly, with no one arrested and the murderer still roaming around free, there was nothing new to be said.

Most weeks, our newspaper editor had to work like Grant taking Richmond to fill his front page up with local news. It was a broader and deeper format then, in the strictly physical sense. Newspaper pages were bigger in the fifties than they are today, and the print was finer too, with lines of text more closely set. It took a lot of local stories to fill up a small town newspaper’s front page in 1951.

Most of the time, the editor would have to resort to articles from the press services to pad out his front page. So he’d scatter, amongst the sparse local stories about our town and county, news of strange, new-fangled ideas, such as color television or some outrageous thing, a national credit card system, for instance. Or he might choose oddities from exotic locales, quadruplets born in Funk, Nebraska, perhaps, where the mood was not very much improved by the jump in population.

Familiar troubles in faraway places meant that stories of the war in Korea, for example, folks would read with great interest. Because many of “our” boys, the boys the town knew and remembered from childhood, wiggling on a church pew or winning a public speaking medal, were over there. And the letters were few from their miserable, muddy trenches. Credit cards we knew little about and cared less. What in the world would anybody want one of them for? People saved up for what they wanted or, often to their ultimate discredit, opened up a charge account at the store and made payments. The town gossips would have something to talk about, if the payments weren’t made.

So life had settled down to a low busy hum, and the people of our town got involved in living and tried to forget the unrecompensed dead. And aside from the peaceful sameness of one week fading into the next and the worries that went with war, there was a good deal of well-founded hope for the future. And not much else to write about in the paper.

Until the first week of November in 1951. The front page on Thursday of that week needed no padding with outside stories. It gave us reason to smile and weep, to hope and dispair. The Masons had broken ground on their new lodge building and the foundation was laid. Kathleen’s father, our Big Daddy, was a member of the building committee. Brick and mortar had been purchased to complete the building. They’d paid cash. My maternal grandmother’s women’s group had a big event planned. They were in the social news every week with meetings, Red Cross blood drives, weight loss competitions alternating with sweet buttery recipe swaps. But the Mutual Improvement Club rarely made the front page. Sometimes they even took themselves and their husbands on trips to Chicago, or the Smokies or Mexico. This particular week, the MI Club, made up entirely of the Avondale Mills wives and working women, were organizing and sponsoring a variety show. Their master of ceremonies would be the “famous Joe Rumore,”  with his equally “famous team of Rebe and Rabe.”

The high school was holding its homecoming football game, and they were on a winning streak. The captain played tough at center, in spite of having a leg weakened by “infantile paralysis,” as they called it in those days. He must have been quite a hero in town, because he represented victory over a disease that still threatened to afflict any child at anytime. And it had struck a local third-grader the week before. His photo is right there on the front page next to the football team’s. That little boy, who so many hoped and prayed would one day be as well and strong as the football captain, has such a sweet smile in his picture. I know my grandmothers prayed for him. They had a little grandson who’d survived polio too. And small town that we were, the polio victim in that week’s story had some first cousins who were also our first cousins. Hearts ached for that little boy. Polio struck fear in the hearts of all parents in 1951.

But there was another story on the front page that week that had set the town to buzzing. Everyone knew about it of course, well before they read it in the newspaper, because the paper came out only once a week. It was old news by Thursday. But it was reported on the front page nonetheless. And townspeople studied the article, looking for clues that weren’t there. It planted another kind of fear and grief in the hearts of our town, along with an oddly half-baked sense of satisfaction. Headline: St. Clair County Man Dead Following Knife Injuries.

A local man is in jail charged with first degree murder, and another lies dead, after a fight and stabbing that occurred over the weekend. Erk Bailey, age 46, of Pisgah was pronounced dead, early Monday morning at the local hospital, of injuries received in the fight. Byrd Richardson, Jr. is in the county jail charged with murder.

The county sheriff’s department and state law enforcement personnel are conducting a joint investigation. Authorities say Bailey was found by two local men near Richardson’s Store in Cropwell after the fight occurred. The men were able to stop a game warden, who called an ambulance to the scene. Bailey was rushed to the hospital, but there was little hope by the staff on duty that he could survive his injuries.

Sheriff Cash Strickland arrested Richardson and jailed him. He was initially charged with attempted murder, pending the result of the Bailey’s injuries. No bond for the accused was allowed. The sheriff indicated that Richardson had said he would plead self-defense.

According to the sheriff, Richardson made the statement “He [Bailey] would not let me take my car home.” Richardson further stated that Bailey physically pulled him out of his car and that he [Richardson] cut Bailey accidentally in the ensuing struggle.

Ernest Forney has been retained as attorney to represent and defend Mr. Richardson in this case. Forney has requested a preliminary hearing at the earliest possible date. Judge John Williams has said he would set the date for a hearing in a short time.

