Southern Scorcher

Fred Sullens, editor of his own paper, can write what he wants to write, and does. Once, when a politician he opposed was scheduled to make a speech, Sullens announced: "There will be a buzzard swarming at Poindexter Park tonight. If you have buzzard appetite, go out and enjoy yourself. But please go home to do your puking. It costs money to clean public parks. . .." Another time, when Mississippi's Senator Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo visited Europe after being elected a second term, Sullens wrote: "When Bilbo reached Denmark, the band played 'God Save the Queen!"

Probably no U.S. editor is quite so tough, colorful, eloquent, prolific and unmindful of editorial niceties as 65-year-old, 185-pound Frederick Sullens of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News. His paper is 50 years old this week and for 38 of those 50 years has come wet from the presses bristling with Sullens' own pugnacious personality. He is perhaps the only survivor of the old Southern-womanhood-must-be-defended school of journalism, whose exponents backed up their words with their fists and divided all office visitors into two classes: 1) those without horsewhips; 2) those with.

Once, after a fight, Sullens reported that a local politician, whom he named, "came to my office today. I beat hell out of him, his son and his dog. If anyone else is looking for trouble, he'll find a man well preserved in his middle fifties well able to take care of himself."

When a candidate for Governor of Mississippi threatened to "lick Fred Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily Liar," Sullens Page-Oned: "If nothing less than a few buckets of blood from the veins of the editor of Mississippi's greatest newspaper will quench your thirst for human gore . . . you are cordially invited to come on and spill it if you can. Being the party threatened, the editor, under the traditional rules of the code duello, is entitled to choice of weapons, jpbj may arm himself with cow dung and shingles at the respectful distance of 40 paces, standing with his face to the wind. . . ." The "jpbj" was, as all Mississippians knew, Judge Paul B. Johnson (later Governor), Sullens' bitterest political foe. In May 1940 Johnson attacked Sullens with a cane in a Jackson hotel lobby; both men were bloodied in the ensuing battle.

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