The second issue of BEALE is here. Vol. 1, No. 2 from October 1968 arrived at the Hooks Institute in the same donation box as the debut, and it is the issue that proves BEALE was not a one-off. Curt Holloway sold eleven hundred copies of the first issue in two weeks, went to the bank for a four-hundred-dollar loan, and put out a second issue that is, in almost every way, better than the first.
The election issue. Three weeks before Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace. Three weeks before the country decided something that C.H. Holloway, writing in his serious political voice, is certain it is going to decide incorrectly. His piece "The Vote" is the bluntest political writing in the entire Dusty Mags collection. Wallace is the segregationist. Nixon is the silence. Humphrey is the only one who has ever said "civil rights" like he meant it. Vote for Humphrey anyway, Curt says, even though he is going to lose, because the act of voting is not just about winning.
The second feature is Reverend Bobby's history of WDIA, the first all-Black-programmed radio station in America, which had been broadcasting from Memphis for twenty years by October 1968. Bobby traces it from Nat D. Williams's first broadcast in 1948 through B.B. King's Peptikon jingle, Rufus Thomas's afternoon show, Martha Jean "the Queen" Steinberg, and the annual Goodwill Revue at the Mid-South Coliseum. The piece makes the argument that WDIA was the first Black media in Memphis—before Stax, before BEALE, before anything—and that everything that came after owes something to Nat D. sitting in front of a microphone and saying "good afternoon, Memphis."
The cover girl is Doretha "Dee" Simmons, 32, a night nurse at John Gaston Hospital who works the 11 PM to 7 AM shift five nights a week and was photographed at sunset on the Mississippi River bluffs because she wanted real light after spending every night under fluorescents. Vernita Clarke, 29, is a hairdresser at Loretta's Cut & Curl on Beale Street—Loretta Holloway's own protege—who was photographed in Loretta's salon chair on a Monday when the shop was closed. Jackie Ann Wooten, 20, is a LeMoyne College sophomore from Ripley, Tennessee, who wrote Curt a four-page letter after reading the first issue and ended up in the magazine.
The letters page is the biggest change from issue one. The debut issue had no reader letters (because it was the first issue), so Curt filled the page himself. Issue two has six real letters, including one from Earlene Calloway (the issue one cover girl, who is annoyed that Slim Tatum told the pool table story), one from Pearl Brimmer (whose mother saw the magazine and said "baby, you look just like your aunt Rosetta"), and one from a man in Helena, Arkansas, who drove an hour and a half each way to buy the first issue and wants a subscription.
This copy is in similar condition to the debut issue. Heavy browning, ink transfer on the denser text pages, rusted staples. The cover image of Dee Simmons on the bluffs has survived well. The humor page cartoon (a pool hall joke about a man scratching every time a woman walks by) is slightly faded but legible. The Kool back cover shows the same water damage pattern as issue one, confirming both copies came from the same storage location.