I think we’re going to make this our online Christmas card. If you receive this in your inbox just know we ran out of stamps.
That’s in Savannah’s City Market. I saw some pictures of this area in a museum earlier in the day. The modern place looks a bit different than the 19th and turn-of-the-20th century market. There is less cotton and other crops and far more tourists now.
Still have horses, though they now are part of the tourist trade, carrying around people in carriages. And also eating ducks. Who knew?
Savannah, it seems to us, feels less festively decorated this year. We’ve been walking through the historic districts under overcast skies and in several layers of clothing wondering where all of the extra lights and garland are. My guess is that they cut back on the manpower budget to hang it all.
Still a lovely city. Always is. At least in our experience. For a place that sells so much of itself on ghosts and deaths and the more sordid parts of its history you can’t find a much more charming place, even if the Christmas atmosphere is down.
There are less people here right now, too, it seems. We mind this less than most of the local merchants, I’m sure. We’ve walked in to every restaurant with no wait. We haven’t had to dodge people, even on the tourist trap River Street. Part of that is the weather, the mid-week visit and probably the economy. Maybe everyone has been here and is off exploring a new place.
Here is the monument to the Chasseurs Volontaires, the Haitians who fought in Savannah during the Revolutionary War:
It is apparently the first such monument in the U.S. It was installed in Franklin Square in 2009. And because this happened in the modern age, there was outrage and money and indignation:
Here’s the Mercer House. We’ve been in this square before. I don’t recall actually noticing the house, though:
The Mercer House was designed by New York architect John S. Norris for General Hugh W. Mercer, great grandfather of Johnny Mercer. Construction of the house began in 1860, was interrupted by the Civil War and was later completed, circa 1868, by the new owner, John Wilder.
In 1969, Jim Williams, one of Savannah’s earliest and most dedicated private restorationists, bought the then vacant house and began a two-year restoration.
You have your origin story and your Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil story. There is a 100-year blank space in between. Makes you wonder what you’re missing out on, doesn’t it?
So we wandered around. We took shots in Forsyth Park as the sun went down. Here’s the big fountain:
We had dinner at 700 Drayton, which was where we had our dinner reception the night we got married. Delicious.
On those rare occasions when we order a dessert we split one between us. Our waiter brought us a second dessert because, he said, in his estimation the chef took too long to prepare our cake.
We walked next door to the Mansion, where we got married.
As we noted it was much cooler today than it was on that steamy, sunny June day in 2009:
About 80 degrees cooler once you consider the heat index.
By the time we walked back to our hotel, though, I’d have taken anything in between.
They called it the wickedest city in the United States. It was a place full of rambunctious army troopers on leave, where the “criminal establishment was organized enough to forge de facto alliances with the local law enforcement and legal communities, eventually turning the business of crime into a political, social, and economic maelstrom so fearsome that Gen. George S. Patton speculated the only solution was to level the city.”
Naturally they celebrate that in their restaurants:
So we’re in Phenix City, at a chicken joint, where that picture is hanging on the wall.
Albert Fuller, not pictured, is the bad guy. He joined the Navy, went west, came home with an attitude. He made himself “chief deputy sheriff” and ran protection rackets, among other things. He feuded with the city police, who were running their own schemes. Fuller was implicated in a couple of murders, in a prostitution ring and more.
And in this instance, he was seen after the murder of attorney general nominee Albert Patterson, who’d been shot three times — at least twice in the mouth.
Naturally you’d celebrate that in a chicken joint. If this doesn’t make sense, you don’t understand Phenix City, and you should start here:
Other rackets followed, from prostitution to untaxed liquor, drugs, loan sharking and common theft – among its other distinctions Phenix City was the site of an exclusive safecracking school. The city government was the mob’s private fiefdom; the police, sheriff, judges and jurors all belonged to them. If anyone complained about illegal activity, they were thrown in jail for drunk and disorderly or given a pair of concrete shoes and dumped in the Chattahochee.
The photo has a caption: “Taxi driver said he saw Albert Fuller run from murder scene on night of murder.”
