Not everybody chuckled at ‘A buck well spent….’

“A memorable early example of [Elliott White Springs‘ circa 1950 magazine ads for Springmaid sheets] was proposed by his friend Dr. Robert McKay [a Charlotte urologist]. ‘What would you say to this — an Indian lying on a sheet, about half-dead, with a pretty squaw just leaving him? You could call it “A buck well spent.” ‘ Springs needed no more….

” ‘A buck well spent on a Springmaid Sheet,’ the ad proclaimed. [It] became a sensation….

The Woman’s Home Companion played into Springs’ hands by refusing to publish his ad until it was redrawn to place both feet of the comely squaw on the ground, rather than posing her in the act of descending from the hammock. [He pulled the ad instead.]”

— From “War Bird: The Life and Times of Elliott White Springs” by Burke Davis (1987)

 

Appomattox so upset him that he… did nothing

“[A] North Carolinian, Dick Ragland, a man of a wealthy plantation family… swore an oath, upon hearing of Lee’s surrender, that he would not lift a finger to work so long as he lived.

“Ragland also vowed that he would never cross to the north side of the Potomac, or stray south of Atlanta, Georgia. Until after 1910 he tramped the South as a vagrant, shaggy and ragged, with a  pack on his back, carrying a long stick with a bayonet fixed on its end.”

— From “Our Incredible Civil War” by Burke Davis (1960)

Davis sources this item in neither his acknowledgments nor his bibliography, and when I asked him about it many years after publication he couldn’t recall it all (not surprising for someone who wrote 57 books). An Internet search for details was similarly fruitless.

Any Dick Ragland experts in Miscellany land?