MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1995
Skulking into the piney forest in the dead of night, they pick off their prey and cart it to market. These are thieves, reminiscent of the cattle rustlers once widely known in Texas. But now the prey are trees. Timber has become a valuable commodity in Southern states, including Texas and Mississippi. Where once only cotton was king, 58 percent of all the timber produced each year in the United States now comes from the South, the U.S. Forest Service says. Southerners who own lands graced by forests and smelling of pine needles are facing losses of $75 million each year from stolen hardwoods and Tall Southern Yellow pine, said Bruce Miles, director of the Texas Forest Service. The practice has become so rampant that the joke in this part of East Texas is it’s become difficult to see the forest for the thieves. Rip-off artists trespass or ignore neighboring property lines to cut down trees because the price of logs has about doubled the past two years and the number of absentee landowners has increased.
50 years ago — 1970
When word first flashed that the “dunk” had been outlawed, oarsmen the world around wept. Why, they sobbed, would their beloved tradition of throwing the coxswain into the water after a victory be scuttled? It was against all laws, including those of Davey Jones. After eyes were toweled dry enough to read again, the raving rowers happily discovered that the order applied not to them, but to the basketball dunk shot by college players. Not only can the ball not be dunked during games but also during pregame warmups. Allan “Sky” Prompter, who coaches at a Midwestern school which places heavy emphasis on the finer arts, claims loss of the dunk will cut attendance in half at his team’s games. 75 years ago — 1945
Employees of Memphis department stores, specialty shops and most men’s shops will get a three-day holiday over New Year’s with decision of the stores to close all day Dec. 31. At the close of business Saturday, Dec. 29, the stores will be shuttered until Wednesday morning, Jan. 2, it was announced yesterday. Memphis furniture stores had not considered the closing yesterday.
100 years ago — 1920
DALTON, Ga. – Jim Sloan and V.W. Bishop, two prominent farmers, met in the road near Tilton, nine miles south of here, this afternoon, jerked revolvers from their pockets and shot each other to death, the encounter being the culmination of recent trials in the courts involving two other families. Bishop was one of the defendants in a habeas corpus case instituted in the Whitfield County superior court here. Jim Sloan was not a party to the proceeding, but was an interested neighbor, and the killing today is believed to have been the result of feeling endangered by the habeas corpus trial.