Look Around Mississippi: The Tales of "Old Sparky"
By Walt Grayson
walt@wlbt.net
This has to be the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in the state. This is the portable electric chair carried from county to county between 1940 and 1954. They call it Old Sparky.
Prior to 1940, the condemned were hanged in Mississippi. Wayne County still has the gallows up on the top floor of the courthouse in Waynesboro. It was never used. Two AWOL sailors were electrocuted here for killing and robbing a former sheriff and stealing his car while they were hitch-hiking. He was the nicest man in the county, generous to a fault and it got him killed by two servicemen in a time of war. Servicemen committing a crime was the part 15-year old at the time Dewey McKee couldn't fathom.
"I could not imagine two sailors committing such a crime when they could have been helping us out on other fronts," said McKee.
The two killers, neither from Mississippi, spent their last hours in the death cell in the Wayne County Courthouse. Then were lead down to the courtroom below, where the state executioner had set up the electric chair so there would be plenty of room for the witnesses.
Somehow, Life Magazine got access to photos of the two taken in the hours or minutes before their sentence was carried out. Getting their heads shaved so the electrodes would make good contact, meeting with a minister, walking into the courtroom to take a seat. Why they were smiling beats me.
Later in life, Marvin Farrior would be sheriff of Wayne County. He was just a boy that night, in with the crowd that had gathered around the courthouse with his dad. He had watched the generator set up outside the back of the courthouse and the leads snaked through a window behind the jury box and the chair set up just in front before he was run out of the courthouse with several other school kids who'd snuck in for a peek.
Marvin Farrior: 02 Just before the time came around for the execution my dad, we left. We went back and when we got half way home we could hear the big generators rev up.
Civility says to look away. But something deep inside, raw and ancient makes you not help but to want to watch.
