Testing Your Memory – Does Anyone Recall J.B. Honnecutt And YABAL?
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DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
After 15 years it may be time for an introduction, or a reintroduction if your memory is long, of one of the many characters involved in the 2007 beer vote in the county. Fifteen years have passed since the big beer election and as contentious as it was, it is a distant memory now.
I started this walk down memory lane last week after reading a blurb in our history column about the beer election. I flipped through the pages of the Herald from that year and it started coming back to me. There was this fellow named J.B. Honnecutt, or at least we thought there was, who launched a one man, anti-beer crusade operating as YABAL (Yalobushians Against Beer and Liquor). As the story goes, Honnecutt’s neighbor, Bobby Reynolds, would drop off crude, hand-written ads urging the good folks in Yalobusha County to vote against beer.
This so-called neighbor explained that Honnecutt was an insurance adjuster who was always on the road, never in town, and lived in a camper at Cossar State Park. This eighbor also said Honnecutt was “death on beer.”
Reynolds first started bringing the ads to the Herald office in early 2007 as work was underway across the county to gather enough signatures to bring the matter to a vote.
Months passed with more and more signatures added to the petition and by summer the topic was hotter than a sweltering August day in Mississippi. In September the petition was presented to the Yalobusha County Board of Supervisors. A week later, over 2,300 signatures from registered voters in the county had been verified, and supervisors set the election date for Dec. 11, 2007.
Emotions ran high on both sides in the weeks leading up to the election, it was as divisive as anything I have ever covered. The late Dr. Joe Walker wrote in the Herald that he had never seen anything that had divided the community during his 37 years in Water Valley like the beer election.
And Honnecutt’s neighbor kept bringing by the ads. YABAL’s message urged Yalobushians to vote against beer, citing additional problems the brew would bring to the county. Another YABAL ad cited the lack of integrity for the “childish acts” of stealing yard signs against beer from yards and streets.
An ad placed in the Herald in 2007 turned out to be from an imposter.
But who was Honnecutt?
In the weeks before the election, people in the county started digging, checking the tax and voter records and discovered there was no such person.
During Reynolds last trip to the Herald to drop off an ad just before the election, one of us eased out the door and wrote down his vehicle tag information. Using that information we discovered that Reynolds was actually Robert Lutjemeyer. And from the Secretary of State’s office, we learned that Lutjemeyer was president of Lutjemeyer, Inc., which had ties at that time to the county-line beer store on Hwy. 315.
YABAL was a HOAX and we had been duped!
We confirmed our suspicion with a phone call to Lutjemeyer. Jack Gurner made the call, and it was his finest hour. Following introductions and an explanation, Jack explained that the phone call was recorded.
“This sounds kind of fishy to me,” Lutjemeyer responded.
“Your ad sounds kind of fishy,” Jack countered. He asked for Lutjemeyer to stop by the office so we could discuss the matter.
“Do you want me or you want him?” Lutjemeyer inquired about Honnecutt.
“If you have a Mr. Honnecutt, you might want to bring him with you,” Gurner said.
Lutjemeyer explained that Honnecutt was in California and could not be contacted. Minutes later in the conversation, he admitted that family members owned the beer store and feared that business would suffer if voters approved beer sales.
“Interesting,” Jack replied.
“Yes it is, (pause) and getting more interesting,” Lutjemeyer agreed.
The conversation ended cordially and even a little comically, and the Herald published a front page story to go along with election coverage explaining that a county-line beer store had been connected to the anti-beer ads.
The funny thing is we kept in contact with Mr. Lutumeyer in the years that followed before he passed. He was good natured about our investigative reporting and seemingly never held a grudge. He was right about the potential loss of business at the county-line beer store. After voters approved the sale of beer in the county, both the 315 store and another store on Hwy. 7 at the Yalobusha/Grenada County line went out of business. The stores sold a lot of beer to Yalobusha folks, and a lot to bootleggers in the county too. Ironically a new county-line beer store opened after the election. This time the store was in Yalobusha County, profiting from customers who lived in Calhoun County, which was still dry.
I would have to say that 2007 was one of the most interesting years during my quarter-century publishing a weekly paper! And we still have the audio of that recorded phone call filed in the Herald archives.
