The second surviving issue of Del Crenshaw's Kudzu Magazine is now in the archive. Vol. 1, No. 6 from December 1975 is the issue Del put together right after a distribution deal with a man named Roy Hennessey from Charlotte (no relation to the cognac, the man wants you to know) bumped Kudzu's print run for the first time over six thousand copies a month. It's also the issue Del wrote during the week his Mercury Montego's alternator finally gave out and he had to walk to the office on Court Square three days running.
It's a December issue, which means it's a Christmas issue, which means Del had to figure out what a Christmas men's magazine looks like. He figured it out the way Del figures everything out: by writing about the things he was already going to do anyway and pretending he had a plan all along.
The two features are 'Christmas at the Deer Camp' by Tommy Reeves and 'Del's Year-End Awards' by Del himself. The deer camp piece is the centerpiece. Tommy and his brother Earl run a deer hunting cabin on the Saluda River that has been in their family since 1948, and every year on the last weekend of rifle season -- which falls right around Christmas Eve in 1975 -- a group of upstate South Carolina hunters drive out there in pickups and spend the holiday in a one-room cabin with a kerosene heater, a stack of Vienna sausages, and a bottle of Wild Turkey. Their wives do not come. Their wives have, in most cases, told them this is the year they're going to be home for Christmas Eve dinner, and the men have, in most cases, lied about it. Del rode along with Tommy on a scouting trip in November and writes the piece in Tommy's voice, which means it's funnier than Del's own voice and probably also more honest.
Del's Year-End Awards is a sit-down piece, the kind of thing you write at a desk on a slow Tuesday with a chili dog from the Greasy Spoon next door. Best Truck Stop Coffee (Hank's 76 in Greenwood, made by Hank's wife Doris since 1958). Worst Mistake at the Edgefield Auction (a Massey Ferguson 135 tractor that ran for forty-seven minutes after Del got it home). Most Unforgettable Funeral (Mr. Gus Pruitt's, with a country band playing 'Up On Cripple Creek' as the casket went into the ground). And the Weirdest Sight: a rooster sitting on the hood of a parked Cadillac DeVille in front of the Piggly Wiggly in Honea Path on a Tuesday morning in September. Del does not know how the rooster got there. He does not know who owned the Cadillac. He has thought about it once a week since.
The cover girl is Reba Lynn Crawford from Honea Path -- 23 years old, redhead, secretary at the Belk-Lindsey department store in Anderson by day, weekend bartender at a new Abbeville bar called The Waiting Room, and (she'll tell you on the second visit) saving up for nursing school at the technical college in Greenwood. Del met her at The Waiting Room on a Tuesday night when he was trying to write the publisher's letter and not having any luck. She told him she had read issue 5 and that he could put her in the next one, on her terms. Her terms were reasonable.
Gail Mae Tatum is the second girl. She's 24, from Saluda, and the youngest of three sisters who grew up on a peach orchard her great-grandfather Lewis Tatum bought in 1924. The other two sisters left -- one for Atlanta, one for Augusta -- and Gail Mae stayed and is going to inherit the orchard. Del shot her among the trees on a Sunday afternoon in November when the leaves were turning and the light was the color of a ripe peach. She agreed to do the magazine because the orchard needs a new packing-line conveyor and the modeling fee covers it.
Joanie McCravey is the third girl. 21, from Greenwood, was at Clemson studying accounting until her parents ran out of tuition money in May of 1974. She came home, got a bookkeeping job at Greenwood Marine and Sports, married a salesman there named Tony in June, and divorced him in August of 1975 after he came home one night and admitted he'd been seeing the secretary at the Mercury outboard dealership across town. Del met her at a Clemson football game in October where she was loudly arguing with Tony about three hundred and forty dollars he owed her. She agreed to do the magazine on the condition that Tony see it. The magazine is sold at the Sinclair station next to Greenwood Marine, so the odds are good. The shoot was at an abandoned farmhouse on Highway 178 that has been completely covered in kudzu since 1971.
Issue 6 has actual reader letters for the first time. Five of them. A private at Fort Jackson who got a copy from a buddy and read the whole thing in one sitting. A woman in Anderson whose husband brought it home and who concluded, with some reluctance, that the magazine is 'less hostile' than she expected. A retired Greenwood Index-Journal columnist named Earl Boggs who wants to write a quail hunting article for Kudzu and notes that he does not have a telephone because his last wife took it. A reader named Wilbur Tatum (no relation to Gail Mae) registering a formal complaint that Del did not eat at his uncle Lonnie's BBQ place in McCormick before writing the BBQ tour. And the kicker: a letter from Luanne Culberson, who was the cover girl in issue 5. She thanks Del for being a gentleman during the shoot, mentions that one man at the Dixie Diner tried to give her a five-dollar bill on top of his tip and she gave it back and told him she was a waitress and not a billboard, and notes that two of the other waitresses at the diner have asked how to get into the magazine. Maybe they'll write him themselves.
This copy is in slightly better condition than issue 5. Less foxing on the interior pages, no center fold mark (this one was probably stored flat in a box in the storage unit instead of folded for a back pocket). Same yellowing on the newsprint. Same ink rub-off on a few of the dense classifieds pages. The cover has a small tear in the upper right corner that I left as-is in the scan. The PBR back cover ad has a coffee ring on it.
Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent. Yellowing preserved.