Thoughts From the Front Porch

Since it has a nice little part in the story, being the site of the only murder trial ever faced by Byrd Richardson, I’ve become fascinated (my family might say “obsessed”) by our original courthouse building. Like most early parts and people of our hometown, the 1902 courthouse has escaped my memory, probably because it was never there. The reason my contemporaries clearly remember the faces and facades of our town before 1957, while I don’t, may very well be that I was too nearsighted to see them. I remember how everything looked after I put on my first pair of glasses at the age of nine. It was a big shock to realize that everybody else could always see the leaves on the trees. But by that time, the old courthouse was gone. I just missed it. It was replaced by the modern one in 1956.

When I “went to looking” for a photograph* of the 1902 courthouse, a friend pointed out this photo on this very website. Sometimes I still feel a bit nearsighted.

Old Courthouse

One wonders, when first considering this picture, what was wrong with the old courthouse? What was so bad about it that it had to come down after only fifty years or so and be replaced? The old one was much more classic in its basic design., though it wasn’t Greek-Revival. And quintessential southern courthouses so often are, as if county seats were longing in concert with the residents for some non-existent, Romantic, idealistic and long-gone past. Our old one was certainly more in the neighborhood of a proper southern courthouse than the one we got later. It was trying to be French Second Empire, another kind of revival of another kind of past. And it was more nostalgic at least than the mid-fifties, mid-century modern, German cousin of prisons we had next. It was lately “gussied up” to become the renovated faux-antique building we have now. But after considering the oldest for a moment, some of its flaws become become fairly clear. It looks as if it were put together by a committee.

The original courthouse committee I imagine as Mr. Gearing, the first mayor, and Mother and Father McIntosh, as the arbiters of all things social and proper. They were new to town at the time and thought a lot of themselves, an attitude which oddly always seems to impress people. Surely there were some county natives involved too, though they may not have been bold enough to speak up. Could be, the mayor’s wife also sat in.

Someone, perhaps the mayor and his wife, came in with a fantasy of French Second Empire style. Ever since the Marquis de La Fayette helped us defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, all things French were deemed superior in America, at least until the second World War. (Come to think of it, the attitude the French took towards us after the war may have been what turned the town against the courthouse.) Our ancestors in the 19th century gave their children French names, although almost no one in Alabama pronounced them as the French did. So they spelled a daughter’s name Etoile, with accented ‘e’, which is French for “Star,” and which the French would pronounce something like Eh-TWA. But the family would call her E-tool all her life just the same. Or they’d take a French name for their boy, such as Henri, and instead of calling him Ahn-ree, he’d be forever Hen-rye. Who, in nineteenth-century Alabama, had ever heard French spoken?

Probably only Mother and Father McIntosh. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the Gearings aside and made suggestions that such French-inspired architecture was the latest fashion. They were, I’m afraid, rather late, by fifty or a hundred years. The 1902 courthouse building was symmetrically block-shaped with tall semi-arched windows balanced on all sides. It was built of darkish brick. A Mansard roof rose up from the squareness of the building itself, with a cupola centered on top. The idea of Second Empire style is to suggest a regal altitude. And attitude too. Elevation of stature was the point.

But though the entrance shown in the photograph is centered as it should be, it is anything but the elegantly proportioned, slim-columned portico it should be. It is a squat white block monstrosity, arched in a heavy way, with a incongruous flat, stepped roof. It looks like a bit like a thick-thighed Budda, weighing the building down. It’s sort of blots out the rest of the building and it’s difficult to see anything else. It’s a horror, but you can’t take your eyes off it, like witnessing a train wreck. Directly above it is another flattened arch of white block inlaid in the building’s facade to repeat the Budda motif. It’s meant, I suppose, to direct the eye above, to what might be a flat clock face. Perched above all, in the center of the roof, is a rather large cupola, exactly the same disproportionate size as the stoop. But it looks more like a widow’s walk by-the-sea or a guard tower at a frontier fort or a well house a mile out of town than any Second Empire accoutrement.

