Fairhope, Day 3 & 4

Notice of Buddy Richmond's death. Gambino's is where I met Buddy.








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Azaleas at Prospect & Coleman

















Fairhope maintains a strong police presence.













The Parker House used to be here.

















The DuBrock's (George & Ida) used to have an antique store here, across from Punta Clara Kitchen.

Reminds me of a Sly Stone lyric...

A Family Affair...

"You can't cry
'Cause you're letting folks down
But you're crying anyway
Because you're all broke down"

Fairhope, day 2

I'll

Left to right, top to bottom.

The azaleas are beautiful.

St Patrick's day is done, but I honored "The Big Fellow"


bet Mary Lois hung out here


Lucasson's grocery used t0 be here .

"W, The President" stickers are prevalent on the SUVs here

Got in to Fairhope today...

I asked my friend about the big crane I saw. It is for the new Hampton Inn going in. I'm not sure if it is on the NW corner of Magnolia & Section, the former site of the M&S service station where my father once worked and where he was alleged to have asked my mother out for the first time, but make no mistake, the M&S is gone.

I enjoyed three scotches at a restaurant/bar next to Ken & Vernon's barber shop. For a few months in 1985, I lived on the second floor of that establishment. My rent was $150 a month.

I went to Gambino's. (I didn't have a drink No one was there, too depressing for me), but the marquee was referencing the death of Buddy Richmond. Buddy was a local architect. I didn't know him well, but he was a guy I knew from back in the day. I think he may have been a partner of some type with John Bethea, who was my$150 landlord. I liked Buddy's wife Kitty.

I drove down to Point Clear and parked at the lot that once held the house I grew up in.

I loved it. The sound of the waves. I looked up at the sky and saw stars like I haven't seen in years. All this, I used to take for granted.

Some dogs barked, some lights came on a few lots over. I saw some flashlights, I called out to my former neighbor, "Susan?" she said "yeah?", I identified myself, and I think she understood.

Gene Owens' Commentary

The legacy of an ex-slave named Lizzie Harris

By Gene Owens

Basset Day never achieved the status of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, or even of the watered-down President's Day.

Perhaps that's because James Lutzweiler, my friend from Jamestown, N. C., was unable to find another sponsor to pick up the tab for the annual lunch, though you'd think Duke University, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition or Al Sharpton's National Action Network might pitch in a pittance to keep alive a legacy spawned by an ex-slave's advice to a laboring white man.

In the wake of the Caucasian-bashing fulminations of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, Lutz and I thought it would be a good idea to bring Lizzie Harris to the forefront in the hope that it would create some interracial good will. The story comes courtesy of Richard Bassett, 90, son of Duke historian John Spencer Bassett, the central figure in what has been called Duke's finest hour.

John Spencer Bassett was not always a scholar. There was a time when he made his living by splitting cedar shakes and posts.

One day, as Bassett was following his sweaty pursuit, Lizzie Harris, who had been reared as a slave, approached him with words to this effect: "You've got a good mind. You ought to be working with it instead of with those splintered hands."

As Richard Bassett told Lutz: "My father looked down at his blood-red hands as the blood-red sun was sinking in the sky, and he decided that Lizzie was right."

But Lizzie wasn't finished. She gave Bassett a book, "Great Thoughts from Greek Authors." Inside the cover she wrote, in beautiful handwriting, "J. S. Bassett, from his friend, Lizzie Harris." She added a quotation: "Know how to wait and the kingdom will come to thee, not by violence, not by rapine, but by the hand of God."

Bassett subsequently enrolled at Johns Hopkins University,where he and some guy named Woodrow Wilson were among the first to receive the newly established American degree of doctor of philosophy.

Lizzie Harris' advice and generosity apparently left a liberalizing mark on Bassett. He joined the staff of Trinity College, as Duke University was then called.

In 1903, Bassett uttered an opinion that, in the eyes of many, amounted to blasphemy. He opined that the two greatest men born in the South during the preceding 100 years were Robert E. Lee and Booker T. Washington.

Never mind that he put the great general ahead of the great educator. To utter both names in the same breath was deemed cause for demanding Bassett's head on a platter.

Josephus Daniels, renowned editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, labeled Bassett an ass. Demands went forth for his discharge from the Duke faculty. The board of trustees met to consider the matter. The trustees voted to go against the tide of public opinion and to retain Bassett.

Lutz has watched many a Duke team bounce its way to glory across the basketball court and the television screen. But he considers this the university's finest hour.

In 1983, on the 80th anniversary of the Bassett Affair, former Gov. and U.S. senator Terry Sanford, then president of Duke University, delivered a speech to his faculty on the topic, "Doing the Right Thing." He recounted the Bassett story. Lutzweiler was intrigued, and soon made Sanford's acquaintance.

"He bought my lunch at least three times," Lutz said. And Duke commissioned him to go to Massachusetts to do a videotaped oral history with Richard Bassett. It was during this interview that Richard told Lutz the story of Lizzie Harris.

"I think it is easily one of the best stories in the history of Duke University -- and in American history, for that matter," said Lutz, who is archivist and rare-book collector at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. "I once offered to tell it to a black historian I met at a conference celebrating the Bassett Affair, if only he would buy me a steak. I am still waiting for his call. So I am passing it on to you in hopes that you will buy me a steak."

IOU one steak, Lutz.

Lutzweiler cites the Lizzie Harris story as illustrative of "the critical role some otherwise obscure black women have played in American history. They ought to be remembered not just in February, but forever."

It's March now, Lutz; I'm a procrastinator. But if you believe in academic freedom, pause a moment to thank Lizzie Harris.

(Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com

Noonan's take on Obama's speech

My feeling is Peggy liked it, she thought it was a great speech.
About the only zinger is suggestion toward the end of the column which seems to label Senator and Mrs. Obama as silver spoon yuppies/buppies.

