Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the
second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the
colonel to cause _The Rose of Dixie_ to blossom and flourish or to
wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers.
The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair
drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches.
The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father
killed during Pickett's charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank,
was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson
Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army,
having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a
milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Roncesvalles Sykes, was a
third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the
colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been
kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy,
got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the
commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who
wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern
families in Reduced Circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named
Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond
from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock
companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.
Well, sir, if you believe me, _The Rose of Dixie_ blossomed five times
before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and
eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on
'em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having
his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So
an advertising manager was engaged--Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks, a young
man in a lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the Exalted High
Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan.
In spite of which _The Rose of Dixie_ kept coming out every month.
Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or
the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain
number of people bought it and subscribed for it. As a boom for it,
Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's
old home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle
of Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!" and a five-thousand-word
biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that
month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina
Vashti Haricot (pen-name), related to the Haricots of Charleston,
South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders.
And an article from a special society correspondent describing a
tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of
tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as
Indians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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