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Korley’s Kolumnsby
Bob Bowman | |
Some
seventy years ago, a self-educated farmer and justice of the peace in Henderson
County starting writing letters to the Athens Daily Review.
In a few months,
Cicero Witt Corley was so popular that he was given a regular newspaper column
he called “Korley’s Kolumn.”
Today, Corley’s columns are treasured as
yellowed clippings put away in the scrapbooks and trunks of older people who remember
him as a lively, satirical writer and philosopher.
Writing from his home
in Shady Grove, a rural community eight miles north of Murchison, Corley was an
elementary school dropout due to the untimely death of his father.
He
possessed a keen wit that made people chuckle. His eighty-eight year old daughter,
Edith Mayfield of Brownsboro, once said her father “loved life and liked to laugh
with people.”
One March in the 1930s, Corley wrote that he was plowing
a field when “I heard “the buzzing of a Ford car” and the refrains of “Love Lifted
Me.” When the car stopped, he looked inside and saw a couple who wanted him to
stop his plowing and marry them. Corley married them with his mule as a witness.
Corley often offered his services as a resident seer and answered questions
from his readers.
One reader asked: “How long will my husband continue
to flirt with women? Corley replied: “Until the undertaker is called, which may
not be long.”
During the Great Depression, a reader asked “when will the
depression be at its worst?.
Corley responded: “During May, June and July,
as neither of these months have a R and rabbits killed in a month with no R are
not good to eat.”
A lady reader supposedly wrote: “Will I ever receive
my diamond stick pin that was stolen from my husband?”
Corley wrote:
“I am very sorry to say the pin was not stolen. The person who got the pin while
in a very friendly conversation with your husband lives in Houston, is a brunette,
is 35 years old and powders and paints excessively.”
A poor farmer asked
Corley: “Will Congress be able to enact any laws that will relieve the farmer?”
Corley replied: “Yes, I see Congress passing several laws that will no
doubt relieve you in many ways. No doubt they will relieve you of your home.”
Corley often struggled with the fact that man had one rib fewer than
women. “I wish someone would tell me why,” he said, “because I feel I have been
shortchanged.”
The highlight of Corley’s career was winning a trip to
Boston to see the World Series after making friends with Dallas radio broadcaster
Gorden McLendon.
Even though he lost his eyesight, Corley continued to
write until he was in his eighties. He passed away in 1980 and was buried in Ashberry
Cemetery, a small country graveyard in Van Zandt County.
But to legions
of fans, he is still remembered through the cherished clippings of his old newspaper
columns. |
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