Category: MISC

Hippie Beach

Hippie Beach is not on any map. Tucked away in the woods along Halls Mill Creek, this small stretch of sand is a place where folks beach the boat, ride jet skis and kick back with friends.

The waterside area, about a mile northwest of where the creek meets Dog River, made headlines the weekend of July 4, when a Mobile man critically injured himself after falling from a tree.

Wade Findley, 32, had intended to jump from the tree into the creek, Mobile police said. A rope swing, which dangles from one tree, is a favorite pastime at Hippie Beach. But Findley slipped while climbing and landed headfirst on the ground, police said.

Findley was taken by helicopter to the University of South Alabama Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition the day of the fall. The hospital declined to release updated information. Attempts to reach family members were unsuccessful.

Greg and Chris Motes, who live close by near the Cypress Shores community, harbor fond memories of afternoons spent on Hippie Beach. Greg, 19, recalls the time he and his girlfriend swam with manatees, the endangered marine mammals that have begun cropping up in Alabama waters. “A family of five came up behind the boat,” Greg said. “(My girlfriend) said, ‘Baby, I want to go swimming.'”

Last week, the brothers rode their four-wheeler though a network of dirt trails behind the beach. To cool off, Greg performed back flips off the rope swing into the creek.

Hippie Beach has long been a haven for local river rats. Faye Haas, who visited the beach with her family last week, said she had been coming since the mid-1970s, back when people called it Hippie Hole. “Because we was hippies, ” she said.

“We used to come and camp out and stay here all weekend,” continued Haas, 52, who soaked up rays while her daughter and granddaughter splashed about in the water. “I remember a couple of friends skinny-dipping.”

A few years ago, Hippie Beach was a well-known party spot for high-school students, said Krys Bolton, visiting last week with her family.

Bolton, 18, spun tales about female mud wrestling and frequent fights. Broken bottles, trash and a burned couch testify to the bedlam she described.

As high school students, Alex Joy and his friends said they partied at Hippie Beach many a night. Last week, they beached their boat and went swimming, if only to reminisce.

Colin Hartery, 18, remembers seeing a shiny brand-new Ford Mustang parked on the beach one night. That was not the case when he returned a week later. “It was burned from top to bottom,” he said.

The parties drew patrons from several area schools, said Joy, 19. The revelry would begin in August, he said, and continue through the school year.

Then the cops caught on. But that didn’t immediately put a stop to the partying, Joy said.

“You could get a few hours in before the cops came,” said Joy, adding that several of his friends got arrested there.

The police drove four-wheelers and SUVs back in the woods to catch those fleeing on foot, Joy said.

Mobile police have made arrests in the area after responding to calls complaining of disorderly conduct and minors in possession of alcohol, said spokesman Officer Eric Gallichant.

Gallichant said police could not specify how many arrests have occurred on Hippie Beach, because the spot does not have an address. He said police consider the beach private property but don’t know who owns it, adding that the beach is largely inaccessible by car.

Source of Pride

It was 1934, and the Depression was in full tilt in Alabama. Roosevelt’s New Deal, enacted just a year earlier, had yet to make itself felt. Amid the desolation there was one great hope for many Alabamians: the Crimson Tide football team.

“It was your source of pride,” said Ben W. McLeod Jr., who at 95 is the Tide’s oldest living former football player. “There was no money then.”

McLeod played on the fabled 1934 national championship team that beat Stanford 29-13 in the Rose Bowl. That squad included names now etched in Crimson Tide lore: Bear Bryant, Don Hutson, Dixie Howell and Riley Smith.

“The state of Alabama didn’t have a whole lot to be proud of back in those days,” said local author Winston Groom, who wrote The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama. “The football team was a great source of interest.”

A three-star athlete at Alabama, McLeod earned eight varsity letters in his time, winning one conference championship in basketball and three in baseball. A retired career Navy man, he lives in Pensacola, in the same house he bought upon arriving there. Tide memorabilia adorns the walls, and scrapbooks teem with old newspaper clippings.

