BASEBALL AND THE "LITTLE EASY"The Mobile Satchel Paige returned to in 1923 was full of optimism. The Great War had been good to the city, expanding Alabama's only deep-water port and making Mobile a trading hub for products as varied as lumber, tractors, and blackstrap molasses. Mardi Gras was back after a wartime siesta, as was the city's reputation as the Little Easy. It was less commercial and more free-spirited than its Big Easy neighbor to the West, New Orleans. Mobile joyfully embraced prostitution and intoxication and disdained the old evangelist Sam Jones, who a generation earlier had declared, "I'd be a stockbroker in hell before I'd be a director of a Mardi Gras . . . [where] men are drunk and carousing on the streets and girls go about in men's clothing." Keep it up, Jones admonished Mobilians, and "your city will be damned eternally."
(NPR, suggested by Garet Cox)
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