Back in 1908, if you sat down in the pew of any prominent Dothan church and heard a preacher's sermon which was "without reason, abusive and bigoted", it'd probably have been best, then as now, to simply ignore the tirade from the pulpit. One Sunday in April of 1908, the preacher @ Foster Street Methodist tore into the vaudeville shows and their "giddy girls" who were performing @ the Elite Theater, 104 W. Main, located on the second story of a building located about where Denny Optical now stands. Jelks Thrasher, an actor on the stage, happened to be in a pew that day because he was back home in Dothan visiting family. Well, Jelks wrote a LETTER TO THE EDITOR denouncing the preacher's criticism of vaudeville and a 20 year-old Grover C. Hall, editor of the DOTHAN SIFTINGS, published it. That was the end of Grover C. Hall's journalistic career in Dothan and produced the bankruptcy of his paper. (Grover Hall would later take over as editor of THE MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER upon the retirement of my good friend Tom Sheehan's grandfather, Captain W. T. Sheehan. In 1927, Grover won the Pulitzer Prize for BEST EDITORIAL WRITING OF 1927 with his Advertiser editorial entitled "UNMASK!")     [clipping from the May 9, 1928 DOTHAN EAGLE]