On this recent morning, McLeod, whose wife of more than 60 years died just two years ago, sits in his living room, surrounded by family, including his son Ben W. McLeod III, who played defensive end and nose guard on Alabama’s 1965 national championship team.

As a football player on the 1934 team, McLeod played end behind the famous Hutson-Bryant duo, seeing only eight minutes of action in the Rose Bowl (though he became a starter the next season). Still, he said he walked tall on campus, like all the other football players.

“Yeah, I became a prima donna,” he said. “You better believe it.”

Historians have called the 1926 Rose Bowl – in which Alabama defeated the University of Washington, 20-19 – one of the most important college football games of all time. The game marked the first time a Southern team had ever competed in the Rose Bowl. Prior to that, the game usually pitted a Pacific Coast Conference team with one from the East Coast.

Alabama’s victory in 1926 famously is known for lifting Southern pride, said Wayne Flynt, an Auburn University professor emeritus and Alabama historian. But Flynt said the 1934 win had the same effect.

In 1934, Southerners were still reeling from comments made by U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who a year before had called the region “an untapped market for shoes,” suggesting that most folks below the Mason-Dixon walked around barefoot, according to Flynt.

“It (the Rose Bowl) was yet another way of responding to what Alabama had perceived was a putdown,” he said.

Howell, an All-America halfback and punter who had a brief career with the Washington Redskins, dazzled the 85,000 in attendance that New Year’s Day, catching two passes for touchdowns and completing nine as well.

One of McLeod’s most vivid memories involves the three-day train ride from Tuscaloosa to Pasadena. Along the way, he recalls meeting Johnny Mack Brown, a halfback on the 1926 team who had since become an actor in cowboy films. (Hollywood and college football were the only two U.S. industries that did not decline in the 1930s, Flynt said.)

The team stopped in Texas and Arizona to practice, McLeod said, and stayed in the Pasadena Hotel. “Everything was first class,” he said.

On the return trip home, McLeod and others on the basketball team stopped in New Orleans for a game against Tulane, which was followed days later with a game in Baton Rouge against LSU.

McLeod’s memories of Tuscaloosa in those years evoke a hardscrabble existence. He recalls waiting on tables as a freshman, which was part of his basketball scholarship. McLeod said he lived on $48 the next year.

But McLeod was lucky, compared to many young men of his time, according to Flynt.

“For a whole generation of white kids, football and baseball were two of the most important ways out of poverty,” said Flynt, adding that blacks had no chance of scholarships and held little interest in college sports as a result.

Born in Leaksville, Miss., McLeod and his family moved to the small mountain town of Geraldine, Ala., before he received a scholarship to Alabama.

While at Alabama, McLeod was tapped into Omicron Delta Kappa honor society. After graduating, he coached football at T.R. Miller, spending his summers playing semi-pro baseball in Alabama and North Carolina. As football coach, success did not come immediately. “I had a terrible first season and was almost run out of town,” he said.

But McLeod battled back. The next year T.R. Miller went undefeated, with the defense giving up a mere seven points the entire season. Tide football coach Frank Thomas visited McLeod in Brewton and recommended he pursue college coaching. “He kind of half way put me on a pedestal,” McLeod said.

The next day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and McLeod was soon stationed in Pensacola, where he’s lived ever since.

In the ensuing years, McLeod followed Alabama football closely. Ben III said Bryant would occasionally ask him how his dad was doing. “Bryant never did get close to the ball players, except the quarterbacks,” he said.

Bryant would stop by the house during recruiting trips to Pensacola and pay a visit, according to the elder McLeod. “Listen, there weren’t many people in the world better than Bear Bryant,” he said.

A picture of Hank Crisp – who served as head basketball coach for 19 seasons, not to mention athletic director and line coach under four different Alabama football coaches – still hangs on McLeod’s wall.

“I didn’t let him down,” said McLeod, recalling the time Crisp asked him to start in place of teammate Zeke Kimbrough, who’d suffered a broken cheekbone.

