Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Crescent weaves its whistling way south toward summer, is a varied, often startlingly beautiful landscape of feathery woods and forests, roses and rhododendrons, pastures and cornfields, laced with urgent streams and dreaming lakes. The earth turns from New Jersey silt to Maryland sand, from Georgia red clay to Alabama's black bottom. Grand estates and hardscrabble farms rush by, punctuated by hamlets as dour as a Grant Wood visage. The voyager is voyeur, peering into the discrete life of the land and its inhabitants...
...simple farmer's daughter, one of ten children, and never went to college. But Melba Till Allen had big ambitions. She taught herself accounting and, after 13 years as a bookkeeper, was elected state auditor of Alabama in 1966. Voters were charmed by her beehive hairdo, ultrafeminine ways and strong Baptist principles. In office, she went so ferociously after state employees who padded their expense accounts and otherwise wasted public funds that she became known as "Melba Watching-the-Till Allen." She was enthusiastically re-elected in 1970 and four years later easily won election as state treasurer...
...testimony last week in a Montgomery courtroom, this ambition led to her undoing. While state auditor, she began dabbling in her own business on the side, taking out 26 bank loans, mostly to speculate in land sales and help her husband Marvin expand his trucking business. Once installed as Alabama's $23,000-a-year treasurer, she quickly turned her new powers to personal use. Chief among them was authority over the cash in the state treasury, sometimes amounting to $550 million, which by law must be deposited in Alabama's 311 banks...
...banks. They totaled $2.9 million; half of them were unsecured. The money went into a variety of enterprises, including more than $400,000 into land development, $378,000 to Marvin's trucking firm and $75,000 for a movie distributing company. She invested $281,000 in Stars over Alabama, a Hamilton amusement park that never opened and mysteriously burned last summer. She even made a brief fling at manufacturing wicker furniture, sinking $14,165 into a company headed by her two children and their spouses...
...Geneva had needed funds to help local corn farmers who were hurt by last summer's drought. After loaning the treasurer $50,000, he said, the bank received $725,000 in state deposits. Businessman Clay Baker described how he arranged $175,000 in financing for Stars over Alabama, in exchange for 10,000 shares of stock. On another occasion, he said, he obtained from her a $100,000 state deposit for a bank in Tuscumbia...