The scene was a bar at 822 West Third Street, the players, a group of hard-drinking Bunker Hill regulars, but the story would turn tragic on July 22, 1956.
Harold J. McAnally of 230 South Flower (the Van Fleet Apartments) tried to buy a drink for a woman in the bar, when he was pushed from his barstool by a jealous rival. McAnally fell, cracking his head on the bar’s concrete floor and fracturing his skull. As you can see in the picture here, though McAnally is lying prone on the ground, no one seems to be all that concerned. Perhaps the regulars were callous, or didn’t care for him, but it’s also possible that McAnally was already dead, and nothing was left to be done.
He arrived DOA at the Georgia Receiving Hospital, and shortly thereafter, Frank Swope, 33, turned himself in to the police, confessing that he was the one who had shoved McAnally at the bar. Swope hadn’t meant to hurt him; he was just angry about McAnally’s flirtation.