In that movie, there’s a scene where the Italian director of “the worst movie of all time” remarks that it doesn’t matter whether your movie is bad or good — it just matters that your movie has an impact. And by shocking millions of people with its low quality, his movie hit the mark in that regard.

That’s the framework with which I was thinking about the performing arts scene in Montgomery. Who is to say what is “good?” A lot of people don’t much care for Shakespeare. They’d rather pay money to go see a play about Bear Bryant or one written by an introverted pervert.

Still, it’s interesting to poke at the idea of aesthetic judgment without going full scale Harold Bloom, bemoaning the death of the Western Canon™. Let’s take then the evolution of our city’s crown jewel of the performing arts, the Alabama Shakespeare festival. In their first season in Montgomery (1985-1986), this was their lineup of plays offered to the public:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare
• The Merry Wives of Windsor – Shakespeare
• Richard III – Shakespeare
• Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
• Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
• A Flea in Her Ear – Georges Feydeau
• School for Scandal – British play from late 1700s, Richard B. Sheridan
• The Octagon: The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams
• The Imaginary Heir
• Betrayal – Harold Pinter

There were 10 plays, three of them by Shakespeare. The other playwrights being offered? All luminaries: Arthur Miller (Pulitzer winner), George Bernard Shaw (Nobel winner), Tennessee Williams (Pulitzer winner), and Harold Pinter (Nobel winner).

Now let’s look at the 2011-2012 lineup:

• Dracula – Oct 7 – 30, 2011 – Adapted by Willian McNulty; Originally dramatized by John L. Balderson and Hamilton Deane from Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• A Christmas Memory - Nov 25 – Dec 24, 2011 – Book by Duane Poole, Music by Larry Grossman, Lyrics by Carol Hall; Based on the short story by Truman Capote.
• In The Book Of ... – Jan 5 – 22, 2012 – “In John Walch’s powerful reimagining of The Book of Ruth, an Army lieutenant, and her Afghani interpreter settle in Mississippi, where they are targeted by a rampaging politician. Family, friendship, and the American Way are tested in this often funny, touching, and unforgettable story.”
• The 39 Steps – Jan 27 – Feb 7; April 22 – May 19, 2012 – Adapted by Patrick Barlow from the novel by John Buchan, from the 1935 movie by Alfred Hitchcock and an original concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon
• Travels With My Aunt – Feb 3 – 7; April 22 – May 19, 2012 – Adapted by Giles Havergal, based on Graham Greene’s novel.
• Merry Wives of Windsor – April 13 – May 18, 2012
• Henry VII – April 19 – May 20, 2012
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream – April 21 & 29; May 4, 12 & 20, 2012
• NANTA Cooking Show – July 11 – 15, 2012 (“The Iron Chef Meets Stomp!”)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee – Aug 10 – Sept 2, 2012 – Book by Rachel Sheinkin, music and lyrics by William Finn, conceived by Rebecca Feldman.

That’s 10 plays, and three Shakespeare. When making the comparison between this year’s ASF offerings and that initial season (the first after ASF came to Montgomery from Anniston, where it ran from 1972-1984), it’s easy to see that there are the same number of Shakespeare plays. Two of the Shakespeare offings are the same this year as that first year, replacing Richard with Henry.

You go, girlfriends!

But the plays are just not the same. The picture of Merry Wives makes this year’s offering look like Merry Housewives of Windsor County. And it’s undeniable that the theater’s offerings in recent years have been more towards more, um, populist fare like Menopause: The Musical and Peter Pan and Bear Bryant and Elvis.

Last year there were only two Shakespeare plays: Much Ado About Nothing and Julius Caesar. And one might guess that this is simply an economic reality of running a theater company in a world of 200-plus cable channels, the Internet, and degraded public tastes. If Beavis and Butthead: The Musical is going to put fannies in seats, who are we to decry the coarsening of taste? Don’t the ASF impresarios know more about what people will pay to see than us?

A few more facts: ASF began in Anniston in 1972 as a professional regional theater company. It has been located in Montgomery since 1985 when it moved from Anniston as a result of Mr. and Mrs. Winton M. Blount’s gift of a performing arts complex. ASF operated through the University of Alabama from 1993-2008 and hosted a highly-regarded MFA program there, starting in 1985.

This program was considered one of the most desirable offerings in the nation for aspiring actors. Elite level talent sought to perform at ASF as a result of the prestige and the ability to use the degree as a springboard to bigger opportunities. Getting a serious run of Othello on your resume was a major credential for actors looking to jump to the most exclusive acting circles.

Unfortunately, while ASF touts 2007-08 as “a landmark season at ASF,” the reality was a bit more mixed. While the holiday production of Peter Pan became the best-selling production in ASF history, the ASF ended its relationship with the University of Alabama in 2008 amid a series of clashing egos and priorities. But the marketing wins for Montgomery’s jewel of a theater is undeniable: Peter Pan is closely followed by Menopause the Musical and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as the top three most successful shows – all having been produced within recent years at ASF.

We’ve heard that ASF is contractually required to produce at least two or three Shakespeare plays every season, allowing them to keep the Bard’s name on their masthead. But it’s clear that the public wants Disney-themed fare, quality productions for families with short attention spans and pre-approved, market-tested, focus grouped winners. Who around here has ever heard of George Bernard Shaw or Harold Pinter anyway?

To be fair, this year’s offerings do include the names of Bram Stoker, Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock, and Graham Greene. All of those artists are favorites of ours, and well-skilled. But they also didn’t really write plays, meaning that the performances are adaptations of their works, leaving a lot of wiggle room for either genius or mediocrity. A musical comedy based on Thelma and Louise might advertise by including a name we like (“based on the movie by Ridley Scott!”), but it’s not the same thing as actually producing and staging a play by Eugene O’Neill.

Again, there’s no denying that audiences are into the new direction. By definition, more popular, less challenging fare is, well, more popular. ASF audiences have increased from 117,965 in 2004-05 to 164,335 in 2006-07. Unclear about the current stats.

And we’ll certainly go see some of the new stuff in 2012. We certainly will see the Shakespeare and may give some of the other stuff a try (probably not the Afghan war one based on a book of the Bible). But the idea that we missed the chance to live in a town that was regularly producing plays by edgy, legendary playwrights is a bit of a bummer.

This isn’t about nostalgia. We aren’t interested in seeing the plays of a Harold Pinter or a Vaclav Havel simply because they are decades old. It simply cannot be argued that Tennessee Williams is yesterday’s version of Twilight: The Musical. The latter may well sell more tickets than the former, but that’s simply a sad fact leading inexorably to Cam Newton: The Musical. A gem like the ASF should not be debased by the ever-descending tastes of popular whimsy.

