CLINTON, Miss. — A little town that thought it was one of the luckiest places on earth to become home to a telecommunications giant like WorldCom is now scrambling to pick up the pieces of a broken dream.

        With WorldCom seemingly on the brink of bankruptcy, Clinton residents are watching the accelerating disintegration of a prime source of employment, corporate donations and community goodwill.

        Many blame one man, former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, for the troubles.

        “It's a shame that so many people put their trust in Bernie Ebbers,” says Phillip Wooley, administrator of Covenant Christian High School.

        Ebbers, a 1957 graduate of Mississippi College here, has laid low as WorldCom fell further and further. The worst news came last week, when WorldCom disclosed that it overstated cash flow by $3.9 billion, one of the largest corporate accounting scandals. Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan was fired, and Controller David Myers resigned.

        The company laid off about 4,000 workers worldwide on Friday, the first in a wave of 17,000 who will lose their jobs. About 90 were from the metro area around Clinton, where the mayor says about 1,100 worked at the corporate headquarters.

        WorldCom built a shiny new headquarters next to the Interstate in Clinton, a town of about 24,000 between the state capital of Jackson and the Civil War battlefield of Vicksburg along the Mississippi River.

        Ebbers, who was ousted as CEO in April but still casts a long shadow over WorldCom, was a familiar sight in Clinton, even though he lived about a 40-minute drive away in Brookhaven. He was usually dressed casually in jeans and a cowboy hat. “He was very self-effacing,” says Clinton Mayor Rosemary Aultman.

        Ebbers sat on the board of trustees at the college, where he spearheaded a fundraising campaign that raised $100 million by 2000, five times as much money had ever been raised in a single drive previously.

        The college sent interns and graduates alike to work at WorldCom. The college's interim president, Lloyd Roberts, says he was impressed at how WorldCom seemed a busy place when he visited. “Hundreds of people were sitting in front of their screens. It was like a space center,” Roberts says.

        WorldCom underwrote major civic celebrations, such as the Brick Street Festival and an arts and crafts fair, Aultman says. She adds that WorldCom has been a “wonderful corporate citizen.”

        Aultman also says that her rock-ribbed Republican, conservative community — restaurants were only allowed to start serving beer last month — has a diverse economy that will see it through the WorldCom debacle. She points to a Delphi Packard auto parts plants that runs three shifts and a Coca-Cola bottling plant as examples.

        There are few fears of a mass exodus if WorldCom cuts deeper into its workforce. Employees live all over the metro area, with many commuting in up to 60 miles a day, minimizing the impact.

        Except for WorldCom, the local economy has been vibrant. Nissan, for instance, is erecting a new auto plant outside Jackson that's expected to employ hundreds.

        “It's not doom and gloom, it's sadness,” says Suzanne Vivier, owner of the Gravity coffeehouse.

        But it's pretty gloomy for Kimberly Spencer, 31, laid off Friday from her data entry job at WorldCom. The married mother of two says “there's not enough jobs” and that she'll miss the prestige of working for a highly regarded employer such as WorldCom. “I enjoyed my work,” says Spencer, a Clinton resident most of her life.

        And there are the many people in town who invested in WorldCom, confident that the company's proximity would give them a front-row seat as it conquered the telecommunications world.

        “It was a Mississippi company, and they wanted to support it,” says Nancy Lotteridge Anderson, a personal financial planner in Clinton. She says about 30 percent of her clients had WorldCom in their portfolio as its fortunes sank.

        The price kept falling even as the company's fundamentals still appeared strong. “I kept giving those guys credit. I thought they could get through this.”

        Wooley says he lost $7,000, having invested at $46 a share and sold at $6 a share. But he says he thinks there are others who were hurt a lot worse. “Some put their life savings into that stock,” he says.

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