In my researches I’ve found a 1930 Sanford Fire Insurance Company map of our town, which pictures a bird’s eye view of every house and shack, to scale.  It’s a drawing, of course, of simple building footprints, and not blueprints unfortunately. But it’s not so disordered a reality as GoogleEarth. The1902 courthouse sat centered east and west on the same entire block of town as our current building, rather more toward the north side of the block and away from the main street, so the front lawn to the south was more capacious. In the north east corner of the block, behind the building, was a hundred-thousand-gallon water tower. In the northwest corner was the jailhouse, just 12 feet square and not fenced. It was placed so that those inside could see nothing much from the windows, except the children going to and from the schoolhouse across the street and on the corner to the east.

The old courthouse sat, as the new one does, on the top of what seems to be a square hill, too conveniently risen and flat on top to have been a construction of nature. The plan for the building itself seems to have been father to that manmade, perfectly balanced rise from street level. They were going for vertical importance. Drive around our state to other small town county seats. You won’t often see courthouses looming from a higher elevation than the town at large.

Changing of the lay of the land could have been planned as a “cost-effective” means to give the building, and the laws it represented, added importance. Maybe it was meant to suggest a boundless, ever-upward future. That was a theme of the times. It does make the building upon it seem taller, even now. Anyone who’s ever been interviewed by a person in a tall chair behind a big desk, while sitting way down in front, will understand the purpose of such a lofty vantage point. It is to intimidate the people below and maintain in them that false sense of inferiority to their “betters.” Mother and Father McIntosh would’ve been in favor of that. But moving all that earth for the purpose doesn’t seem cost effective. Unless they used prison labor.

Prisoners were sometimes bought out of incarceration, I’m told, or rented for their labor in those days. Workers could be procured for a one-time fee paid to the state and kept for the remainder of their lives. A general rule back then, when looking for house servants, was to stay away from those imprisoned for thievery. Because a thief doesn’t change his stripes, as it were, and you’d never be able to trust him. Look for a man who’d murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy, they said. He won’t be likely to kill again.

Prisoners could be “leased” in Alabama as late as 1924, when the state legislature outlawed the practice. At the time it was banned, it was earning the state a million dollars a year. I imagine it took quite a legislative brouhaha to put the state out of the prisoner leasing business. Alabama was the last state in the union to abandon this source of revenue. But in 1902, it would have been cheap and easy to rent a few dozen laborers from the prison system and have them move the earth, a shovel-full at a time.

The first town fathers couldn’t have known in 1890 that there’d be a second courthouse on that square. On the other hand, there it is, a handy square in the center of town, available for a courthouse. Could be, they did know. They certainly knew where the junction of the railroads was going to be. Otherwise, the established town of Eden, just a mile or two to the west, would have been just as good a place for them.

Our principal founder looked down from New York to Alabama and chose a spot to found his town, then he bought the site. His family happened to be in the railroad business. A junction nearer the river could have made more commercial sense. Selma had the river transportation commerce and then the railroad came. Same with Tuscaloosa, Demopolis, Montgomery, Eufaula. But not our town. Get you a 19th-century map* and look at that little iron horse dogleg to where we are. Would’ve made more sense to put the railroad through Cropwell where they had river traffic already. Where the cotton was being grown. But our founder didn’t own Cropwell, he owned a little piece up the road a ways. And somehow or other, the railroad junction came to us.

*(Here’s some: historical maps)

The point was to lay out a town and make a killing in real estate on their insider trading knowledge. Unfortunately for our principal founder, it didn’t work out that way. He was caught in the depression of the 1890s in a bank fraud scandal in New York. And he went to prison. He was later pardoned, though, and lived out the remainder of his life on his lavish old family estate in New Rochelle (that’s way up north) enjoying the country and holding lavish dog shows. And the town he owned was just about abandoned till 1900, when another investor thought of building a cotton mill and bought the town at a reasonable price.

A decade after its layout and beginning, our town was designated the second county seat. Look at an early twentieth county map, and you’ll see the obvious problem we had here. Railroad tracks lay along every possible route between towns, except from our town to Ashville. The reason was simple. It wasn’t possible to build a railroad to traverse Backbone Mountain. You couldn’t get there from here. If the first town planners, those who bought the land and laid out the town, knew where future railroads would be, wouldn’t they know where they wouldn’t be as well? Yes. It is possible they set aside a large central block just for that purpose.

The size of the courthouse square itself is unusually large. Logically, it has to be as   wide as the blocks on two opposing sides.While you’re out driving around to other county seats in our state, notice most towns were laid out in smaller blocks with larger lots, with whole squares dedicated to schools and libraries. Not so in our town. The purpose from the beginning in 1890 was to enrich the owners as quickly as possible. Of course, roads and sidewalks are more expensive in such towns, because there are, by necessity, more linear feet of them.

