This is the Abbey, and on this spot there has been a place of Christian worship, in one form or another, for more than a millennia. Three churches have been there, the first, in 757, an Anglo-Saxon monastery. Norman conquerors destroyed that one and a cathedral was started around 1090, but it was rubble a few hundred years later.
The first King of all England, King Edgar, was crowned here in 973. The monasteries here were closed in 1539, and in 1616 much of the current building was repaired, with new pinnacles and flying buttresses added inside and out in the 19th century. You can see the interior here.
At the top you can just make out the statue of Christ in glory. That one was hard to shoot. But this is the one just above the door, a likeness of King Henry VII. It was placed during a restoration around 1900:
These are the statues installed on either side of the main door. One is Peter and the other is Paul:
You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:
Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.
Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.
You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:
“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.
And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.
“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.
Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”
I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:
As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.
Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.
You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.
The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.
“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.
“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.
Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.
“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.
Nothing little about that.
I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:
Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”
Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”
Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.
She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.
If any one thing inspired him, during this period, it was Kirke Simpson’s news story on the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Simpson was an Associated Press reporter.
“I cried over that,” Pyle told friends later, “and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece.”
Kirke Simpson, as an old AP man, won the Pulitzer for the piece Pyle was talking about, the first wire service writer to win the Prize. And that piece is an incredible piece of literature and history. The lead Pyle mentions:
Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland America’s unknown dead from France sleeps tonight, a soldier home from the wars.
Alone, he lies in the narrow cell of stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit that is America. Wherever liberty is held close in men’s hearts, the honor and the glory and the pledge of high endeavor poured out over this nameless one of fame will be told and sung by Americans for all time.
Toward the end:
Through the religious services that followed, and prayers, the swelling crowd sat motionless until it rose to join in the old, consoling Rock of Ages, and the last rite for the dead was at hand. Lifted by his hero-bearers from the stage, the unknown was carried in his flag-wrapped, simple coffin out to the wide sweep of the terrace. The bearers laid the sleeper down above the crypt, on which had been placed a little soil of France. The dust his blood helped redeem from alien hands will mingle with his dust as time marches by.
The simple words of the burial ritual were said by Bishop Brent; flowers from war mothers of America and England were laid in place.
Something fun … this is at Birmingham’s WBRC. Mickey Ferguson is the weatherman. Swell guy, lots of fun. Wonderfully comical. And this other gentleman stole the show:
This 92 year-old man got to dance during a weather forecast because the world is okay sometimes: http://t.co/zYWmxGX95g
Today we were at the New Hope memorial for Southern 242 – Georgia’s largest aviation disaster.
The Southern 242 committee just unveiled their upcoming memorial sculpture.
Around the pedestal, the committee says, will be the names of the 72 fatalities and 22 survivors of the 1977 crash.
A terrible storm, bad radar brought on by the storm, a bad forecast, complete systems failure on the plane and human error on the ground led to the crash. The pilots, former military aviators, then steering a glider, desperately attempted the unprecedented: landing a DC9 on a country road. Witnesses on the ground say Capt. William McKenzie and co-pilot Lyman Keele, with 23,000 flight hours between them, put their front wheel on the center line of the two-lane road. But for power poles. The wings hit poles, snapped trees and spun the plane out of control.
When the plane came to rest, emergency workers couldn’t get to the site for the debris. Survivors were carried through that house, into the backyard, through the woods and to a parallel road. Everyone that made it into that house and out the back door survived.
You can tell people all of the reasons they shouldn’t take pictures of signs, and there are plenty of good reasons, but still, when the classics come back to life, you can’t help yourself:
After nearly a decade of its pumps sitting idle, fuel is again flowing at the former Saco gas station at the corner of Dean Road and Opelika Road in Auburn.
Auburn resident Mike Woodham turned the station’s original lights back on at the Saco gas station Monday as he reopened it as Woodham’s Full Service—a gas station offering full or self serve fuel service, a full-service tire shop, oil changes and more.
“The City of Auburn has been very gracious to my kids and very good to me, and we wanted to give something back,” said Woodham, who owned Woodham’s Tire in Montgomery and has been in the auto business for 30 years. “We wanted to serve back. And the best way that we know of is what we bring to market with our tire knowledge.”
Known for its iconic Saco sign, the previous gas station closed more than nine years ago after then-owner Dick Salmon was shot and killed at the business in July 2005. According to an Associated Press article as reported by The Decatur Daily on July 24, 2005, Salmon had worked at the family-run business for 43 years.
And the store:
Not a lot has changed, and that seems to be the plan, and that’s great.
Breakfast at Barbecue House this morning, which meant I could skip lunch. Read students’ news stories all morning and afternoon, and that is always fun, right up until I imagine then trying to read my marginalia. And then there was class, where we talked about profiles and obits and got ready to point to exciting digital methods of story telling, which will last us through the rest of the week.
There were other office things, a late dinner and here we are.
Things to read … because here we are.
I’m keeping it to three, but these are three incredible Selma pieces to read. Because they are better than the headlines, I will link you with a good quote for each:
And now for another kind of fortitude, this is a strong testament of health, strength, and mind over chemo, Finding strength in triathlons:
It was debilitating. “I was 10 days away from doing my eighth Ironman,” Hackett says. “I was still training 100 percent and I had this huge, stage four tumour going.” His youngest daughter was just two weeks old. His oldest was five years old.
[…]
Hackett is on an aggressive form of chemotherapy, a regimen called FOLIRI, whose name represents three different drugs. His oncologist, Dr. Michael Sawyer, combines the regimen with a relatively new drug called bevacizumab that attacks the growth of new blood vessels. Hackett tolerates it well. “He told me he biked 20 or 30 kilometres the day before I saw him,” Sawyer says. He also ran a five-kilometre race just four hours after he finished his first round of chemotherapy.
The exercise might have something to do with it. “There are many studies, both in curative chemotherapy (to remove cancer completely) and chemotherapy to prolong people’s lives, where it appears that people who exercise do better than people who do not,” says Sawyer.
So we’ll all be at the gym a bit longer tomorrow, no?
And, finally, we’ll end with some music today. If you’re still looking for something to hate Tom Hanks in, keep looking because this probably isn’t that thing either:
Have a great and purposeful week. See ya tomorrow!
