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Society

City Personals
Mary Clay Brooks

Happy Birthday wishes to Dunn Boatwright, who turned 10

Happy Birthday wishes go out to Gene Brown, who celebrated Monday. Friday evening, he traveled to Clarksdale to watch the Patriots play the Lee Academy Colts.

Dunn Boatwright celebrated his birthday last week. He flipped double digits! Happy 10th birthday to him!

Once again, Holly Springs welcomed thousands of tourists and conservationists for the annual hummingbird festival put on by the Audubon Society at Strawberry Plains. Mother Nature certainly cooperated, as it was a perfect weekend for all of the festivities. It is so fascinating to watch all of the birds and other creatures at Strawberry Plains, as many different species were out there with handlers who answered questions and explained about them. If you have never attended, mark your calendar for next year’s festival! We truly were given a gift by Margaret Shackleford in Strawberry Plains!

(To put your news in City Personals, please e-mail maryclayb@yahoo.com; mail to City Personals, The South Reporter, P.O. Box 278, Holly Springs, MS 38635 or call 662-252-4261. You may also e-mail your City Personal news to southreporter@dixie-net.com).

Museuming
Lois Swaney Shipp
Museum Curator

Labor Day – the ending and the beginning

Labor Day has been around for a long time, but when I was growing up, it didn’t exist. School always started the day after Labor Day, even colleges began then. It was a day of ending of summer and the launching of a new beginning. It was really an exciting time in the South.

Memorial Day was the beginning of summer and Labor Day was the end of summer. In the South we had very few factories then and Labor Day was formed by the northern union to give the workers a holiday and a day of rest. The Lord said for us to work six days, then rest on the seventh day and He knows best. We need a day of rest, relaxation and creation.

In 1936, Mississippi started the BAWI program in the Depression that stands for Balance Agriculture With Industry and was on invitation to northern industry to move here and have cheap taxes and cheap labor. The leading and only crop in the state since its inception was cotton. Cotton was king and by this time, the soil was beginning to wear out and that dastardly boll weevil was destroying the crops.

I love Mississippi, Marshall County and Holly Springs. The whole place is where I want to be, but the most amazing thing about this whole place is the people. We live where people have good character, patriotism for our country and a love for the Lord. When God made this state, we think it was set aside as the best of states. People are friendly and mostly kind.

When I had a television show, my motto was “This is the place where all the women are beautiful and all the men are good looking, all the children are treasures as well as pleasures.” Great writers and artists and musicians come from here.

I am always astonished when ignorant people think we are ignorant. We have some poor people but doesn’t everywhere?

We hardly have any cotton left. We learned to eradicate the boll weevil about 10 years ago. We had no boll weevil one year. Then the next year came something called the boll worm, or the tobacco worm. It had nothing to do with tobacco and I know not how it got this name. There was no eradication for it and it completely destroyed the boll.

The tobacco worm turned out to be that beautiful luna moth. It put us out of the cotton business. We had to turn elsewhere. Many farmers turned to soy beans as that was a lucrative crop much in demand. At one place in Alabama, a statue of the boll weevil was put on the square instead of the Confederate soldier, as when the boll weevil did them in they started growing peanuts and peanuts became their main crop.

Last week I went to a Christian retreat at “Heavenly Acres” here in Marshall County and it was an exhilarating experience. It was down among the waves of hills of Marshall County on a lake. There were 45 women who enjoyed it.

The Lord had sent unique Christian ladies to inspire us with their spiritual happenings. A delightful lunch was served in the middle of the day. It was a day of prayer and inspiration and we were renewed by it. Everybody was thankful for the incredible lady who set this up and her husband for providing the setting.

The gist of the program was “Work for the day is coming, work for the day is long, work for the night is coming, when man’s work is done.” That old-fashioned hymn was written a long time ago and is still appropo.

It is a warning that none of us is here forever and each of us has been given a job to do and a limited time to get the work done, so make hay while the sun shines, for you can’t do it after the sun sets.

Report News: (662) 252-4261 or southreporter@dixie-net.com
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The South Reporter
P.O. Box 278
Holly Springs, MS 38635
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