In Talladega, founded much earlier, the courthouse square is smaller, because the town was laid out with twelve smaller blocks in the center, and increasingly larger blocks as you move from the center in any direction. This provides more street-front shop space downtown and more spacious lots in the neighborhoods. But in our town, the first high school was alloted only half a block’s space and was just to the north and east of the courthouse. A block further north was the “classroom building” where the elementary students went to school. There was no thought of a library.

I imagine the architect, if there was one, eventually threw up his hands in disgust and let the committee go off in all the directions that it wished. Why Second Empire anyway, except for the French-ness of it? Because it was the second courthouse in the county? Because the place had changed hands and come back from the brink of being a ghost town?  It was in a way the second coming of our town, with a second family at the helm taking us in a more fortunate direction.

Whatever the reasons, whatever the flaws, the Second Empire Courthouse gave way in 1956 to something entirely new. A courthouse designed by Martin J. Lide, the same architect who’d drawn the plans for Kilby Prison in 1924. It was known as the most elaborate prison in the South in its day. A “monolithic concrete structure” with a concrete roof laid on steel. And walls topped with four strands of barbed wire, carrying 6,600 volts of electricity. There’s a hint to what our new courthouse looked like, but without the barbed wire, of course.

On November 1,1951, Byrd Richardson was arrested and taken to the jail across the street from the old courthouse. He remained there until his bond hearing, in that courthouse, on November 16. Now Richardson was no doubt familiar with the jailhouse. He’d been taken there drunk and disorderly many a time, but was always released right away to his daddy or his friends. Never before had he been kept longer than one night. Those fifteen days and nights were a new experience for him.  I like to think his situation was uncomfortable. I like to think he worried quite a lot during all those days and hours when he had little else to do. The sheriff came under quite a bit of pressure to release him, but, bless his heart, he stood his ground.

From cell across the street, Byrd could see the courthouse building. I’d like to imagine him worrying that he might be convicted, thinking about “Yellow Mama.” But I sincerely doubt he ever gave it thought. It was just an inconvenience, this spell in the jailhouse. He knew he’d get out, and he knew he’d never be convicted. His daddy would see to that.

The Grand Jury met the following spring, and on April 10, 1952, they issued the following official statement:  Byrd Richardson, Jr. aka John Byrd Richardson did, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, kill Erk Bailey, aka Eckhart Bailey, by cutting him with a knife, contrary to the law and against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama and is to answer in court to the charge of Murder in the First Degree.

And, until the trial in the hottest part of the coming summer, in the French Second Empire courthouse, Byrd would keep on doing whatever he pleased.

*As I look again at the 1911 photo of the courthouse, I doubt that it was taken from the front of the building. On the left we can see the fancy facade of buildings that seem to be aligned along main street. The 1930 map shows no buildings on the street to the west of the courthouse, except city hall on the front corner and the fire station on the far corner. The rest of the block was vacant. Of course it’s possible there were buildings there twenty years before the map was drawn, but unlikely. The 1930 map clearly shows the jail building to the east and back of the courthouse, just about where we see the small building on the right of the photograph. My cousin remembers concrete walks from all four sides of the building to the edges of the block, and from the corners of the block to the corners of building. Lots of roller skating. The photo seems to be primarily of the man on the bench, taken from the eastern sidewalk near the corner drugstore. Maybe someone who remembers the courthouse from the front can confirm or deny this. Although it’s no excuse for the Budda stoop, and the front may have been better, I like the 1902 courthouse better than any we’ve had since. We could’ve fixed it.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner

Kathleen Holding Her Nephew

Our town in 1951, like most American small towns in the middle of the twentieth century, was a place where very little out of the ordinary ever seemed to happen. The storefronts were occupied with thriving little businesses, and the sidewalks were busy with foot traffic then. Men in ties and fedoras or flannel and overalls went about their various occupations. And women in stockings and full-skirted dresses towed pre-schoolers along on housewifely errands. Our concerns would have seemed humdrum to some, being mostly about family, home, church, and community. But they were earnest concerns and important to us, however conventional.There was comfort in the mundane routine of our quotidian existence. Because we knew the disquiet of something happening, when that something was murder unresolved.

