Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Where you came from they didn't call you Horace, did they?” inquired the old man.

“Naw, suh, that they didn't,” admitted Horace, showing all his teeth except the extremely rearmost ones.

“What was it they called you—Smoke or Rabbit?”

“Ginger,” owned up Horace delightedly, and vanished, still snickering. Malley noticed that the coin which the old man had extracted from the depths of a deep pocket and tossed to the darky was a much smaller coin than guests in a big New York hotel customarily bestowed upon bellboys for such services as this; yet Horace had accepted it with every outward evidence of a deep and abiding satisfaction.

With infinite pains and a manner almost reverential, as though he were handling sacred vessels, the old judge compiled two dark reddish portions which he denominated toddies. Malley, sipping his, found it to be a most smooth and tasty mixture. And as he sipped, the old judge, smiling blandly, bestowed himself in a chair, which he widely overflowed, and balancing his own drink on the chair arm he crossed his booted feet and was ready, he said, to hear what his young friend might have to say.

As it turned out, Malley didn't have much to say, except to put the questions by which a skilled reporter leads on the man he wants to talk. And the old judge was willing enough to talk. It was his first visit to New York; he had come reluctantly, at the behest of certain friends, upon business of a more or less private nature; he had taken a walk and a ride already; he had seen a stretch of Broadway and some of Fifth Avenue, and he was full of impressions and observations that tickled Malley dear down to the core of his reportorial soul.

So Malley, like the wise newspaper man he was, threw away his notes on the Brazilian rubber magnate and the merchant prince of Sandusky; and at dark he went back to the office and wrote the story of old Judge Priest, of Kentucky, for a full column and a quarter. Boss Clark, the night city editor, saw the humor value of the story before he had run through the first paragraph; and he played it up hard on the second page of the Sun, with a regular Sun head over it.

It was by way of being a dull time of news in New York. None of the wealthiest families was marrying or giving in marriage; more remarkable still, none of them was divorcing or giving in divorce. No subway scandal was emerging drippingly from the bowels of the earth; no aviator was descending abruptly from aloft with a dull and lethal thud. Malley's story, with the personality of the old judge deftly set forward as a foil for his homely simplicity and small-town philosophy, arched across the purview of divers saddened city editors like a rainbow spanning a leadish sky. The craft, in the vernacular of the craft, saw the story and went to it. Inside of twenty-four hours Judge Priest, of Kentucky, was Broadway's reigning favorite, for publicity purposes anyhow. The free advertising he got could not have been measured in dollars and cents if a prima donna had been getting it.

The judge kept open house all that next day in his room at the Hotel Royal, receiving regular and special members of various city staffs. Margaret Movine, the star lady writer of the Evening Journal, had a full-page interview, in which the judge, using the Southern accent as it is spoken in New York exclusively, was made to discuss, among other things, the suffragette movement, women smoking in public, Fifth Avenue, hobble skirts, Morgan's raid, and the iniquity of putting sugar in corn bread. The dialect was the talented Miss Margaret Movine's, but the thoughts and the words were the judge's, faithfully set forth. The Times gave him a set of jingles on its editorial page and the Evening Mail followed up with a couple of humorous paragraphs; but it was the Sunday World that scored heaviest.

McCartwell, of the Sunday, went up and secured from the judge his own private recipe for mint juleps—a recipe which the judge said had been in his family for three generations—and he thought possibly longer, it having been brought over the mountains and through the Gap from Virginia by a grandsire who didn't bring much of anything else of great value; and the World, printing this recipe and using it as a starter, conducted through its correspondents southward a telegraphic symposium of mint-julep recipes. Private John Allen, of Mississippi; Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas; Marse Henry Watterson and General Simon Bolivar Buckner, of Kentucky; Senator Bob Taylor, of Tennessee, and others, contributed. A dispute at once arose in the South concerning the relative merits oi mint bruised and mint crushed. An old gentleman in Virginia wrote an indignant letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch—he said it should be bruised only—and a personal misunderstanding between two veteran members oi the Pendennis Club, of Louisville, was with difficulty averted by bystanders. For the American, Tom Powers drew a cartoon showing the old judge, with a julep in his hand, marching through the Prohibition belt of the South, accompanied by a procession of jubilant Joys, while hordes of disconcerted Glooms fled ahead oi them across the map.