I spent sixteen years living near downtown Phoenix and met some characters who never should be forgotten. Here is Shitty Smitty’s story.
Shitty Smitty was a hustler. He had a TV and radio repair business, but hadn’t fixed a TV since they replaced tubes with transistors in the 70s. He mostly sat outside the dilapidated shack he rented and sold prescription painkillers and the occasional junk car or other merchandise of usually legitimate origin. Somehow he found someone desperate enough to live in the shack and fix the TVs and radios that came in.. If Smitty attended church, he was there to take money out of the offering plate.
Most Blacks who came to Arizona before World War Two came because they weren’t wanted in Texas and most of the rest came because they were wanted in Texas. A few moved to Arizona from Mississippi because any place had to be better than Mississippi.
Some of Smitty’s ancestors moved to Phoenix from Mississippi. As a result, he was the butt of Mississippi jokes from his neighbors who were from Texas. He laughed at the Texans because he felt it was better to give than receive a hard time. That may have been the only time he felt that way.
Smitty learned to fix radios in the Army during World War Two. He never went overseas, spending most of his time in Mississippi. The most important thing he learned in the Army was to never go back to Mississippi again.
One of Smitty’s hustles that worked well until it didn’t was selling junk TVs to Mexico. At some point the Mexicans stopped buying his junk and he ended up with a shack full of TVs he could not get rid of. Smitty would sit in a chair outside the building especially when the landlord collected the rent each month. The building had no windows so no one could see what was inside. Imagine the surprise the landlord was going to get when Smitty died and didn’t pay the rent.
Footyfried 