Tag: Alabama

The November Guests

November is not the cruelest month on Mobile Bay; in fact, it may be the best time of year. The weekend before Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I kayaked and fished on the Blakeley River and around the marsh islands of the upper Bay. We’d never had much luck fishing the area in the funkier months of summer, but this time was different. We launched at Hooked Up by the Bay and paddled south on a cool midmorning, moving out past the Causeway and Bayway, mooring for a bit on the marsh islands that were dotted with heron and other waterfowl I could not name. In the distance to the West stood the RSA Tower and the container cranes of the Port that stretched across the skyline like great Mesozoic birds. From her kayak near the marshes Aryn harvested Rangia clams — also known as Cajun or cocktail clams — a muddy-tasting bivalve that never really caught on as a food source here and one that I would not be eating that night. We only had one fishing rod between us that day so we passed it among the kayaks and took turns casting, catching a bounty of redfish and flounder and baby croaker with miniscule live shrimp. And though the fish were not quite legal size — this part of the Bay is a nursery, after all — it was nice to see the Bay so alive with activity after so many bereft outings in the warmer months. When the fish are biting the hours dissolve into liquid and time is of no consequence. So eventually it’s not the clock that brings you in but a gnawing hunger and subsequent visions of Conecuh sausage and gumbo.

The water in the Bay now is clearer than it’s looked in years, the locals say. There’s been a drought this season, and while the water is generally less turbid in the winter months, the pause in dredging since August (to be picked back up this April) has likely contributed to greater water clarity. It’s a great time to be outside. And if fishing is not your thing, I recommend traversing the beaches of Dauphin Island in the early winter mornings and embracing your inner snowbird. Take your dogs to the Audubon Trail on the East End and let them cavort off-leash and swim in the Gulf if you’re alone. Like us they have nothing to lose but their chains. Dauphin Island is, of course, a bird sanctuary, and while the sightings were few during our trip there in late November there are still great opportunities for birding in the winter months. The cover story for this issue looks at the work of coastal biologist Olivia Morpeth with the Alabama Coastal Bird Stewardship Program, and what the organization is doing to preserve aviary habitats that are so critical to nesting, reproduction, and migration.

“These birds play an important role as indicator species for our coastal habitats” Olivia tells writer Sam K. Wilkes in his in-depth piece. “The presence of these birds, or lack thereof, can signal potential health issues in local coastal ecosystems … Monitoring these health factors is not only important for our local wildlife, but also for the people who live here and recreate in these waters.”

Not only are the birds important bellwethers of ecological health, they also drive ecotourism on the island, with some 400 species wending their way through this little spit of land in the spring and fall, making the island a sort of “ATL Delta hub” for our feathered friends. And with that come the visiting birders with their binoculars and a more focused attention on habitat preservation.

Indeed, everyone (fish, fowl, beast, or man) plays a part in our area’s ecological health, so if you’re not yet a member of Mobile Baykeeper, we ask that you consider joining this winter season, and becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

The U.S. Supreme court is damaging our waters

The U.S. Supreme Court appears hell-bent on dismantling what remains of federal environmental protections in this country.   
 
By overturning the Chevron doctrine in its recent rulings — Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Commerce — the 6-3 conservative majority court has all but stripped the EPA of its authority to implement and regulate programs whose statutes are not expressly delineated by Congress, a task that many concede is beyond the capacity of the legislative branch.  
 
The nut of the Chevron issue involves judicial interpretation of ambiguous statutes in the federal code. Prior to its overturning, the Chevron doctrine was cited by lower courts as a way to defer to agency expertise on matters where ambiguous statutes — and the ways in which they are implemented and sometimes regulated — are unclear and beyond the ken of the judiciary. Many of these statutes are made purposefully ambiguous, due to the highly complex and ever-shifting nature of agency operations (just think Medicare) that move at warp speed and often require a swift pivot. 
 
In his opinion, Chief Justice John Robers wrote “the agencies have no special competence.” Under this logic, the expertise of a hydrologist at the EPA carries no significance from a legal standpoint, say, when it comes to the interpretation of an unclear statute under the Clean Water Act. Say what, John? 
 
Last year the Supreme Court stripped most of the nation’s wetlands of protection when it redefined WOTUS (“waters of the United States”) in Sackett v. EPA, arguing that the filling of wetlands requires no permit unless those wetlands are adjacent to a free-flowing waterbody (most aren’t). That decision greatly imperiled the waters of Coastal Alabama. Baldwin County is the seventh-fastest growing county in the U.S., and development continues apace. We’re already seeing an increased loss of wetlands as a result. That leads to increased runoff, which means there is far more mud and raw industrial poison flowing into our waters. 
 
For a democracy to even approximate competence, the principles of federalism must be somewhat intact. Here in Alabama, that often feels like a pipe dream. Many of Alabama’s officials act like they are the second coming of George Wallace, constantly braying the state motto “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” Yet some of these officials, who work at state agencies like the Public Service Commission and the Environmental Management Commission, are little more than shills, forever doing the bidding of corporate behemoths like Alabama Power. Exactly whose rights are they defending? 

