Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part One: Buford Pusser: The Worst Sheriff Ever About this episode Robert tells the story of legendary lawman Buford Pusser, whose lies about his real life inspired the movie 'Walking Tall' and helped create Hollywood's conception of the ideal lawman.
(2 Part Series)
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Transcript 12,904 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Robert Evans? Hey everyone, Robert Evans here. And on Thursday, September 25th at 8:00 PM, Behind the Bastards is doing a live show. The show itself is in Portland, Oregon, but all of the in-person seats have sold out. However, there are live stream tickets available. If you go to Alberta Rose Theater, T-H-E-A-T-R-E, Behind the Bastards, just type that into Google or whatever search engine you use, Alberta Rose Theater, Behind the Bastards, you can find a link to buy tickets for the live show. This is to benefit the Portland Defense Fund, which helps bail people out who don't have you know, resources of their own. So it's a good cause. Tickets are $25 for the live stream version of the show. So please go to Alberta Rose Theater, Behind the Bastards, and pick up a live stream show to check it out
0:48 Robert Evans? on Thursday, September 25th at 8:00 PM.
0:53 Robert Evans? Oh my God, what time is it? Is it, is it, it's Behind the Bastards 30? Or whatever. I don't know. Not, not my best effort. This is the show about bad people, the worst in all of history. And to distract everyone from honestly just a disappointing introduction. I feel, I feel bad about it. The person that I feel worse when I'm incompetent in front of? My old boss, Dan O'Brien. Dan, welcome to the show. I'm so sorry.
1:23 Speaker 01 That's me. Don't apologize. I was hoping this was one of the episodes where we, we would shake things up and not do a bastard. Do you not do those? Just like cycling a few?
1:33 Robert Evans? I do for Christmas.
1:34 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:35 Robert Evans? What's a year?
1:36 Speaker 01 Rats.
1:37 Robert Evans? You want to come on for Christmas, Dan, and hear about a nice person?
1:40 Speaker 01 Just once. Just want to hear about one nice person.
1:43 Robert Evans? Well, that's not this week. That's not what we're doing this week. Although, we are going to be learning a lot about what it was like to grow up in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, which, as a spoiler, bad. It was a horrible time to be a person.
1:59 Speaker 01 Okay, rats.
2:01 Robert Evans? So that's going to be fun. So, Dan, who I forgot to introduce, my former boss at Cracked, one of the best writers and mentors that I've ever had in my life, and also writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where you have won, not an Oscar, and not a Tony, but the, the, the one, the Emmy, right? You're at, are you at two now? Uh, I, I really hate that you're making me do this. I am at six now. You're at six? Jesus Christ. So. How did I miss four? It's so rude that you made me do that. That's. It's the worst thing in the world to correct someone on. Mm hmm. No, I could've just let it go. No, Dan, you have to. Come on. We, we have my friend Patches on to celebrate his Grammy.
2:46 Robert Evans? We have to celebrate my award winning friends. I love that episode. Mm hmm. What a, what a, what a delightful person. Oh, yeah. Old Greasy Will.
2:54 Speaker 02 Old Greasy Will?
2:55 Robert Evans? Yes. Old Greasy Will, who will be listening to this. Well, Dan, I'm proud of you. Uh, and I'm really excited to, to take you through a really a dark and depressing story about one of the worst police officers that this country ever had. Ah.
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5:25 Robert Evans? So, do you know anything about Buford Pusser?
5:29 Speaker 01 Great name. Uh, I love the name, yeah. Apart from that, no.
5:33 Robert Evans? It's incredible. It's an amazing name. Yeah. It's almost, he has almost the name from the, as the same name as the cop from Smokey and the Bandit.
5:42 Speaker 01 Right.
5:43 Robert Evans? But no, this was a real cop. Have you seen the movie Walking Tall, the original, like 1973?
5:48 Speaker 01 No, not the original.
5:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, I mean, there was a reboot in like 2004 with The Rock, but like, both Walking Tolls, and there's actually several Walking Tall movies. It became like a whole franchise. They're all based on a real guy, a real cop who up until literally like a year ago was almost universally viewed to have been like a hero. And his name was Buford Pusser.
6:11 Speaker 01 It's a name that, that were you writing a screenplay, someone would be like, haha, this is a fine placeholder, but like, no one's gonna buy it for your bad guy character.
6:21 Robert Evans? We gotta get a real name.
6:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:24 Robert Evans? Yeah, I don't even know if like Buford or Pusser is more ridiculous, but like together, it just does not sound like a real person. Absolutely not. No, but no, it was a real man and his, his story came out on film. The kind of like the, the shorthand version of the story is that he's this cop who is like Tennessee cop who declared war on this like local organized crime group, the state lion gang, who were like doing, running gambling and prostitution and illegal liquor because McNary County was a dry county. And he, he went to war, he smashed up their stills with like a baseball bat or just like a big, sometimes you'll just see, see him like wielding a log. And like, that's kind of Buford Pusser's like legend is this, this cop who went head
7:08 Robert Evans? to head with the mafia and like beat mafia guys to death with boards, basically, right? Like that's, that's the, the version of him from the movie. This is Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Yes. Adjacent, yeah. Yes, yes, very much so. And he kind of became, because the movie comes out in 73 and because it's supposed to be a real guy, there were a lot of news stories about this guy's actual exploits. And he is personally like the model that you get around the seventies and eighties of like the gritty, hard boiled cop who, he breaks the law, he doesn't play by the rules, but he gets results. Like Buford Pusser is the origin in a lot of ways of a lot of that, that mythos. Like he's not the only person it's based off of, but he's the real guy that a lot
7:52 Robert Evans? of that stuff gets kind of wrapped around. Like there's a lot of Buford Pusser and Dirty Harry, you know, like he's, and it, it kind of makes sense that 73 is when this guy in his movie go, get famous and blow up because, you know, 73 is when Nixon resigns. It's this period in which like crime is raising and Americans are, there's just kind of this general sense of exhaustion, both at like crime in the streets and crime at like the top of the country. So people were kind of craving this like just law paladin figure who Sure. Didn't wait for, you know, the, the court system to catch up, didn't wait for the niceties of legal, just went right after the bad guys and took them down, you know?
8:34 Speaker 01 That makes a lot of sense. I do have to say, and I don't want to note you to death. You've, you've come a long way since you were my intern and the podcast is great and everyone loves it. I will say, if you're going to say a sentence like, "There was a lot of Buford Pusser in Dirty Harry", you've gotta leave some air. You gotta give some space for someone to say something. You can't barrel on through after that.
8:55 Robert Evans? Really? I mean, you know, I, I kinda just thought maybe, maybe we just, maybe we just let that lie.
9:00 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:00 Robert Evans? I, I didn't know. I didn't, I don't know, Dan. This is, this is the, these are the kinds of life and death choices people in our field have to make.
9:10 Robert Evans? I'm ready for all your Pusser jokes and, and Buford jokes. He was played in 1973 by Joe Don Baker, which is a, actually sounds more like a real sheriff's name than Buford Pusser. Yeah. So before we get into this guy's story, I want to give you a little bit of like, how he's known in pop culture before the myth gets busted, which really has just happened. Like in the last year or so, there's been a lot of like crimes that have been re-investigated that Buford was involved in, that has kind of tarnished his legacy. But prior to that point, here's how the LA Times described Walking Tall, which went on to make more than $40 million off of a half a million dollar budget.
