Of all the migrant waves that have swept into Chicago in the 125 years since the city mushroomed from the swamps, none have seemed so alien or posed such social problems as a recent influx of native-born white Americans. For the past five years, at the rate of more than 1,000 a week, displaced people of Anglo-Saxon stock have been swarming into the city from the scrubby hills, marginal farms and depressed coal-mining areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama. For lack of a better term, Chicagoans concerned with the problem lump the minority under the label "hillbillies." Lured to Chicago by Northern industry, the newcomers are compressed into slums where squalid conditions, strange customs and limited opportunity seem to lay bare more of the bad than the good in them. Coming from states whose literacy rates are below the national average (exception: Missouri), the clannish, independent migrants show a deep-rooted aversion not only for the law, but also for sanitation, schooling, church and most other alien urban institutions as well. Though police, school, health and social-welfare agencies all agree that these newcomers are their No. 1 problem, few Chicagoans were aware of the seriousness of that problem until last week, when the Chicago Tribune ran a hair-raising series on the hillbillies.
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 and "Presley sideburns"; the women go in for sleazy skirts or slacks. The sure signs of the hillbilly, male or female, as observed by Reporter Browning, were "shoulder-length bobs (slightly matted, heavily greased) and bubble gum."
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."
Though she and her escort were shabbily dressed, their arrival in a dive invariably resulted in the same "sudden, startling transformation." The yipping, hollering, three-piece band would stop its "loud perversion" of hillbilly music. The patrons would stalk out, glaring venomously at the intruders. In one joint a husky bouncer planted himself beside the reporters, "cracked his fingernails and waited, just looking."