Miss Edna

"Miss Edna" decided long ago that one of the things her sleepy community (pop.

4,450) most needed was to have its cattle fenced in. "Miss Edna" is Mrs. Edna Cain Daniel, editor & publisher of the Quitman, Ga. Free Press (circ. 2,000).

Quitman's reaction to her crusade has ranged from the lethargic to the down right hostile. Lawyer Stanley Bennett, whose two cows grazed on the courthouse lawn, protested that the milk and butter milk produced thereon was vital to the health of Quitman's widows and orphans.

Miss Edna shut him up with a front-page editorial headed "Buttermilk Bennett." Last fortnight Brooks County, of which Quitman is the county seat, was at last persuaded: it passed a law requiring cattle to be fenced. Said Editor Daniel, in quiet triumph: "The farmers are boycotting us now, but they'll get over it." Despite this thumping victory, Miss Edna could not afford to relax. For months she has watched the draft creep up on 50% of her composing-room staff, healthy Frank Ramew, 26 (Frank's father, J. H., is the staff's other half). Spunky, birdlike, greying Miss Edna pressed her associate editor Beth Williams ("Sister Bessie") Powers and her cook Lilly into composing-room service (see cut) when Frank went to Atlanta for his Army physical test. But if Frank goes for good, she warns Quitman that the Free Press may go the way of the 1,000-odd U.S. rural weeklies that have folded up, for lack of manpower and other reasons, since Pearl Harbor.

Miss Edna, rated one of the South's best all-around newswomen, started her career on the Free Press more years ago than she will confess. Against the wishes of her editor father, she then went to New York and landed a kind of country-visitor feature job on the Evening World. Her boss was the late, tyrannical Charles E.

Chapin, and she held her own with col leagues like Irvin S. Cobb. But small-town journalism was in her blood. She went back to Quitman, married the Free Press's Editor Royal Daniel,* took up the fight for tolerance and decency and such progressive steps as the removal of hitching-racks from Quitman's streets.

During World War I, when she was subbing as the editor for her husband, a Quitman clergyman used his churchly influence to wheedle a local grocer out of more than his Hooverized share of flour. The news leaked, and Quitman's food administrator cracked down on the parson. The scandal rocked the town. A Quitman banker, chief elder of the church, ordered Miss Edna to write an editorial denouncing the food administrator. She laughed him out of her office. Next day came word that the bank was going to foreclose a loan on the Free Press. When this news got around, Quitman quickly showed what it thought of the Free Press and its editor. A new note got so many endorsers that Miss Edna could not find room for her own signature, had to pin it on.

At the start of Gene Talmadge's last campaign for Governor, three local businessmen suggested that a favorable editorial policy would bring the paper an expensive ad for their candidate. Miss Edna told them they ought to have more gallantry toward a woman. Later, another businessman threatened to cancel his advertising unless the Free Press let up on Talmadge. "All right," said Miss Edna, "you can cancel, but I'll give you one free ad. I'll write it and tell why you canceled. That's blackmail, I suppose, but I learned about it from you." The advertising stayed.

Miss Edna's editorials are read and quoted far from Quitman. Sometimes she chooses national topics: "Arthur Krock in the New York Times was lamenting that we had lost the freedom of the press for the duration of the war. He'd better be concerned about what we did with the freedom of the press when we had it." But mostly her thoughts and her words are of Quitman and Brooks County.

"As a matter of fact," she wrote recently, "we really are a No. 1 country town. The Chamber of Commerce pretends we want to be a city, and that leads us into many expensive follies. . . ." Her advice to Quitman's young ladies: "No more sophistication, my fine feathered females. You'd better be good and innocent and sweet, dewy and unspoiled--at least you'd better look that way."

* Last week the Georgia Press Association hung a portrait of Miss Edna's late husband, who died in 1939, in the Hall of Fame of the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady School of Journalism.

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