Read the rest on al.com.

Point Clear in the ’80s: A Remembrance

Point Clear was a special place in the 1980s. It was a kids’ paradise. It’s where you learned to ski, pop a wheelie, and fight without really hurting your opponent. It is where you learned to operate a Stauter. You wore Jams shorts and carried Throwing Stars in your pocket and you knew for a stone-cold certainty that the Soviets were your enemy. 

I remember the unmistakable scents of honeysuckle and wisteria, Capri-Suns and Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil. The town dripped with atmosphere, and the damp air wrapped around you like a blanket. The live oaks that lined the Bay — writhing, ancient grotesques with arms that twisted and dipped over the boardwalk, nearly touching the sand — we scrambled barefoot over, like spider monkeys crazed on sugar. They are the best trees in the world for climbing and the Bay opened up to the sky with its promise of a never-ending day. 

In those long, amphibious summers we spent as much time in the water as on land. No one would have been surprised if one of us had sprouted fins. On some instinctive level the water represented freedom and a sense of possibility that you did not have in Mobile. Even as kids of six or seven, we understood the significance of what we had. 

The Bay was still the color of chocolate milk along the boardwalk in Point Clear. I don’t remember any talk from the parents about the Bay being unhealthy. Swimming with cuts on your knee — a near constant — was never cause for concern. But I do recall the dads wearing T-shirts that read “Mobile Bay: Together We Can Keep It Alive.” And the Bay was alive. That it could be otherwise was an ominous impossibility, edged far on the periphery, along with the sense that something precious could be lost. 

Hit It 

Learning to ski was a rite of passage that dominated the agenda in the early days of summer. Ski school started early and the moms were the instructors. They ran a tight ship. Every kid had to learn to ski and there was no such thing as a pass. Tubing had not yet entered the picture and though hydro-sliding was popular it was very much on the side stage. When it came to skiing, there was definitely a sense of competition over who could get up first. 

We learned on four-foot, yellow Cypress Garden trainer skis that were fastened together with a rope. One of the moms, the one not on boat duty, was positioned in the water to hold you steady and give you an extra shove. When you gave her the go-ahead she’d yell “hit it” and the driver would floor the Stauter. 

Once you got up on trainers, it was difficult to dart in and out of the wake, and there was not a lot of opportunity for showing off.  You mostly just glided along with your thoughts and waved to idlers on their wharves until your arms got tired and you finally quit. Once we learned on real skis, we were certain it would be a different story. 

Catfish Pond 

Fishing off the wharf was a daily enterprise. For bait we used mussels we’d managed to dig out from beneath the surface of the Bay, cracking them open with a hammer to get to the meat. We fished with brightly colored Zebcos purchased at the mini-mart down the road. Spinning rods and reels were reserved for the dads. We dared not use those and risk getting the lines all tangled and cattywampus, which would have incurred their wrath. 

We mostly caught catfish in those summers. There was a section near the end of the wharf — the wharves were rickety and weathered then and not like the showpieces you see today — which we named Catfish Pond. You would catch one there every time. One night my granddad stepped on one and got an infection in his foot from where it finned him. Naturally, we vowed revenge. From then on any catfish we caught was summarily bludgeoned and used as bait for the crab-traps. Beaver, the family golden retriever, looked on with bemusement. Our methods were wantonly cruel, but it seemed right at the time, convinced as we were of the collective guilt of catfish. 

I don’t recall any redfish being caught. Occasionally one of the kids would snag a speckled trout, and once someone caught a flounder with a grape. The incident bloomed into a folk legend that continues to this day. 

The Bells 

I remember hearing the bells at dawn, heralding a jubilee, something I’d long heard about. A few hours later the Igloos were running over with crabs and flounder. What the hell did we do with all that food, I wonder? The anticipation of the bells was like listening for the sound of reindeer hooves the night before Christmas. 

Keys to the Boardwalk 

When we were not on the water, we were on our bikes. Our turf stretched along the boardwalk from the Grand Hotel all the way to the Punta Clara Kitchen candy-store (where, we were convinced, there lived a witch). I don’t remember ever having to check in except for lunch and dinner. These were not the days of helicopter parents. I don’t think anyone ever got hurt or lost, and the ice-cream man was not someone to be feared. 

The movie Rad had done for kid bike-culture what Karate Kid had done for the martial arts. I rode a candy-red Mongoose, my prized possession. Not the fastest ride on the street but it got the job done. It was decked out with pegs and wheel-spokes the color of Skittles. I rode it proudly, without a helmet of course. 

We rode to the gas station next to the Grand Hotel to buy baseball cards, the coin of the realm back then. At the time a pack of cards (15 cards, 55 cents) came with a stick of pink gum that tasted like cardboard. You traded cards constantly, carefully weighing each negotiation and never entering into a trade without anxiety. There were a few instances of alleged theft, including one involving the then-coveted 1987 Topps rookie card of Andre Thomas, a now-forgotten Braves shortstop. 