The double killing of 1948 had not yet slipped into the background of bygone days. People still whispered about the lingering mystery, running over old ground behind closed doors and reminding each other that danger might lurk anywhere. But the newspaper had nothing to say on the subject. It was not a case of no news being good news either. Because, quite frankly, with no one arrested and the murderer still roaming around free, there was nothing new to be said.

Most weeks, our newspaper editor had to work like Grant taking Richmond to fill his front page up with local news. It was a broader and deeper format then, in the strictly physical sense. Newspaper pages were bigger in the fifties than they are today, and the print was finer too, with lines of text more closely set. It took a lot of local stories to fill up a small town newspaper’s front page in 1951.

Most of the time, the editor would have to resort to articles from the press services to pad out his front page. So he’d scatter, amongst the sparse local stories about our town and county, news of strange, new-fangled ideas, such as color television or some outrageous thing, a national credit card system, for instance. Or he might choose oddities from exotic locales, quadruplets born in Funk, Nebraska, perhaps, where the mood was not very much improved by the jump in population.

Familiar troubles in faraway places meant that stories of the war in Korea, for example, folks would read with great interest. Because many of “our” boys, the boys the town knew and remembered from childhood, wiggling on a church pew or winning a public speaking medal, were over there. And the letters were few from their miserable, muddy trenches. Credit cards we knew little about and cared less. What in the world would anybody want one of them for? People saved up for what they wanted or, often to their ultimate discredit, opened up a charge account at the store and made payments. The town gossips would have something to talk about, if the payments weren’t made.

So life had settled down to a low busy hum, and the people of our town got involved in living and tried to forget the unrecompensed dead. And aside from the peaceful sameness of one week fading into the next and the worries that went with war, there was a good deal of well-founded hope for the future. And not much else to write about in the paper.

Until the first week of November in 1951. The front page on Thursday of that week needed no padding with outside stories. It gave us reason to smile and weep, to hope and dispair. The Masons had broken ground on their new lodge building and the foundation was laid. Kathleen’s father, our Big Daddy, was a member of the building committee. Brick and mortar had been purchased to complete the building. They’d paid cash. My maternal grandmother’s women’s group had a big event planned. They were in the social news every week with meetings, Red Cross blood drives, weight loss competitions alternating with sweet buttery recipe swaps. But the Mutual Improvement Club rarely made the front page. Sometimes they even took themselves and their husbands on trips to Chicago, or the Smokies or Mexico. This particular week, the MI Club, made up entirely of the Avondale Mills wives and working women, were organizing and sponsoring a variety show. Their master of ceremonies would be the “famous Joe Rumore,”  with his equally “famous team of Rebe and Rabe.”

The high school was holding its homecoming football game, and they were on a winning streak. The captain played tough at center, in spite of having a leg weakened by “infantile paralysis,” as they called it in those days. He must have been quite a hero in town, because he represented victory over a disease that still threatened to afflict any child at anytime. And it had struck a local third-grader the week before. His photo is right there on the front page next to the football team’s. That little boy, who so many hoped and prayed would one day be as well and strong as the football captain, has such a sweet smile in his picture. I know my grandmothers prayed for him. They had a little grandson who’d survived polio too. And small town that we were, the polio victim in that week’s story had some first cousins who were also our first cousins. Hearts ached for that little boy. Polio struck fear in the hearts of all parents in 1951.

But there was another story on the front page that week that had set the town to buzzing. Everyone knew about it of course, well before they read it in the newspaper, because the paper came out only once a week. It was old news by Thursday. But it was reported on the front page nonetheless. And townspeople studied the article, looking for clues that weren’t there. It planted another kind of fear and grief in the hearts of our town, along with an oddly half-baked sense of satisfaction. Headline: St. Clair County Man Dead Following Knife Injuries.

A local man is in jail charged with first degree murder, and another lies dead, after a fight and stabbing that occurred over the weekend. Erk Bailey, age 46, of Pisgah was pronounced dead, early Monday morning at the local hospital, of injuries received in the fight. Byrd Richardson, Jr. is in the county jail charged with murder.

The county sheriff’s department and state law enforcement personnel are conducting a joint investigation. Authorities say Bailey was found by two local men near Richardson’s Store in Cropwell after the fight occurred. The men were able to stop a game warden, who called an ambulance to the scene. Bailey was rushed to the hospital, but there was little hope by the staff on duty that he could survive his injuries.

