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The 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 Miss Browning: "They have the lowest moral code, if any, of any [group], the biggest capacity for liquor and the most savage and vicious tactics when drunk, which is most of the time." Police say that they would need 2,000 extra officers to cope with hillbilly crime; educators have urged special grade-less schools for their children. But short of sending hillbillies back to the hills—and city officials are not even sure how many there are—authorities see no swift or clear-cut solution to the problem.
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
Elizabeth. "I get all the dope addicts," she grins, "and all the royalty." Country-born (in Trenton, Mo.) and Radcliffe-educated, she is married to Photographer Russell Ogg, with whom she frequently teams for free-lance magazine pieces. Her eye for detail and sophisticated good sense made the series an immediate hit; after only two installments it was pulling in 150 letters a day.
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 folks." To Editor Kennedy such letters were vivid proof that he had hold of a good story. At week's end he ordered Norma Lee to brave the mountain menace for six more installments.