That makes the subject of this photo James Radius Taylor:
Taylor said Fuller, former chief deputy in once sin-ridden Phenix City, ran from the alley “a couple of minutes after I heard three shots.”
[…]
Taylor said he was positive in his identification of Fuller. He said he had known the former police official for six years.
You can read pages 160-162 to get a good sense of what happened that particular night.
Fuller did 10 years of a life sentence, maintaining his innocence throughout. He was paroled and died in 1969, six months after a fall from a ladder. You can read his page one obit on his Find A Grave page. Here’s a letter he wrote to a judge-friend while he was in prison, wishing the family well, hoping the judge will “try and keep from sending a young kid down here, for it does not do them any good just hurts.”
Here’s Fuller at the Patterson crime scene, acting as police officer once again, just before he was one of three arrested for the murder. He was the only one to stand trial. That picture is not in the chicken joint.
There is a picture of the raid on the Manhattan Cafe, which in 1954 featured 12 slots, five horse racing machines, four pinball machines, blackjack, craps and poker. Anecdotes from that place fit the description of notorious.
It was two miles from the restaurant. Less as the chicken flies.
Everybody has them, some are better than others. Some can be told to illustrate a point. Some can be told just to be told. I try not to share too many “war stories” in class because they are usually disturbing or pointless or sound like bragging. But I told some stories today. It is a trip down memory lane for me, some of these things I’d all but forgotten.
Once I was called on my off day to go stand outside in the bitter, freezing cold and watch a hostage standoff. Seems a man and a woman had gotten into a fight. He displayed a knife. She got out of their house, but the three kids were stuck inside. I remember stamping my feet for warmth, wishing for a bigger jacket, watching the SWAT team rehearse down the block and then this kid, maybe seven or eight, dangling from a window in his home. It was just a bit too high for him and he was having trouble letting go. There was a police officer in body armor right under the window and he was reaching to get the kid and his shirt was riding up and then he was on the wrong, in the officer’s arms and being trotted away. All the kids got out safely and we reported from there for the better part of a day.
Not every story is a happy one, of course.
I talked about the guy so cranked out on drugs that he used the toddler in his arms as a weapon to ward off police officers. I always thought watching the police sit on their cruisers crying after that was the best part of the story.
Sometimes, I say a lot about any format, the story is about timing. You turn away, you miss it. You leave early, arrive late, you miss it. Really talented reporters can see everything, hear of everything and are apparently everywhere. Or at least they can make it seem like that. For mere mortals, chance plays into it.
I think I was just driving by when I saw a big scene in this one apartment complex. Stopped in there to find out a police officer had just been shot. Jack Cooper was his name, I remember that a decade later. The guy he was dealing with was worried about vampires and demons and pepper spray didn’t bother him. Somehow he got Cooper’s weapon and got off a shot before being killed himself. That was a pretty neighborhood, and I stood around those cruisers and ambulances for hours talking to and about the neighbors. I got back to the studio that day and received probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten professionally. I described things with words, someone whom I greatly respected said, better than the television cameras did.
I didn’t talk today about covering stories where babies were found in the garbage or molested dogs or bodies found in car washes on Christmas morning. Some of that stuff is too depressing.
So we talked about broadcast news writing today, from which I have several years of stories and experience to draw. Some of my best writing was probably done in a studio somewhere, rewriting something I’d written three times before because I needed to get three more seconds cut from the source time. Perhaps nothing makes a print writer a stronger writer than considering the broadcast style.
Of course perhaps two-thirds of this class was interested in public relations, but still. The lesson plan called for broadcasting, so that’s what we talked about.
I miss it, but only a little. I don’t miss being at work at 4 a.m. Don’t miss that at all. That was my last broadcasting job. When I went online in 2004 and that job called for me to show up at 6 a.m. I thought I’d really earned a step up in life.
Now I stay on campus all night watching students put their newspaper together so, really, I’ve finally found the night owl schedule my circadian rhythms have always demanded.
I don’t have quite the same pool of war stories, because our campus is a beautiful little serene place and I now tell tales of improper pronouns and misspelled building names and warning off plagiarism, but it is a great tradeoff.
