Alabama's huge (6 ft. 8 in., 260 Ibs.), boar-browed Governor James ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom was feeling fine when he set out on a drive to Washington last week. He hoped to testify before a congressional committee on tidelands oil. He planned to go to New York to see some fashion models who had voted him No. I Leap Year Bachelor, and thus get his picture in the papers. As a self-avowed presidential candidate, he also hoped to rebroadcast a campaign promise—that he would take his "ole cornshuck mop and his ole suds bucket" and sweep up the Democratic Party.
But when he got to Washington he discovered that a Mrs. Christine Putnam Johnston, of Hanceville, Ala. (pop. 650) had beaned him with a legal dornick. Christine, a tall, redheaded divorcee, had asked the Cullman County circuit court to declare Big Jim her common-law husband and the father of her 22-month-old son. She had also told reporters a tale of unrequited love.
Big Jim had come into her life, she said, in 1944 when she was 26. She was a Baptist farmer's daughter who had been married, divorced, and had a job as cashier of a Birmingham hotel. Big Jim was 36, a widower with two small daughters. He had been around the world as a merchant seaman, had gone briefly to college, had served a short wartime hitch in the Army. When he met Christine he was a salesman for a burial-insurance company.
He immediately bought her a big charcoal-broiled steak. There was a wild, backwoods look about him. He seldom wore socks and liked to take his shoes off when he ate; he enjoyed wiggling his enormous toes and grinding ice cubes between his gargantuan molars. As time wore on, he sometimes borrowed money from her. But she loved him madly anyhow. She swore they had lived as husband and wife.
She had her baby (11 Ibs.) in Nashville, recorded his name as James Douglas Johnston, and, on directions from Big Jim, "withheld the birth of the child from press publicity." She did not complain—Big Jim was running for governor and had promised to make her the "first lady of Alabama" afterwards. She didn't even object to his campaign methods: he traveled to the "crossroads, the branch-heads and the brush arbors" with a hillbilly band, called on it to strike up a tune called "Pucker up, Honey, Jim Folsom's Comin'," and then galumphed through crowds kissing all the women.
But after he got elected, Christine began to have doubts. For one thing, Big Jim began wearing socks and a pin-striped suit and took to riding around in a Cadillac sedan. For another thing, he didn't send for her. Finally—to the dismay of her father's neighbors, who wanted Big Jim to build them a "black top" (paved) road—she decided to sue him.
In Washington, Big Jim seemed staggered, though not overcome, by the news. While registering at the Statler Hotel, he gazed at a female employee, said, "My, but you're mighty pretty, miss," but did not attempt to kiss her. He blamed the paternity suit on "politics." Next day, he got into his car and vanished.
But Alabamans knew that a coon as big as Kissin' Jim couldn't stay holed up forever. What would happen next? As they waited for him to burst out of the brush, nobody seemed to know whether the voters would boo, cheer, or just gawk as though they had seen a pink giraffe.