In 1973 Burt Reynolds flick ‘White Lightning,’ Auburn was a hippie hotbed

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Screenshot 2015-08-04 14.36.50 — In 1973, Burt Reynolds went on a moonshine-fueled mission to avenge the death of an Auburn man.

Auburn finds its way into a lot of things these days. Jennifer Lawrence movies. Broadway plays. Coachella coverage. Prime time crime dramas.

In 1973, that was not the case.

Which is why the scene in the Burt Reynolds hixploitation classic White Lightning dropped jaws and scored guffaws at The War Eagle Theatre late that June.

But it wasn’t just because hearing Auburn mentioned in a movie was rare. It was because hearing Auburn mentioned in that movie, in that context, was hilarious.

At the time, Auburn’s only real pop cultural claim to fame in film (unless I’m forgetting something… wait, does Back to Bataan count?) was that elevator exchange in the original Oceans 11. Auburn beating Alabama? That made sense. Someone on set was obviously gunning for realism, and they nailed it.

White Lightning missed by a country mile.

Sure, there were some hippies on the Plains in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A few rallies. An underground paper or two. A couple of protests. A too-commie-for-comfort edition of the Glomerata (pass the weenies!). A little nudity. Even a (dud) Molotov cocktail! (I am required by my 2005 self to here once again promise more on all this later.)

But famously conservative Auburn a wellspring for the Revolution? A staging ground for radicals—and teen moms!—so down for the cause they were organizing sit-ins two states away? That came as news on Toomer’s Corner… news that Plainsman managing editor (and future controversial cartoonist) Jimmy Johnson understandably felt the need to address.

Here’s the start of his tongue in cheek column (“Auburn’s new liberal image?”) that ran a couple of weeks after the movie opened at the War Eagle.

“Auburn has finally made the big time. It has taken its place along with Yale, Antioch College and Kent State as a hotbed of liberal radicalism. Or at least that’s the way its portrayed by United Artist movie makers in their picture ‘White Lightnin’.”

The plot concerns Gator McKlusky (played by Cosmopolitan’s own Burt Reynolds) attempt to even the score with a dishonest sheriff who murdered his brother Donald.

Donald McKlusky is the unseen hero of the whole squalid affair. He was the only McKlusky, it seems, who ever ”mounted to anythang… only one ‘at ever went to school.'”

But not just any school. Donnie McKlusky was an Auburn man, a long-haired Auburn man, who before fall classes started decided to organize “some protestin'” in fictional Bogan County, Arkansas, the crookedest, most corrupt, most backwards county in the whole state precisely because it was the the crookedest, most most corrupt, most backwards county in the whole state (“you know how Donnie was…”).

A wounded, hunted, disoriented Gator learns all of this while holed up from the sadistic sheriff (Burt’s Deliverance co-star, Ned Beatty) at Sister Linda Faye’s Home For Unwed Mothers. Crazily enough, one of those unwed mothers, a blonde bohemian bumpkin who looks and acts all of 14, was a “good friend” of Donnie’s.

Not just a friend—a classmate.

“We went to school together down in Awwbun.”