We realize that the battle between art and commerce is nothing new. With the economy collapsing, people aren’t going to pay $30 a pop to go see academic fare about people Coming to Terms With Things. They want to see musicals, vampires, and Captain Hook swordfights with Spider-Man hung from a harness while riding the Lion King. And tickets must be sold to keep the lights on. We get it.

Over the holidays, we’ve been reading Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. He conjures a world where the self-medicating seek frivolity and distraction. It’s a place where love of servitude is made possible when confrontation and non-conformity are obliterated by consumption of art that is touching and heart-warming and musical. When confronted for the first time with that dystopia, Huxley’s character John (the Savage) speaks rapturously of “the Brave New World.”

The origin of that phrase being quoted by John? “The Tempest” by some guy named William Shakespeare.

This is intellectually slippery territory. It’s hard to find your footing when every move in this high/low culture fight has been mined with various politically charged explosives. To be clear: we’re not saying Julius Ceasar has to be staged in togas every time. We haven’t even seen many of the plays we’re talking about. And we’re not trying to pick a fight with ASF, which we love and revere.

But we do want to start a conversation about art in our city, and we don’t have a lot of places to do that – Grandma Advertiser certainly isn’t keeping a theater critic on staff, not that the newspaper’s comment pages are the best forum for talking art (or anything, for that matter).

As Michael Chabon rightly says, there’s nothing wrong with entertainment as the purpose of art. Homer tried to entertain his audiences, and it’s been the same even through dreadful Victorian novels and empty experimental French cinema. But artists also push at the bounds of what’s comprehensible, thereby expanding the bounds of what’s possible. We don’t need Shakespeare to help us see more, differently and better, but it’s irresponsible and dangerous to think that Disney and musical tributes to Buddy Holly serve the same purposes.

A great city can’t exist without great art, and even a pretty good city’s residents deserve art that encourages them to dream in something other than Technicolor.

We’ve posted here a few times about learning from other cities, including a recent trip to Minneapolis  – this time, a few things we learned traveling and one thing we learned from our destination city.

First, the road trip itself. We took the dog, which presents a whole set of challenges. She loves to go, but taking her means stopping more frequently, not totally blasting your music all the time and generally being more humane about the road trip experience than you might be if it were just you humans in the car. The advent of spacephones greatly helped with our dog travel experience. We used our phones to find dog parks on the way. It turns out that when you enter Oklahoma going east, the rest stop has free coffee, palatial marble restrooms and a fenced in dog park. Just across the freeway, evacuees are rewarded with the opportunity to stroll through the set of The Road and pee in a metal hole. The Internets also helped us to find hotels that would allow the dog to stay with us by laying them out on a map near our current location, even if we were in Van Buren, Arkansas.

Mapping in general is kind of awesome; having the mobile Internets allowed us to find cool place to eat so we were able to avoid chain restaurants (sure, we hit a Taco Bell one time, we’re only human, but it was in Moriarty – surely that counts a little toward our indie cred?). On the way there, we ate at the Sawmill Cafe in Arkansas – not through the Internet, just because it was the only non-chain at our stop and we were starving. Plus, we dimly remembered that we’d eaten there before and that they sold comics in their weird little gift shop (Jesus! Slightly crinkled James Patterson thrillers!). The buffet is pretty good, but also a bit overpriced – you’re lucky to get out of there for less than $30 for the two of you.

On the way back, we used mapping to find vegetarian food in Amarillo and Memphis, cities that are both nationally-known temples of animal slaughter meat culture. Our alternative to Amarillo’s 72 ounce steaks was vegetarian chili and a bagel pizza at The 806, where a display case of local art featured necklaces made of human bones ($50). It was cool to see part of Amarillo that we’d never seen before, an otherwise awful-seeming city looking like it has a scene after all. Much the way some people probably feel when they come to El Rey. It made us reflect on the way sometimes creative types end up retrenching in their own little areas of town. We are all challenged to take over our cities, not just hide out in enclaves. Truly great cities are big, sprawling canvases extending beyond a small neighborhood.

In Memphis, we ate at a vegan restaurant so good its own review is forthcoming – Imagine. It was in the Cooper-Young district of Memphis, the kind of neighborhood you drive through and know you’d love to live in. Next door at Goner Records, we bought an album by super weird Memphis music scene icon Tav Falco, then walked to get coffee at Java Cabana. It was advertised as the best coffee in Memphis. We concur, even though it’s also the only coffee we’ve ever had in Memphis.

One cool thing about Cooper-Young is that they publish a surprisingly large and well made neighborhood newspaper, the Lamplighter, every month. This is how we learned that two Memphis neighborhoods competed against each other last year in a contest to see which neighborhood could reduce their energy use the most – The Smallest User. Check out the website here, and there’s also a blog. I think this is the kind of thing that would be able to get our neighborhoods interested in a little friendly competition. Anyone game?

Our destination, Albuquerque, was warmer than usual despite the Great Storm. This allowed us ample opportunity to sample the Duke City’s ample off-leash dog parks. We know that Montgomery is going to (knock on wood) open its first of these in 2012 over at Blount, but may we humbly suggest that the Capitol of Dreams look west for some inspiration as it expands opportunities for dog recreation? Albuquerque’s approach is to use odd plots of land – the place right up against the freeway where nobody wants to live or own a business, the odd-shaped triangle behind baseball fields – and convert them into low-maintenance dog parks. Several are covered in mulch, rather than grass, so they don’t need a lot of mowing.

All in all, blogging has been light in the last piece of 2011. Look for more to come in 2012. Thanks for staying with us and thanks for reading. Happy New Year!

I'm gonna' break. I'm gonna' break this. I'm gonna' break this rusty cage and run.

Comes now that most sacred time of year, when the City of Montgomery erects a shrine to Baby Jesus, and hides it behind chicken wire so the thieves don’t make off with the plaster cherub. And lo, all who look upon it may gaze with wonder that this beautiful moment in human mythology history is represented today as a city’s rural municipal downtown tribute to humble origins, an infant savior, and a fear of vandalism. Let no knee remain unbowed to this annual monument to tasteful beauty.

We started with Jubilee, because nothing says “Happy Birthday” like an amazing piece of fish served with overpriced rice pilaf. Closed. Then we thought: Michael’s Table! We’ve still never been, but this might be just the right time! Closed. The Olive Room, for spy-movie ambiance and martinis? Nope. The Chophouse, where we’ve been meaning to go when we get rich someday? No. Sure, Roux is open on Mondays in our part of town, but at what cost? We decided to look further afield.

We considered Garrett’s, which is basically in Shorter but has amazingly delicious flash fried oysters. Closed. The last time we had a nice dinner with our loved one, we went to Ham and High – enough to convince us we weren’t going back there, plus it’s at (shudder) Hampstead – nevertheless, the home of Montgomery’s worst fried green tomatoes was closed.

