One day in the late fall of 1972, James Pryor Smith walked into the roomy two-bedroom house that belonged to his aunt, Elizabeth Dickerson, an elderly woman who was confined to a nursing home, and he could hardly believe his eyes. Located in the heart of Cloverdale - an exclusive, old-money neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama - the house, his son Neil remembers now, "was a total wreck." A chandelier was badly damaged, there were holes in the wall and the place was full of empty liquor bottles. "The cleaning bill alone was $900," Neil Smith says, "which was no small...