Still, I generally find Ms. Noonan's commentary interesting and fairly objective.

/////////////////////////////

	March 21, 2008

DECLARATIONS By PEGGY NOONAN

D A Thinking Man's Speech March 21, 2008 I thought Barack Obama's speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to. It was clear that's what he wanted, and this is rare. It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution. We'll see if it was a success. The blowhard guild, proud member since 2000, praised it, and, in the biggest compliment, cable news shows came out of the speech not with jokes or jaded insiderism, but with thought. They started talking, pundits left and right, black and white, about what they'd experienced of race in America. It was kind of wonderful. I thought, Go, America, go, go. You know what Mr. Obama said. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was wrong. His sermons were "incendiary," and they "denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation." Mr. Obama admitted that if all he knew of Mr. Wright were what he saw on the "endless loop . . . of YouTube," he wouldn't like him either. But he's known him 20 years as a man who taught him Christian faith, helped the poor, served as a Marine, and leads a community helping the homeless, needy and sick. "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me." He would not renounce their friendship. Most significantly, Mr. Obama asserted that race in America has become a generational story. The original sin of slavery is a fact, but the progress we have lived through the past 50 years means each generation experiences race differently. Older blacks, like Mr. Wright, remember Jim Crow and were left misshapen by it. Some rose anyway, some did not; of the latter, a "legacy of defeat" went on to misshape another generation. The result: destructive anger that is at times "exploited by politicians" and that can keep African-Americans "from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition." But "a similar anger exists within segments of the white community." He speaks of working- and middle-class whites whose "experience is the immigrant experience," who started with nothing. "As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they've built it from scratch." "So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town," when they hear of someone receiving preferences they never received, and "when they're told their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced," they feel anger too. This is all, simply, true. And we are not used to political figures being frank, in this way, in public. For this Mr. Obama deserves deep credit. It is also true the particular whites Obama chose to paint -- ethnic, middle class -- are precisely the voters he needs to draw in Pennsylvania. It was strategically clever. But as one who witnessed busing in Boston first hand, and whose memories of those days can still bring tears, I was glad for his admission that busing was experienced as an injustice by the white working class. Next step: admitting it was an injustice, period. * * * The primary rhetorical virtue of the speech can be found in two words, endemic and Faulkner. Endemic is the kind of word political consultants don't let politicians use because 72% of Americans don't understand it. This lowest-common-denominator thinking, based on dizzy polling, has long degraded American discourse. When Obama said Mr. Wright wrongly encouraged "a view that sees white racism as endemic," everyone understood. Because they're not, actually, stupid. As for Faulkner -- well, this was an American politician quoting William Faulkner: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." This is a thought, an interesting one, which means most current politicians would never share it. The speech assumed the audience was intelligent. This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift. It also assumed many in the audience were educated. I was grateful for this, as the educated are not much addressed in American politics. Here I point out an aspect of the speech that may have a beneficial impact on current rhetoric. It is assumed now that a candidate must say a silly, boring line -- "And families in Michigan matter!" or "What I stand for is affordable quality health care!" -- and the audience will clap. The line and the applause make, together, the eight-second soundbite that will be used tonight on the news, and seen by the people. This has been standard politico-journalistic procedure for 20 years. Mr. Obama subverted this in his speech. He didn't have applause lines. He didn't give you eight seconds of a line followed by clapping. He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn't summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn't hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he'd said. If Hillary or John McCain said something interesting, they'd get more than an eight-second cut too. But it works only if you don't write an applause-line speech. It works only if you write a thinking speech. They should try it. * * * Here's what didn't work. Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn't summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions. There is of course some truth in his portrait, but why do appeals to the Democratic base have to be so unrelievedly, so unrealistically, bleak? This connected in my mind to the persistent feeling one has -- the fear one has, actually -- that the Obamas, he and she, may not actually know all that much about America. They are bright, accomplished, decent, they know all about the yuppie experience, the buppie experience, Ivy League ways, networking. But they bring along with all this -- perhaps defensively, to keep their ideological views from being refuted by the evidence of their own lives, or so as not to be embarrassed about how nice fame, success, and power are -- habitual reversions to how tough it is to be in America, and to be black in America, and how everyone since the Reagan days has been dying of nothing to eat, and of exploding untreated diseases. America is always coming to them on crutches. But most people didn't experience the past 25 years that way. Because it wasn't that way. Do the Obamas know it? This is a lot of baggage to bring into the Executive Mansion. Still, it was a good speech, and a serious one. I don't know if it will help him. We're in uncharted territory. We've never had a major-party presidential front-runner who is black, or rather black and white, who has given such an address. We don't know if more voters will be alienated by Mr. Wright than will be impressed by the speech about Mr. Wright. We don't know if voters will welcome a meditation on race. My sense: The speech will be labeled by history as the speech that saved a candidacy or the speech that helped do it in. I hope the former.

Political commentary...from back in the day

The Wearin' Of The Green

"O Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that's goin' round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground!
No more Saint Patrick's Day we'll keep, his color can't be seen
For there's a cruel law ag'in the Wearin' o' the Green."

I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand
And he said, "How's poor old Ireland, and how does she stand?"
"She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen
For they're hanging men and women there for the Wearin' o' the Green."

"So if the color we must wear be England's cruel red
Let it remind us of the blood that Irishmen have shed
And pull the shamrock from your hat, and throw it on the sod
But never fear, 'twill take root there, though underfoot 'tis trod.

When laws can stop the blades of grass from growin' as they grow
And when the leaves in summer-time their color dare not show
Then I will change the color too I wear in my caubeen
But till that day, please God, I'll stick to the Wearin' o' the Green."