Word: pitchfork
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...must to all men, Death came last week to Wilford B. Smith, editor and publisher of the once-famed Pitchfork and a mighty man in North Texas...
Prodigiously built (he was six feet four), prodigiously dressed (in black suit, broad black hat and flowing black Windsor tie), a prodigious writer, talker, fighter and drinker, Pitchfork Smith worshipped at the shrine of one man and one man only: William Cowper Brann (the Iconoclast). Once, on Brann's birthday, his disciple got drunk, visited his grave at Waco, and sat there all night communing with the soul of his friend, for every drink he took himself pouring an equal amount of whiskey...
...lawyers he saw were drunk and a newspaperman told him that if he wrote he would starve to death but, meantime, would always have a lot of fun. He founded a magazine called Plain Talk, which was suppressed for inciting race troubles. So he changed its name to The Pitchfork "because the pitchfork is the poor man's implement; you can fight with it or work with it." When he was ordered never again to publish a political paper in Missouri he moved The Pitchfork to Dallas. Its first office was over a saloon, so that the editor never...
Famed throughout Texas grew Pitchfork Smith's thunderous writings, his private battles, his oratorical eloquence. Old timers still quote from his street-corner oration on the death of John Barleycorn, the night before Prohibition took effect. One of his speeches ("When You Die, Will You Live Again?") was so highly esteemed by one P. S. Harris, president of Lucky Tiger Remedy Co., that Mr. Harris gave The Pitchfork a lifetime advertising contract, reprinted the speech and sent copies to every barbershop...
...Pitchfork supported Pa Ferguson, and its editor once sued a newspaper for the 5? he had paid for a copy only to find nothing about Ferguson in it. Ten years ago Pitchfork Smith 'walked into a church where Fort Worth's Rev. J. Frank Norris (who had just been acquitted of murder) was preaching, shook his finger in the preacher's face, boomed: "Dr. Norris, you murdered D. E. Chipps." Threatened by the congregation, he shouted: "Come on, I'm not afraid of a mob! I can lick a mob with a switch!" He was charged...