By Hardy Jackson
Alabama Rural Electric Association, 2023
Paper, $21.95
Reviewed by Bill Plott
There was a time when local columnists were fixtures at Alabama’s weekly newspapers. One of the best was Earl Tucker, editor of The Thomasville Times and father of the beloved Katherine Tucker Windham. Skillet Bird filled that slot on The Shelby County Reporter for many years. Shrinking print media, even in local weeklies, has likely taken a toll on that tradition.
However, a version of it survived in Alabama Living Magazine, thanks to editor Lenore Vickrey’s having heard Jackson speak at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. She persuaded him to begin the column, this book being a collection of them. Jackson, who retired from Jacksonville State University as professor and eminent scholar in history, is a native of Clarke County and the author or co-editor of 15 books.
Local columnists were often humorous, sometimes dedicated to sharing local history, but almost always observant of the human condition. All of those traits were presented in a folksy, down-home style, and all of them are embraced by Jackson in this slender little book.
In a wide-ranging collection of essays, he touches on the South and what makes us Southerners. Also, what has changed us as Southerners with the No. 1 likely being the development of air conditioning. He recalls when the first commercial AC units were cooling theaters. Then, store windows announced they had air conditioning to pull in customers from the streets.
In a look at coastal storms and electrical power, he observes: “…until you have been without power for a few days, it is…hard to imagine how you ever lived without it.”
On the power of B-Western movies with their white-hatted and black-hatted characters in Saturday matinees he writes: “It might be overstating things, but I think [kids] learned as much about right and wrong from those afternoons as they did from the teachers who schooled them during the week.”
On firecrackers, he knows that every fearful mother “knew of” someone who had been horribly maimed by the noisy things, and there was the ever-present legend of a boys’ bathroom toilet being demolished by the powerful cherry bomb.
And there’s more. We read of hitchhiking, regifting ugly neckties, good dogs, the 4th of July, and other topics.
Some of these pieces are humorous, some are sad, some are a mixture of both, but all are readable. To really enjoy them, it is best to space them over several days. Read a chapter of that mystery novel, then join in a couple of Hardy’s walks down memory lane.
Not to be overlooked are the wonderful illustrations by Dennis Auth. With a style reminiscent of the great illustrators in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other 20th-century magazines, Auth enhances the warmth and charm of this book.
Bill Plott is a retired journalist and author of several books including The Negro Southern League, A Baseball History, 1920-1951 (McFarland, 2015) and Black Baseball’s Last Team Standing, The Birmingham Black Barons, 1919-1962 (McFarland, 2019).