Up until eight years ago, McLeod drove to Tuscaloosa with his wife for home football games. “All I know was that Alabama was good to me,” he said.

(Press-Register, July 2008)

“Revenge”

Originally published in Richmond’s Style Weekly. May 2008.

Last summer Wayne’s granddad gave him a vial of poison. The bottle was small and green and featured a skull and crossbones on the label.

“I think you’re old enough to have it now,” his granddad said. “I stole it off a German at the end of the war. Maybe you can use it one day on one of your enemies.”

“Thanks, granddad. Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he said. “I know you will use it wisely.”

Aside from his Rambo survivor knife, the poison was Wayne’s most cherished possession. He kept it hidden on the top shelf of his chest of drawers, along with his Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card.

Wayne never told anyone about the gift. His grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few months earlier, and Wayne had been told to report any unusual activity.

“If he does anything weird, like complain about spies in the attic, let me know,” his mother said.

Wayne had the chance to use the poison a few weeks later, after his friend Jerry betrayed him. Jerry was one of the most popular kids at school. He was charming, athletic and excelled at Cub Scouts. He was also the first boy in class to put his hand down a girl’s pants.

But Jerry, for all his strengths, was insecure. One afternoon he began telling classmates that Wayne’s mother worshipped Satan.

“She and a bunch of other kooks go to City Park every night and make fires and praise Satan,” he told them. “Then they have sex with each other and do drugs.”

In recent weeks Wayne had begun selling chewing tobacco on the playground. Every Thursday Wayne stole all the chew he could from a drugstore, selling it to his classmates the next day for two bucks a pouch. The new business made Wayne the most popular kid in class. At least until the rumors started.

A kid named Pete finally told Wayne what Jerry had been saying.

“He says she wears a black robe and leads them through chants,” Pete said. “It’s scary stuff. I sometimes get nightmares.”

“Jerry’s a dead man,” Wayne told Pete.

The next week Wayne decided to put several drops of poison in Jerry’s pouch. Wayne sold it to his foe the next morning. Before class, Jerry had a chew on the basketball court. Nothing happened. “Why was it taking so long?” Wayne thought to himself. In the movies they died instantly. Maybe he didn’t use enough.

Jerry lived. He even had another chew that day at recess. Wayne went home that afternoon and tasted the poison. He didn’t die either. He had seen fake poison at the magic shop. This was probably the same stuff. He was pissed at his granddad. He decided to leave the bottle on his granddad’s nightstand. He wanted to humiliate the old fool.

Richmond’s Difficult Legacy

Originally published in The Washington Times – Saturday, May 3, 2008

On April 4, 1865, just two days after Union forces had taken Richmond, President Abraham Lincoln arrived in the Confederate capital with his son Tad. The city’s black residents gave the Great Emancipator a hero’s welcome, while the city’s whites greeted him icily.

Today, a bronze statue of Lincoln and his son sits at the Richmond National Battlefield Park Civil War Visitor Center. The president, who wears a melancholy expression, has his arm wrapped around his 12-year-old boy. Behind him, etched in stone, are the words: “To bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The unveiling of the Lincoln statue in April 2003 marked a turning point in Richmond’s attitude toward the historic conflict. “We in Virginia are glad to claim him as one of our own,” said then-Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine. “Abraham Lincoln is one of us.”

Richmonders, of course, have not always considered Lincoln “one of us.” Any visitor to Richmond recognizes what seems to be the city’s preternatural obsession with its Confederate past. Monument Avenue, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, boasts monuments to four Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

However, a new museum in Richmond is taking on the conflict in a different way. The American Civil War Center, which opened in 2006, approaches the conflict from three perspectives: Union, Confederate and black. The museum offers a more balanced interpretation of the war. “No side offered a monopoly on virtue,” a video tells visitors at the beginning of the exhibit.

James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at Princeton, was one of several historians involved in the planning. Mr. McPherson, whose scholarship has dealt with all three perspectives addressed by the exhibit, says the museum is unique on the national stage. “Most of the other museums that deal with the Civil War have a particular perspective,” he says.

