Tag: Winston Groom

The Bodhisattva of the Bay

The mullet are jumping this summer morning in August. It has not rained in days and the water looks relatively clear, almost green in the early sunlight. I am sitting on a bench under a live oak overlooking Mobile Bay with Jimbo Meador, in front of his house in Point Clear, not far from the hotel. We are drinking coffee and the way these mullet are jumping it’s clear they’ve been drinking it too.

This is the house where Jimbo has lived most of his adult life with his wife, Lynn, and where he raised his two children, Bo and Carolyn. Prior to that it was the house of his wife’s parents. Built in the 1850s, it typifies other coastal cottages of that time period along the Bay with its long galleries and low-form broad roofs which were designed to enhance ventilation in the long, hot summers. It reminds me of another antebellum house along the boardwalk, where I lived one July without air-conditioning at the age of eight, a time punctuated by the sound of a rickety ceiling fan and a black-and-white television tuned constantly to the videos of MTV.

From the bench to the right stands Jimbo’s wharf, where he has cast his fly rod and bait net over the decades and stood sentinel over one of his greatest loves: the Bay. He has seen it change greatly over time. He remembers the days when the water was always clear and seagrass covered its bottoms and gigging flounder with a spear was a daily pastime.

I don’t think there’s anyone who personifies Mobile Bay more than Jimbo. Like those people who seem to blend into the land from which they come and take on its colors and topographical features, Jimbo almost seems to be a natural extension of the water, as much so as a blue heron that melts into the marshes and muddy bottoms of the Delta.

Save for a stint working for Beretta gun company, every job Jimbo’s held has been water-related: shrimping, tug-boat captain, a designer of fishing kayaks, seafood distributor, eco-tour guide in the Delta, the list goes on. 

For some time this certified Master Naturalist has been a sort of spiritual godfather to Mobile Baykeeper, having in recent years developed a keen friendship with our director William Strickland. Jimbo knows the watershed as well as anyone and his memories and knowledge of the Bay and Delta are crucial to draw from as we work to build a better future for our waters.

An icon in the world of fly fishing, Jimbo defies any clichés associated with the “sportsman” or “outdoors-type.” He is a true Southern eccentric: a storyteller and natural-born humorist with a deep interest in Eastern spiritual practices. He has counted among his friends such luminaries as Jimmy Buffett, Guy de la Valdène, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison.

Winston Groom dedicated the book Forrest Gump to Jimbo, and it seems Groom’s hero shares more than a few characteristics with our interview subject. Jimbo’s voice was somewhat famously the model for Tom Hanks in the film version of the book. And the fact that we’re sitting here, chatting on a bench under an oak tree hung with Spanish moss is, well, a little uncanny.

As the morning unwinds our talk drifts over a continent of subjects, almost all having to do with the water. What shines through in hearing Jimbo’s tales is his deep sense of spirituality, and the life-affirming quality of his time spent in harmony with our natural world. Our talk only scratches the surface, but there is plenty more where this came from. This fall will see the publication of his long-awaited book, Short Stories From a Life Well-Lived: Stories by & about Jimbo Meador. It can be pre-ordered at JimboMeador.com, and is sure to be a must-read for any lover of the water. 

Until then, we’ll let Jimbo talk.

Early lessons
I was into nature probably more than anybody my age. I had a trapline and I wanted to be a mountain man. I sold furs. I took a correspondence course in taxidermy when I was about ten. I found a mail-order catalogue and I ordered everything I could find about trapping and the outdoors. I was just always fascinated with it. I’ve been blessed with all of that. In fact, the Bible tells us to take care of this—that God created this for us and we should take care of it.

Master naturalist
I took tours up in the Delta for a good while. One time I pulled up in a little bayou, and the lotuses were blooming. I had some women in the boat. We pulled in there and one woman stood up and she said, “There is a God.” I’d take those tours and show people all the vegetation and talk to them about it. I’d show them the invasive species and say, “You know what the worst invasive species is?” And they’d say, “What?” I’d say, “Us.”

The vegetation up there in the Delta is really important. It holds the land, you know. It also supplies a lot of life. People don’t realize how much life there is under the water that they don’t see. I once had some nets made, and I’d take kids up there and let them scoop down in the water and show them all this stuff. I had these little plastic goldfish bowls and we would see all the life that was in there in just one scoop.

And those little bowls I had, I’d let them keep them and watch the stuff and then release it. It said “Catch and Release” on the thing. I’ve forgotten where I got those things. But yeah, kids loved it. And their parents did, too. Parents enjoy seeing their kids enjoy it. But yeah, it’s a pretty unique place.

But this whole Bay—I mean, see how it’s brown? We once had seagrasses all in here. And the seagrass is a habitat for all marine life—crabs and shrimp and all kinds of fish. So we’ve destroyed a whole habitat with muddy water. For example, if I tell people, “If you put a tarpaulin over your grass, without photosynthesis, how’s it going to live?” Well, the Bay’s the same way. Muddy water is a tarpaulin, and as long as the water’s muddy we can’t have vegetation. So it’s like putting a tarpaulin over your garden, you know. You’re not gonna produce much.

Read the rest from CURRENTS (Fall 2026) here. Photo by Courtney Mason.

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)