What were we left with? Capitol Oyster Bar is closed on Monday, and although the dining is fine there, it’s not exactly fine dining. There’s always El Rey, but we eat there so often with our loved ones that we feared it wouldn’t have the super special birthday feel we were hoping for – though we knew they would do us proud, we wanted to tablecloth it up and use cloth napkins (instead of the otherwise perfectly serviceable roll of paper towels at the table).

Then it came to us – the City Grill. It’s way out in the Hellscape, and we’d seen it before when we visited the simply atrocious East China years ago (our stomachs may still be recovering – if you haven’t been, spare yourself). A call confirmed our reservation, and we had a plan.

City Grill doesn’t have a website. They have a Facebook page where updated menus and announcements are posted, and it’s easy to find their contact info all over the Internets. We rolled in for a fairly early dinner and immediately found the place to be warm and inviting. The wine list was affordable and unpretentious, the bread was good, and even though we were sitting in a booth we found that the place met our tablecloth-y needs. Two of us got fish, and one got some mussels and their grilled Greek cheese salad. The latter had been highly recommended by a bunch of people on Yelp, which should have been taken as a warning rather than advice, given that the damaged online mob was basically the same group of food idiots who got us to East China in the first place via the Advertiser’s “Best of Montgomery” supplement. The fish was good. The salad was slippery, oily and weirdly sweet. But the fish sure was good, and the mussels were also delicious, like the dessert (creme brulee) we shared afterward. City Grill’s a find, for sure.

Unfortunately, we had to drive all the way across town to get there. What is the deal with the Monday night conspiracy, Montgomery?

We understand that many places are open on Saturdays and want to have a two day weekend for staff. But this doesn’t seem to bother restaurants in other cities. You just rotate staff. That seems like a reasonable solution. Or maybe some people want to work 7 days a week. Kind of like people enjoy eating 7 days a week.

Isn’t this a gaping hole in the market? Won’t some enterprising restaurant owner step up and say, “People of Montgomery! Feast at my table for a reasonable cost on a Monday night!”

“Perhaps the best way of encapsulating the gist of an epoch is to focus not on the explicit features that define its social and ideological edifices, but on the disavowed ghosts that haunt it, dwelling in a mysterious region of nonexistent entities which nonetheless persist, continuing to exert their efficacy.” – Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute

It’s difficult to write obituaries of people like Jesse Helms or Mayor Joe Smitherman of Selma. You’re talking about men who ended up on the wrong side of history. You’re talking about people who, whether their crimes were legal or moral (or both), or even forgivable, still leave this world with families that care about them. And even the most objectionable of that bad lot, say, Richard Nixon or George Wallace, still were, beneath the accumulated iconography, men who went into public service with an idea of improving their communities and working on behalf of those they saw as their constituencies.

This has always been true for the humble writer of the villain’s obituary, juggling historical perspective, balancing the good deeds with various atrocities, writing with an honest voice without seeming to be ghoulishly dancing on the graves of the recently deceased. That’s why some batch of scribes is going to soon have to parse through the reprehensible career of a highly-respected war criminal like Henry Kissinger. To have any ethics at all, we’ve got to make judgments about these fallible (and usually proud) humans.

This is especially dicey when you’re dealing with people who were famous back before social attitudes underwent some kind of massive transformation. There can be all sorts of quibbles with understanding someone’s life “within the proper context.”

Allen Tullos, in his book Alabama Getaway, writes about the ghost of George Wallace, making extended reference to the brilliant work of the Drive-By Truckers. Tullos writes about the Truckers’ song, “Wallace,” which posits that even if Wallace’s vile racism wasn’t genuine, pandering to evil in order to get votes is still sufficient to earn a person eternal damnation.

“Concerning Emory Folmar, the mayor of Montgomery, there is no middle ground. To a substantial majority of Montgomerians, he is the greatest thing ever to happen to their city. He attracts from them a Wallace-like loyalty. Then there is the vocal minority who see Emory Folmar as a power-hungry racist who would turn Montgomery into a veritable police state.” — Alabama Magazine, December 1980

Emory Folmar was a heavily decorated Korean War vet. He was a millionaire who made his fortune in construction. He built shopping centers. And he was mayor of Montgomery from 1977 until 1999.

He was a legendary hard worker. He was also no friend to free thinkers, nor to Montgomery’s African-American community. He was a constant nemesis of the city’s black leaders, notably Joe Reed, who was then on the city council, and was (and is still) the head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the black wing of the state’s Democratic party.

Media accounts of Folmar’s tenure as mayor have mostly focused on his gruff personality and his incredible work ethic. He was a stickler for details and would often accompany city employees on their most routine tasks. And certainly there’s a double edge to the idea that he’d ride along with garbage crews, making sure they were picking up trash properly. On the one hand, he wanted the citizens of Montgomery to be receiving top-tier service from their tax dollars. On the other hand, there’s a certain point where “salt of the Earth” becomes Helicopter Boss.

Folmar and Race

It was 1982. No sitting president had been to Montgomery since Jefferson Davis. But Folmar was a Republican back before that was Alabama’s dominant political orthodoxy. So when Folmar backed Reagan in 1980, the Gipper repaid the favor by coming to Alabama and addressing the sitting Alabama Legislature. Rep. Alvin Holmes, who still represents Montgomery at the Statehouse, walked out of Reagan’s speech. The event seems like a microcosm of where Montgomery was in terms of racial harmony.

Still, Folmar valued law and order more than he valued white supremacy. The Mayor was on the scene in 1979 to order the arrest of nearly 200 Klansmen as they marched from Selma into the city limits without a permit. News reports from the time highlight the fact that the mayor, sporting his pistol, stood alongside the police in their riot gear.

Nonetheless, the city under Folmar remained extremely racially polarized, as noted by some electoral reporting in the Times Daily on Oct. 12, 1983:

“Supported by an organization of more than 3,000 campaign workers, Mayor Emory Folmar trounced challenger Franklin James Tuesday in an election that revealed a clear division between white and black voters.”

Folmar won that election by a count of 32,734 to 23,149 (58 percent to 41 percent), but it was a high-profile battle. Nearly 50 percent of the registered voters in the city voted.

Montgomery was then 40 percent black, but, according to the article, Folmar barely campaigned in the city’s black districts. Still, he somehow got 20 percent of the city’s black vote. The Times Daily article waits to the end to explicitly state the subtext of the campaign:

“While Folmar denied he was making an issue of race, his campaign literature and his radio ads repeatedly asserted that James would allow “radicals” to run the city. Those “radical forces” he named – city councilmen Donald Watkins and Joe Reed and state Rep. Alvin Holmes – are black.”

