Famous Gordon Anderson remembered

Following the death of Marshal Victor Gordon Anderson, Jr., age 78, who died September 29, 2023, at North Oaks Medical Center, a family member asked that I revisit the death of Hammond’s original Marshall Gordon Anderson in 1933.

Victor Gordon Anderson, Jr. Gordon succeeded his father, Vic Anderson, who retired in 1975 as the Seventh Ward Marshal after first being elected in 1942. Gordon was re-elected and served seven consecutive six-year terms until he retired in 2014.

However, the line of service to Hammond began with his grandfather.

At age 49, James Gordon Anderson served his community as a Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Deputy, a Hammond Town Marshal, and a Sunday School teacher. Following his death in 1933, a Hammond Vindicator newspaper column entitled “The Stroller” included a curious line:

“I wonder how the judge is sleeping after a slayer’s special treatment got another man killed.”

The front-page story in that edition recounted the events leading up to Night Marshal Gordon Anderson’s murder.

On a Sunday afternoon, March 15, 1933, highway patrolman Delmas D. Sharp, 26, stopped a 25-year-old black man named Isadore Marsh as he stepped off a bus in Hammond. Sharp, son of former Livingston Parish Sheriff Simpson Harvey Sharp, suspected Marsh of carrying a concealed weapon but found none. Still, he charged the man for “being a suspicious character.” He escorted him to Carter’s Garage to wait until local law enforcement could take him to jail. Hammond Mayor Charles Congreve Carter, 50, owned the garage and occasionally allowed law enforcement to use his empty storeroom as a holding cell.

After Sharp had gone, Marsh slipped from the storeroom, exited a back door, and ran. The mayor’s brother-in-law, Garage Manager Randolph Corbin, 40, gave chase, firing a shot in the air, and Marsh surrendered.

Monday morning, Hammond City Judge Joseph M. Blache, Jr., fined Marsh $50 for resisting arrest and set him free. Marsh told the judge he lived in Lutcher, and Judge Blache suggested he immediately return to his home parish.

On the night of March 16, Mayor Carter and garage employee Walter R. Skeahan, 31, working late in the garage, heard two people arguing farther down the tracks. When a shot sounded, the mayor tossed Skeahan the shop pistol, a .32-30 Smith and Wesson revolver, and both men ran toward the rapport.

As they got closer to the commotion, a second shot rang out. One of the arguing men fell, and Skeahan shot the second man in the arm as three officers with the State Highway Patrol stepped from the shadows and began firing.

Newspapers said Lester and Elizabeth Brackney “narrowly escaped being hit by a stray shot as they left their ballroom building on West Railroad Avenue.”

Locals referred to the Porgiee’s building as “Brackney’s Ballroom” due to the large open room on the building’s second floor where the couple held dances. A round broke the transom over the front door and lodged in the wood frame, showering Mrs. Brackney with glass as she ran from the ballroom.

“Scores of people were on the scene within five minutes, and hundreds more, alarmed by the fire siren, reached there shortly after,” the Daily Courier reported. “Many citizens saw the shooting or part of it, but no one could explain the events preceding the fight on the tracks.”

When the smoke cleared, two dead men laid over the tracks. Marshal Anderson had a bullet through his chest. Isadore Marsh, 4 feet away, his body riddled with bullets, died from a shot piercing his skull.

On Cate Street, the highway patrolmen – Officers Delmas D. Sharp, 26; Herbert A. Schultz, 23; and John R. White, 19, – found Marshal Anderson’s car on Morris Street, parked between the main railroad track and the switch track with a bullet through the windshield.

These officers theorized that Marshal Anderson had again discovered Marsh still in town and placed him under arrest. He may have been transported back to the jail in the 100th block of South Hansen Avenue. They suggested that Marsh grabbed the marshal’s gun inside the patrol car, causing the weapon to discharge and pierce the windshield as Marsh escaped.

They believed Marshal Anderson chased Marsh to the tracks, a scuffle incurred, and Marsh shot the marshal through the heart. Without additional evidence, this hypothesis became the official version of what happened.

With that version in mind, reconsider that line from The Hammond Vindicator column:

“I wonder how the judge is sleeping after a slayer’s special treatment got another man killed.”

