Volume 36, Number 1 - Summer 1996
Title Sign of the Times
March 5, 1954
Dear Mr. [Roscoel Stewart,
The last straw always breaks the camel’s back. This is to tell you that I will not be writing any more for the MOUNTAINEER, and please remove my name from the heading as a member of the staff. I have tried hard not to do this, and for your sake, but I cannot reconcile the disgraceful, stupid looking thing on the front page of this last issue (thanks to my good friend Steve Miller!) with a publication that I should in any way be connected with. And if you would care for the advice of a well meaning and long experienced friend, this thing will not promote the MOUNTAINEER in the eyes of anybody. It does not fit the nice little publication which started out with high ideals, carrying to its readers the lore and history and charm and progress of this storied and far-famed Ozark Uplift.
I have been a long time now bringing myself to this decision as you well know. My friends and particularly my family have made it pretty miserable for me since the magazine seemed to dedicate itself to the deriding and defeating of Congressman Dewey Short. I haven’t a friend who can ever picture me in such a role as contributing to it with my small efforts and I know they consider me an arch hypocrite, as I have considered myself for some weeks.
With this last issue my family simply hit the ceiling! My good son-in-law, Herman Janss has for a long time remonstrated with me in his usual slow and unhysterical way (my children are more or less intense) to stop writing for a paper which with its stand against the Administration for which I have voted for many years, also against my lifelong and devoted friend Dewey Short, was hurting me wherever it went. And he told me he would be only too glad to write me each month a check for three times the amount I received from the paper, and put the check in the mail. But I told him, as you well know, that I was not writing for money, but to try to contribute in a small bit personally to a magazine which was a fine little organ until it became partisan.
I don’t suppose Dewey Short would care a whiff about my writing or not writing for the MOUNTAINEER. I have never seen him to discuss the matter. I know it would take much more than my feeble journalistic efforts in any sort of publication to turn his friendship from me and mine, or the memory of my husband or of my mother who worshipped him as a youth and young man and whose love was deeply returned.
But whether Dewey cares or not, I care! And I feel that I cannot longer impose upon his friendship and his kind and sweet tolerance toward me.
In other words, Mr. Stewart, I am in the wrong church and the wrong pew. I feel that with your intelligence you will concede that I am right. Also, I feel that you will get along
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much better and feel much freer when you are rid of me on your staff, and feel that you are not always hurting my sensibilities in any way, for I have felt all along that you have a very real friendship for me.
With kind wishes and with no departure from that friendship on my part,
I am yours sincerely,
May [Kennedy McCord]
717 N. Jefferson
Springfield.
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