And it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was under Folmar that Montgomery experienced the notorious “Todd Road Incident.” An excellent 30-minute documentary about the incident can be seen here, but this racially-charged tragedy will forever be linked to Folmar, not just the officers in question. Folmar and the city went to court to try to force the officers to submit to questioning about the incident. Folmar ultimately fired the officers, but the city was torn apart by the fallout from the incident.

Development of the City

Folmar was defeated in 1999 by a prison guard-turned-lawyer named Bobby Bright. Bright and current mayor Todd Strange spent years of their terms (and millions of tax dollars) repairing downtown Montgomery. During the 1980s, the whole center of the city became a bombed out and abandoned wellspring of fear. Sure, some of that was caused by white flight and sprawl, factors too large to be caused by a single mayor. Yet, the focused efforts of Bright and Strange (which we admire and mostly support) demonstrate that concentrated leadership in the area of urban development can make a difference. When we moved to Montgomery, there was a near total consensus that downtown was just emerging from a time in which it was a decimated wasteland. Even if some of the credit for Riverwalk redevelopment goes to Folmar (as Mayor Strange said during some of the memorializing), it must also be true that Folmar could have stopped some of the creeping blight before it reached the tragic levels that it did.

One would think that a person from the construction industry would have seen and corrected the ongoing and worsening disrepair of Garrett Coliseum. One would think that someone who made a fortune building shopping malls would have been more attuned to the withering and death of the Montgomery Mall, which remains an abandoned eyesore at the southern entrance to the city.

Like Zizek says in the epigraph to this piece, Folmar (with his focus on the east side of the city) still haunts downtown’s boarded up buildings and the undeniably heart-breaking impoverishment of the city’s west side.

The First Republican

It is a now-familiar thesis in political science circles that George Wallace made people like Newt Gingrich possible. Although a Democrat, Wallace carved out a template for a brand of populism that Republicans used to engineer their 1994 rise to national power. Among the hallmarks of this political mode of being: a resentful contempt for softness, a chest-thumping support for a militant foreign policy, and a toxic distrust of elites, intellectuals, and “special interest” minorities.

Long before dimwits like Ann Coulter showed up on the public radar, Folmar was quoted saying things like:

“You turned the media people loose on me, saying that I had a Reagan-Bush sticker on my car as though it was a city car. I own that car. I furnish my own gas, my own tires … I can do with it what I damn please. I want to let you know that this was the beginning of a long war against what I consider liberals. And anytime one of you liberals gets in my sights, I’m going for the kill and I’m taking no prisoners. You liberal do-gooders have damn near destroyed this country and here is one who is going to do all he’s big enough to do to make damn sure you don’t get your hands on the throttle again. That’s what I told her … No, this war’s not ever going to be over.”

We already noted his stumping for Reagan, and it’s hard for young people to remember what the nation’s climate involved at that time: Afghanistan, ICBMs and the missile gap, AIDS, the explosion of crack cocaine, fear of the Japanese economy, Iran-Contra, the savings and loan crisis, and dozens of other issues that don’t make much sense to contemporary ahistorical minds.

Most Republicans in this era were exceptions to the political rule. Alabama, while conservative, was still part of the “solid South.” Democrats didn’t lose control of the Legislature until 2010. Republicans back then were simply ahead of their time, and it took a while for the national partisan trends to catch up to the groundwork plowed by men like Folmar.

As a Republican, Folmar ran against George Wallace in the gubernatorial campaign of 1982. Wallace had done his whole “repent and apologize” routine for the racist unpleasantness of previous decades and also was operating on some sympathy because a would-be assassin had put him in a wheelchair. In his indispensable book, Black in Selma, a legendary civil rights lawyer tells this interesting story about the Wallace-Folmar campaign:

When he beat MacMillan (in the primary), Wallace came seeking (the Alabama Democratic Conference’s) endorsement in the general election against Emory Folmar, the Republican mayor of Montgomery. Joe Louis Reed, the chairman of ADC, usually called the shots on the state and national endorsements, but this was one decision he didn’t want to make by himself. Joe called about twenty ADC leaders from around the state to come to Montgomery to meet with Wallace the next day in the boardroom of the Alabama Education Association, the state teachers’ union where Joe works. We were all sitting around the big conference table when Wallace — smoking a big cigar — came in with a black man pushing his wheelchair.

He started talking his usual stuff about how he was a populist. He and his family had been dirt poor. He’d built trade schools, raised teachers’ salaries. Emory Folmar was nothing but a damn “Republican chief of police” running around looking for some black heads to whip. He said he wanted us to make a statement endorsing him. He thought it would make a difference.

Somebody said they didn’t think the race would even be close. There weren’t that many Republicans in the state of Alabama except when electing a president.

“In all my years in politics, I’ve never taken a race for granted,” Wallace responded.

Wallace was correct that we weren’t going to ask black people to vote for Emory Folmar, who was so right-wing, some folk in Montgomery called him the mayoratollah. He liked to strap on a pistol and ride to the scenes of crimes with the policemen. More than one black had been shot or injured by the Montgomery police under questionable circumstances, and the black community there deeply disliked him.” — J.L. Chestnut, Black in Selma, p. 334-5

Statewide candidacy rebuffed, Folmar later threw in his lot with Fob James, running Fob’s failure of a campaign against Don Siegelman in 1998. Fob, the sitting Governor at the time, was famous for agitating for prayer in schools and two terms of states rights-themed meanness. James was trounced by Siegelman, the last time that the Democrats managed to win a race for the executive office. Among the highlights from that campaign, Folmar said he “laid a trap” for Winton Blount, James’ challenger in the GOP primary, by having Richard Arrington (the black mayor of Birmingham) endorse Blount. That’s right: For Folmar, it was a strike against you if a black person endorsed you.

Folmar was also famous for always being in shape. He was a high school football star and worked out regularly, maintaining a trim and muscular figure throughout his public life (as noted in the picture above). And in some ways, this is an appropriate metaphor for state partisan politics. The lean and trim GOP, made sharp by year in exile, ultimately destroyed, perhaps permanently, the state Democratic Party that had gotten over-confident, lazy, and bloated from years of control.

The Gun

And then there is the pistol. Every story about Folmar mentions the fact that he packed heat. He said it was because there were threats on his life. Evidently somebody shot out the windows of his car a couple of times. And there certainly seemed to be no lack of bravado from the Marine who killed Koreans during the Truman administration. Many folks seemed to cringe at the primitive Wild West image of a pistol-packing mayor. But others took pride. Folmar was a “man’s man,” showing up many mornings when police did their first roll call. He’d be out there at the scenes of traffic wrecks and crimes, embodying the idea that this was his city, and he had the loaded sidearm to back it up if need be.