Sheriff Cash Strickland arrested Richardson and jailed him. He was initially charged with attempted murder, pending the result of the Bailey’s injuries. No bond for the accused was allowed. The sheriff indicated that Richardson had said he would plead self-defense.

According to the sheriff, Richardson made the statement “He [Bailey] would not let me take my car home.” Richardson further stated that Bailey physically pulled him out of his car and that he [Richardson] cut Bailey accidentally in the ensuing struggle.

Ernest Forney has been retained as attorney to represent and defend Mr. Richardson in this case. Forney has requested a preliminary hearing at the earliest possible date. Judge John Williams has said he would set the date for a hearing in a short time.

Funeral services for Bailey were held at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on Tuesday afternoon, with burial in the adjoining cemetery. He is survived by the widow, four sons and four daughters. The children range in age from 19 down to 2 years old.

All right. The town sighed in unison. What relief! What delivery from evil. Richardson was in the jail. He’d been allowed to kill again, and leave a large family with no husband or father. But at least they’d put him away this time. And this time he should stay put. That’s what a lot of people expected and prayed for. It is what my grandmother and grandfather profoundly hoped.

I’m not sure Byrd’s own Uncle Pete didn’t share my family’s hope that his nephew would go away to prison permanently. He knew it would cause immense pain to his brother and sister-in-law. But damn it all, they’d raised him. It would cause enormous embarrassment to the family. But the embarrassment could hardly be more than it had been already. Probably, Mr. Pete held out little hope.

Most folks believed Mr. Pete was pure-dee scared to death of Byrd. And who could blame him? Mr. Pete knew a lot more than he wanted to know about his nephew’s transgressions. He’d been forced to step in before and open the bank in the middle of the night to take money out. That money had been used to pay people off.  Mr. Pete was an honest and gentle man by nature, and his conscience bothered him. He prayed for deliverance from evil too. Knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete understood that Byrd, Jr. might kill anybody he felt like killing, whenever he took a notion. And knowing what he knew, Mr. Pete felt that at any time he, himself, could be a victim of Byrd’s irrational anger or fear of exposure.

Most folks in town would have been glad to see the last of Byrd Richardson, if only the authorities could lock him up and throw away the key. They were grateful to Sheriff Strickland for putting him there for the time being.

This was not the same sheriff who’d been serving in 1948, when Kathleen and Doc McIntosh had been stabbed to death and their house burned down with them inside. Sheriff Wiley Dodge had been persuaded, by politically sensitive and well-connected friends, not to seek re-election to the post of county sheriff in 1950, for reasons known best to himself and his friends. Wiley Dodge had instead been persuaded to run for the state house, and aided by those politically connected friends and the voters they controlled, in and out of local cemeteries, he was elected to represent  the people of his district in the state legislature. I’m sure he fit in well there. Those politically connected friends had counted on Byrd to behave himself from that time forward. They’d been disappointed.

The new sheriff actually tried to enforce the law. He been a thorn in Byrd’s side since he taken over. He’d busted up a number of Byrd’s stills in the area. He’d refused all attempts at bribery and would take no payoff money. Sheriff Strickland held Richardson in jail for almost two weeks, from the day of the murder to the day of the hearing. And all during that time, he was taking calls from a party in Washington, D.C. everyday, beseeching him to grant the prisoner a release on bond. He refused.

There was another article in the local paper the next week about this unfortunate incident, to put a southern euphemism to it. Down by the movie theater listings, on Thursday, November 15, 1951, there are three short paragraphs. Headline: Charges of Murder to be Aired Friday at Hearing. The text below the headline reveals nothing new, except that hearing date, Friday, November 16, 1951. It briefly reports again who is accused and who is dead. The dead being unable to object, once again the defendant accuses the dead man of dragging him from beneath his own steering wheel and states that the killing was accidental. And, anyway it was self-defense.

There is no mention in the newspaper of a fact which all those who read it probably already knew. The defendant outweighed the murdered man by at least 100 pounds, and he was quite a bit taller too. The idea that Mr. Bailey could have pulled Mr. Richardson from his car would have been laughable, had it not been surrounded by such tragic circumstances.