And now a very mellow tune performed on a frozen pond that, beyond the name, has absolutely nothing to do with the Joe Walsh standard:
I like the kitchen shots. They’re cute.
That is a band about which you can find little information, called Eden’s Empire. On their Bandcamp page they write:
This is an anthem for hope.
We are the sound of Jimi Hendrix strapped to the front of a run-away freight train with Dylan feeding the fire.
We are not rock stars. We’re not selling sex, angst, or anarchy. We’re giving away songs about how hard it is for our generation to find love, purpose, and truth in a world that just wants us to buy more of what put our parents in this situation.
We are over educated, underpaid, and unsatisfied.
We are James Dean with a guitar.
We are twenty something’s and we’re restless.
Hurricanes, diplomas, love, and big ideas have pulled us from all corners of the country and dropped us together in the Midwest.
We have no money, no map, and no desire to just dream anymore.
We are on an odyssey, we don’t know what were looking for, but so far all we’ve found is rock n’ roll.
The share of Americans living in multigenerational households reached the highest level since the 1950s, after rising significantly over the past five years, according to Pew.
In the never-ending quest for story ideas and opportunities to prove my entrepreneurial prescience I am always looking for a hook or an angle. And, forgive me if this is just the Ken Burns talking …
But I think there’s some modern John Steinbeck story waiting to emerge. This being a tectonic type of tale on the scale of ultimate stories. Of course there will be WiFi and cable television and hipsters and even more politics this time around, but there might be something to it.
I rambled on here for awhile about Franklin Roosevelt, James Bond and YouTube propaganda. Those paragraphs didn’t add much and I discovered the delete button still works; you’re welcome.
It started out, though, with the idea that the Dust Bowl changed a lot of lives, not just in the short term, but generationally. People who lived in Oklahoma moved to California or Arizona, if they were lucky enough to get in, or back east and they had children and grandchildren and those people live in those places, or at least started in those places and where are they now and what got them there? These are the plates of life, right? So I say it is tectonic. I look at my family history and wonder what were the reasons they moved down from the mountains? I found several strands of the tree that ventured to Texas or Oklahoma, probably be cause they knew a cousin there who told them times were good and your parents aren’t here, anyway. And what prompted them to go there?
If you spend time in one of the genealogy books of my extended family you find they came from Germany in the early 18th century. It is written somewhere that generally people of that place and era moved to recapture something in a new place. Then, according to this family book, some of those particular people fought in Pennsylvania regiments in “the Sectional War” and later moved to north Alabama in the 1880s. The why is left to your imagination.
Another side of my family moved down from Tennessee before the Civil War. They were in a part of the state that typically stayed out of the war and some of the young men finally only joined up when the Union all but pressed them into service.
This is all in my mother’s family. On the Smith side of things, well the Smiths are hard, but I found an old newspaper mention early this year that led me to a new name on a genealogy site which led all the way back to the Netherlands in the 16th century. Those people moved to North Carolina before the Revolutionary War, and eventually worked into Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma, probably just in time for the Dust Bowl.
They, like the other branch in the book above, were all just farmers for the most part, poor in a hardscrabble world during a challenging time. The whys died with them, but they are probably straightforward and logical. Or fantastical beyond belief. Maybe life was good to them. Who knows what war stories they had?
Had dinner at Chick-fil-A tonight. Took a piece of paper to give to one of the guys I often see working there. He always asks me what I’m reading. We’ve talked about the various things we enjoy. I read a lot of history. He said he reads a lot about the Revolutionary War period.
So I’d promised I’d bring him a list of things that I’ve read. I spent a few minutes in my library one day last week writing down names and titles. I pulled images from Amazon to put over the names of the books. I gave it to him tonight. He was happy, smiling, pleased, thanked me.
But then I wondered: Maybe he doesn’t really read about this period. Maybe he was just being nice. Now, maybe, he’s wondering why some guy brings him this piece of paper.