Needless to say, it’s extremely difficult to imagine an elected official behaving in this way today. Nothing says “good place for economic development” like a city with a mayor always prepared to draw down on his many foes.

Moral Leadership

Also while running that James campaign, Folmar appeared on a local TV show called “Good Morning Montgomery.” According to an Associated Press article that ran in the Tuscaloosa News on Christmas Eve 1997, someone called into the show to complain about being harassed outside a Montgomery nightclub.

Evidently, the person was gay and the nightclub in question was a gay club. The Mayor called the person a queer.

“I said something to the effect of if you didn’t all hang out together there wouldn’t be a problem.”

To its credit, the Tuscaloosa News slammed Folmar’s comment in the opinion page of the same issue in which it reported the story. And Folmar, for his part, was fully unapologetic about using the slur.

A report complaining that Folmar refused to meet with gay residents or support city AIDS services quoted the Mayor as saying, “I used the word queer and I’ll use it again. I’m not going to call them gay. I don’t approve of their lifestyle one bit.”

Oh, and evidently at one point he described AIDS deaths as “self-inflicted wounds.”

Truly, it was a simpler time.

And then there’s this gem of an AP that ran in the Times Daily on March 5, 1988:

Police broke up a punk-rock concert that Montgomery Mayor Emory Folmar described as a “Satanic event,” sending about 100 disappointed teenagers home without making any arrests.

Um, what? Wow. The ’80s were crazy. We wish there were punk rock shows at The Capri. Well, except for the part where the police raid the place and ruin everything.

The article quotes Capri Theater Director Martin McCaffery as saying, “The kids at the show had much better manners than the police.” He continues:

“After a fishing expedition through our trash cans — which the police videotaped — they found a few empty beer cans, most of which were in there because we confiscated them.”

Police said they showed up because McCaffery rented the theater to someone without a business license. “That’s not usually handled with 30 cops and a paddy wagon,” McCaffery said.

And that wasn’t the last clash between Folmar’s regime and the Capri. It’s hard to fathom now, but religious right protesters flipped out over a movie called The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese. Folmar and then-Gov. Guy Hunt led a “Stand Up for Jesus” protest march, although they declined McCaffery’s invitation to actually view  the film that they were making into political hay.

And that sort of thing was sort of par for the course under Folmar. Numerous people that lived in Montgomery under the Folmar regime remember a string of rock concerts that were ruined (if not banned) by the mayor. It wasn’t that Folmar hated music or the arts — he was partly responsible for bringing the Shakespeare Festival to Montgomery. It was just that he saw young people (and black people) as disrespectful troublemakers and he didn’t want their loud rock music happening in his town (to say nothing of the explosion of hip-hop that was sweeping the rest of the nation in the 1980s).

And in some ways, maybe that’s one of the good things about Folmar’s legacy. He created a counter-cultural opposition. Youth culture can be forged in some memorable fires when your mayor is a dour, gun carrying enemy of fun. Folmar, the glowering gay bashing Reaganite, may have unintentionally given rise to new and interesting forms of cultural opposition. It’s certainly a more revolutionary climate when your mayor is trying to use the city’s toolbox to actively suppress fun and art — versus having the mayor trying to use fun and art as mechanisms to fuel economic development.

Still, that seems like little solace to the actual victims at the time. If you were gay and felt like your mayor hated you, or were black in the birthplace of the civil rights movement and felt like you were still ghettoized, you’re not going to take a lot of comfort in the fact that some skateboarding teen has a convenient nemesis. Hunter S. Thompson got a lot of mileage out Nixon’s evil, but at the end of the day, those kids in Vietnam were still dead.

All told, I think the legacy of Emory Folmar shows us how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time. He seems to have run this town for over two decades in a manner similar to that in which the principal in The Breakfast Club ran the school. He was a hardline authoritarian who probably loved (parts of) Montgomery in equal proportion to his contempt for those who had differing visions of reality.

Good mayors like Bright and Strange seem to understand that it takes a lot of effort to ensure that rising tides lift all boats. The city has a heap of problems on its plate, many of which defy easy solutions. And every one of which will need more than a single mayor to properly tackle. We’re all in this together.

But reflecting on the life and times of Emory Folmar may well give us a map of where we’re going, as much as where we’ve been.

Since Folmar brought the Shakespeare Festival to Montgomery (lured it here from Anniston, where it ran from 1972-1984) perhaps it’s fitting to end this obituary with a quote from Mark Antony’s legendary eulogy of Caesar:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

No, not the one that looks like a plantation home. That’s Mt. Meigs, which opened in 1911 as the “Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers.” It’s a prison for children, is run by DYS, should in no way be confused (as I once did) with that other place that starts with an “M” where wayward youths get sent (Marion Military Academy, which is in the opposite geographic direction and is run by the Department of Postsecondary Education).

So, no, not the mansion-looking thing. That other huge building out there on the way to Atlanta.

Why, it’s the former headquarters of Colonial Bank!

Remember them? They were one of the biggest employers in the area. They were a holding company (Colonial Bancgroup) valued at, oh, about $26 billion. They were one of the 25 largest banks in the United States. And they went under in 2009, the 6th largest bank failure in American history! And it was right here in lil’ ol’ Montgomery, Alabama.

Well, there were 346 branches, many of which were not in Alabama, and then all those real estate investments, which weren’t in Montgomery either. But the headquarters was here … and it’s still there! A big ol’ empty building that is probably feeling the warm intra-state feeling of solidarity with Jefferson County, just about 100 miles to the north, which filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. That’s right, Alabama: Creating lesson plans for business schools around the world!

Anyway, you may or may not have given too much attention to the story behind that Class A, 200,000 sq. ft. office building as you zip past it on the Interstate. We’re here to tell you the facts, nonetheless!

It’s been renamed, of course, as have all of the branches of the failed bank. Those were mostly snapped up by a bank based in Winston-Salem, NC, called BB&T (which stands for Branch Banking and Trust). The new name of the corporate monolith that we still have here in Montgomery? It’s the Capitol Commerce Center now, reflecting a burst of creativity from the branding department.

A commercial real estate firm is trying to find some tenants for the new building. We’re talking between $21 and $26/RSF, with almost the whole thing rentable. When we checked, only about 10,000 sq. ft. had been rented, some of it to the FDIC, which, probably not coincidentally, paid about $2.8 billion into the dying company. In fact, the FDIC owned the place for a little while, before selling to an automotive magnate from Arkansas named Larry Crain. He once owned a failure of an NBA D-League team! Go Rimrockers! When Crain bought the building, he also got $110,000 of items, including a Josephine jewel box, a Chippendale 1860 table and a Louis XVI console that is (or was) evidently located in the building.