9:53 Robert Evans? "During his six years in office, Pusser, known for carrying a big hickory stick he used as a weapon, fought a gang of bootleggers and con men who were operating along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. He was shot and stabbed on several occasions, killed a thieving, female motel owner who ambushed him, and in 1967 was waylaid in his car by the criminals who shot him and murdered his wife Pauline."
10:14 Robert Evans? Almost none of that's true, with the exception of the fact that he did get shot and stabbed on several occasions. Everything else kind of open for reevaluation, given the more recent facts that we've got.
10:27 Speaker 01 So I'm, I'm assuming that means like murdered, thieving woman, the parts of that that are, are false, it's gonna bum me out, right?
10:36 Robert Evans? Right. Yes. The murder part is true. The other parts, maybe a little less clear. His wife getting killed in an assassination may not have been exactly how it went down.
10:48 Robert Evans? It is worth noting, at the time, one New York Times reviewer called Walking Tall a fascist movie.
10:56 Robert Evans? And it, you can see that, right? Like, it is fundamentally about how some people should just be allowed to do whatever to enforce the law, even if they have to break the law to do it. And that's not, not a great message. Joe Don Baker, who played Buford, describes the film's appeal as, quote, "A response to people being sick of crime and politicians like Richard Nixon. They just wanted to take a stick and beat up on the government." And I, I think we can all identify with that urge. I just don't- Yeah. But is it the government that Pusser is going after in the movie? Is it the government he fought? Is that thieving female motel owner, Richard Nixon?
11:34 Speaker 01 I'm just so goddamn mad about Nixon. I'm gonna go to his bar and beat up some people that I've decided are criminals.
11:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, I do, that's a very American thing. Like, "I'm angry at the government. I need to see a huge man beat the shit out of poor people." Yeah.
11:52 Robert Evans? So, as I stated, over the last few years, a growing body of experts has started to question the official story of Buford's life, and particularly the story of the night his wife was murdered and he was grievously injured. And so, we're going to talk, as much as we can, about the real Buford Pusser this week. He was born Buford Hayes Pusser, and Hayes is spelled just wrong. H-A-Y-S-E. That's not how Hayes is supposed to be spelled.
12:17 Speaker 02 No, incorrect.
12:18 Robert Evans? I'm not happy about that. Really took me a long time to get over. On December 12th, 1937, DeCarle and Helen Pusser, at a farm in McNary County, Tennessee. His dad's side of the family had come over from England in the 1630s, and his grandpa had settled in Tennessee in 1879 after leaving Georgia, where he had served in the Confederate military, probably. We don't know exactly, but we know that his brother died in a Union prisoner-of-war camp, so, pretty likely. Now, these guys would not have been, we're not talking like the slave-owning class, these people don't have money, but, you know, we're talking like the, the class of poor whites who made up the bulk of the Confederate military, you know? Like, that's, that's Buford's relatives.
13:03 Speaker 01 Sure. Fair enough to say that they were still like broadly supporters of the cause?
13:08 Robert Evans? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, although although Buford is that's really not a thing he has an issue with. He's actually going to be one of the first sheriffs to appoint a black deputy. I think the first in Tennessee. Um, and he has a reputation for being like pretty good on race stuff. And in fact, none of his crimes involve him being racist. So he might actually get a pass on that. Um, just a murderer. Hey, there we go.
13:33 Speaker 01 Small victories, man.
13:35 Robert Evans? Yeah, you love to see it. Um, so Carl and Helen, his parents had three children and Buford Hayes Pusser was the youngest. Uh, he was delivered by his nanny because the doctor was late getting to their farmhouse. He was delivered right as the doctor was walking in the door.
13:50 Speaker 02 Wait, I have a question.
13:50 Robert Evans? Um.
13:51 Speaker 02 What are, what are the?
13:52 Robert Evans? Is it, did the doctor still bill? Cause I'm guessing, yes.
13:55 Speaker 02 Well, the doctor definitely still billed, but no, what, what are his siblings' names?
14:00 Speaker 01 Fantastic question.
14:01 Robert Evans? So his brothers, his brother was John Howard and his sister was Gaylia?
14:05 Speaker 02 Okay.
14:06 Robert Evans? G A Y L A I, again, not a real name. Um, no. So just one normal name.
14:11 Speaker 02 How'd they come up with John?
14:13 Robert Evans? John Howard, that one of the kids they figured had to have like a real person name. And the rest, the rest you can just go for broke. I, I, I don't understand how they're spelling things. The only answer I have is that nobody knew how to spell words properly. Because you just don't, Hayes doesn't need an E, anyway.
14:30 Speaker 01 Gayla, Gayla Pusser?
14:32 Robert Evans? Gay, G A Y L I A Pusser, Gayla Pusser, Gaylia Pusser?
14:37 Speaker 01 Gaylia Pusser.
14:38 Robert Evans? Gayla Pusser.
14:39 Speaker 01 I'm so sorry, elementary school was tough.
14:42 Robert Evans? Yeah, I know, right? At least, at least she didn't come up in like the nineties. That would have really been rough.
14:48 Speaker 02 That's actually like an amazing stage name.
14:51 Robert Evans? Gaylia Pusser?
14:52 Speaker 02 Yes.
14:53 Robert Evans? It would be a stage name for a very specific kind of performer today. But not maybe the easiest name to grow up in Tennessee in the forties with.
15:01 Speaker 02 Also true.
15:02 Robert Evans? So Buford was huge. He's going to be six foot six as an adult and he's noted as being a very big baby. He's got a full head of hair by the time of his first birthday. So this is a big kid. He's immediately eating everything he can get his hands on. He just, he just turns out massive. He's just a, just a monster from the jump. Um, now, most of our details on Buford's early life come from a book written after his death by his daughter, Dwana Pusser, D W A N A. This family cannot spell people's names normally, or give them normal names. I don't know what's going on. Um, and this book is fantastic. It's so funny. Like Dwana, it's not intentionally funny because Dwana is clearly very proud of her dad and buys
15:45 Robert Evans? into the whole hero myth of him. She barely got to know him because as a spoiler, he dies pretty early. So the book is all her talking about the different family lore that she got, both from what she remembers from her dad telling her and from what other relatives told her about like her family. And she's clearly really proud of it and doesn't realize how horrifying everything that she's saying is. And so it's, it's this like unintentionally terrifying narrative. And there's a lot of humor and like her describing these awful things that are happening to him and that he's doing as like, ah, boys being boys. That's just how kids were back in the day.
16:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. Was this the only book that she wrote or was she an author or biographer by trade or anything?
16:29 Robert Evans? I don't believe Dwana Pusser wrote any other books.
16:32 Speaker 01 Okay. Then it's, it's very sweet to do that for your father, Dwana Pusser. I appreciate that. I, I understand that impulse very much, but I also, it puts me in the right headspace to understand what, how accurate this is going to be.
16:47 Robert Evans? Right. Right. And I, I would not view this as like a, a very good work of history. I think it's more, but it is fascinating in terms of the shit that she is willing to admit that he did, that she doesn't see as bad. But like, I think we can look into be like, oh, this is obviously like a fucking psychopath. Like this kid is, is deeply, deeply damaged and dangerous. That's going to be, that's going to be a, where the sweetness And in this first episode comes out. So Dwana describes her father, she gives kind of scarce details of his first six years of life, other than to say he was a mama's boy who fought against going to school at first. She describes him kind of conflictingly as both a natural leader and someone who was
17:30 Robert Evans? bullied from an early age, which quote, "is one of the ways he learned to sympathize with the underdog."
