"Hey, Bilbo!"

One day last week Linda Gaddy Bilbo, tall, thin, grey-haired wife of the stocky little pecan-growing Governor of Mississippi, summoned her Cadillac to the front door of the Bilbo home at Poplarville, Miss. To her Negro chauffeur, an ex-convict pardoned by her husband, she named her destination: West Point, N. Y. Then away she drove to visit her son. Cadet Theodore Gilmore Bilbo Jr., a plebe at the U. S. Military Academy.

Several days later James C. Hall, president of the Master Guides of America, was crying up trade, as is his wont, on Washington's Pennsylvania Ave. before the White House. He spotted tourists' cars by their out-of-town licenses and hailed them with some appropriate local epithet. "Hey, Cracker!" he would call to Georgians. Tourists from Illinois were greeted with "Hey, Capone!'' and from North Carolina, "Hey, Tar Heel!" When Guide Hall saw a big car with a Mississippi tag rolling toward him, he sung out the state cry: "Hey, Bilbo!"

The car coasted to the curb. Here, thought Guide Hall as he ran forward, was a fat fee. Out of the car's window was stuck a woman's face, its wrinkles beaming delight, its bespectacled brown eyes fairly dancing. "How," she asked, "could you tell it?"

"Tell what?" responded battled Guide Hall.

"Why, that I am Mrs. Bilbo, of course."

Meanwhile Linda Gaddy Bilbo's husband stayed on the Poplarville pecan plantation while his State went from bad to worse financially. A bull-headed little man of the Blease-Vardaman stripe, Governor Bilbo continued deaf to pleas to call a special session of the Legislature to consider only fiscal legislation. The rump session last April at which no impeachments were promised failed to budge him (TIME, May 4). The State deficit had passed the $3,000,000 mark, was bowling along toward $7,000,000 by the year's end. With tax collections off, only by hand-to-mouth borrowing from lenient bankers could the State keep its institutions halfway going. A serious crisis is anticipated in December when $6,000,000 in State obligations fall due.

Only Alabama ($1,284) is poorer in per capita wealth than Mississippi ($1,376). Only South Carolina (55%) has a denser Negro population than Mississippi (52%). Only Louisiana and South Carolina are more illiterate. Mississippi has the highest birth rate, lowest death rate in the South. It was the first state of the Union to ratify the 18th Amendment. It is cursed with the most virulent form of partisan Democratic politics. Its last great man: John Sharp Williams.

Surrounded by his nut trees. Governor Bilbo pondered these facts, and others, wrote a speech in which he forecast Mississippi's future, told why it got in such a bad hole. Later in the week he set forth on a typical Bilboan barnstorming trip through the State's swamp towns and back-country villages. State law barred him from re-election but he was bent on picking his own successor.

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