On Thursday, November 22, 1951, Thanksgiving Day, the newspaper appeared on doorsteps all over town again. But if anyone looked in it for a report on the court hearing of the week before, they were disappointed. It seems the news staff was too busy discovering the identity of the minister who would deliver the community Thanksgiving service to attend and report on the court hearing. If anyone hoped that the short holiday week had prevented the paper’s staff from publishing a report, and it would come later, in the next week’s edition, they found in a week’s time nothing to be thankful for on that front.

There was never any report in the town’s newspaper on what happened at that hearing. In fact, as far as we know, nothing is mentioned in the local newspaper about the murder of Mr. Bailey for the rest of the natural life of the newspaper. And it hung on, under one banner or another, for an additional fifty-seven years. That is an odd thing indeed, given the editor’s usual scraping around for a story, and the general lack of news there ever was to report.

Fortunately, some court records for this case still exist. On November 16, 1951 the accused waived his right to a preliminary hearing and by a mutual agreement between the defendant and the State, he was granted release from the jail. Bond was set at $15,000. His bond note is signed by, other than himself of course, his father and mother and his attorney, Mr. Forney, all of them certifying that they are able to pay the full amount of the bond set. He was charged by the Grand Jury with Murder in the First Degree. And the trial was set for the 1952 spring session of county court.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved

The Right Southern Corner

It’s a term we’ve heard a lot lately, usually applied to our valiant ancestors who survived the Great Depression, went into battle and kicked the Axis’ tail during World War II, then came home victorious to help pave the way for the most prosperous decades of American history. But how can we really define greatness;  what made them different from their own forebears, or the generations that followed?

If we assume it takes large portions of courage, bravery, intelligence, strength and perseverance, then these folks definitely qualify. But those qualities still exist today, however well-masked by these pitiful times. To truly appreciate the source of their greatness, we need to look at how people lived in those days.

It’s said that the finest steel comes from the hottest forge. I doubt any generation ever rose up through tougher times. The War of 1914-1918, aka The Great War, War To End All Wars , or World War I,  produced a fine stock of battle-hardened forebears.  They returned home with a great victory and quietly began raising families, only to find themselves in the grip of the Great Depression just as those families were reaching young adulthood.

This new generation faced an economic plague of unimaginable deprivation. Many did not survive, but those who did emerged with a new strength & resolve that can only come from battling the worst and living to tell about it. Today’s so-called major problems would have been little more than mere nuisances to people of that caliber.  They would have quickly and efficiently dealt with them all.  Enduring hardship and conquering the unacceptable was in their nature.

Thence cometh World War II. America’s enemies were once again clearly defined; their intentions unmistakable. Our parents and grandfolks once again rose to the occasion, and once again they excelled and came home as heroes, rightly so. Each had enough war stories to keep the rest of us enthralled and justifiably envious of their valor.

National pride was at an all-time high, for these Yanks had licked half the world in the name of everything they cherished, many of them for the second time.

War is scary stuff.  Even the most patriotic volunteers would still have been fearful, making me wonder why so many went “over there” anyway. Tens of thousands went because they were drafted.   But, unlike later generations, we’ve heard few stories of deserters and draft evaders in that era.  Many others went because making war for good cause was in their nature, like the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord. If the truth be fully known, the armed services probably offered a better deal for many than they were getting at home.

We were still largely a rural populace in those days.  Farm labor is hard and boring; factory work & mining were no real bargains either. The military at least gave them a break from backbreaking, tedious routine.   Then there’s always a certain percentage of folks who simply do not thrive in everyday life situations. The war offered them an opportunity for real accomplishment and recognition.

Whatever the reasons, Americans rose to the occasion, with the full support of their countrymen and Allies. They were a seasoned, hardened bunch of survivors whose latest assignment was just another ordeal in a long line of stressful situations that we cannot imagine without having lived them ourselves.  These people simply took it all in stride and did what they felt was right.

Those who remained behind also found a new resolve: do everything humanly possible to support their troops overseas and keep our flag flying proudly back home. They openly hated and berated the enemy because he was trying to kill their loved ones and take over a free country, and because our finest were over there instead of home.

These loyal civilians worked overtime to produce what was needed to defeat the enemy’s purpose.  They sacrificed luxuries, grew their own gardens for food, walked instead of drove so there would be fuel for military use, organized home guards in case the enemy made it as far as their homeland, became civilian plane spotters, and performed countless other duties of a concerned populace under fire.