17:37 Robert Evans? Now, again, this kid is like famously large and famously violent. I don't know how much I believe he was like ever the underdog at his school. He's also like a basketball star at his local, at his schools. I, I don't know how much bullying I think he actually endured, but maybe. Uh, Dwana was convinced of it.
17:54 Speaker 01 As someone who was famously real life bullied in middle and high school, I don't think it was much to do with how giant I was. That didn't make me a target, I don't think. In fact,
18:04 Robert Evans? No.
18:05 Speaker 01 There was an inverse relationship.
18:08 Robert Evans? Yeah, the, the, the six, the kid who is a foot and a half taller than everyone and the best at sports is usually not the underdog, right?
18:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:15 Robert Evans? Usually not the bullied kid.
18:17 Speaker 01 That guy's so huge, I bet he could throw me over the fence. Well, I suppose we'll find out.
18:21 Robert Evans? Yeah, let's make fun of him.
18:24 Robert Evans? Hey, basketball guy, you like being good at sports?
18:30 Robert Evans? So, family lore about somebody whose legacy became the subject of a successful series of movies and several books is notoriously inaccurate. But the family lore of, that, that Dwana gives is that as a kid, Buford mostly socialized with women, right? Uh, he writes, or she writes, "Girls were drawn to my father. He liked them too." "As a child growing up in the 40s, he encountered the kind of traumas you'd expect. At age eight, he was walking with his siblings and their dog after a rainstorm, and they found the corpse of a neighbor girl his age who lived nearby and had drowned in a ditch." Like, this is just like a casual, like, "Yeah, he's on a walk one day after a rainstorm, and they find the dead body of one of their neighbors."
19:10 Speaker 02 Very stand by me.
19:12 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's a real stand by me kind of moment. And Dwana does describe this as upsetting to her father, but most of her stories of daddy are related as lighthearted humor, even when the text of what hap, what's happening is like fucked up, to say the least. And I'll give an example here. By the time daddy got to be a big boy, he was seeing the fun of playing practical jokes. I remember hearing about one he played on his granddaddy, Bliss Harris, who had come to stay with the family. Again, not a normal name among these people. They had an outhouse and my great grandfather Harris went outside to use it. Daddy knew he was in there. He fired a shotgun and rained a storm of pellets against the side of the outhouse. When his grandpa came running out with his pants hanging down below his knees, daddy thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen.
19:57 Speaker 01 Holy shit.
19:59 Robert Evans? That's not a prank. That's just shooting at your grandpa with a shotgun.
20:03 Speaker 01 Right.
20:03 Robert Evans? Look, that's not a prank. That's shooting at someone.
20:07 Speaker 01 Yikes. And it's such a, it's such a rich area that like, oh, he went to the outhouse and pranks are in the air. I think, I bet I know where this is going. I bet he's gonna like shake it or do something like maybe tip over the outhouse, something with poop involved, but it's like, no, it's just standard pedestrian gun violence.
20:25 Robert Evans? No, he just fires a 12 gauge at his grandfather.
20:28 Speaker 01 The toilet is a non-factor, really.
20:31 Robert Evans? Yeah.
20:31 Speaker 01 That prank works in any setting.
20:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, he could have shot him anywhere. And he will, he repeatedly throughout his life, will you, will you shooting at people with guns as the punchline of a joke? Like this, that's one of Buford Buster's favorite gags is aha, I shot you and you got scared.
20:49 Speaker 01 Gosh, comedy was so easy back then.
20:52 Robert Evans? It, it really was. I mean, you could just get up in front of an audience, fire off a shotgun and then, you know, walk off the thunderous applause. And probably some screaming. Yeah.
21:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, you get a Comedy Central Presents special off that.
21:05 Robert Evans? Yeah.
21:08 Robert Evans? I will say that if that's what like Joe Rogan and company were angry about as opposed to not being able to say slurs. Man, you can't even fire a 12 gauge shotgun at your grandfather anymore and get laughs. People just get angry. It's, it's this fucking new woke bullshit. Not allowed to shoot at people as a joke anymore. Tragic. Um, so Duana tells another story about Buford's childhood church. It had no outhouse, no bathroom facilities of any kind. So I'm, number one, it just sounds like a nightmare, like going to church, doing one of these long services. Churchgoers just had to go in the woods nearby if the need took them. And there was a side for men and another side for women. And Duana goes on to relate this story. Daddy and his friend
21:52 Robert Evans? came across two little boys who were fighting and one of the youths had just pulled a pocket knife from his pocket. Daddy calmly approached the kid and took it away from him, but not before the boy cut daddy on the wrist. Daddy's friend ran and told Papa what had happened. Papa told the boy, why, son, he'll be all right. Sure enough, when he came back, daddy had simply tied a handkerchief around his wrist and acted as though nothing had happened. So just like a casual knife fight at church, you know, that's the, that's this, the, the attitude towards violence this guy grows up with.
22:21 Speaker 01 A church knife fight that he was trying to, uh,
22:25 Robert Evans? Break up?
22:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
22:26 Robert Evans? Yes. And wound up getting stabbed. And yeah, when his friend freaks out, his, his dad is like, yeah, don't worry about it. You know, like it's just a little, he just got stabbed a little bit. It's barely anything, you know?
22:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. There, there's so much information that the father's casual response to it barely even registered the first time around was like, oh yeah, that's kind of strange. I, I, I hope the first time I got stabbed as a child, my dad was like, that's alarming. Let's look into this.
22:52 Robert Evans? Yeah.
22:54 Speaker 01 This will blow over.
22:56 Robert Evans? Yeah. I'm not, I'm not going to say there's, there's more than one right way to handle your child getting stabbed in a knife fight outside of church, but this is probably not the ideal way to do it.
23:05 Speaker 01 Right.
23:06 Robert Evans? Um, so as this anecdote, Mike Key went on CPS was not even a gleam in Congress's collective eye at this point. And so despite all of this stuff happening, all of the violence and shootings and whatnot that Buford is involved in before he's like a teenager, there's like, there's never any chance that anyone's going to take him or his siblings out of the house or like, look into what's going on in their home environment in any way.
23:30 Speaker 01 Right.
23:30 Robert Evans? That's just not a thing. Like this is, this is, it's kind of important to note, I don't think this is a wildly weird upbringing for the time period, right? Like this, it's certainly not treated as one by anyone who lives around Buford. The family moves to Adamsville, Tennessee in 1951, when he is in eighth grade. Or I should say, his mom moved there and she took the kids while Papa was away working on an oil pipeline. And the story that Duana gives is that he refused to move and so his wife made the decision for him. And he found out when he came back from the pipeline and his family was gone. It kind of sounds to me like maybe she left him and didn't want to tell the kids the truth and they just got back together later. It's a little unclear.
24:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's certainly the most generous way of framing that story. It was like, oh yeah, we wanted it to be a fun surprise.
24:23 Robert Evans? Yeah, we surprised Papa by fleeing from him and leaving the state. Literally. You know who would never abandon their children to work on an oil pipeline? Me.
24:36 Speaker 01 Me? What are you, yeah, my parents?
24:38 Robert Evans? I would.
24:39 Speaker 01 It's such a long list.
24:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, most people probably wouldn't. And among the most people is our sponsors.
24:46 Speaker 01 Ah.
24:47 Robert Evans? Yeah, that's what I was trying to do there, Dan.
24:49 Speaker 01 I know the game. I'm gonna fuck with you.
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26:34 Robert Evans? We're back, and Dan's fucking with me, you know? Why, Dan? What did I ever do to you?
26:42 Speaker 01 Well, this episode's got me in the mood for pranks, I guess.
