CLINTON, Miss. — Wyatt Waters never owned a scrap of WorldCom Inc. stock or set foot in its hulking headquarters with the big black gate and big black windows a mile down the road.
He was unimpressed at first when the telecommunications giant relocated to his little town, saying the only thing Clinton got out of it was a firetruck with a ladder. But like so many others in Mississippi, Waters, a watercolor artist, became a believer.
WorldCom turned into the state's Cinderella story, a home-grown venture born on the back of a napkin that grew to knock out corporate heavyweights and become Mississippi's first--and only--Fortune 500 company.
"We were rooting for WorldCom because it made us all look good," Waters said Thursday as he reached for a homemade pickle in his downtown gallery. "Now, I guess, we feel let down."
As details emerge of a massive accounting scandal at the nation's No. 2 long-distance provider and WorldCom's stock price searches for zero, Mississippians brace for hundreds of job cuts and something even harder to swallow: lost pride.
Its founder, Bernard J. Ebbers, had been lionized as a Ted Turner-like hero, an irreverent executive known for daring mergers, cowboy boots and shooting the breeze at local truck stops.
Folks in Clinton, a suburb of Jackson, used to look forward to seeing the tall, bearded man--once worth a billion dollars--chatting under the oaks at the local college, stooping beneath the striped awnings of the postcard downtown and teaching Bible class on Sundays.
Now there's a certain bitterness. Especially among shareholders.
"A lot of us held on to the stock because we believed in Bernie," said Margie Smith, a longtime investor and Jackson-area resident.
And that's just it. Mississippi is not crammed with rich people or stockbroker types. For many investors, WorldCom felt safe because they had mingled with the executives running it. Ebbers, who lives in nearby Brookhaven, has declined interviews. He resigned as chief executive in April after it was disclosed that he owed WorldCom more than $400 million for loans he took to cover bad stock bets.
Clinton and WorldCom might seem an incongruous pair. WorldCom was one of the top-performing stocks of the 1990s, going from 81 cents to $64. Mississippi remains one of the poorest states: 49th in household income, 49th in money spent on education and 50th in homes with phones.