The Colonial Bank HQ, while glaringly visible from the Interstate, is oddly hard to find on Google maps, so we’ll do the exploring for you. When we checked the place out, the pond out front smelled like a cesspool. The fountain came across as something purchased on the cheap from a corporate HQ supply catalog. The parking lot, which holds 632 vehicles (360 in a garage), was more full than we expected given the sparse tenancy of the buidling. All in all, it looks like it’d be a horrible place to work. It’s way out from anything interesting. Sure, the Hellscape of the east side of Montgomery is creeping in that direction, but we actually see that as a drawback and try to stay as far away from Chantilly Parkway as possible. But even if you’re into that sort of big box sprawl and monocultural semi-casual dining, if your job requires that you clock in at the Capitol Commerce Center, odds are that you’re not going out to The Shoppes at Eastchase on your lunch break. You’re stuck in this giant corporate box. And you probably don’t get to play with the Josephine jewel box or the Chippendale 1860 table and the Louis XVI console (whatever that is).

Now, we’re not going to rant too much about the sordid tale of Colonial’s fall. It’s a fascinating tale that involves what most people say was over-investment in construction projects in Florida and Nevada. We’d argue firmly with those who say that the collapse was an unfortunate product of unpredictable market forces (“the bubbles just burst”), especially because we’re talking about everything ranging from TARP money to a cease and desist order from the FDIC which was described by the South Florida Business Journal as follows:

In a strongly worded criticism of the bank’s leadership, the federal order said Colonial Bank must cease and desist from operating with “inadequate management and board of directors oversight.”

The order also called the bank’s method of reserving for future loan losses inadequate, which could mean Colonial Bank might have to lower its capital levels further to boost these reserves.

Within 60 days of the order, the bank must review its management team, especially the senior executive officer to “determine whether these individuals possess the ability, experience and other qualifications to perform present and anticipated duties.”

Ouch.

Oh, and there was some business with Lee Farkas and a former senior vice president (Catherine Kissick) and the head of Colonial’s Mortgage Warehouse Lending Division (Teresa Kelly). Something about what the government said were $1.5 billion in “worthless” and “fake” mortgages. Also, false reporting in financial statements, which investors always appreciate. And did you know that banks get to pick who they want to regulate them? They can switch, as Colonial did, back and forth between state and federal regulation, which helps explain why the whole economy damn near collapsed (and may yet still).

Good times!

And if you’ve read this far, you’re in for an even juicier twist.

The whole thing was run by the guy that ESPN named “the most powerful booster in all of college sports.”

There is a lot to enjoy about this ad. The pic of the three grinning brothers, looking like they just got away with something; the ad copy, calling the bank a muscular child; the assurance that "dad" lurks in the background. From the May 1982 issue of Alabama Magazine.

If you aren’t from here, you may not appreciate the significance of this fact. Imagine if someone was some blend of mafia don and Pope. You begin to have an idea of what it means to be the private citizen with the most influence over college sports in a state that is beyond obsessed with college sports. And ESPN didn’t mean “most powerful booster in Alabama.” They meant of all the college-football-loving weirdos in the nation, of all the rich white guys that are pouring tens (if not hundreds) of millions of their personal wealth into (usually) state-supported institutions, Bobby Lowder had the most clout at his school.

Lowder was appointed to the Auburn Board of Trustees by George Wallace in 1983. He was on the board from then until this past year, when (after a bit of a political kerfuffle), he was re-appointed and then un-appointed by Gov. Robert Bentley. ESPN called Lowder, “the ultimate campus puppeteer” and “the George Steinbrenner of college sports, only without official ownership papers.” That may not mean anything to you, but here, where college football is life or death, it means many people had very strong opinions about Mr. Lowder, long before his bank tanked and blasted a crater in the economy.

CNN did a lengthy profile of Lowder in 2009, covering lots of bases, starting with him being born as the son of the guy who built ALFA into one of the single most powerful political players in the state. The story of how the Alabama Farm Bureau became ALFA, a name that causes state legislators to get wobbly in the knees? That’s a tale for another post. But know that Lowder was born into power and kept hold of it from that giant, now-empty building where, we’re told, he had Israeli embassy level security. Well, kept hold of power from 2006 (when the building was built) until 2009, when Colonial vacated the thing.

And here, thinking about that big empty building and all of the people that once worked there, it’s probably worth noting that the Lowder name retains considerable currency in Montgomery circles because not just of Bobby, but also his two brothers, the twins, Jimmy and Tom. Check out this fawning Central Alabama Business Journal article from 2004 for more on the structures of their various holdings.

And then there’s Anna, who, with her husband Harvi Sahota, operate the Hampstead Institute — which is sort of an Institute-meets-housing development thing waaaay out on the east side. It’s on 416 acres in the middle of nowhere, but nobody I’ve ever talked to thinks that it’s actually a “sustainable community.” It’s more like an art project where people will drive their SUVs back into town before retreating to their “neighborhood” that nobody can walk to.

But it’s still a family affair. The Lowder New Homes website links to Hampstead’s bizarre crest at the bottom of this page, but we’ll save the ruminations on that project for some other time. Needless to say that the link here goes to townofhampstead.com, even though it isn’t really a town.

And the City of Montgomery, which partners with Hampstead to run the downtown urban farm, also decided that this area would be the perfect place to build a new high school, shelling out $1.95 million to buy some land on which to build the new school. This article from 5/3/11 says the land was owned by ALFA, the company founded by Ed Lowder, but this article from 5/16/11 quotes a guy named Mac McLeod, described as president of Hampstead LLC’s parent company, Colonial Co.

McLeod, unsurprisingly, sees the land deal as beneficial to Hampstead and hopes that it spurs further development.

Because we all know the good thing about development. Once you build a big building, it’s there — whether it’s occupied or not.

Also, I have work in the morning. And when you have to get up to go to a job, you’re thankful for a good night’s sleep.

Both of which are reasons why I’m annoyed to be up with my heart racing due to the familiar sound of gunshots.

We’ve written before about how we were diligent when we moved here about dutifully calling the police after hearing them. We figured that the “time of call” would help the police pinpoint the exact time that the shots were fired, somehow assisting in the ongoing investigation. But the police seemed bored when we called, and it was, after all often 2 in the morning. So we made a note of it the first time we heard them, woke up, and rolled over and went back to sleep. It was like our cynicism deflowering. We were here now, and the gun violence was just part of the landscape — not even worth reporting.

It’s a familiar, if unpredictable routine by now: hear the shots, wait for the sirens, scan the paper the next day to see if it was anything the media discovered. I almost said, “See if it was anything major,” but it’s still major in the lives of the participants, even if it doesn’t make the newspaper.

