In what last week promised to become the most involved inheritance litigation of 1933, the principal adult personages were:
Zachary Smith Reynolds, fourth child of the late Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of a tobacco company at Winston-Salem, N. C. Two years after his birth in 1911, his father's tobacco company gave birth to the first package of Camels. While Zachary Smith Reynolds was growing up, a weak-chinned, moody child at his family's elaborate 600-acre country seat, "Reynolda," the U. S. entered the War. Out of the War came mass-smoking of cigarets, with Camels a U. S. favorite. In 1918, the year "R. J." died, Reynolds were producing more than 20,000,000,000. This accounted for the trust fund of $60,000,000 for the four Reynolds children.
In 1929, when he was barely 18, Smith Reynolds married Anne Cannon, daughter of a Concord, N. C. textile tycoon. In August 1930, they had a daughter. A year later young Smith Reynolds, who had studied aviation instead of going to college, flew his wife to Reno for her divorce.
Anne got a settlement from Smith Reynolds of $500,000 for herself and the same amount for little Anne. On the same day, Smith Reynolds took out a license for his second marriage—to Elsbeth ("Libby") Holman. A week later they were secretly married in Monroe, Mich. Immediately afterward, Smith Reynolds set off to fly around the world in his own plane. When he got back, in May 1932, he and Libby Holman Reynolds announced their marriage in Manhattan. On July 6, at "Reynolda," Smith Reynolds and his wife gave a party, during which Smith Reynolds was found in an upstairs sleeping porch shot to death by person or persons unknown.
Anne Cannon Reynolds Smith came from a family which, in the industrial feudalism of the new South, occupied at Kannapolis, N. C. a position analogous to that of the Reynolds family at Winston-Salem. The Cannon textile mills were founded by James Cannon who started out as a clerk in a Concord, N. C. general store just after the Civil War. Old James Cannon had five sons, four of them given to jollity and excesses, one given to sober industry. He willed his textile mills to his sober youngest son. Charles A. Cannon proved the wisdom of this move by running them so ably that in 1918 the U. S. soldiers who were smoking Camel cigarets were drying themselves with Cannon towels embroidered with such fiery legends as "To Hell with the Kaiser" and "In God We Trust." By 1930, Charles A. Cannon had introduced the vogue for colored towels; the Cannon mills made 65% of the towels in the U. S. It might therefore have seemed that a wedding between Anne Cannon, daughter of the oldest of old James Cannon's lively sons, and young Zachary Smith Reynolds, would be an ideal alliance, satisfying the prudence and propriety of smokestack royalty as gracefully as it embellished the legend of Southern romance. Such was not the case. The wedding of Anne Cannon and Smith Reynolds was celebrated at midnight in York, S. C. There were no witnesses except the bride's father and a policeman.