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Sitting stage left

American holly, Ilex opaca, in Auburn, Alabama.

That’s outside Telfair Peet, the theatre building. We were there for a show tonight. If you’re in or near Auburn you need to come see this show this weekend.

Dr. Tessa Carr, who wrote and directed the show, is a friend of ours. We’ve been talking about this performance for months. It sounded great and played even better. Go see “The Integration of Tuskegee High School.”

What Tessa wrote about this show gets right to the point of the performance:

All of the players are college students. And in every show I’ve seen they always do a great job, especially when you consider the demands on their time. And even moreso in this case, some of the actors and actresses aren’t theater majors or have never been on stage before.

Also, I know some of the people being portrayed in the play, and know most of the names of the rest. A few of them were in the audience. That must be wild, to see yourself portrayed on stage.

They’re doing a Q&A after the show, and that’s worth hearing, particularly when the people who lived in those moments are there to take part. But the show itself, the show is powerful and terrific.

UPDATE: They’ve uploaded the full show. It is full of important history lesson that we should remember, lest we forget:

cycling / history / markers / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Apr 16

Riding for markers

I’m working on wrapping up a project I’ve been undertaking, more off than on, for several years. I’ve been riding my bike all over the county to photograph the markers and the places they document. The ones I’m showing you today are all from the same place. So important is this location, there are three markers within view of one another.

Three signs in all, six sides of information, generations of families and leaders and history. Interesting how cemeteries are both the beginning and end of history.

You can see the other sides to these signs, and the sacred grounds they mark, here.

cycling / history / markers / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Apr 16

Back to the markers

I have to finish this project up and, so, for the next several weeks I’ll be sneaking in a few posts that will shoot you over to my historic marker page. The concept there is pretty straightforward. I’ve been riding my bike all over the county to photograph the markers and the places they document. This has been an on-again-off-again project for years. Time to wrap it up. Here are two that will get us a bit closer to doing just that.

This is a superlative sign. It is the most difficult one in the county to get to. It was one of the hardest ones to find. Being from 1954 it is perhaps the oldest of the bunch. It has perhaps the widest ranging actual historical significance. And there’s less at this physical location than any other marker in the county. There’s absolutely nothing there:

You can see the other side, and the locale.

After France, late in the Colonial period gave all of this region to Britain surveyors marked the boundaries including this one in south Smiths Station. This line goes all the way across at least two states. I wonder if there are other signs elsewhere on this line.

Also, 18th century surveyor still sounds like an impossibly difficult job.

I had a professor once who explained that the railway switch that was located just down from this sign is why all of this is here. And then he’d walk you through a few decades of railway history and it made sense. And now the town which grew beside the railroad became a city and then a blue collar town and then it dried up and now it is making a comeback. And that’s about 100 years of history.

Click here to see the other side of the sign and a lot of the locale.

family / history / photo / weekend — Comments Off
2
Apr 16

A place still called New Hope

We journeyed to New Hope, Georgia. Dallas, Georgia, really. Dallas is a narrow spot on a road. New Hope doesn’t appear on a map. It is between here and there, Chattanooga and Atlanta, west of Marietta. To be such a small place a lot has happened here. We were there for a memorial of the crash of Southern Airways 242. My grandfather died on that flight, the largest aviation disaster in Georgia history. This, then, is thought to be one of the longest-running memorials of its kind in the country. I wrote about it a few years ago, and a version of that also landed on the Smithsonian Magazine’s site.

The plane touched down and crashed just down from this church:

On Monday, April 4, 1977, at 4:18 in the afternoon, a Huntsville to Atlanta DC 9 Jetliner crashed into the small community of New Hope, northeast of Dallas, Georgia. The jet plane’s first contact with the ground was about fifty yards from the New Hope First Baptist Church. A piece of the plane’s metal fell on the church property. This was on the same ground that the great battle of New Hope was fought on May 25, 1864, when so many lives were lost. There were eighty-two passengers and crew aboard the Southern Airways plane and at least sixty-one passengers lost their lives. Eight local residents perished due to the accident. Two of these were members of the New Hope First Baptist Church.

This happened during a thunderstorm. It was a dark rainy afternoon and strange as it may seen, this was the type weather that was described on May 25, 1864.

[…]

The aircraft hit in the middle of the 92 Highway then seemed to shift with the wind, clipping power poles, electric lines and cutting trees as it went. It was kept closely between the many stores, New Hope Elementary School and the volunteer fire station and was seemingly under control when suddenly the plane touched down in front of Newman’s Grocery Store where two gas pumps were hit, causing an explosion.

[…]

Residents all around were bringing out sheets, blankets and anything they could to help, trying to provide and assist as best they could. Some helped in pulling the injured from the wreckage, putting them in their cars and for Paulding Memorial Hospital.

According to the hospital’s timeline, the first victims arrived just 10 minutes after the crash.

The accident investigation ultimately concluded that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The storm the plane flew into was so thick that it swallowed radar signatures, so their equipment didn’t see it. The hail cracked the cockpit windshield and cause complete engine failure. The air traffic controllers made some critical errors, too. Ultimately the two pilots, Captain William W. McKenzie and First Officer Lyman Keele, who were accomplished military aviators had to try a desperation landing on a country road. Eyewitnesses say they put the landing gear down on the centerline of the road, but the wings clipped the poles and they lost control from there. One of the last battles before Sherman burned Atlanta took place there 103 years prior. And evidence suggests that before that, apparently, there was a great Native American conflict there, too. All of this in one cursed spot.

The wooded area bordered a house where a mother and her children who had been playing outside just moments before. I know one of those guys, and his mother. Sweet lady. Just behind what was then their home is the site of the Civil War battle, a place called Hell Hole. The locals brought survivors through the lady’s house, in the front door, out the back, down through the woods and to another road behind them. That was the only way they could get cars to the site, through the debris. Every crash victim who went in through her front door survived.

One of the local facilities has a display of contemporary newspapers:

adventures / family / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
24
Mar 16

More family photos

There are whole chunks of things I don’t know about. That’s only my fault. So I try, on some of my visits, to fill in the gaps.

For instance, these are my grandmother’s parents:

That’s a familiar picture, though I don’t remember the two of them. Here’s a picture of them I don’t think I’ve ever seen before:

The boys in the background are my great-uncles. The years melt away, but the same mischief is just noticeable in the eyes you can see on the left margin of the shot. That’s a familiar look. They were old when I was young, but only in that way that adults are old to children. Their creeping up there in years now, of course, but you still see that in the eyes. To see them as ankle biters themselves is amusing.

This picture is a few years later than the previous one. This is my grandmother’s senior portrait:

Cute girl, right? She grew up in the narrowest wide spot in the road in a tucked away corner of northwest Alabama that it is still hard for most people to find. In her yearbook she quoted a first century Syrian, taken as a slave to Italy where he won the favor of his master, who freed and educated him. Publilius Syrus became a writer and actor. The quote: “When we stop to think we often miss our opportunity.”

My grandmother was in the Glee Club and Future Homemakers of America.

Me and my grandmother today. Still a pretty lady:

This is my grandfather’s father. Never met him:

Back with the folks. Allie has been patiently waiting at the table for a treat.