When the shots wake me up, I still note the time, as if I’ll later have firsthand knowledge to contradict some sort of official report. I’ve decided that I can tell the difference in sizes of guns from the shots. Tonight’s were especially close and sounded closer to the AK end of the spectrum than the clipped bursts of an Uzi. And yes, they sounded fully automatic. Much different than the occasional pistol round.

One thing that made tonight’s shots memorable is it sounded like someone yelled something during the spray. Might have been the shooter yelling something like, “boom.” Might have been a victim crying out. Hard to tell when you’re groggy and it all happens so fast. Anything can get mangled if you replay it in your mind enough times, especially if it’s just a tiny fragment. Within a few minutes, it’s hard to know if there are six shots or seven, and you appreciate the hard work of the justice system (both lawyers and witnesses) trying to piece together little scraps of violence several months (and even years) after they happen. Memories fade, especially if they aren’t written down right away.

And I guess that’s why I’m writing now. We weren’t hit. No holes were punched in the walls or windows. The dog didn’t even wake up. We didn’t call the police. Shots were fired, almost certainly in anger, and the night sprouted a blurry sonic blanket of sirens. It sounds like they might be driving around in circles in the next neighborhood, either chasing a suspect or totally passing by a victim who is leaking life.

Anyway, I’m not sure what we can do. It’d be nice to do an interview with local law enforcement. Our police chief is Kevin Murphy. He is not to be confused with Chris Murphy, who heads our city’s Department of Public Safety. Chief Murphy was hired by Chris Murphy, who used to be the head of the Alabama Department of Public Safety (the state troopers). Our police chief from 2004-2010, Art Baylor, was appointed by Obama to be a federal marshal.

But an interview with local officers and leaders isn’t likely to be all that enlightening. I’ve interviewed cops before. They mostly just talk about how crime is down and how nobody appreciates how hard their job is. Both facts are unarguably true, although the current crime fighting strategy (cramming poor people into unconstitutionally overcrowded prisons) leaves something to be desired.

Now that the World Series is shaping up to be pretty uninspiring (we hate the Rangers, can’t believe the Cardinals are still in it, and can bring ourselves to root for the Brewers mostly on account of our love for vegetarian slugger Prince Fielder), it’s time to invest in Montgomery’s most high-octane fall sport.

That’s right, dear readers – we are talking league co-ed league softball! It’s too late to join a team this year, but you can still catch some games during the fall season if you get yourself over to Lagoon Park in the next few weeks.

In the future, if you want to play you’ll need to get on a team. This involves making one yourself or joining an existing infrastructure. Some teams are made up of people who work together, occasionally including affiliates like spouses or siblings. Others are linked together by church membership or social group. Still others seem to have accumulated over a few seasons, shedding dead weight and adding better players until they deserve a suitably threatening name. Unless you own some baseball pants and used to play college ball, the latter sort of team is probably out for you.

Before your game, you might want to hit the batting cages at the front of the park. It’s easy to feel the tug of the collective pop-cultural unconscious when you go to the little sliding window staffed by a nice-seeming older man. He dispenses cards and tokens. He’s had to make up new cards because someone was photocopying them. You wonder who would even think of doing something like this, cheating this nice man out of his humble little business, and then sadly remember you’re living in the United States of Goldman Sachs as he gives you six tokens for the cages. Choose among the war-torn bats of various weights and handle tape colors and get to work making hollow noises as you whack at floaty balls coming out of the pitching machine.

Thursday is co-ed night. In the spring season, co-eds play on Tuesdays too. In the fall, they play two games in one night, at 6:20, 7:20 or 8:20. To play, you have to have five men and five women. You can bat six and six, with more on the sub list. You have to alternate men and women, and the league uses a larger ball for men than it does for women. This means one of the home plate umpire’s main responsibilities is handing the relevant ball to the catcher, or throwing it themselves if they are feeling especially frisky (or if the catcher is especially incompetent, more rule than exception given the “dumping ground” status of the position on most of the co-ed teams).

The rules are extremely gender-conscious. If a man walks, he takes two bases. This is ostensibly to prevent teams from walking men so that they can pitch to women. Lineups must be gender-balanced in the infield and outfield, so that you’ve got two men and two women in the outfield (yes, there are four in the outfield) and a three/three split infield. Some of the women are extremely good at softball, just like some of the men are. But there are some teams where women have clearly been drafted and/or bribed to play so that the team will “make.” We once played a team where all the women had pink bats and batting gloves. They said they had demanded the special equipment from their husbands as compensation for playing on the team. I think I would have asked for something better than pink softball equipment. Women rarely pitch, so the catcher is almost always the weakest female player on the team after whoever gets sentenced to stand out in right field (hell during mosquito season, a dreamy abandoned heaven on cool fall nights).

Softball isn’t baseball. In the first place, there’s a different architecture of noise: bats chunk or clink rather than crack, many players don’t know how to call catches or organize plays (or they are too selfish to try) and there’s a surprising amount of heckling both between teams and within teams. The rules are different, too. There’s no sliding and no bunting. If your team hits a home run, any subsequent hits out of the park will get you out until the other team scores with their own dinger.

Everyone seems to manage their team a little differently. Some are obviously rabidly competitive, with folks getting chewed out for bad plays and humiliated by their peers. Others are competitive, but having a good time – there’s lots of good-natured ribbing exchanged between players, much of it loud and hilarious. Still others have decided to eschew competition altogether, preferring instead to rotate folks through positions and not hassle each other when errors pile up. The most fun games to watch are when serious (but not too serious) teams play each other.

Lagoon Park is one of Montgomery’s few integrated social scenes. This is true even though the teams themselves are largely segregated (“that’s one of those black teams,” folks will sometimes say, the “black” sotto voce the vocal equivalent of two raised eyebrows, as in: You know what I’m saying, and I know what I’m saying, but in case you don’t agree with what I’m saying I can always say oh no, that’s not what I meant at all).

Casual racism doesn’t stop the diverse crowd from lining up peaceably for overpriced concessions. You can pay movie theater prices for the usual sweet and salty snacks – over-iced Cokes in styrofoam cups, round and vaguely stale chips served with a side of slippery cheese and then move along to the bleachers to watch a game.

The games themselves are fun, fast and too often over before they start. Teams forfeit because they don’t have enough women, or men, or just because people were drinking and smoking in the parking lot and didn’t make it into the park in time (Lagoon Park is “family friendly,” which they explain means no booze, no smoking and no cursing). You could miss other games while in line at the concession stand because the “mercy rule” kicked in 15 runs into an especially lopsided matchup.

The fields are well kept and studiously monitored by the folks sitting up in the central tower, who will demand your lineup and hassle you if you make illegal substitutions or commit other rule infractions, even as they are unfailingly polite and as Southern as the red Alabama infield dirt. Which is surprisingly hard to get off in the laundry, adding place to the variety of prides felt in evidence of an illegal slide or a diving catch.