This ominous statement could be referencing Judge Blanche freeing Marsh. However, there is no evidence that Isadore Marsh did anything to warrant a newspaperman describing him as “a slayer” before Marshal Anderson’s death. Therefore, the columnist knew something we do not, or the writer was unreliable.

To assess the latter, consider the following editorial from the Hammond Daily Star, February 27, 1967:

“This editorial is about the man who typed his stories at a desk next door.

“He died this morning. Born George B. Campbell, locals knew him best by the title of his column, ‘The Stroller,’ which appeared in his weekly newspaper, The Hammond Vindicator.

“A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, he was the son of John M. and Mary Moore Campbell. He attended public schools in Newburn in Dyer County in northwestern Tennessee and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

“George was a newspaperman throughout his entire life. He started as a cub reporter for The Nashville American in 1902. In 1905, George became the compositor for the former New Orleans States. He moved to Hammond in 1907 to become editor of the former Louisiana Sun, a position he held for a decade. He became editor of The Hammond Southern Vindicator in 1917, working for Colonel James B. Adams, who launched the publication as The Hammond Graphic in 1892 and renamed it in 1897.

“George bought the publication when Adams retired in 1918, and within ten years, The Hammond Vindicator became the largest weekly in Louisiana. Today, the Vindicator is also the oldest weekly newspaper in the state.

“George rotated two mottoes on the Vindicator’s front page: ‘Land of Sunshine, Moonshine and Flowers’ and, to show that Campbell was willing to step on toes, ‘Let the Fur Fly.’

“George wrote his ‘Stroller’ column and served as editor of that paper until its sale in July 1966. He came from a family of newspaper people and, 87 at death, lived to become one of the oldest newspaper editors in this state.

“His passing is another marker in the decline of ‘personal journalism’ as George exemplified this approach to newspapering.

“His editorials could be biting and spirited: sometimes attacking corruption in state government; sometimes citing the evils of a growing federal bureaucracy; sometimes favoring a candidate he liked, and sometimes just trying to get a bumpy road repaired.

“Until his last illness, he was a familiar personality, impeccably dressed, strolling about town or taking a Sunday drive about the countryside.

“Trusted by the citizens of Hammond for more than four decades, George B. Campbell was ‘the Stroller,’ Hammond’s answer to Walter Cronkite.”

The Hammond Daily Star purchased the Hammond Vindicator in 2003.

Marshal James Gordon Anderson left behind a wife, Mary McCrain Anderson, and three sons: J. C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, and Dermott Anderson. He had one daughter, Mary Gordon Anderson.

With city hall closed in mourning, the funeral held visitation at the family residence. “The room and casket were banked with flowers, and hundreds of friends attended the service,” the Hammond Vindicator reported on May 19, 1933.

“Hundreds of citizens of Hammond and the parish crowded the Anderson home at 604 South Orange Street. Reverend William Uptegrove Holley of the Federated Church and Reverend J. A. McCormack of the Methodist Church conducted the services,” the article said.

Victor Anderson remembered that people circled the block waiting to get in, including many black friends, all welcomed without incident.

After a choir sang two hymns and the solemn ceremony concluded, the pallbearers, friends of the slain marshal, took him from his home to Centreville, Mississippi. Dr. E.L. McGehee, Mitchell, Carl Hyde, Rand, Joe Robinson, and Wood Spiller escorted the fallen peace officer to his former hometown.

The burial occurred at the Oaklawn Cemetery, a half-mile east of Centreville. The Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church hosted services there, conducted by Reverend Holley and Dr. F. L. McCue, minister of the Centreville church.

In later years, Gordon Anderson’s son, Vic “Gordon” Anderson, became a town marshal, as did his grandson, who died last week.

Grandson J. Thomas “Tom” Anderson, a local attorney, served Hammond as mayor, the youngest to hold the position. When elected, Tom was also the youngest mayor in Louisiana history.

He still owns the revolver believed to have killed his grandfather in 1933. Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Jimmy McGovern, Walter Skeahan’s nephew, holds the pistol that fired the initial shot into Isadore Marsh. According to Deputy McGovern, both guns are identical.