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116 TWO SUCCESSES AND A FLOP George McLean’s return to Tupelo and the Journal was noted in the paper in a modest way.On Tuesday,August 14,1945,the masthead read,“George McLean, on leave in U.S.Navy.”OnWednesday,August 15,it read,“George McLean,editor and publisher.” (Harry Rutherford’s still carried the label“on leave in U.S. Navy.” He did not get out of the service until November.) Interim publisher Bill Stroud had focused on keeping circulation and advertising stable.Stroud’s forte was business,not community involvement.On Monday ,August 13,1945,for example,the left“ear”—a house advertisement at the top of the front page, next to the paper’s nameplate—proclaimed, “Journal WantAds Get Results.” McLean’s return changed the emphasis. On Friday, August 17, with McLean back in charge, the ad now announced, “The Journal Backs Any and Every Project Looking toward the Upbuilding of Tupelo and Northeast Mississippi.” While letting Stroud continue to run the business side, McLean put his considerable energy into Tupelo and the surrounding area. It was as if his navy years had been an incubator for the development ideas he was aching to try.The side benefit was that if those ideas worked, the Journal would profit along with everyone else. McLean returned to Tupelo’s civic life at an opportune moment. The Northeast Mississippi economy was, at best, stagnant. The last new business to move to the area was the Carnation milk plant in 1927, eighteen years earlier. In the postwar economy, people, especially the younger rural people, were beginning to leave for better jobs and more opportunities in northern cities; many of the remaining farmers were mired in a cotton-and-corn mentality that produced very little income—the sole bright spot was the improved milk production of the Jerseys. The city’s leaders—the bankers, large landowners, and upper-tier businesspeople—wondered what to do. 7 Two Successes and a Flop 117 Tupelo’s top layer of society, like that of many small towns, typically did not welcome outsiders. Their version of southern hospitality was restricted to people who had been in town for at least a generation. Yet despite McLean’s liberal reputation, and although he and Keirsey had moved to Tupelo only a decade before, the McLeans had meshed well with these people. They saw each other at the First Presbyterian Church and at Bible study groups,some of which the McLeans held in their home. They saw each other at Rotary Club meetings and book club events, at social gatherings and Highland Circle bridge games. They had experienced the tornado and the rebuilding together. These businessmen came to know McLean and his newspaper as clearly civic-minded and interested in seeing the area prosper; they came to know Keirsey, whose social skills far outshone her husband’s, as a pleasant, intelligent woman who fit the southern pattern they knew (she had worked with the wives of these men during the early war years to found the Tupelo Service League, which later became the Junior Auxiliary). In the postwar years,when Tupelo faced an uncertain future,George McLean was an ideal person to turn to. The town’s leaders, among them J. P.“Phil” Nanney , the president of the Bank of Tupelo, who was also mayor, decided they needed someone younger, a fresh voice with fresh ideas. McLean, forty-one at the time and newly returned from the navy, was an obvious choice. “When I got back in August,” McLean recalled in an interview years later,“I remember two or three of the bankers and merchants calling me in a meeting and saying, ‘Now George, your business was run better with you out of town than it ever did with you there.You can just give us a year or two as head of the Chamber of Commerce and help do this job.’”1 McLean’s self-effacing words were characteristic.While he definitely had an ego, he was not a self-promoter. The Chamber of Commerce, made up of Tupelo’s businessmen (it had no women members), had around $30,000 in its bank account and offered him a small salary if he would take the job as president. McLean agreed to serve but refused the salary and told them he would pay his own expenses. It was a wise decision. The title gave him the authority to act as a spokesman for the...

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