This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:
Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.
A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!
More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.
Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:
Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.
Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.
He was president of Samford University, some 143 years ago, two campuses and one name ago, when the place was still known as Howard College. The statue, seven feet tall and tipping the scales at a metric tonne, was delivered to Samford two years ago after a long tour in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
He was replaced there by Helen Keller, and so now he’s back on campus. Not that he’d know this place. Birmingham wasn’t even a town then.
Curry, was a Mexican War veteran, Alabama lawyer and member of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Confederate Congress and an officer in the Confederate Army. Later he would become a Baptist preacher.
He was also a Horace Mann universal education disciple. Booker T. Washington proclaimed “There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro than Dr. Curry.”
Curry was appointed president of Howard College in 1865, where he served for three years. Later he was an ambassador to Spain.
The sculpture had been stained by tobacco smoke and marked by generations of U.S. Capitol visitors with pens, proving people are stupid. But he was cleaned for his return to Samford, where he is on display in the Beeson University Center. He has a (presumably) unauthorized and sadly dormant Twitter account. And, now, is wearing what is presumably a university sanctioned Christmas hat.
Had a nice conversation with the fiancee of a former student today. (She is designing at Oxmoor House here in town.) He is a storyteller. Check out some of his recent work.
Among other things, he’s also working as a research assistant on the first authorized biography on Jerry Lee Lewis. Those will be interesting interviews.
That would be the tale you told at every gathering, if it happened to you. It was just another day in Jerry Lee’s world.
Just another fine day on campus for me as well. I taught about broadcast writing today, and focused on radio scripts. We’ll do television next week.
So I did the spiel, told some of my own war stories and showed written examples. We talked about the active voice and visual structure and actualities.
I gave them two stories from the paper to re-write as an exercise. “This one,” I said, “is probably a 30 second story. This one is probably 45 or 50 seconds. Write them out and read and time them.”
I wrote a version of the longer story. It was 42 seconds.
It has been almost eight years, but I’ve still got that clock in my head.
He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
so shop the endcap for goodness sake.
Those are foam stickers, Santas, presents, stockings and trees. They have the thin white peel-back paper and will stick pleasingly onto some clean surface for exactly four days, three if there is any curvature of the stuck upon surface, 36 hours if you do it more than a week before Christmas.
There’s something about that Santa Claus’ face that is unnerving. How can he see me? How can he knows? His eyes are closed. And yet he still has that wan smile. Maybe it is the economy. The strain of it all is probably getting to him too. Like in this story:
The result is a Christmas season in which Santas — including the 115 of them in this year’s graduating class of the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School — must learn to swiftly size up families’ financial circumstances, gently scale back children’s Christmas gift requests and even how to answer the wish some say they have been hearing with more frequency — “Can you bring my parent a job?”
Santas here tell of children who appear on their laps with lists that include the latest, most expensive toys and their parents, standing off to the side, stealthily but imploringly shaking their heads no. On the flip side, some, like Fred Honerkamp, have been visited by children whose expectations seem to have sunk to match the gloom; not long ago, a boy asked him for only one item — a pair of sneakers that actually fit.
“In the end, Santas have to be sure to never promise anything,” said Mr. Honerkamp, an alumnus of the school who also lectures here. He has devised his own tale about a wayward elf and slowed toy production at the North Pole for children who are requesting a gift clearly beyond their family’s price range. “It’s hard to watch sometimes because the children are like little barometers, mirrors on what the country has been through.”
And if that story doesn’t tug on your heartstrings, I present to you the Press-Register’s Neediest Families, like the Colemans:
The 33-year-old Prichard native says that it takes a lot to keep them smiling. And even as she battles sickle cell anemia and struggles to support Ashley, 7, and Michael, 14, she believes that with a few key breaks, her household will come out OK.
Cooking, for example, is an issue since Coleman has only a microwave and hot plate, but no regular stove.
In June, 51-year-old Norman Hodges saw a doctor for what he thought was a pulled muscle. Testing revealed lung cancer.
The five months that followed were filled with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, sudden paralysis, long hospital stays and severe complications from infection. The father of two passed away at home on Nov. 2.
It’s not even December yet, and those stories just grow more and more heart-rending. I read them all when I worked at al.com. I’ve read them all every year since.
The building in which I work, the best I know, is now 54 years old.
Not much has changed over the years. This shot was from last fall:
There’s probably no way of knowing how many roofs have been on the building in those decades, but there’s no getting around the need to fix at least portions of it now.