26:46 Robert Evans? It's in the mood for a casual prank, like shooting a shotgun at your grandfather? Or getting stabbed at church? Classic pranks. We're gonna hear some more good pranks in this episode. So, Adamsville, where the family moves in '51, is a comparatively large city. There's about 1,000 people there at the time. So, they're no longer just out in the sticks. And Buford's earliest memories of life in the big city to him involved his mom getting increasingly paranoid about crime. Dwana Pusser just writes, quote, "Being new to city life, she didn't know what city folks might do," right? So, they move to the city, and she's heard all of these, it's kind of familiar to today, where like, kind of rural, more conservative people hear a bunch of horror stories about
27:30 Robert Evans? how violent and dangerous the big city is. And so, when they get to Adamsville, she's just prepared for everyone to be a monster. And one night, soon after they move there, when she's alone with the kids, someone knocks on the door, and her immediate move is to threaten to shoot whoever's at the door? And then that person knocks again. And here's what Dwana writes, quote, "The noise started up once again, and sure enough, Mama fired her shotgun through the door and went back to bed. The rest of the night was silent. The next morning, she got up and found the family cat stoned dead on the front porch."
28:03 Speaker 01 God. Incredible. I mean, thank goodness it was just the cat. Good lord.
28:09 Robert Evans? God, it was just the cat. Yeah, that your husband didn't come back or something?
28:14 Speaker 01 Or just a neighbor being like, let's welcome you to the neighborhood.
28:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, I brought a pie.
28:19 Speaker 02 Also, sorry to the cat.
28:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:21 Robert Evans? And there's, there's so much information about the character of his mother, because we get very little explicit. But just from the fact that her response to noise is to shoot through the door and then not check.
28:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:34 Robert Evans? It's like, she doesn't open the door, she fires a shotgun through it and then goes to bed. Like, that, that's wild.
28:42 Speaker 01 That's, if I have to get up to pee, I'm not going back to bed. I'm just up and tossing and turning for a while. God bless her, her, the inner peace that she has.
28:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. She just, as soon as she shot, she was like, calmed out. That like, yeah, spiritually cleansed her. It got her into that yogic state. She was able to, to reach Nirvana after murdering the family cat. And you have to imagine, again, this is all like related as these funny anecdotes by Dwana. That has to have an impact on the kid. Your mom shooting the family cat to death in the middle of the night, ranting about crime. Now, the, the fact that his mom is so paranoid about crime in this period of time would not have been out of place for the time in the area. The end of World War II had brought an economic boom to the whole country. And obviously Tennessee and Mississippi and the border regions of those states, which is where the Pusser family lives, like, were included in that boom.
29:37 Robert Evans? But all of that money also brought in organized crime. Now, traditionally in the region, like the big hub of Sin and Vice had been Phoenix City, Alabama. But in the mid 50s, the Attorney General of the state was assassinated by mafia-related guys. And the governor declared martial law and sent in the National Guard to like, actually deal with like, the organized crime problem in Phoenix City. And this cleared out Phoenix City, but it sent all of these guys who had been set up there fleeing for other areas. And a lot of them wound up settling on kind of like the state line in McNary County, right around where Adamsville is, right? So that, that's kind of like the inciting incident to, to why there was a surge in crime in and around Adamsville in this time.
30:22 Robert Evans? Is all of these guys had been cleaned out of Phoenix City, Alabama, and so they'd had to relocate. Yeah.
30:29 Speaker 01 The consistency of criminals where they get kicked out of their town and they can start over and do whatever they want, and they just decide to still do crime is genuinely admirable. If I was forced to flee and go somewhere else, I would just like be a different guy.
30:44 Robert Evans? I don't know, Dan. Like, when the old place, when crack fell apart, we all wound up getting jobs writing and doing comedy of some sort. I imagine it's the same if you're like a pimp, where you get busted, you're like, "Well, this is what I have 10 years' experience doing."
30:57 Speaker 01 That's true.
30:59 Robert Evans? Yeah, there's a lot of similarities between pimping and internet comedy, Dan.
31:03 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
31:04 Robert Evans? Mostly hats. That's 90% of it.
31:07 Speaker 01 And famously, neither is easy.
31:09 Robert Evans? Neither. No, no, but they are both necessary, obviously. We could go on. So, in the 1990 book, The State Line Mob, author W.R. Morris, and that's if you're looking at like a broader history of organized crime in the southeast, The State Line Mob is a good book for that. W.R. Morris writes that this crackdown basically causes a criminal diaspora, and a significant number of gangsters settled in the state line joints when authorities closed the gambling casinos and whorehouses in Phoenix City. So, that's a part of why, and part of why they picked the state line is that in McNary County is still a dry county, like alcohol sales are illegal, which means when they're kind of looking, "Where are we gonna go from Phoenix?"
31:52 Robert Evans? They're like, "Well, we can still bootleg in McNary County," you know? So, that's an easy choice. Like, there's a whole extra business here that doesn't exist in most of the country, because the state's still trying to keep a lid on this. So, there's money for, you know, making moonshine and smuggling booze. Again, see the documentary, Smokey and the Bandit, if you want to learn more about smuggling alcohol through dry counties. But over the course of the late 1950s, a guy named Jack Hathcock and his wife Laura Luis Hathcock came to run the state line gang, or the state line mafia, which is kind of the loose term for all the different criminal groups at this area. It's kind of like right
32:33 Robert Evans? where Tennessee meets Mississippi, along US Route 45. That's where all these folks are based.
32:38 Speaker 01 You are presenting me with an inevitable showdown between Pusser and Hathcock?
32:43 Robert Evans? I am, I am. Yes, yes. No, the, the, the, the woman who am, is said to have ambushed him that he had to kill is Laura Louise Hathcock, right?
32:52 Speaker 01 Excellent.
32:52 Robert Evans? Um, no, so the Hathcocks and the Pusser, famous family feud. Um, I know, I know.
33:00 Speaker 01 As they were, the first time they were writing history, someone was like, we just, we simply can't. I know it's the past and all of our names are different. Just make it Hatfield and McCoy. Just do something else.
33:12 Robert Evans? That, that would be like the studio note if you were trying to do a movie about these people in the mod, like trying to reboot it. They'd be like, okay, we gotta change the names.
33:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:19 Robert Evans? For one thing, the, the audience can't watch The Rock, and that's why when they did the 2004 reboot, The Rock was not named after the actual sheriff. They're like, we can't have this guy calling himself Pusser on screen for an hour and 40 minutes. That's not gonna work for anybody.
33:34 Speaker 01 Right. We're aiming for a PG 13 here. We can't have Pusser said more than once.
33:40 Robert Evans? We, we've gotta, we've gotta lock that down. Um, and people will just be confused about Buford because that's not a name that we let kids have anymore.
33:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:49 Robert Evans? So Jack had been raised, Jack Hathcock, had been raised in McNary County, the same as Buford. And like many of his peers, he grew up drinking hard and fighting regularly. His father had been an alcoholic who was brought low at an early age by the Jake leg, which is a kind of paralysis caused by drinking poisonous moonshine. Since prohibition had hit right when Jack Hathcock was a teenager, he immediately, it's like I was saying earlier, the, his whole like CV is crime. Like from the time he's like 15, he's smuggling liquor, he's running moonshine. He's literally like selling moonshine to his classmates in his grade school when he's in like seventh or eighth grade.
34:27 Robert Evans? So a career criminal. Um, he left home before turning 18 for a very good reason, which is that his father shot his twin brother to death. And he, I guess, got the message. Like, I'm out of twins.