Win or lose, nachos or popcorn, spring or fall, Lagoon Park is an unfailingly fun place to spend a weeknight playing or watching a sport that gets a bad rap as the pastime of the people too drunk, stupid or female to play baseball.

Speaking of the Tide, that is the football team we pull for in the great Sunni-Shiite football wars of this state. [Sidebar: I have used that analogy multiple times to characterize the depths of the religious passion felt by college football fans in this state. It is useful to convey strong passion and the sense of the either/or binary. However, it has also resulted in several people asking me whether Bama represents the Sunni or the Shiite in the analogy, leading to some pained expressions of ignorance regarding Islamic theology, not to mention the political situations in any number of foreign countries.]

So, we pull for Bama and we happened to be in New Orleans. Perhaps you will find yourself in a similar boat, hoping to spend some part of some Big Easy Saturday in some sort of place with a television, in whose hypnotic light you hope to bask while pulling for your beloved Crimson-clad unpaid workers.

May we suggest that you find your way to 1100 Constance Street, to a bar called The Rusty Nail?

I only learned of the place when wearing my Bama shirt around town on Saturday morning. I was responding to various “Roll Tides” and such in my usual genial way, hoping not to be too much the tourist as I took the St. Charles trolley line for the first time. A woman on a bicycle not only gave me a RTR, but stopped to ask if I was going to watch the game at the Rusty Nail.

“The what?”

“Oh, dear,” she said with all of the empathy of a concerned mother, “you simply must go.”

It was as if she were ashamed of my ignorance. So I went. It was within walking distance of the place that I was standing when I received her suggestion.

Dude.

A bar with bleachers. Yes!

They have bleachers in the bar. They have an amazing patio. They were grilling food on said patios, including veggie burgers. The bartenders were wearing Bama shirts. They had a half dozen TVs, all showing college football until the 2 p.m. game (versus Arkansas), at which time all TVs were flipped to the Bama game. The bar owner (named David, I think), is a Bama grad who not only stands there watching the game with the massive crowd of fans that assemble, he (and this is important) actually mutes the commercials during the breaks in the action.

It’s all well and good that this bar is where the New Orleans chapter of Bama alums likes to gather. That’s nice and it’s wonderful to watch the game with like-minded fans, wearing crimson and shaking shakers. It’s as close to a game day environment in a non-Tuscaloosa bar that I have ever experienced. But the fact that the owner mutes the commercials and plays the Alabama fight song, along with topical music, well, that’s just over the top. James Brown was in heavy rotation, and the commercial break after a Razorback TD brought us Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.”

The bar was nearly full, but not so crowded as to be uncomfortable. In case you’re wondering, yes, people really do pack out the bleachers. I didn’t take any photos (other than the one above of the empty bleachers) because I was busy getting drunk and watching the game. Folks were lively, but not out-of-hand, fueled by a steamroller of a Bama win and healthy pours from the bartenders. Did I mention that they have an immense collection of rare scotches?

Truly, this is the best bar for watching Alabama football in the nation. This owner, these bartenders, they know what’s up. I cannot highly enough recommend

This went on for a few years, until we stopped seeing him. We wondered if he had some sort of dementia and had finally been whisked away to some assisted living facility by some son or daughter or grandchild. Shortly thereafter, piles of stuff started appearing on the curb — massive, heaping piles of boxes and bags. There were pieces of furniture, but also the accumulated debris that must be cleaned out at the end of someone’s life. For weeks now, new piles have appeared and vanished. They are rained on, get moldy, and are picked over by various roving trash pickers. We never stop to examine the piles. Until today. A newspaper caught our eye, peeking out from one of the unsightly mounds.

It is part of the February 5, 1969, edition of the Montgomery Advertiser. As we read the editorial page out loud on the way home, we came across a letter to the editor under the section, “Tell It To Old Grandma.” We have noted before how hilarious we think it is that people once called our newspaper Grandma Advertiser. Anyway, the letter merits sharing with you in full because it reads like it could have been written today. And although it was written over 40 years ago, it needs to have also been written today. Here’s hoping that teachers across the state are writing similar letters today.

—

Dear Editor,

I am one of those controversial, intimidated creatures who serve as whipping boys for frustrated parents, fearful politicians, and self-serving private-interest groups. I am a teacher.

At least, I once believed that I was a teacher. I have even had the unmitigated gall, on occasion, to think that I might perhaps be a “dedicated” teacher.

Why do I now wonder if I am really a teacher? The answer lies not only in the impossible demands that are made upon teachers, but also the coals of fire that are repeatedly heaped upon their heads. I, like many other teachers, am demoralized.

For example, I find it intolerable that teachers should be expected to genuflect, hat-in-hand, and beg, “Please Mr. Legislator, throw me a crumb! See what a great job I’m doing.” Yes, we teachers must “sell the public” (I’ve heard that expression quite often lately) on the needs of education.

Why must we “sell the public?” Are the members of the Legislature incapable of rising (just once) above the politically expedient course of action?

If they, the legislators, are awaiting a consensus (a great word among politicians — consensus), I have news for them. The rank and file of their public couldn’t care less! I would delight in a deluge of letters proving my disillusionment to be wrong, but I simply don’t expect those letters; nor do I expect any great shift of public opinion on behalf of education — for Coffee County, my home county, only a few months ago, for the third time in the last ten years, defeated a proposed five-mill tax for the Coffee County school system.

A shift in opinion, therefore, will not occur because the public wants a good educational system only if this system costs no additional money, an impossible condition.

I can understand the public’s aversion to additional taxes. I, too, am a victim of taxation and inflation — inflation of everything except my paycheck. I, too, can understand the feeling that is prevalent today: “If the federal government is going to run our schools, let the federal government pay for them.” Granted that the federal government is running them, but it is not paying for them.

These bitter facts notwithstanding, one additional fact must be faced: that the future of our schools and of our state is at stake. If our legislators fail to act, they must face the resulting alternatives — not only face them, but also bear the responsibility for them.

These alternatives are quite obvious: disruptive, heart-breaking teacher strikes or increased exodus of teachers to neighboring, higher-paying states, both alternatives being destructive for our children and our state.

I call upon our Governor and our Legislature to forget political expediency; upon our rural and urban areas to forgo rural-urban bickering; upon our universities, colleges, junior colleges, and State Department of Education to cease their sickening wrangling over who gets the biggest slice of the meager pie.

Remember the forgotten member of the team, the overworked, overloaded, underpaid elementary-secondary teacher, who, after all, is the great heart of any education system. Could the universities and colleges, the State Department of Education, and yes, even the Legislature itself, exist without this much-ignored, often-scorned, always-maligned creature!

Mrs. Bryant Steele,
New Brockton, Alabama