Them Dang Movies

Gloomy Sunday is a 120-year-old tradition in Mississippi. An 1822 blue law still forbids Mississippians to attend bearbaiting, cockfights, bullfights and any other routine amusements of a Sabbath. Sunday movies are taboo-to the intensified boredom of some 110,000 soldiers training in the State. They wander aimlessly up & down the dead, empty streets of Mississippi towns, honing for something to do, and usually finding it only in honky-tonks and back-street bordellos.

Last week the Mississippi Senate, for the third time this session, fearlessly faced the issue. The opposition thundered that a bill permitting Sunday movies would "open the gates of hell." Roared Senator Joe Daws of De Kalb (pop. 866): The Pearl Harbor tragedy came about because sailors were not at their posts. "They were attending Sunday movies!"

This was too much for Senator Earl Richardson of Philadelphia (pop. 3,711). Senator Richardson stopped his whittling, brushed the shavings off his lap and his desk. He snorted: "Do you know what time Pearl Harbor was attacked? It was about 7:15 o'clock in the morning. That's a mighty funny time for soldiers or anybody else to be in the movies."

Up rose Senator Olen C. Hull of Lawrence (pop. 400), a lay evangelist. He warned his colleagues that passage of the bill would mean "religious suicide for Mississippi"; that "the downfall of every nation so far has been due to two things-first, desecration of the Holy Sabbath, and second, loss of the virtue of its womanhood." Members spat rich brown streams of tobacco juice at the shiny brass spittoons. Senator Hull warmed up. He had been summoned, he said, "to come at once" to the home of a friend 80 miles away. He "raced" there in his automobile to discover that his friend's daughter-"a beautiful young woman"-had confessed to losing her virtue. "And where do you think it happened? Where do you think it happened? It took place in a picture show!"

This was too much for white-haired Senator Dave Crawley of Kosciusko (pop. 4,291). "I don't dispute the story," said he, "but I do observe a picture show is a hell of a place to lose it." After the fireworks, the bill passed: 29-to-10, went to the House, which has twice killed a similar bill. The measure was strictly class legislation. Even if the House should pass the bill, cockfights, bullfights, and bearbaiting will still be illegal in Mississippi on Sundays.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.