I was saddened to hear of the death of Smithie Buie Sr., one of Pike County’s more interesting characters for a number of years when I was reporting for the Enterprise-Journal.
I guess you could say we developed a friendship through mutual acquaintances and the untold number of times I’ve enjoyed eating his fried catfish.
“Smitty,” as many of us called him, and I never ran in the same circles but our paths often intersected.
I don’t recall how many times I contracted with him to cater catfish dinners for Enterprise-Journal events and a few times for gatherings of family and friends at my house.
At all of those parties I enjoyed joking with Smitty and hearing some of his tales, some of which may or may not have been true. Unfortunately, I can’t relate all of them in a family newspaper.
Something that always struck me as amazing about Smitty’s culinary talent was his ability to have the right amount of fish on hand to feed whatever crowd he was serving.
Give him an estimate of how many you wanted to feed and he would always have enough with just a little left over. He never came up short; he never wasted much.
My daughter Kathy worked for Wayne Dowdy in Washington, D.C. when Dowdy was in Congress, and Smitty went to Washington a couple of times to cook Mississippi catfish at a Capitol event.
Smitty hit it off with then speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, and they became friends.
A Shriner and a politician who served as the elected Magnolia police chief and was active in a number of political campaigns of others, Smitty had enough memorabilia in that old Magnolia Hotel building to start a museum.
Usually Smitty was on the winning side of political campaigns, but occasionally he wasn’t.
One story goes that Joe Pigott, who later became district attorney and then circuit judge, was running for a county office. Smitty, who was backing Pigott’s opponent, put a loudspeaker or a sign on a car and drove it around Magnolia touting his candidate.
After this went on a while, Pigott walked into Smitty’s cafe and gave him some money to buy gasoline and keep on campaigning against him, alleging it was helping Pigott more than hurting him.
We’re missing that kind of personal touch and humor in today’s politics.
As I have noted, Smitty could spin a yarn, and he once did that for a reporter from California who was visiting Pike County, doing a series of articles on Mississippi.
I’m not sure whether the reporter knew Smitty was joshing him, but he wrote a full-page profile of Buie. I think it was in the Los Angeles Times.
Included was an account Smitty told of going to a chiropractor in McComb who had him stretch out between two chairs, face down, while the chiropractor climbed up a step ladder and then jumped on Smitty’s back.
Smithie Buie, who has been ailing for a while, will be missed. If there’s catfish in heaven, he’s probably firing up the cookers.