I recently attended a concert featuring a forever-young lady, 80+ years of age, who had traveled all over the States and Europe with a USO troupe.  She and her companions brought a little bit of home to those fighting forces, encouraging them, and reinforcing their resolve.  As I listened to her piano music and watched her perform, it occurred to me that she was also a hero; another integral part of something so immense and wonderful that we must also include her as one of the Great Ones.

You could literally see the inner strength in her face and feel her magnetism as she belted out dozens of tunes that were popular in that era.  Indeed, those songs themselves were also part of the greatness; songs that refreshed and inspired those going in harm’s way with promises of unequivocal support back home and a glorious new world at peace when it was all over.

More than sixty years later this remarkable lady’s music worked its wondrous effect on this new audience, regardless of our age or hers.  One can only guess  what memories were stirred that night.  Many openly wept, and sang along as best they could.

What a pity  those who’ve protected our interests in later conflicts have not been afforded the same glory and acceptance by their own peers.  It reflects badly upon all of us.

Only the great can recognize greatness.  It’s mostly gone now; not from our soldiers, but from those for whom they die.

Views From Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith

Views From Benny Hill

Something urged me to rise out of bed at 0500, rather than the usual 0630-0800 I’ve enjoyed since retiring more than ten years ago.  It’s like I was going to miss out on something special if I waited a minute longer.   My usual leisurely routine was put on hold as I stepped out on the back porch to check out the day’s weather.

The chilly, pre-dawn air was rich with musky dewiness.  Whitish-orange light reflected upon the sky from somewhere barely over the horizon, causing a pale, ground-hugging fog to slightly glow as it lay in smoky layers in the hollers and valleys behind my home.  Turning to my hummingbird feeders, I saw that one had been completely drained despite bring filled late the previous afternoon.  It was my largest feeder, with one-litre capacity and six stations.

I went back inside and got a gallon jug of fresh nectar from the refrigerator. They’re currently consuming about three gallons a week.  As I removed the feeder’s jar and started to fill it,  the air around me began to thicken with hummingbirds, at least fifteen or twenty of them.  But this morning instead of re-hanging the feeder, I simply stood there holding it in my outstretched hand, as I occasionally do.

Almost immediately I was swarmed with hungry, grateful hummers, one at each feed station with others lined up awaiting their turn.  As they became more accustomed to my presence and their obvious hunger emboldened them even more than usual, I gradually drew the feeder closer until it was mere inches from my face.    What a wondrous sight it was!

About a dozen of these little emerald-colored marvels of evolution were all around me, the wind from their wings sweeping across my face, hair, and bare arms as they jostled each other for a turn at the nozzles.  At least as  many more were in a holding pattern only a few feet away, while others darted in & out among the trees. It reminded me of the five oclock rush hour at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport.

Their usual territorialism had been put on hold, probably because my own presence overshadowed any threat they may have felt from each other.  Unlike hummers’ usual pattern of fighting over rights to every feeder in sight, these birds were in a total feeding frenzy.  Several  alpha males hovered a few inches away at eye level, staring at me with fearless, tiny black eyes and flashing iridescent red and orange throats while twittering defiantly as if I were merely a larger version of themselves, the biggest alpha bird in the neighborhood.

It was truly an enjoyable experience that probably would never have occurred had I lingered in bed until full daylight.   Hummingbirds are some of the most remarkable, exquisite creatures on Earth, in any kind of light.  Their colors and the way they flash them changes with every new hour of the day, every week, and with every instinctive posture.  To see buzzing, humming, twittering clouds of them boldly swarming around one’s head against a pre-dawn backdrop of morning fog is about as good as it gets in this life.  No picture can do it justice; you just have to be there, and be the one holding the feeder.

But this spectacle also brought a touch of regret.  The fact they are no longer battling over feeders means they have no more nests to build in St Clair this year, and are all preparing to head south as soon as they fatten up a bit.  And, I have to wonder how many of these little jewels will survive their six hundred mile, non-stop journey over the Gulf of Mexico from Dauphin Island to Yucatan.  Because of the rigors of their lifestyles, few hummers live for more than two or three years.

Everyone’s heard of swan songs; it saddens me to realize that a few of them are probably singing the hummingbird version this morning.

Views From Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith

Views From Benny Hill