The layout is a bit unusual. As the building stretches back out of the frame there are second-floor wings on both sides. Those roofs are flat, which does not promote drainage. And water freezes nicely on it too, as you might have noticed if you were on the site last February:
My office, on the third floor, commands a view of the second-floor wing roof on one side. Walking to the stairs on the front end of the building shows the other side, where the leaks are.
Today they’ve been destroying the old roof coating, which appeared to be a tar-based material. There’s been precisely rhythmic hammering — you could gesture, like a conductor, and keep perfect time with the worker — and some sort of mechanized tool. If anyone on that side of the building got any work done this morning you should be impressed.
But we worked anyway.
Later. The promotional sticker on the CD case calls it the “greatest Muppets soundtrack ever.” Track 11 is “We Built This City,” so I doubt that claim.
To your everlasting amusement, however, the Muppets Barbershop Quartet covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
You should be singing that for a day or two. You’re welcome.
Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Thought I’d throw in a few clips from memorable games during my years as an undergraduate. This space is nothing if it isn’t good for self-indulgent memories. So let’s take a stroll down that particular lane.
The first game I attended as a student was against Ole Miss. A fight broke out in the student body, probably over too many drinks or girls. Order was quickly restored by the people around them and Auburn won 46-13.
The biggest games of my freshman season were unavailable to me. Student tickets were sold on a seniority basis, which meant no Florida and no Alabama. I had to watch them both from my place just off campus.
Strange to now think that the 1995 Iron Bowl was just the third one on campus. I’d only missed history, the first time Alabama finally played a true road game in the series, by a few years. (This may sound silly to readers that aren’t involved. To you I recommend this column, this article, and also this piece and the CBS pre-game video below.)
That was all just before my time in undergrad. My freshman year was a mediocre one for football in the state. Both Alabama and Auburn came into the Iron Bowl with seven wins. Auburn would win 31-27 and Tide fans still complain about a referee’s call late in that game.
Later, in bowl season, a struggling Auburn played a solid Penn State.
Moving on, then.
In 1996 we watched The Barn burn down. That was one of the athletic buildings on campus. They used to play basketball in the facility, but in 1996 it housed the gymnastics team and was one of three wooden buildings on campus. A tailgater put their grill too near the structure and during the game the flames leapt higher than the football stadium directly across the street.
I asked Carl Stephens, the former public address announcer, about his most memorable games, and this one was in his top three. No one who was there will ever forget it, or Stephens’ deep voice announcing “Attention Auburn fans if you parked near the barn please exit the stadium and move your vehicle.”
A moment later he followed that up with “Attention fans. It is too late to move your vehicle.”
From most views in the stadium it looked like we were on fire. There’s no way you’re moving 85,000 people, so we were resigned: Well, if you have to go, go with friends.
The bigger problem at the moment, however, was why Auburn could not kick a field goal. Priorities: We have them.
Ironically, it was a building donated by LSU — my roommate said “Pistol Pete played in there!” — and it was destroyed during the LSU game. That there is no footage of this online is a glaring blind spot in mid 1990s video uploading. My friend Joe McAdory wrote about it, however.
That year there was also the famous four overtime game with Georgia. I was in Kansas City, but I could have flown home, driven from Montgomery to Auburn and caught the end. Georgia won, unfortunately, so I was glad to watch from my hotel room. Mostly, this is remember as the day Uga tried to bite Robert Baker:
The next week Auburn lost a narrow game to Alabama, 24-23 in Birmingham. But the days of going to Legion Field for that game were coming to an end.
Now to the story you will not believe. In 1997, I called this turnover. It wasn’t a wish or a hope. I was not being an irrational, desperate fan late in the game. I turned to the friend standing next to me and said “They are about to give the ball back to Auburn, just as if I’d looked into the sky and said “It is night.”
Ed Scissum, who fumbled the ball at the crucial moment, works at Evangeline Booth College, a theological school in Atlanta. Martavious Houston, who forced the fumble, had a nice career in the Canadian Football League and then had a moment in the NFL. Jaret Holmes, the placekicker who scored the winning points for Auburn, had three years in the NFL and is now back home in Mississippi.
Auburn earned their way into the SEC Championship that year, but we don’t speak of it much.
So 1998, then, featured the last ever Iron Bowl in Birmingham. I was there, and on a chill night watched the Tide close that chapter in a storied history with a 31-17 win over my Tigers.
Shaun Alexander was a good back.