Though the museum opened in 2006, the foundation has been around since 2000. H. Alexander Wise Jr., a former director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, got the ball rolling back in the late ‘70s. Mr. Wise created a national board and enlisted the support of historians from different viewpoints. Those involved collaborated in a “harmonious and creative” manner, Mr. McPherson says.

The center’s founders felt it was important to have the center in Richmond. Also, the center is located on historic ground, atTredegar Iron Works, an iron foundry that was the largest munitions factory for the South during the war. Across the James River is Belle Isle, a former Union prison camp that has become a public park.

At the beginning of the exhibit, visitors have the opportunity to vote on what caused the war. The exhibit concludes with a look at the war’s legacy. Adam Scher, the center’s vice president of operations and interim president, says one of the primary goals is establishing a connection between the war and contemporary life. He adds that the legacy portion of the exhibit strikes the greatest emotional chord.

“We talk about issues that still linger,” he says.

The museum also has worked with several schools in the area as part of an effort to foster civic engagement and explore issues of race and reconciliation.

“Students are our most important audience,” Mr. Scher says, “and in many cases, they have not formulated a perspective about this story. It allows them the opportunity to see the story from different sides.”

Less than 1½ miles away from the American Civil War Center is the Museum of the Confederacy. Founded in 1890, it is one of the oldest museums in the nation, but it has struggled in recent years. Attendance is down, and funding has long been a problem. Not to mention that the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center has practically eaten the museum, making it nearly impossible to locate. Next to the museum stands the White House of the Confederacy, which is open daily for tours.

Waite Rawls, the museum’s president, acknowledges that the museum has suffered an image problem for some time. “There’s a big gap in the reality of what the museum is today and the perception the public has,” he says.

During the 1990s, Mr. Rawls says, the museum began an effort to change its image, offering exhibits on the struggle of blacks for freedom in the South and the role of women in the war.

Mr. Rawls insists that the museum is not in competition with the American Civil War Center. In fact, he says, Richmond as a whole is in competition with other historical cities. However, he thinks his town comes up short when it comes to marketing its historical offerings.

“If you look at Northern cities, particularly modern, progressive cities, they put [historical legacy] at the forefront,” he says, citing Boston, Philadelphia and Washington as examples.

Richmond, Mr. Rawls says, has an advantage in that regard. Cities such as Charlotte, N.C., he says, aren’t so fortunate. Still, Richmond is unique in that its history is sometimes considered an albatross, a fact that is often chalked up to race.

“Twenty-first-century racial politics have used the Civil War as a political football,” Mr. Rawls says. “Blaming that on the Civil War is a peculiarly local phenomenon.”

Nevertheless, the conflict is still a big draw for tourists in the Old Dominion. One out of every 10 visitors goes to some Civil War site, says Richard Lewis of the Virginia Tourism Corp. “There’s so much to see,” he says. “You’d be hard-pressed to do all the Civil War stuff in Virginia in one day.”

There has been a move recently by city officials to pay greater tribute to the role of blacks in the city’s past. Last year, the city unveiled the Slavery Reconciliation Statue in the historic Shockoe Bottom area. Identical statues have been erected in Liverpool, England, and Benin, in West Africa, representing three prominent focal points of the slave trade.

Virginia is planning its Sesquicentennial Commemoration — or 150th anniversary — of the war, beginning in 2011 and running through 2015. That will likely set the tone for Civil War tourism in the former capital of the Confederacy in the 21st century.

“We’re looking at this as an opportunity to improve the way Richmond has been marketed,” says Jeannie Welliver, director of tourism for the city of Richmond.

Old Business

Prostitution is not a new enterprise in the City of Richmond, or anywhere else in Christendom for that matter.

