Alabama: As Contagious as Corruption

In meditative loneliness, a single customer last week sipped a beer in Chad's Twist Lounge—the only nightclub left in Phenix City (pop. 29.000). on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochie River, across from Columbus. Ga. All that day, members of the Chamber of Commerce had been stringing Christmas lights across the city's main street; a local radio station had hired a plane to bombard the town with colored pingpong balls that were exchangeable for merchandise at the million-dollar Phenix City Plaza Shopping Center; a weekly newspaper glowingly reported plans for the second annual Christmas parade, featuring "seven bands, 18 floats, clowns, entertainers, riders on horseback"; and the sounds and sights of building were everywhere. And all this good clean fun, all this civic enterprise, was taking place in what was. not too long ago, the tawdriest sin city left in the U.S.

Within the past eight years. Phenix City has gone from a Sodom to a ghost town to a bustling community with reasonably high hopes for a decent and profitable future.

Spat Upon. Long before the Civil War, Phenix City became famed as a vice town, populated mostly by crooked gamblers and diseased whores. Gunfire was all too common. In later years, slot machines lined the walls of barbershops and service stations, even sprouted on the sidewalks. Servicemen from nearby Fort Benning kept the brothels operating full tilt. Such was Phenix City's infamy that members of its high school football team were spat upon when they played out of town.

Then, in 1954, Reformer Albert L. Patterson won the Democratic nomination for Alabama attorney general on the promise to clean up Phenix City; before he could take office, he was shot to death on Phenix City's streets. (His son John won the office, later became Governor.) That tore it; public indignation followed, a errand jury went to work. By the end of the year, Phenix City's bawdyhouses were padlocked, and the National Guard was called in to burn the slot machines.

Real Thrust. Having lost its main industries. Phenix City seemed about to die. But slowly, steadily, it has risen from the ashes of its vice. Last week Phenix City was grading land for a modern river port that will become a transfer point for shipping to such major nearby cities as Atlanta and Birmingham. On blueprints or in the works are a new $400,000 municipal building, two fire stations, a bank, an office building, a post office, a bridge, a $3,700,000 sewer program. New schools have shot up. 20 miles of dirt streets have been paved, a health clinic building has been opened, as well as a golf club and the shopping center.

The memory of Phenix City's past gives real thrust to the new effort. Says Otis Taff, 57, a grocer and county commissioner: "Oh. we have a few who would like it the other way. but a majority want the town to be clean. We know we can't be an average town with average people doing average things. We have to be outstanding people doing outstanding things to overcome our past." Adds Finance Commissioner James Gresham, 39: "The amazing thing about the folks of Phenix City is that they all want something a little bit better. You know, progress can be just as contagious as corruption."