Mississippi Spurning
Calendar
The Overflow of Their Cups Fills My Little Bucket
Topic : Rivalry
Ticket Please
groups of students—math and engineering majors—boarded a train that was headed for a technical convention. Each of the math majors had a ticket, but their engineering counterparts had only one ticket between them.
The math majors were snickering at this when an engineering student shouted, “Here comes the conductor!” With that, all the engineering majors squeezed into a bathroom. The puzzled math students watched as the conductor collected their tickets, then knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Ticket please.” The conductor took the single ticket that was passed under the door and left.
Not to be outdone, the math students boarded the returning train with only one ticket, while the math majors piled into another. Then before the conductor entered the car, one of the engineers came out of his bathroom and knocked on the math majors’ door.
“Ticket please,” he said.
Mississippi Spurning
A good bit of one-upmanship has transpired over the years between Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, the two Mississippians in this week’s showdown for Bob Dole’s job as Senate majority leader. But as Jackson columnist Bill Minor notes, their rivalry pales when compared with a feud waged six decades ago by two other Mississippi senators.
The nation knew the state’s junior senator, Theodore Bilbo, as a race-baiting demagogue, the author of a bill to ship blacks to Africa. But many Mississippians revered him as a champion of the poor and foe of the mighty. Others in the state despised him as a bribe-taking crook. One rival, preparing to discuss Bilbo in a stump speech, shed his coat and said, “Excuse me. I’m going to skin a skunk. Ladies had better leave.”
Mississippi’s senior senator, Pat Harrison, had helped engineer Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal. When the Senate majority leader’s job opened up in 1937, Harrison went after it. Nose counts put him in a tie with Kentucky’s Alben Barkley. Harrison’s campaign manager asked Bilbo to consider voting for his fellow Mississippian. Bilbo said he would if Harrison asked him to. That was a big if. Harrison loathed Bilbo and hadn’t spoken to him in years. The response was swift: “Tell the son of a bitch I wouldn’t speak to him even if it meant the presidency of the United States.”
When the ballots were in, Pat Harrison was a one-vote loser. But his reputation as the senator who wouldn’t speak to his home-state colleague remained intact.
Calendar
July, the seventh month, was named after Julius Caesar. Not to be outdone, the Emperor Augustus called the following month August after himself. Since that month had only thirty days at the time, he borrowed a day from February and added it to August, making sure that his month would not be inferior to Julius Caesar’s.
The Overflow of Their Cups Fills My Little Bucket
When F. B. Meyer was pastoring Christ Church in London, Charles Spurgeon was preaching at Metropolitan Tabernacle, and G. Campbell Morgan was at Westminster Chapel. Meyer said,
“I find in my own ministry that supposing I pray for my own little flock, ‘God bless me, God fill my pews, God send me a revival,” I miss the blessing; but as I pray for my big brother, Mr. Spurgeon, on the right-hand side of my church, ‘God bless him’; or my other big brother, Campbell Morgan, on the other side of my church, ‘God bless him’; I am sure to get a blessing without praying for it, for the overflow of their cups fills my little bucket.”