34:39 Speaker 01 Holy cow.
34:40 Robert Evans? I'm gonna take this as a warning.
34:41 Speaker 01 Oh, man, Pa's got a taste for killing people who look just like me. I gotta get out of here.
34:47 Robert Evans? Probably time to bounce. And I, I do love the idea of a guy for whom crime is like, it's like being a child actor, but like,
34:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:55 Robert Evans? Yeah, it, the mafia version of that, where like, yeah, from the time he's like 12 years old, you know, he's, he's, he's getting inculcated into the life.
35:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, just a nepo crime baby for sure. There's just no way around it.
35:08 Robert Evans? Obviously, you know, running liquor and, you know, murdering people and doing illegal gambling is a lot healthier for a teenager than being a child actor. Um, but, you know,
35:18 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
35:19 Robert Evans? So Jack and Luis, uh, meet in 1937. They get married soon after and they're, they're married for like 20 years. And for a while, it seems to be a really good marriage. Uh, the two operate a growing assortment of illicit businesses. They go from basically nothing to running four or five large businesses on the state line. And yeah, the organization that they control comes to be known as the state line mob. And while they're building their empire, while they're, they're starting, because they've got like a hotel and they've got a couple of different road houses and bars. They've got a couple of brothels. Um, and they're gambling at all of these facilities, obviously. And while they're building, you know, from nothing into having an empire and to being like very influential, powerful
36:01 Robert Evans? criminals, young Buford continues to make his way through school. Uh, he gets his first job at age 12, working at a general store. He is tall for his age. He towers over most of the other boys in town and his primary character trait, aside from violence, is that he drinks milk constantly and is convinced that it's why he turns out bigger and stronger than everyone else. Uh, which I guess maybe actually he might be right on that one.
36:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:26 Robert Evans? Um, if the milk ads from the nineties, I remember were accurate. Um, and he gets into the normal huge guy hobbies. He's into football. He's into basketball. He played, he's, he's good at football, but he doesn't like it as much as he likes basketball, which did surprise me because his other favorite hobby is constantly fighting every other boy that he can fight in his school. His daughter would later write that, had it not been for athletics, she didn't think her father would have graduated. And then she related this anecdote from one of his high school teachers. And this is the teacher talking. "I whipped Buford Pusser. I came into my classroom one day and found two holes about the size of your head in the top of my desk. Buford was standing on my brand new desk, wrestling with four or five other boys. As they tugged and pulled on him, Buford's
37:09 Robert Evans? weight sent him sinking knee deep through my desk. After the dust settled, I brought him around to the front of my desk and tore him up with my paddle." And yeah, just a lot there, too. Both number one, your brand new desk. How does a boy sink through the town? Like, what the fuck shit material is your desk made out of?
37:27 Speaker 01 Right, there's, I'm having, I'm not sure which, which outhouse to point my gun at. I don't know which twin to shoot here because like, this teacher for starters is way too preoccupied with their desk. That's like, too much, too much affection for their desk.
37:43 Robert Evans? Yeah, not the, like, the literal brawl that's happening in their classroom. But it does say a lot about the time that like, fighting, huh?
37:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:51 Robert Evans? You know what the punishment for that is? Getting beat.
37:54 Speaker 01 Maybe some violence will beat that out of you.
37:57 Robert Evans? Yeah, well, violence the violence out of you. Buford? So he and his friends, as we've established, love to play pranks. And these are almost exclusively the kinds of pranks that would get you a criminal record today. Buford's childhood buddy Paul Wallace recalled one Halloween where Buford and he and several other friends borrowed a neighbor's wagon from his barn, towed it to a nearby town, like the town over, basically, took it apart, carried the pieces up to the roof of the general store, and then reassembled it on the roof of the general store in that other town?
38:29 Speaker 01 Okay.
38:31 Robert Evans? Which is at least creative and nonviolent.
38:33 Speaker 01 That does resemble a prank to me. That's, that's the kind of prank I can get behind. Because it just creates a little bit of whimsy in the world. And there's like, there's like a victim, but not like a, like a victim victim, you understand? Not like a hospitalized victim.
38:50 Robert Evans? Right. No one's like, killed or maimed or injured. There's no permanent property destruction. You've created a conundrum for somebody, but it's an amusing one. This will be the only real prank that he ever plays.
39:04 Robert Evans? Buford spent the summer of his junior year working on a pipeline in Oklahoma with his father. And this is actually something he begged his mom for permission to go work on an oil pipeline. And she only agreed on the grounds that once he came back for class in the fall, he'd have to work extra hard to get his grades up to passing. So, working on an oil pipeline is like his reward for promising to study harder?
39:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:26 Robert Evans? Very different time and a very different kind of person.
39:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was Sonic the Hedgehog for me. That was my pipeline.
39:32 Robert Evans? Yeah.
39:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, I guess it was Warhammer 40,000 miniatures for me.
39:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:38 Robert Evans? So yeah, we had similarly difficult upbringings to Buford, you know? I would say those are like equal experiences, playing Sonic the Hedgehog or gluing models together and working on an oil pipeline in the 40s or 50s. Yeah. So he comes back from the oil pipeline and he's as good, he follows up with his promise to his mom. He does put in more work. His grades go up well enough that he's able to pass. However, the final months of his time in public school also saw a continued escalation in the severity of the violent encounters that he had with his classmates. His friends later recalled that Buford and his crew had a feud with a group of boys from the nearby community of Savannah.
40:19 Robert Evans? And this other gang of boys was led by a kid nicknamed Big Red Hubbard. Both crews would drive through each other's territory, speeding and heckling each other to try to provoke a fight. Like they'd drive past and they'd all be like piled into one guy's vehicle. They'd throw some shit at you and like try to get you to follow them or something, right? And one day after they drove by, like Buford runs off after them. And then when he comes back a few minutes later, he's got like a wound on his leg and he tells his friends that he had been stabbed in the leg by a member of Big Red's crew. Now, this was a lie. Buford had cut himself taking down a volleyball net earlier and just, I guess, had saved up
41:00 Robert Evans? the injury, had like avoided talking about it until Big Red's crew went by and then he runs off. I think he probably reopens the cut and is like, "Look, they fucking stabbed me." And he does this. His daughter's explanation is that he decided to lie and say that they had stabbed him because the lie would be then, quote, "the foundation for some future mischief." And this is what one of his friends, Paul Wallace, this is how he describes the mischief that comes later. "A few days later, Buford told his mother that I wanted to borrow his daddy's shotgun to go squirrel hunting. Those squirrels just happened to live in Savannah and like to play pool and drive fast. Buford spotted the car of Savannah squirrels and let go with nine shots into the back of that car. It was like a Wild West show.
41:45 Robert Evans? We then drove off a little down the road and hid next to the river bottom near the levee. We were sure that any minute we'd hear police sirens, but nothing happened and nothing was ever said."
41:54 Speaker 01 Man, as much as we've established that half-cock was a born crook, this big giant Pusser is a born cop. That is some very sophisticated cop creation of a reason to do violence against people you don't like. That is, that is some really early instincts that will, will pay sweeping dividends for him down the line.
42:20 Robert Evans? Yeah, it is amazing that like his, his immediate instinct as a kid is like, I have to first set up a justification for this as some kind of self-defense. And then I'm going to do what is just a drive-by shooting, right?
42:31 Speaker 01 Right.
