Great Moments in Journalism: Sod Off
Great Moments in Journalism are submitted by readers, who always send their nominees this address.
The polls have closed, and your winner is Mimi Spencer, whose chatterbox "ladies lunch like this" piece seemed to confirm every negative stereotype about the fairer sex that hack comedians have been running into the ground since time immemorial. Spencer wins a copy of the Calvin Trillin classic Alice, Let's Eat.
Today's Moment is from another installment of Charlie LeDuff's "American Album." Today Charlie explores the effects of a factory closing in McMinnville, Tenn., a subject which allows him to record the kind of details that Erskine Caldwell would have been embarrassed to include.
The factory employs six people now, security men making sure the place doesn't burn down. When it was boarded up, Mr. Rackley, 48, looked for another job, but there were few beyond the convenience-store counter or the gas station. With the screw plant and box factory gone and the electric motor company in the final stages of shutdown, Mr. Rackley tried tree-stump grinding for a while, but business was catch as catch can.
Now he drives a sod truck for a third of what he used to make. His wife, Jovella, 51, has a little beauty parlor next to their house, past the white church beyond the railroad tracks, with goats and chickens roaming behind it. She charges $8 a haircut.