But, according to many Richmonders, more people are practicing the world’s oldest profession in River City than ever before. At the City Council meeting on Sept. 26, a number of people from a civic association in Battery Park , which is located on the citys North Side, testified to the severity of the problem in their district, citing instances of prostitutes “flashing” innocent bystanders, as well as non-camouflaged sexual activity between prostitutes and johns occurring in the clear light of day. The association’s members said they loved Richmond, but they did not love what the non-stop trafficking of sex was doing to their property value, and their children’s worldview.

After listening to the litany of complaints from the residents of Battery Park at the meeting, Councilman Chris A. Hilbert (3rd) vowed to introduce legislation in the near future that would help stem the tide of prostitution in Richmond.

Hilbert had already introduced one initiative to help combat the issue, recently hosting a Town Hall-style meeting with the Richmond Police Department in which local officials and the public discussed ways in which to address the problem. During the meeting, Police Chief Rodney Monroe presented a slide show of prostitutes that had been known to work the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor. One slide featured a transvestite prostitute, whom an audience member knew was camped out at the Red Roof Inn. The police chief made one call, and the prostitute was arrested there minutes later.

This year, the RPD also launched “Johns TV” on the citys public-access station, a controversial program that airs the faces of all those who have been convicted recently of soliciting a prostitute in Richmond.

On Sept. 30, this writer had the opportunity to witness one of the police departments undercover sting operations, which on this day happened to target johns.

From 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., I sat in an unmarked car with an RPD lieutenant in a parking lot across the street from a motel on Chamberlayne Avenue, where a rotating cast of female undercover officers from the RPD posed as prostitutes. The operation began at noon. By the time I joined the lieutenant, the department had already arrested four johns.

“Believe it or not, there is a demand for sex during the day,” the lieutenant told me, tongue-in-cheek. It is well known, even among non-shoppers, that the Chamberlayne Avenue corridor has long been a hotbed of prostitution in the city. Other popular spots include parts of Jefferson Davis Highway, First Street and West Grace Street.

The lieutenant, who shall remain nameless, had been working the prostitution beat for seven years. He said the volume of sex traffic had been relatively constant during that span, although he said there seemed to be a slight upsurge this year, at least on Chamberlayne Avenue.

“They seemed to have all migrated here,” he said.

The undercover officers who may or may not be armed, it’s their choice – were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, standard garb for female prostitutes in the city, the lieutenant said.

“They don’t look like they do on TV here, like they did on that HBO special,” the lieutenant said. “If theyre dressed up, theyre going to be a man, and those only come out at night. And some of the transvestites look rather attractive from a distance.”

Here’s a how a deal would go down during the sting: The johns would drive by and see the undercover pacing up and down the sidewalk, often twitching so as to imitate some kind of drug withdrawal. The john would pull over to the side of the road and talk to the officer, who would dictate the terms of the agreement. The officer would then “make the case,” which means that the john would agree to offer “something of value,” i.e. money or drugs, for some type of sexual activity ($20- $25 for oral sex and $30-$35 for intercourse are the standard rates, the lieutenant said).

The undercover officer would lead the john to the motel room, where two uniformed officers would be waiting to make the arrest. Once the arrest – a Class 1 misdemeanor – had been made, the RPD would issue a summons for the john to appear in court. The lieutenant said they did not have a problem with the johns appearing for their court date. A “SWAT” team was also camped out in the area, in the unlikely event that the operation went haywire.


During the hour that I was with the lieutenant, two arrests were made.
The johns run the gamut of the social order, from blue-collar workers to teachers to doctors and lawyers, the lieutenant said. “I’ve even some johns who were prominent members of a church,” he added. But no pastors. Just some deacons or such.

He said they dont see many johns that are repeat offenders, but he said they do arrest many of the prostitutes multiple times.

The lieutenant estimated that 99 percent of the prostitutes were addicted to some kind of drug crack, cocaine and heroin being the most popular.

Asked where prostitution sat on the department’s priority list, the lieutenant said near the top because prostitution went “hand-in-hand” with violent crime. “There’s more to it than sex,” he said. “Some of the girls rob the johns. And some of the prostitutes have been murdered.”

(Richmond.com, October 2005)