42:31 Robert Evans? And I, I feel the need to emphasize, he fires nine shots out of a shotgun. Shotguns, especially in that day, most of them, the biggest probably aren't going to fit more than like six, maybe seven shells in the tube. Like that's kind of the max and it was probably less, I don't know exactly what he had. What I'm, what I'm saying is that they, he reloaded to continue shooting into their car at some point. Like this was not like a spur of the moment thing. This was like planned with malice aforethought, right?
43:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:01 Robert Evans? Yeah. He is 17 or 18 and he's done his first drive-by, so that's good.
43:06 Speaker 01 Holy cow.
43:07 Robert Evans? And yeah, as you said, like a very cop-style drive-by.
43:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:10 Robert Evans? And these, again, this anecdote, like all these others, is described by his daughter as like boys being boys. And like a drive-by shooting is not boys being boys.
43:18 Speaker 01 Absolutely not.
43:20 Robert Evans? But it is going to graph precisely to his adult life and the primary allegations against him as a lawman. Like he is already the guy he's going to be his whole life at 17. And I guess you have to respect consistency. I don't know if respect is the right word, but he's certainly consistent.
43:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, but he's consistently like shit.
43:42 Robert Evans? Yes.
43:42 Speaker 02 I'm not going to respect that.
43:45 Speaker 01 I feel like it makes me a hypocrite to like the criminal hustle and for some reason, not his cop hustle, but I guess I'm okay being a hypocrite in this direction. Yeah.
43:54 Robert Evans? Yeah, you know, criminal hustle is like, because there's usually something beyond it behind just like violent nihilism, like a desire to make money or, you know, have access to substances that aren't normally legal, as opposed to this guy just wanted to shoot some other kids potentially to death for the crime of like yelling at him as they drove past.
44:15 Speaker 01 Right. It's the difference of people who are doing crimes because they recognize like this system is rigged.
44:20 Robert Evans? Yeah.
44:20 Speaker 01 Everyone's, everyone's robbing everyone, I'm gonna do it too. And, uh, Pusser being like, the system's rigged and it's great. I would like to be one of the riggers.
44:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, I'm gonna figure out how to rig the fuck out of this thing. I love shooting people. I shoot my grandfather with a shotgun. You think I won't shoot someone else? So Buford is drawn to crime, uh, from an early point in his life, not just the violent crime, but you know, the gambling and drinking and that sort of stuff. He, he and his little gang of buddies started traveling to the state line in high school and they would drive as a group to partake. They'd go to these brothels and these road houses, they'd drink and they'd gamble and they'd whore and, you know, they're paying into the state line mob, right? Like that's who's running all of these businesses. So they are consumers of, of, you know, these different illegal ventures, uh, while he's a teenager.
45:12 Robert Evans? Buford's daughter would later insist, "They mostly went just to stand around and gawk as schoolboys do." And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Well, yeah, I just went to the, the brothel casino to look. I just wanted to gawk a little bit, you know, like boys do.
45:29 Speaker 01 Do you wanna, I don't think you, you, you know much about brothels. There's not like a looking part.
45:34 Robert Evans? Yeah.
45:34 Speaker 01 There's, there's, there's mostly the going in part.
45:37 Robert Evans? Oh, you boys are just here to gawk? Come on in. Gawk away.
45:42 Robert Evans? So Buford graduated Adamsville High School in 1956 and he immediately enlists in the US Marine Corps. Now, I think 56, the draft was still on, so this is probably one of those like had to, like enlisting gave me a degree of choice as opposed to, you know, waiting to get drafted. The Tennessee, and he doesn't, he does not have a long military career. The Tennessee encyclopedia just summarizes that he was discharged due to chronic asthma, and he only serves about three months, half of which he spends in a military hospital. He does get an honorable discharge in November of that year, 1956. And his daughter notes that he wore his uniform all the way home, keeping it on until the last moment he legally could because he was so proud of being a Marine, even though he really wasn't.
46:25 Robert Evans? He's in the job for like three months. That's about as long as I worked at Sonic.
46:29 Speaker 02 You worked at Sonic? Oh my god.
46:34 Robert Evans? It was my first job. It was awful.
46:36 Speaker 02 The visuals in my head are fantastic, my friend.
46:38 Robert Evans? It's a nightmare.
46:39 Speaker 02 Oh my god.
46:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, everyone working at a Sonic is already dead inside. I can tell you that right now. Were you the, were you rollerblading out the cars?
46:48 Speaker 02 God, I hope so.
46:50 Robert Evans? No, they wouldn't let me rollerblade.
46:51 Speaker 02 Damn.
46:52 Robert Evans? They were scared of me. They were scared of my power, Dan. That was wise of them. Yeah, probably was. So this short chapter of his life, while he's briefly a Marine, is bookended by yet another very normal 1950s experience. Nearly dying in a horrific car accident because there were absolutely no safety measures in vehicles back then. In late November 1956, within really a couple of weeks of him getting out of the Marine Corps, Buford is riding back from Memphis with a friend when the car that they're both in crashes and he flies out through the front windshield. He survives, but he suffers three crushed vertebrae and he has to spend a month in the hospital and he has to wear a back brace for an additional two months upon release. And then, having narrowly survived a brush with death, he starts studying to be a mortician
47:37 Robert Evans? and he goes to work as a mortician's assistant in March of 1957. You know, that's the first positive move. Get this guy in a room with the corpses, right? He's not safe around alive people, certainly.
47:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's such a, this does, at the risk of saying something positive about this massive pussier fellow, that is one of the most interesting decisions coming from a person who I don't think is, sounds very capable of like thoughtfulness or introspection. You know, like, like, crime to Marines to cop is a path that makes sense to me, but surviving a terrible accident and then being drawn to the work of mortician is, I don't know, there's something kind of poetic about that to me. There's something that, that, that shows he's got some, some like real like inner
48:33 Speaker 01 thoughtfulness and pathos to himself that I, that I didn't initially give him credit for.
48:38 Robert Evans? Yeah, it verges on being like a healthy way of coping with a near-death experience, right? Which you wouldn't expect from this guy. That is, that is an interesting, like, that is one of those weird little, "Oh, I didn't, I didn't expect that from him, actually."
48:51 Speaker 01 Right, I assumed he was gonna walk out of the hospital and shoot a car.
48:55 Robert Evans? Right, right. Like, to start his, start a one-man war against automobiles. He does shoot at some cars in this story, Dan, but that's not, he doesn't, he doesn't do it in vengeance for the accident. He actually seems to be pretty good as a mortician's assistant at first. He takes a weird degree of pride in his work. Dwana relates that he would periodically call his mom over to the funeral home to look at the corpses of strangers that he felt like he'd done a really good job embalming. Like, "Mom, you gotta check out this dead lady or this dead guy. Like, I did a fucking, I know you don't even know him, but like, come over here. Like, look at this corpse. Look at how good I am."
49:32 Speaker 01 He looked better alive, but like, I did a, did a pretty decent job.
49:36 Robert Evans? Pretty, pretty good job, yeah.
49:38 Speaker 01 Also, like, as, as sweet as it is that he takes pride in his work, if I died, even if the mortician's assistant thought he did a really good job, don't like, "Show me" to people. I don't want that. I don't want your relatives to come in and be like, "Oh yeah, you really nailed it." Literally.
49:56 Robert Evans? Oh yeah, great work. No, uh, yeah, so morticians, you know, uh, make a note of that. And also, make a note of these products and services. Because if you're a working mortician, you get 10% off the next ad that comes on the podcast.
50:12 Speaker 01 Wow, that's huge.
50:13 Robert Evans? I can't actually promise that.
50:14 Speaker 01 Would be cool.
