Merry Christmas! Have a lovely holiday and celebrate with much joy and peace!
“And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” — Luke 2:16-19
What are your favorite ornaments? Write about them in the comments.
I joked last week about sending out a digital card. We even have a good picture from last week’s adventures.
It’d be a great way to tell where you fell on the spectrum. You could save a stamp. Your wrist wouldn’t hurt from writing all of those addresses. No envelopes to lick.
When we wrote ours last night Allie wanted to get in on the act. So we made her one too.
She doesn’t have stamps, so just feel free to print a copy of this for the mantle.
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.
music / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Caledonia Soul music | Tell me what it is 4 Dec 12
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?
