MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1996
Woody Harrelson is offering to pick up the tab for Colorado’s first test crop of hemp if state legislators allow farmers to grow it. Harrelson, who has been filming The People vs. Larry Flynt in Memphis, is an investor in a hemp clothing company and import firm. He wrote a letter to state legislators urging passage of the bill. ”Industrial hemp has never and could never be used for drug trafficking,” he wrote. ”You could smoke a pound and not get high.” On Friday, a state Senate committee approved the bill, saying it would give Colorado ”an enormous economic edge.” Vermont and Missouri are considering similar legislation. Colorado’s bill would set up a pilot program to allow 40 acres of industrial hemp to be grown in 1996. In 1997 up to 120 acres could be planted.
50 years ago — 1971
ASSIGNMENT: MEMPHIS — You never know what will stir people up in the springtime, man. Would you believe Huckleberry Hound? The other day I relayed a question about the name of Huck’s sidekick in the old television cartoons and the fur has been flying ever since. This has gotten bigger than that photo show at the Memphis Academy of Arts. THE FIRST reply (Daddy Doggy) merely aroused the proponents of Augie Doggy. Next came a host of lone snipers, firing off rounds on behalf of of such claimants as Boo-boo, Pixie and Dixie, Deputy Dawg and the like. “I’M NOT sure who Huck’s sidekick was,” one anonymous citizen informed me heatedly, “but I’m sure who it wasn’t. Doggy Daddy was the father of Augie Doggy. They just happened to be on the same show with Huck. They were never sidekicks.”
75 years ago — 1946
Sponsors of pending minimum wage legislation announced formation of a bipartisan House bloc of 43 members to fight for its passage. This came as Senate leaders prepared to vote Tuesday on the measure boosting the minimum level from 40 to 65 cents an hour. The bill also would extend the rate to 70 cents a year later and to 75 cents in two years.
100 years ago — 1921
The alleged liquor scandal that in the summer of 1919 threatened to involve certain federal officials and others of Memphis will never be aired in the courts if rumors current during the last
few das prove to be true. Following an investigation by one Oldfield, a Department of Justice official, sent here to probe the affair, Tyree Taylor, then deputy U.S. Marshall, was indicted on a
charge of accepting bribes from Memphis bootleggers. Taylor at the time declared that he was to be made “the goat” saying that an attempt was being made to railroad him to the penitentiary.