So I got my food, found a table and continued reading Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope — which is good, if you like Alter or Roosevelt. Alter is a fine writer, but he’s a Roosevelt apologist and, really, there’s been enough of that. But I did learn about Roosevelt’s role in contributing re-writes to Gabriel Over the White House, a movie meant to “prepare” the American constituency for a dictator who, ultimately, executes his enemies in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty. This was actually produced and put in theaters. There’s some of that about 62 minutes in and then you’ll see a Star Chamber immediately thereafter. Roosevelt wrote to William Randolph Hearst, who produced the film, that he thought it would be “helpful.”
You can watch the full movie here:
The Library of Congress says about the film, “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.”
Happily we didn’t go down those roads, but then again, in 1933 with the Depression on, people in the U.S. thought a lot about Mussolini. Il Duce was in the midst of his successful years. He was winning people over as a dictator with public works, improved jobs, public transport and more. It’d be a few more years until everyone turned on the guy. In 1933 desperate people looked at him and thought, Why not?
So anyway, I’m sitting there, trying to wrap up this book so I can move on to the next thing, and these two ladies sitting nearby are discussing the music they’ll perform in their church choir’s Christmas performance.
They’re flipping through three-ring binders. As it often happens when music people discuss music things there was a bit of singing. The lady on the right was pointing out parts to the one on the left.
A guy comes up, a contractor of some sort based on his clothes, and he says “You sure make that beautiful song beautiful.”
I had lunch at Alabama Power today with my friend Ike Pigott. He was a local reporter on television for years, moved to the Red Cross and now is in PR and corporate and strategy communication at the power company. Nice guy. Very smart. He’s on our department’s advisory council at Samford. We’re trying to get him more involved.
We ate under the atrium of the Alabama Power headquarters building, seen in the banner on this page, if you’ve ever wondered. Inside they have a barber, a shoe shine repair and leather stretching shop, a post office, a congressional lobby bureau, pneumatic tubes to deliver the staff home at the end of the day and are tinkering with a transporter platform. The place is fancy.
They also have rows of classic radios on display from the Don Kresge Memorial Museum which is housed in the building. Fitting. The first radio station in the state belonged to the power company. They used it to communicate with their outlying folks and to do weather updates and that sort of thing. Eventually they gave the gear to Auburn University, then Alabama Polytechnic Institute, where it took the WAPI calls. Some time later it came back to Birmingham, where WAPI broadcasts today. I used to work on the oldest station in the state. Lots of fun and news and anguish and entertainment went over those airwaves over the years. Most of it during my time there!
But I do go on.
Here are some of the radios they have out for your examination. I skipped most of the oldest models, as Lileks called them the other day, the woody old cathedrals. Why look at those when you can stare at the beauty of the Crosley Bullseye. The 1951 model here came in eight colors. Beautiful bakelight and tubes build. And you thought the 50s were staid:
Here’s the Trav-ler T201, from 1959. How many teenaged girls had this in their room in the early 1960s?
Here is the Westinghouse H124, also called the refrigerator radio. It was in circulation after the war, from 1945 until 1948. It came in four colors, which is probably two more than you could get the fridge in. This radio came with the refrigerator purpose. I wonder if the companion model is available at the refrigerator museum. (There are a few of those, surprisingly.)
The Motorola 53H came in several colors when you ordered it in 1953. Someone in your family had this radio. They were the most boring person in your family. But the rockabilly sounded great:
The Airline 84 BR 1508, just about as beautiful as the genre could get. It has six buttons, so you could set up six pre-set stations across the manual dial. “No more fighting with sis!” the ads might have said. This radio was so important they made postcards about it:
OK, two from the wooden cabinets. Because this one is a globe: The Colonial “New World” picked up only the AM band and had a top vent for the five-tube configuration. This was in catalogs in 1933. Someone listed to Franklin Roosevelt for the first time on this radio:
This Superflex, this very model, was made in Birmingham at Radio Products Corporation in 1927. The engraving on the front panel, which doesn’t really come across in this one shot, is admirable. This Superflex is thought to be the only surviving example.
It was built right here:
Oh, that Crosley Bullseye? The sexy, red picture above? You can buy one of those on ebay for $1,840.