To make matters worse, the next year Alabama came back to Auburn and for the first time won the Iron Bowl there. Not a pleasant experience:
On the other hand, it would be 2008 until Alabama won the Iron Bowl at their own stadium. Just took them three centuries to accomplish the feat.
Now. The purpose of this little entry was to talk about the Iron Bowls and a few other games from my time as a student. I was very fortunate, working as a journalist and in a few other capacities, to see some of these games and work with the people — like Pat Dye, Jim Fyffe, Rod Bramblett and others — that helped create these moments over the years. My experiences are a bit atypical.
For example, one of the best games I’ve ever watched at Auburn — and we’ll discuss the best game tomorrow — was the 2005 Iron Bowl. I was in grad school at UAB at the time, so it doesn’t fit the tidy theme here, but it bears mentioning. My future bride managed to land sideline passes, she worked at Fox at the time, and we shot the game. This was Carl Stephens last game behind the microphone. This was the last Iron Bowl flight for Tiger VI. They named the field in Pat Dye’s honor.
And this happened all night long:
We were on the sideline for that. It couldn’t get much better, I figured, on the way home. And until this last year’s championship run, I was right.
Tomorrow I’ll write about the best contest I’ve ever seen at Jordan-Hare Stadium in a special holiday use of bytes and bits.
Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Yesterday we briefly examined a youth “misspent” as an Alabama fan. Today we’ll discuss sorting out the brain washed allegiances and finding what your heart tells you is true and right and just.
This will read like my college decision was centered too much on football. That’s an important part of the culture, but only a side note for me. Education is and has always been an important consideration for me. The program I was interested in at Auburn was great and … well … you’ll see …
The first time I visited Auburn was in the summer of my eighth grade year. It was part of a school trip and the teacher, an Auburn graduate, decided to visit one of the bookstores. This was awkward for me because I was wearing an Alabama shirt at the time.
The visit was brief, though. We got to where we needed to go, participated in the contest we were there to take part in and traveled to Montgomery.
The next visit was a few years later. More school organizations led me to campus for meetings. Being involved in the FFA meant spending more time with ag kids, and that was an important contribution to the exposure. There was also game experiences like this:
I watched Nix-to-Sanders in a hotel room in Montgomery, and — this makes no sense — there was an embodiment of attitude in that team and that game that seemed admirable.
Perhaps most importantly, when I was a high school senior the girl I was dating was a freshman at Auburn. I went to visit early in her freshman year, spent a weekend with friends and had a blast. Everyone was nice and the place was beautiful. And I knew people and all of that was very important to a high school kid.
[She and I dated off and on for the next few years. But being at Auburn never seemed a bad decision. (Except for chemistry classes. Yeesh.)]
I made it home, announced I was going to Auburn and went to my room.
My mother was … less than pleased. “If you’d told me you’d robbed a bank, I would have said ‘That’s OK, son, I still love you.’ But I never, ever, thought you would tell me you were going to Auburn.”
The only thing we’d ever really disagreed about was how to pay for this. There would be a way, said the wide eyed child. The pragmatic parent wasn’t so sure.
That same fall, this happened:
I missed the great comeback because of a flat tire. A flat tire! It would be six or seven years before I actually saw the game. Why LSU was throwing the ball still boggles the mind. But I digress.
I got one scholarship, was able to qualify for good grants and tried to figure out how to live cheaply. And then, just three days after my high school graduation, I was called in for a scholarship interview. I sat in a small room with two older gentlemen and discussed college, life, ambition and study habits. After the meeting I drove to my mother’s business.
“What if I told you they offered me a one-year scholarship?”
“That would be good,” she said.
“What if I told you they offered me a two-year scholarship?”
“That would be good,” she said.
“What if I told you they gave me a three-year scholarship?”
“That would be even better.”
“What if I told you they gave me a four-year scholarship?”
“I would say ‘War Eagle!'”
And so everything was fine.
She still gave me a hard time about all things Auburn, even beyond football. So did the family. I’m the one Auburn person in the bunch in the whole family — both sides! I catch a lot of grief, but it is, usually, all in jest.
And then after a few wonderful years I graduated (in spite of chemistry).
In 2004 I started graduate school at UAB. They all took great pride in pointing out what the A stood for in that acronym.
But no matter. The boy had long since become an Auburn man.
Tomorrow, we’ll dig up some memorable games from my time as an undergrad, as we try to pad out the holiday week. May all your turkeys be delicious, and all your football teams win. Unless that team is Alabama.