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51:56 Robert Evans? And we're back. Yeah, I hope all the morticians who listen to this show got a great deal on... What is... Who sponsors us these days, Sophie?
52:08 Robert Evans? Halliburton. Halliburton, yeah. I hope you guys have a good... Got a good deal on Halliburton, you know? Halliburton, we make corpses and we clean them up. Excellent. That's their motto. So, within days of having his back brace removed, Buford and several of his friends take a trip down to the state line area, presumably to celebrate the fact that he doesn't have to wear a back brace anymore. And in the book Mississippi Moonshine Politics, author Janice Tracy gives a vivid description of how things worked in state line mob territory. Right? This is the area that, you know, he and his friends would had probably for the last three or four years at this point, had been going up to on the weekends to party. During the first two decades of their marriage, Jack and Louise owned and operated four establishments: The State Line Club, the 45 Grill,
52:52 Robert Evans? built in 1951 after the State Line Club burned, the Shamrock Restaurant in Mississippi, and the Shamrock Motel, just across the line in McNary County, Tennessee. Jack built and operated the latter two establishments in 1959, and Louise remained at the 45 Grill. Jack's nephew, W. O. Hathcock Jr., and Larry's Hathcock, W. O.'s wife, operated the Plantation Club, another liquor and gambling establishment, located directly across US Highway 45 from the 45 Grill. Large roadside signs advertising "Country Ham", "Red Eye Gravy", and "Homemade Biscuits" for 45 cents lured travelers to the 45 Grill. But Louise's southern cooking, served on red and white checkered tablecloths, was only one of several offerings at the roadhouse. With their appetites for food satisfied, many of the male travelers just passing through headed to the game room or the dance hall,
53:37 Robert Evans? where liquor, gambling, and available women were the main attractions. Most of the men who opted for what they believed to be a good, quick game of three called "Card Monte", or a toss of dice, however, left the place broken alone. And more likely than not, if the gambler complained too loudly when he lost the last of his cash, or if he threatened to report the Hathcocks' crooked gambling operation to the authorities, he was beaten badly and thrown out the door by Jack and his cohorts. Allegedly, Louise often ended arguments herself when she beat dissatisfied gamblers about the head and shoulders with a ball peen hammer that she carried in her apron pocket.
54:08 Speaker 01 You know.
54:08 Robert Evans? So cool people.
54:09 Speaker 01 I, I, I. I love the crooked half cocks. There's, there's no way around it. I like them a lot.
54:15 Robert Evans? I, I love that. Yeah. Her cooking is a draw and also she will beat you half to death with the ball peen hammer.
54:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, man.
54:20 Robert Evans? She keeps in her apron. If you complain that you lost money.
54:23 Speaker 02 It's the ball peen hammer for me, my friends.
54:26 Robert Evans? Mm hmm. This is what Vegas casinos have lost is just an angry lady with a hammer who will beat you half to death. If you complain, you know?
54:33 Speaker 02 Now they just try to make a fuck out of you.
54:36 Robert Evans? Yeah. Now, obviously a lot of times people die when you're beating them with the ball peen hammer. And it was, it was said at least that a number of folks bodies wound up thrown in the nearby river. As a result of, you know, Luis or one of her goons going too hard when trying to deal with somebody. Um, so these are not safe people to quarrel with, right? This is a mafia. Um, and anyone who had good judgment would try to avoid pissing them off. But no one ever credited Buford Pusser with having good judgment. So on this spring 1957 trip, right after getting out of his back brace, he brings $300 with him to the state line. And for whatever reason, he decides to try his luck at the plantation club.
55:17 Robert Evans? Now we only have the account that he passed down through his daughter, but per that account, he was totally winning and beating the house. Before one of the house employees switched the dice on him. Now, whether this happened or not, Buford accused the house of rigging the game, which got him jumped and pistol whipped by four men. He was robbed, dragged out into the rain and left for dead. Now, as I noted earlier, not an uncommon experience for gamblers partaking at half cock owned establishments. And most people who survived an encounter like this would thank their lucky stars and make a note not to come back. But Buford Pusser was not most people. Uh, he gets angry. Uh, he has to have 192 stitches for his injuries. And while they're being sewn, he starts planning his revenge.
56:02 Speaker 01 Man, um, this guy is just so much man. I love it. I, I, I love when someone from the past, there's just, uh, there's so few details written about like a normal person's history, but like it's enough that everyone is like, look at this huge fucking kid. Like, look at this giant man. It really tickles me that he's so big that it makes the news. I like it a lot. It's a great defining characteristic.
56:27 Robert Evans? Just huge. Yes. A lot of body space for stitches. Yeah, like, yeah, it's a whole canvas for you to beat on if you're a goon.
56:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, just this enormous acre of Pusser.
56:41 Speaker 01 Clomping down the street to your casino.
56:45 Robert Evans? So perhaps spurred by the loss of $300, Buford makes another career change at this point. He decided that mortician, he wasn't making enough money as a mortician's assistant. So he leaves the state for a month to work on a pipeline with his dad. And while he's over there, he hears from a friend who moved to Chicago and is like, hey, wages are a lot better in Chicago. Why don't you try living here? So after working on the pipeline, he moves to Chicago. Now, one of the first articles I read on Buford was published by the McNary Historical Society, which is like the county that he grew up in's historical society. And so far as I can tell, the historical society, the McNary Historical Society is like 99% just the Buford Pusser Historical Society, since nothing else of note has ever occurred in McNary.
57:29 Robert Evans? And here's how it summarizes this chapter of his life. During his time in Chicago, he wrestled professionally. He was called Buford the Bull and was reported to have wrestled a grizzly bear.
57:39 Speaker 01 Didn't happen.
57:40 Robert Evans? Didn't definitely, well, that didn't happen, but was a little closer to having happened than you'd expect, although as you'd expect from a county historical society, all of these details are like wrong in their specifics because he does fight a bear, but it's not while he's in Chicago. And this brings me to my favorite chapter of the Buford Pusser story. You will hear anytime you run across like a popular history of the man, like a news article or just like a, you know, an internet clickbait article talking about the walking tall guy, you'll hear the claim that he wrestled and beat a live grizzly bear. The claim is repeated by the Sheriff Buford Pusser Museum by a bunch of different places.
58:21 Robert Evans? And while Buford was a big guy, I just couldn't believe that he actually, it's very rare for a human being to fight a grizzly bear and win. You can find some cases of it. The only ones I've found where it wasn't like a man with a gun is like somebody hits the bear with like a huge log and manages to do it in just. Just the right place. Um, so wrestling a grizzly bear just seems physically impossible to me. And I couldn't find any more detailed claims about what he'd actually done until I ran his daughter's book. Walking on, which says that the match, she claims there was a match against a bear. But her description of it is a lot less impressive sounding. Number one, this doesn't happen when he's in Chicago. This is when he's in his like senior year of high school.
59:05 Robert Evans? Quote, "A summer carnival came through the area. The bear's owner had a gimmick where he challenged local boys to wrestle his black bear. Daddy pinned the bear. He would later say it was just a little bear that didn't have many teeth or claws."
59:18 Speaker 01 Okay.
59:19 Speaker 02 I'm still choosing the bear.
59:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:22 Robert Evans? Again, the details this gives you about this time in American history and place where it's like, yeah, this carnival owner who just traveled around challenging teenagers to fight his pet bear.
59:32 Speaker 01 Right. Like a, like a completely harmless bear that he's charging boys to pin for bragging rights makes so much more sense than.
59:42 Robert Evans? Exactly.
59:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:44 Robert Evans? Cause like it, it, number one, black bear, much smaller than a grizzly, but also it sounds from her description, like this is a sick bear. Maybe it had its teeth and claws like removed, like people did shit like that. So I wouldn't be surprised if this was like a purposefully crippled bear that, yeah, this man kept around so that teenage boys could pay to fight it and feel like badasses.
1:00:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:07 Robert Evans? Yeah. Uh, but that does give you an idea also of like, when we're looking at the myth versus the reality of Buford Pusser. Like they're all kind of this level of off where like, yes, there is like an actual real story there. He did fight a bear at one point, but it's not, it's not as impressive as it sounds initially.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 Right. He fought a bear, but so did anybody else who had $4.
1:00:31 Robert Evans? Right. The bear was sick and dying and had been like purposefully hobbled so that he could beat it. Yeah, much less impressive.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's similar to the stories that I I shot a clown in the mouth so hard that it's its brain exploded. I mean, it was at a carnival and it was a water gun and it was a balloon, but but like enough of the details are true.
1:00:51 Robert Evans? Right, yeah, that you could you could base your whole your whole legendary career off of, uh, yeah, that time you shot that clown. I do think we've lost something as a country that in that it's no longer acceptable or legal for a man to wander around with a pet bear and challenge teenagers to fight it. Like, we are missing something as a nation now that we've lost that. And it does make me sad, Dan.
1:01:13 Speaker 01 It's such a fun, such a fun time in American history to just come up with businesses and just be allowed to do them.
1:01:21 Robert Evans? Oh, yeah. So there just weren't any rules back then, huh? You could just you could just do anything.
1:01:25 Speaker 02 I'm just saying, if that still existed, we might have a different US Secretary of Human Health Health and Human Services.
1:01:32 Speaker 01 That's absolutely true.
1:01:33 Robert Evans? If that still existed, Cool Zone Media would be entirely about challenging teenagers to fight bears. But I wouldn't have no no beat up black bear. I'd bring a real grizzly, you know, like, we're we're leaving a body count behind when these kids.
1:01:47 Speaker 01 I feel your business would would be, uh, less popular. It would be it would make a real splash early on. And then people will be like, this, this is a.
1:01:56 Robert Evans? He's just feeding teenage boys to bears.
1:02:01 Robert Evans? So we will talk about Buford's career as a pro wrestler because soon after moving to Chicago, he does start wrestling. Uh, and he is he is like moderately successful at it. But first, we're going to talk about and close this episode, talking about the most fateful connection that Buford would make during his time in Chicago. He met Pauline Mullins, the woman who would become his wife. Now, at the time they meet, she's already been divorced once and has two kids from her first marriage, but this doesn't dissuade Buford, and the couple were married on December 5th, 1959.
1:02:31 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:02:32 Robert Evans? Just a little over a week later, Buford Pusser would return to the state line for the first time in two years. So he gets married, and a week later, he drives up to the state line where he had gotten beat up and nearly killed, you know, a year or so before, and he drives up on December 13th with two friends with the plan of ambushing W. O. Hathcock Jr., the owner of the plantation club, and beating the shit out of him. And they wind up catching him alone, and Buford bashes his head and nearly kills him with a fence post.
1:03:01 Speaker 01 What are you doing?
1:03:02 Robert Evans? And this is the origin of like, the myth.
1:03:03 Speaker 01 You're a married man now. You can't hold grudges post-love. I don't understand.
1:03:08 Robert Evans? No, no. A week later, like, he's supposed to be on his honeymoon, but he's like, no, I've got to bash a man's skull in with a fence post.
1:03:16 Speaker 01 God.
1:03:17 Robert Evans? And this is the origin of like, the stor- like, the myths that you'll see of him, like, even if you look at the poster of the 2004 The Walking Tall with The Rock, he's got like, a big fucking stick in his hand or something? Like, that's the, that's the, the one thing everyone knows about Buford Pusser, is he fought crime with like, fucking logs and baseball bats?
1:03:36 Speaker 01 Right.
1:03:37 Robert Evans? The real story is that he and his friends ambushed a man who was alone, and while they held him down, he bashed this guy's head in with a fence post. And it wasn't because he hated crime, it was because he had been committing crimes badly, and they'd beaten him up earlier.
1:03:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:52 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:03:53 Speaker 01 You lost at a casino.
1:03:54 Robert Evans? Illegal casino.
1:03:55 Speaker 01 Which is the oldest tale in the book. And like, sure, they, like, maybe they switched the dice.
1:04:02 Robert Evans? Maybe.
1:04:03 Speaker 01 Maybe they didn't, and it's just casinos win, because casinos win. It's, it's like...
1:04:07 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:04:08 Speaker 01 You lost, or you were fooled. Those are like, not reasons to hold a grudge for a very long time.
1:04:13 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's certainly not to beat someone's head in with a fence post. Yeah.
1:04:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:19 Robert Evans? The fact that he's, he has to pass on to his daughter, that like, actually, I was winning first, and then they switched the dice, like, I think he probably just... Were drunk and lost your money gambling, but I don't know, maybe, maybe you were too good at gambling and they had to switch the dice on you.
1:04:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:35 Robert Evans? I just don't particularly trust that version of events. I trusted about as much as I trusted the grizzly bear story. I'll say that.
1:04:40 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:04:41 Robert Evans? But this is where part one is going to end. Buford Pusser has just, like, he's turned this from normal business, oh, this guy got drunk and was kind of a dick in our gambling establishment, so we beat him up, to now we, the Hathcocks, have beef with this kid, Buford Pusser, right? Because he has, he has now tracked down and ambushed and badly beaten, like, one of our lieutenants. So
1:05:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05:03 Robert Evans? That has started, as has his married life, in the end of part one. And we'll talk about the rest of Buford Pusser's story in part two. Dan, you got anything to plug?
1:05:12 Speaker 01 I do. We've talked about the show last week tonight, but also, a quick question. It's the podcast that I host with Sorin Buie. He will be familiar to those of you who used to watch us on the YouTube show After Hours or read our work on crack.com, where we both lived for about a decade. I write for Last Week Tonight, Sorin writes for American Dad. Sometimes we talk about being TV writers. Sometimes we do the kind of pop culture analysis that we used to do at Cracked and on After Hours. Sometimes we tell inside Hollywood stories, but mostly we just are friends who talk on the phone and you get to listen in on it for an hour every week, and it's free. It's on YouTube and everywhere you get podcasts. It's called Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel. I wrote this down because I've been
1:05:55 Speaker 01 ordered by our business guy to plug the podcast because I frequently forget to do it.
1:06:02 Robert Evans? You've got so many great stories of [bleep]. And yeah, I didn't realize that, you know, he'd killed those people, but apparently so, Dan. Shit, yeah. Yeah, stuff like that on Quick Question.
1:06:15 Speaker 01 I know. And I, I'm such a fan of his work, and I, and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I was like, it was self-defense, right? And he looked me dead in the eyes. He was like, absolutely not.
1:06:24 Robert Evans? Absolutely not.
1:06:25 Speaker 01 I was like, buddy, I'm giving you a way out. And he's like, I'm not taking it.
1:06:28 Robert Evans? No, no. Shocking stuff. Now, obviously, we've both forgotten which episode, but if you just listen through Quick Question, you will hear which of your favorite celebrities is absolutely a murderer, you know? I promise that.
1:06:40 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:06:40 Robert Evans? You know what else I promise? Nothing. Go away. The episode's over.
1:06:47 Speaker 02 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.
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