David Cohn wrote in 1935, “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepherd’s, the London Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby ... ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta....” Ducks began swimming in the Peabody Hotel fountain around the same time Cohn made this observation. After returning from a hunting trip empty-handed and whiskey drunk, the hotel’s general manager and a friend put live duck decoys, still legal at the time, in the fountain as a prank. The daily “Marching of the Ducks” is now a grand occasion, complete with a Duckmaster and the playing of John Philip Sousa’s King Cotton March.