BY ROBERT MCFARLAND, JR.
Delta Business Journal

  The Mississippi Delta will receive coverage in the July 10 edition of Time magazine as that publication’s executives and reporters visited various Delta river cities on a river tour that began in Missouri.
  “The idea of our tour down the Mississippi River was to get a sense of what people were thinking about and what issues concerned them as we go into an election year,” says Barrett Seaman, special projects editor for Time. “We used the river as kind of a metaphor for the country as a whole, but realizing that we’re not getting the cross section that we did three years ago when we took a similar bus trip across the country from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco on Route 50. This trip down the river was inspired in part by that cross country bus tour and the special issue that we published as a result of that.”
  Like Huck Finn,  the representatives from Time began their trip in Hannibal, Missouri on April 23 and ended in New Orleans on May 5.  They made approximately 22 stops along the way. Time representatives also followed in cars, enabling reporters to move ahead, or stay behind, in order to capture stories.
  When asked to provide an overview of his findings, Seaman responds, “I think we were impressed by two things: the first, especially in the northern part of the river by the communities, were struggling to regain the stature that they once had in the heyday of the river as a commercial artery. This was especially true up in Illinois and Missouri, where we saw a lot of signs that the commercial vitality was less than it had been 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Many of those towns have been in slow decline, but were looking for ways to recapture that vitality, some of them by reverting to tourism - sort of a Williamsburg
effect - to recreate the history that they had. This struck us as an interesting and in some ways a melancholy solution to their problems. It requires an examination of the long term reasons for the decline of those areas with the interstates and the lessening of the importance of the river as a commercial vehicle.”
  Seaman says that one of the most memorable moments on the river was when the group visited the Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana.
  “We were taken on a tour by the warden that included a stop by the execution chamber and death row,” says Seaman. “That was a very moving experience for many of us.”
  On the afternoon of the group’s stop, a reception was held at the home of Bern and Franke Keating in Greenville, followed by dinner at Doe’s Eat Place, where some 35 attended.
  “We found the Delta very fascinating and had a wonderful time in Greenville,” says Seaman. “It was good to see that literature is alive and well in the South and we met some very interesting people up and down the area from Rosedale down to Vicksburg and just really had a great time.”