The Light That Never Fails

Of all the jerkwater traffic traps set to catch and fleece U.S. motorists, the most wondrously efficient was a fast-flicking traffic light in southeast Georgia's tiny (pop. 2,100) Ludowici.* The Ludowici light, which has brought the American Automobile Association more complaints than any other light in the U.S., hangs astride the intersection of two heavily traveled highways: State 38 to Savannah and a combined U.S. 25 and U.S. 301, which funnels thousands of vacationers from the East and Midwest toward Florida. For traffic on U.S. 25-301 (which makes a 90DEG turn), the light has been known to flick from red to green and hold for only 16 seconds--just long enough to let three left-turning cars through, and get the piled-up traffic rolling. Then its timer snaps through a quick-as-the-eye amber warning to a red stop.

Unless he slams on his brakes and risks a pile-up from behind, the fourth driver in the left-turn line--and sometimes the fifth and sixth--rolls through the red toward a waiting menace of another color: one of the two blue Chevrolets manned by the town's three-man police force, whose chief occupation is to collect a $15 "bond" from each driver not willing to stick around town to be tried and fined $15 for running a light.

The magic lamp went up in 1947, one of the first official achievements of jovial Mayor J. W. (for James Willis) Godfrey, gas-station operator hand-picked and backed in five re-elections by the local political boss, spectacled Ralph Dawson, who doubles as city attorney. Mayor Godfrey drawls that the light, "being a machine, might vary four to five seconds in wet weather," admits that rain comes often enough for the light to produce a quarter or more of the town's $12,000 to $15,000 annual budget. But local members of the Good Government League, organized by polio-crippled Mail Carrier Harry Chapman to fight the "Dawson crowd" and its red light, consider Godfrey's figures overly modest. They once counted 30 arrests in a single day, estimated the light's take at something upwards of $50,000 a year, got brushed aside when they demanded a look at town books on public revenue and outlays.

Last week agents of the American Automobile Association and the Georgia State Department of Commerce sat down for still another in a long procession of meetings with Mayor Godfrey and Boss Dawson at the Long County courthouse, laid out the motorists' grievances about the speed trap, and warned that traffic might just bypass Ludowici entirely if things did not change. In the midst of the proceedings, Good Government Leaguer Chapman got in a fist fight with Dawson, touched off an uproar that a pistol-packing state trooper had to break up. But when things had quieted down, the meeting brought unexpected results. Mayor Godfrey, Dawson & Co. agreed to traffic studies by the Georgia Highway Department, agreed as well to follow the department's recommendations about correct behavior for the Ludowici light.

Motorists would be the first to know.

*Changed from the Southern-style, Anglo-Saxon name of Johnson's Station in honor of German Immigrant Karl Ludowici, 19th century roofing-tile manufacturer, who gave $1,000 toward a new school building.

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