Funeral services for Bailey were held at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on Tuesday afternoon, with burial in the adjoining cemetery. He is survived by the widow, four sons and four daughters. The children range in age from 19 down to 2 years old.

All right. The town sighed in unison. What relief! What delivery from evil. Richardson was in the jail. He’d been allowed to kill again, and leave a large family with no husband or father. But at least they’d put him away this time. And this time he should stay put. That’s what a lot of people expected and prayed for. It is what my grandmother and grandfather profoundly hoped.

I’m not sure Byrd’s own Uncle Pete didn’t share my family’s hope that his nephew would go away to prison permanently. He knew it would cause immense pain to his brother and sister-in-law. But damn it all, they’d raised him. It would cause enormous embarrassment to the family. But the embarrassment could hardly be more than it had been already. Probably, Mr. Pete held out little hope.

Most folks believed Mr. Pete was pure-dee scared to death of Byrd. And who could blame him? Mr. Pete knew a lot more than he wanted to know about his nephew’s transgressions. He’d been forced to step in before and open the bank in the middle of the night to take money out. That money had been used to pay people off.  Mr. Pete was an honest and gentle man by nature, and his conscience bothered him. He prayed for deliverance from evil too. Knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete understood that Byrd, Jr. might kill anybody he felt like killing, whenever he took a notion. And knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete felt that at any time he, himself, could be a victim of Byrd’s irrational anger or fear of exposure.

Most folks in town would have been glad to see the last of Byrd Richardson, if only the authorities could lock him up and throw away the key. They were grateful to Sheriff Strickland for putting him there for the time being.

This was not the same sheriff who’d been serving in 1948, when Kathleen and Doc McIntosh had been stabbed to death and their house burned down with them inside. Sheriff Wiley Dodge had been persuaded, by politically sensitive and well-connected friends, not to seek re-election to the post of county sheriff in 1950, for reasons known best to himself and his friends. Wiley Dodge had instead been persuaded to run for the state house, and aided by those politically connected friends and the voters they controlled, in and out of local cemeteries, he was elected to represent  the people of his district in the state legislature. I’m sure he fit in well there. Those politically connected friends had counted on Byrd to behave himself from that time forward. They’d been disappointed.

The new sheriff actually tried to enforce the law. He been a thorn in Byrd’s side since he taken over. He’d busted up a number of Byrd’s stills in the area. He’d refused all attempts at bribery and would take no payoff money. Sheriff Strickland held Richardson in jail for almost two weeks, from the day of the murder to the day of the hearing. And all during that time, he was taking calls from a party in Washington, D.C. everyday, beseeching him to grant the prisoner a release on bond. He refused.

There was another article in the local paper the next week about this unfortunate incident, to put a southern euphemism to it. Down by the movie theater listings, on Thursday, November 15, 1951, there are three short paragraphs. Headline: Charges of Murder to be Aired Friday at Hearing. The text below the headline reveals nothing new, except that hearing date, Friday, November 16, 1951. It briefly reports again who is accused and who is dead. The dead being unable to object, once again the defendant accuses the dead man of dragging him from beneath his own steering wheel and states that the killing was accidental. And, anyway it was self-defense.

There is no mention in the newspaper of a fact which all those who read it probably already knew. The defendant outweighed the murdered man by at least 100 pounds, and he was quite a bit taller too. The idea that Mr. Bailey could have pulled Mr. Richardson from his car would have been laughable, had it not been surrounded by such tragic circumstances.

On Thursday, November 22, 1951, Thanksgiving Day, the newspaper appeared on doorsteps all over town again. But if anyone looked in it for a report on the court hearing of the week before, they were disappointed. It seems the news staff was too busy discovering the identity of the minister who would deliver the community Thanksgiving service to attend and report on the court hearing. If anyone hoped that the short holiday week had prevented the paper’s staff from publishing a report, and it would come later, in the next week’s edition, they found in a week’s time nothing to be thankful for on that front.

There was never any report in the town’s newspaper on what happened at that hearing. In fact, as far as we know, nothing is mentioned in the local newspaper about the murder of Mr. Bailey for the rest of the natural life of the newspaper. And it hung on, under one banner or another, for an additional fifty-seven years. That is an odd thing indeed, given the editor’s usual scraping around for a story, and the general lack of news there ever was to report.

Fortunately, some court records for this case still exist. On November 16, 1951 the accused waived his right to a preliminary hearing and by a mutual agreement between the defendant and the State, he was granted release from the jail. Bond was set at $15,000. His bond note is signed by, other than himself of course, his father and mother and his attorney, Mr. Forney, all of them certifying that they are able to pay the full amount of the bond set. He was charged by the Grand Jury with Murder in the First Degree. And the trial was set for the 1952 spring session of county court.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner