That was just the revenue that made it onto the books. Time magazine called it “a magic lamp” in 1959 and noted that it brought in a quarter of the town’s $15,000 annual income.
The fast-changing “Ludowici light” was known all over the South and became the subject of more complaints to the American Automobile Association than any other traffic signal in the country. Rumor had it that the light was connected via remote switch to a desk in the second-story office of a bus station, where a local stooge sat waiting to push the button and catch yet another driver.
The one traffic light in the center of town also had a habit of unexpectedly flashing from green to red-skipping yellow altogether-while cops lurked nearby. And in Ludowici, the speed watch always seemed to be calibrated funny. A stopwatch would clock the tires’ first strike, then the second, and then report the car’s speed for a motorcycle cop waiting behind a billboard. This ’50s-era device was called a “speed watch” or, appropriately enough, a “speed trap,” and it worked a bit like the bell-ringing hoses that used to lie like snakes outside gas stations. Yankee snowbirds were routinely nailed by, among other things, a twin set of rubber hoses laid out in the road near Harley Odom’s hog pen, not far from the place where the speed limit plunged suddenly to 25 miles per hour. In short: Ludowici was a classic speed trap. Rather, it took thousands of inhospitable acts toward thousands of out-of-town visitors to put Ludowici on the map-to give it a national reputation as one of the most venomous of a particular breed of Southern hamlet. But it was not his accomplishments that made the town famous. T he village of Ludowici, in the deep piney lowlands of southeast Georgia, got its name from a German fellow who came there in 1904 to manufacture clay roof tiles.