May the Best One Win 

It was not all about the kids. The parents had their share of fun, to be sure. And the fun was not always rated PG. At some point in every summer, a group of moms, sporting short hair and the oversized, tinted sunglasses that were fashionable at the time, took part in a competition known as “The Boob Contest.”

This atavistic ritual involved the contestants standing up and performing gyrations while balancing on a black inner tube, Miller Lites and cigarettes in hand, topless as Woodstock in the pagan days of yore. This was not something we kids witnessed, but being kids, we had caught wind of it. Although it may have been hidden from our sight it did take place in the bright light of day under the watchful eye of God. Not sure if there was a single presiding judge or if a committee was appointed, but the winner was awarded a plastic gold trophy of a single, naked boob. 

Adventures in Babysitting 

The teenage baby-sitter was an important personae in this drama. Casting usually involved a girl of 12 or 13 — cheap labor for the parents. The babysitters, for the most part, were generally cool and not strict disciplinarians. They taught us jokes above our reading-level and gave us lessons on gender-bending by way of Boy George’s music. There was one bad apple in the mix, however. He was a guy of about 15 who drank Budweiser longnecks in tandem on the wharf while we slurped Kool-Aid and cannonballed into the water throughout the hot afternoon. We were quite disturbed by his prodigious beer consumption. When we asked him how old he was he just replied “old enough.” He was fired but no charges were pressed. 

The Fry House 

One summer my family stayed at the Fry House. I’ve been told that it served as an ad-hoc hospital for soldiers during the Civil War. It stood on the boardwalk about 13 houses down from the Grand Hotel and at the time it was one of the more decrepit edifices facing the Bay — a planter’s version of the Boo Radley dwelling. There was no air-conditioning that summer. I recall the whir of enormous ceiling fans, endless PB and Js, the flare of heat lightning over the Bay, and a black-and-white television playing Braves games and the videos of George Michael and Crowded House on constant rotation. 

Epilogue 

Summers die, but the memories don’t. I’m grateful for my child- hood summers spent in Point Clear. To this day they come back in the Technicolor of my imagination, clear as the jubilee bells at dawn.

— from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS.

The Crichton Leprechaun Song

I live in Mobile with the leprechaun
I want the gold from the green jolly mon
I shine my light but I can’t see enough
Some say he’s a crackhead who got the wrong stuff

Gonna take my backhoe gonna root up his tree
Leprechaun make a shadow when the people try to see
People draw the leprechaun make him look like a fool
Leprechaun gonna teach them the golden rule

Everybody see the leprechaun
Everybody see the lеprechaun
Everybody see the lеprechaun

Say yeah
Say yeah

Leprechaun he don’t live anymore around here
City chopped down his tree and the cops took his beer
I miss the leprechaun and it makes me feel cold
Due to the inflation we all need the gold

Everybody miss the leprechaun …..

(Word and music/ Caine O’Rear)

Randy Owen, Quincy’s Steakhouse, and the Shirt That Got Away

Fort Payne, Alabama, the “Sock Capital Of The World,” is also the home of the country music group Alabama. Randy Owen, Jeff Cook and Ted Gentry, the band’s founders, all grew up in and around this little mountain town in northeastern Alabama, in the years following World War II.

After many a wild sock-hop, Randy and the boys enjoyed nights of ecstasy with their lovers while parked in cars, down in the holler under the glow of the mountain moonlight.

Indeed, these were days of plenty in Fort Payne, and the boys had a little jingle in their pocket. The Buster Brown Mill No. 2 was running strong and the town was reaping the benefits of having invented the Argyle Sock – a weave that legions of Southern grandmothers still give as gifts every Yuletide season.

Not content to spend their days working forty-hour weeks in the sock mills, Randy and the boys started a country band, notching their first hit in 1980 with “My Home’s In Alabama.” The rest is history, as they say. The boys went on to become one of the most successful recording groups of all time, selling more than 75 million records.

I first met Randy in the spring of 1993. It was during my school’s 8th Grade Alabama History Trip. When the bus pulled off the interstate in Fort Payne, the teachers gave the students the option of eating at McDonald’s, Hardees, or Quincy’s, the former home of the “big, fat yeast roll.” I chose Quincy’s, along with a few other eccentrics. We met Randy in the buffet line. He graciously signed our napkins and posed for a picture, which ended up in the school yearbook.

Five years and a galaxy of pimples later, I found myself standing in that very same parking lot. I was working as a camp counselor on Lookout Mountain and had been granted leave that evening, so I drove into nearby Fort Payne for a quick bite. After finishing my meal, I went outside and started walking toward the Dairy Queen when I noticed a large flyer that had been stapled haphazardly to a telephone pole. The flyer featured the picture of Alabama you see above. Below it was written: FOR SALE! SHIRT WORN BY RANDY OWEN ON BACK OF FEELS SO RIGHT ALBUM COVER. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY!

I never made that call, friends, and I’ve regretted it to this very day. Live and learn.

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)