Word: norma
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Assigned to the story by the Trib's able assistant managing editor, Ardis ("Mike") Kennedy, Reporter Norma Lee Browning took a muscular male staffer as escort and started out by scouting the scores of hillbilly hangouts scattered from West Madison Street, Chicago's Skid Row, to "Glitter Gulch" on the squalid South Side. There, in dives that were "wilder than any television western," Reporter Browning set out to stalk and observe a species "whose customs and culture-patterns are as incomprehensible to us as dial telephones are to them." The men mostly sport Levis, black leather jackets...
High Capacity, Low Code. In three nightlong sorties through the neon-lit gathering places of the hillbillies, Norma Lee found that "the ironclad code of the hills permits no meddling from outsiders...
...newcomers' defiance of outsiders -particularly of the civic agencies that attempt to orient them-is fostered by their long history of geographic and cultural isolation. School officials told Norma Lee that they had even met "real backwoodsy hillbillies from areas that go in for snake rites, had burned down schoolhouses and horsewhipped the teachers." Most refuse to send their children to school. Even more alarming to authorities, said Reporter Browning, is the parents' "rebellious resistance" to immunization shots and other elementary health measures. Chicago's polio outbreak last year was "centered in Southern white migrant areas." Said...
They Called for More. No stranger to seamy-side reporting, Norma Lee Browning, 42, is a veteran Tn&sister whose assignments have ranged from posing as a repentant prostitute (TIME, Dec. 12, 1949) to interviewing the then Princess...
Most readers, and most officials concerned with the hillbilly headache, applauded Norma Lee. Scores of Southerners-including some who have migrated from the -same areas themselves-wrote to explain that the folks who made the trouble were "poor white trash," "Michigan farmers," "a lower grade of people that are not exactly civilized." But the heaviest response came from hillbillies who had heard about the series. They called Norma Lee-with embellishments -"nigger-lover," "sewer rat," "D.P.," "Communist," "garbage picker," threatened her with fates ranging from poisoning via "Southern-fried chicken in arsenic" to dismemberment at the hands of "us woman...