“Our Socialist President”: Mooseprints, Pt 1
Spending time in Bessemer can be exhausting: so many old friends to catch up with; BBQ at Bob Sykes (try Brisket Wednesdays) and Snapper Almandine at the Star; a bit too much bourbon in great bars like W-T’s; and all those chopped up roads. And then there’s my obsessive search for Moose Park.
My friend Joe and I are sitting at the bar at W-T’s talking to owner Wanda Parsons Chandler, whom I went to high school with (Spoiler alert, we were in the Thespian Club together). We cover a good bit of old ground as people do who haven’t seen each other in forty years. The “Nick Saban for President” sign keeps me smiling as we get to more sensitive talk.
Wanda has been helping me try to locate info on Moose Lodge and Moose Park for a project that I can only tease here (something about a Klan rally back in ‘63). As Susan Alexander Kane told Thompson, the reporter in Citizen Kane, about Raymond the Butler, Wanda just might know “where all the bodies are buried.” Figuratively, that is. Wanda has info that some mutual acquaintances from high school lost their father in a shooting at Moose Lodge sometime in the early 60’s. No one I know remembers this or remembers the man’s first name. She suggests that I might find 90-year old Gordon Seale, a Legionnaire with an excellent memory. We check the phone book for his number, but Bessemer phonebooks have only business listings now.
“I’ll see what else I can dig up,” Wanda says as she shows us to the door in the descending Bessemer sun. I give Wanda a hug, and Joe and I head out into the night.
With very little to go on, I visit Bessemer’s Hall of History the following day to see what I can uncover. William, one of the researchers, is expecting me, and he’s made ready several bound volumes of The Bessemer Advertiser, a weekly that my parents never took. Edited by BM McElroy, the paper lists every legal notice occurring in the past week. We have the years 1961–3, and William and I pour through them looking for Moose artifacts.
“If they just bought an ad somewhere, that would be something,” he says.
I agree.
In the photo at the beginning of this column, you can see the fruit of our labors. The inaugural Moose meeting with George Wallace, when he was still a Judge campaigning for Governor, as the star speaker. The Moose seem so friendly here; they’re working on finishing new little and pony league baseball diamonds, I suppose in Roosevelt Park, though the caption doesn’t say.
Nor does it say where this meeting with Wallace took place.
Damn.
This is the only Moose-related item in three years of the Advertiser, and while I love finding this pic, it doesn’t answer my more pressing questions: a murder, a Klan rally. The death of the Moose.
But as I looked, I found other crazy things published in this news digest.
I find a letter to the editor from a prominent, and of course long-dead, Bessemer citizen. I knew this man and his family, and I knew his reputation. Still, it’s a hard read, especially when I reach the part about the Black race being the only race — out of “white, red, and yellow” — that “takes no pride” in itself as a race.
So many questions: as a white man, how would this writer know about the “pride” of an entire race, one different than his own? Or, and this is just a thought, how much “pride” should a race of people have given that they mainly knew subjugation, discrimination, hate, lynching, and of course, slavery? There can certainly be pride in one’s ancestors, in survival, in a deep and abiding faith that saw many through such hardships.
But doesn’t pride get us all into trouble? False pride, excessive pride. Pride goeth before a fall — stuff like that. I know that this is somewhat ancient history, and again, I report it mainly here because seeing it in print, seeing it from someone I knew, even if I already knew the man’s attitudes, is even now like running my hand down an unpainted, weathered wooden rail.
And I do have pride: not in my skin color or where I was born, since I had nothing to do with these. I am happy enough with my life — happy that I had great parents and friends and very happy to be able to live in a country where I can freely write these words. This is happiness — and good luck — though, and not pride. I am privileged to make good money and to have had the opportunities that my background and, yes, my skin color afforded me.
But pride?
My pride lies in being a good son, a faithful husband, a present father, dedicated teacher, and I hope at least a competent writer.
There were other “Advertiser moments,” though, and since you are surely wondering about the other part of the title, here it is.
Someone in another letter to the editor commented on “our socialist president,” John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, a socialist. Right. We could discuss the excesses, the infidelities, and the unscrupulousness of many in the Kennedy family. But socialism? The Bay of Pigs; the face-off with Krushchev; Ich bin ein Berliner?
I was reading in 1963 by now, and I passed the date of the Klan rally I was searching for. No mention of it. Okay, I suppose I can see that one might not want to call attention to such matters, though I did see a notice for people to attend a White Citizens Council meeting in Bessemer — a call to all those who “love segregation.” I kept reading, wondering if the paper would report on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that September (it didn’t).
There were many articles about Alabama’s senators opposing civil rights legislation, and I kept turning pages. Given the tenor of the Advertiser’s editorial viewpoint, I wondered how it would handle the events of November 1963.
The paper appeared on Friday, November 22, and mostly it was in pre-Thanksgiving mode. Of course, the paper came out early that day, before the Dallas motorcade. I turned those pages, getting to the next issue, Nov. 29.
There was absolutely nothing about JFK’s assassination.
I looked up and remarked on this incredible omission.
“Well, you know Alabamians didn’t exactly like Kennedy,” one of the workers said.
“Yes, I know, but the assassination of the country’s president, and not a word in a current newspaper?”
When I was a kid, other children I played with used to pridefully refer to JFK as being a “N*****-Lover.”
Oh God, oh god.
A few weeks later, the paper was glad to help all its readers celebrate Christmas and New Year.
Needless to say, there was no article about a murder at Moose Lodge.
Nothing at all.
When I finished that day, William saw me to the door with these words, “The funniest thing. We were given those bound copies of the Advertiser, but the years from ‘64–68, you know, the Civil Rights years, were all missing.”