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A Poor Man Rejoices (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

My father was a keen observer of human nature and a gifted storyteller, and he’s been on my mind more than usual as the 13th anniversary of his death approaches. Recent news items as disparate as the bankruptcy of Sears Holdings, rising interest rates and Elizabeth Warren’s DNA have all made me teary.

Doyle Crownover was born on a farm on Harmony Mountain near Bee Branch in Van Buren County on Jan. 9, 1925. The word hardscrabble was invented to describe the lifestyle of John Lester Crownover and his wife, Maggie. (She was one of several Fullertons who married Crownovers, so my father’s family tree is more like a bramble bush.) They had three sons and two daughters, my father in the middle.

The Cunningham family in “To Kill a Mockingbird” always reminds me of my dad’s family. “The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest,” Atticus Finch told Scout. The Crownovers had no phone, no lights and no motorcars, but they were connected to the outside world by the Post Office Department and mail-order catalogs from Sears Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward.

In the mid-1930s, my dad received in the mail the most thrilling new technology of his young life. The plain button jacket his mother had ordered was out of stock, so Montgomery Ward substituted a more expensive jacket — my father’s first zipper. He demonstrated the zipper to his schoolmates so many times that it broke on the first day he wore it.

Knowing how important mail-order was in my father’s childhood made all the more fascinating a series of tweets last week from Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, on the radical change that mail-order catalogs brought to African-American consumers in the Jim Crow era.

“The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait,” Hyman wrote. “And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because … sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy.”

Until Sears, that is.

“The catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, and by extension the landlord. Black families could buy without asking permission. Without waiting. Without being watched. With national (cheap) prices!”

My generation witnessed the retail transformations wrought in urban areas by shopping malls and in rural areas by Walmart, and mail-order has been supercharged by online shopping. But I had never considered the transformative power of mail-order for African-Americans, and I wish I could audit Hyman’s course on the history of consumption.


The slow rise of interest rates toward historic norms, and the complaints directed at the Federal Reserve by the president of the United States, also reminded me of my dad. In the mid-1980s, interest rates were coming down from crazy heights, and my dad’s brother-in-law was complaining. “A poor man can’t make a dollar,” my uncle Opie Maxwell said.

“Opie,” my father replied, “a poor man rejoices when the interest rate goes down.”


Elizabeth Warren, D-Flamethrower, exaggerated her Native American ancestry in her pre-politics life in academia. Whether she gained any measurable advantage from it seems to be in dispute, but if she did, it has to have been far outweighed by the political price she has paid as one of President Trump’s favorite targets.

Last week, she released DNA test results that showed that she likely did have a distant Native American ancestor, just as her mother had told her. Trump called her a phony, which is rich coming from a man who used fake identities to plant self-serving stories in the New York tabloids. I doubt releasing her DNA results was a good political move; surely Warren understands that men like Donald Trump are rewarded for exaggeration while women are punished.

The entire episode sure did make me miss my dad, who adored his family but put no stock at all in pedigree. I was a teenager when I asked him what he knew about his ancestors. “I’m pretty sure they were horse thieves,” he said.

A white man named Crownover was lynched for theft in Yell County in 1897, according to a list of lynchings in the state compiled by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, and he may have been a relative but was not a direct ancestor. The message I received from my father, in this and innumerable other ways, was clear: We are individuals responsible for our own successes and failures.


Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.
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