Last day of class today, and so we wrapped it up with broadcast scripts. I gave them a Christmas tree story, a real lean-in piece about how it isn’t trees that give some people an allergic reaction, but the mold sometimes found in live trees that irritate people’s sinuses.
We’ve all been there, covering strange non-stories and trying to make it feel important trying to feel like it isn’t a waste of our time. I certainly did my share in this newsroom or that. Not every story can be a triple homicide, thank heavens, so then every example shouldn’t be such a thing.
At the end of the class we went over the ground rules of the Monday final again. I crossed the lowercase Js on the last details of the class, wished them a happy holidays and, as always, thanked them for suffering through the class with me.
And then back to the office to finish up this and that, a host of emails, the required moment of listening to Van Morrison, traditionally marking the last day of class for reasons I’ve already forgotten. Ordering this, checking off that, phone calls and the details, details, details that always mark the end of a week, the sigh of a Friday, combined with the exhalation of the term.
I got out of the office a little later than I wanted, but still beat the traffic, for the most part.
I found these in that archive folder I’ve been working through. These aren’t from the Crimson, but rather from the Birmingham News, which was still a daily newspaper back then. This first one blows out the site’s template a little bit — I don’t regularly publish squares — but this was an important story, the fight over changing the area was underway:
Basically, when the university’s board purchased, for a song, the Lakeshore property and moved from Eastlake in the 1950s they got the land on both sides of Lakeshore. On the one side is the campus proper. (There are a few things across Lakeshore now.) But they also go the land on the other side, which was a swampy lake undeveloped and, of course, back then the atmosphere through the area was a lot more quiet.
Now there’s the high school, a business park, some retail development down the road and so on. Also, a lovely recreational area. Of course the residents weren’t keen on all of that once upon a time. I don’t remember the area as they were fighting over it, but the building up over the years has been quite nice. There is more traffic, yes, and the road feels too slow while the traffic simultaneously feels too fast. They were concerned about flooding, but that has always seemed minimal in my experience. At the end of the day, if you’ve never been through there, you’d think it was a charming area, because it is.
There is so, so much local and campus history built up in all of those events of the last 60 years, and specifically since the development really kicked in during the 1980s.
This clipping, also from the Birmingham News, is from 1987 and it details the sell of some of that property to Southern Progress. They would ultimately build three nice buildings and a handsome campus for their various publications. But Southern Progress, which has been based in Birmingham since 1911, has fallen on hard times like many publishers in recent years. Time has owned them since the 1980s, one magazine was sold off a few years ago. There have been cutbacks and rollbacks and all sorts of restructuring.
Last month, Samford started the process of purchasing the property once again. Today, the university’s board approved the 28-acre purchase. The three buildings and parking on the Southern Progress campus will be shared by the pub pros and university units. Everything comes full circle.
This photo was on the back of one of those stories. I can’t now recall if I remember this name or if my searching my memory is giving me the wrong impression. Johnny Imani Harris pled guilty in the 1970s to a string of robberies and a rape. Apparently, his representation wasn’t very good and they convinced him to pled guilty or face the death penalty. He did. He got five life terms. He took part, or was caught up in, a 1974 protest of prison conditions that turned into a riot where a guard died. No one said in court that Harris stabbed the corrections officer, but nevertheless Harris was found guilty and given the death penalty.
When you dive into the entire Johnny Imani Harris tale, things quickly seem itchy. A circuit judge in 1987 agreed and overturned the death penalty. Somewhere in that part of the story is where we find this photo. The build up to that ruling and the finding itself brought up more demonstrations. He was paroled in 1991 on the rape and robbery. As far as I can tell he hasn’t showed up in the media since then.
Went to the last high school state football championship game at Jordan-Hare tonight. Sat in a booth with some folks from Clay-Chalkville. Two of them were on the last state championship team from that school. They both wore their letterman’s jacket from 2001. In the next booth was the grandmother of one of the Clay-Chalkville running backs. She said she’s raised him and we cheered for him because she was adorable and she kept bringing food over to our booth. Better, she said, than carrying it back downstairs. So go number 6, we said. Clay-Chalkville won in a blowout. Everyone we saw, then, was very pleased.
As we left the stadium from the nice little luxury boxes we poked our heads in the even-nicer president’s suite. Right by there is the elevator. Good to see Gene Chizik still hanging around:
I guess they figure “We’re still paying him, we may as well take advantage of the photograph.” He’s getting $209,457.84 a month, through the 2015-2016 fiscal year. Maybe he has pictures of key university players hanging in his home, too.
