Stray and abandoned dogs wander among the tombstones at Oak Hill Cemetery near the BJCC in north Birmingham, and several call the city’s 140-year-old graveyard home. Some keep to themselves, and others travel in packs. Oak Hill’s executive director Stuart Oates, who has worked at the cemetery for a decade and has been an animal lover all his life, frequently spies the animals roaming the grounds and is sometimes forced to call animal control when encountering aggressive dogs. Most, however, seem afraid of people and are unapproachable. They are difficult to catch—savvy creatures seemingly expert at self-survival.

A few dogs have been friendly, however, and Oates and his family have adopted two of them. The first was a Siberian Husky puppy named Lubka, who he discovered lying near a gravestone, one of her legs completely shattered. He speculates that the dog’s owner abandoned her, since it’s unusual to see a purebred dog wandering as a stray. The second animal the family took in was a shaggy black dog that his eight-year-old daughter Mina named Lucky.

“We were digging a grave, getting ready for a funeral, and all of a sudden this sweet looking, little black half–Cocker Spaniel, half-Dachshund came wandering up near us,” he says. “He just kind of sat there staring off in the distance like he didn’t have a friend in the world. He came over, and at the time I just didn’t think that we could keep another dog. But he was a perfectly fine, house-trained dog.” The Oates family—Stuart, his wife Gabriela, who works at UAB, Mina, and her brother Teddy, age five—adopted Lucky in 2008.

On a recent Sunday morning at the cemetery, father and daughter share anecdotes as a homeless Shar Pei that Mina named Baby Doll lounges on a nearby tombstone slab. After correcting my mispronunciation of her dog Lubka’s name (Lubka is Russian for “little love,”), Mina told the animal’s story: “Lubka was running around somewhere in the cemetery and her leg was broken or something. And then my Dad took her in. She wouldn’t drink water, so he, like, got a wet rag and put it over her, so then she drank a little bit and he took her to the vet.

“There’s also puppies,” Mina continues. “A dog had puppies up here, like in the back of the cemetery, and there used to be 11 but a couple of them died.” “One’s called Scrappy Doo, which turned out to be a girl, even though we thought it was a boy.”

Stuart tells of a Good Samaritan veterinarian who offered help free of charge. “Scrappy Doo had puppies last year—and this is part of the problem—she had a big litter, and most of them died. But fortunately, by the grace of God, there was a vet out on Highway 280 who decided to take those that survived, and he adopted them out, found homes for them. Scrappy Doo was born in a previous litter here, and now Scrappy is a full-grown female still hanging out with her mom in the cemetery.”

Lisa Stewart, who works at the Birmingham Museum of Art and volunteers on weekends at Tigers for Tomorrow (a large cat sanctuary near Attalla, Alabama), first became aware of the stray dog issues at Oak Hill while going to the cemetery on her lunch hour.

“I had seen this Shar Pei [Baby Doll] several years ago somewhere around the civic center,” Stewart says. “Then I started going to the cemetery at lunchtime just because it’s so pretty, and there was that Shar Pei.” Like the Oates family, she has also adopted one of the “ghost dogs,” as Mina has dubbed them, from a litter born underneath the caretaker’s house at Oak Hill. “I ended up taking one, and somebody with a local animal advocate group took the rest and found homes for all of them. I was hoping I could catch the mother so that I could at least get her fixed.”

The plight of stray animals at Oak Hill Cemetery, as well as the irresponsibility of pet owners, prompted Mina Oates to write of the creatures that roam the cemetery grounds. Mina first wrote about the ghost dogs at age six for a literary journal published by the Advent Episcopal School she attends. (A year later, she flew to Wisconsin to accept an award for winning an essay contest through the University of Wisconsin.) Her parents sent her story, reprinted below, to Black & White.

• • •Ghost Dogs
Hi! My name is Mina, age 8. My dad works at Oak Hill Cemetery. And you know what he has there? Ghost dogs. Oh no, not those kinds of ghost dogs. I mean thrown out, left alone, sick dogs. And you know who does that? Us. A lot of us are rich and live in rich neighborhoods, but when we have a dog that we don’t want, we drive to this poor neighborhood and throw our dog out in my dad’s cemetery and let it die.

It is very sad.

	(click for larger version)

My dad and I do our best to help these unwanted dogs. We have even named them. I’ll tell you some: There is Baby Doll, Mama, Baby, Buck, Chase and Leo, Spike, and Buttercup. They are all very sweet. And guess what? Spike and Buttercup are babies! There were more babies—there used to be 11 babies but now there are 7.

Lubka was a starved Husky puppy with a shattered leg. She was barely alive when my dad found her. She had been left by a tombstone. We took her to the vet. They had to do surgeries on her but they saved her. She came to live with our family.

Or last year—a little black doggie was left at the cemetery right after Christmas. We took him home and named him Lucky.

Buck was thrown out of a car. He wandered around for a few days and left. He came back many months later, in the winter. He had lost all his hair except a little tuft on the top of his head. He was covered with mange sores. His joints were swollen and one eye was blind. It was very cold outside. He was looking for shelter. My dad tried to feed him but he couldn’t eat. When the Animal Control lady came to pick him up she knelt down and put her hand on his head. And you know what happened? Buck started crying. Not just inside. He cried with sorrow, his dog eyes closed. This may have been the only act of human kindness he has ever known, the last one.

That’s why we need to save our dogs. If you don’t want them, find a home for them.

Be human.

With the return of the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 7, all is well in my pro football world. Quarterback Peyton Manning’s finesse at rallying the Colts from fourth-quarter deficits with his precision passing is a sight to behold. Manning is capable of moving a team the length of a football field in mere seconds.

It was late Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas who mastered the “two-minute offense” that revolutionized professional football in the 1950s and ’60s. Manning has perfected that tactic. Manning’s style features the hunched shoulders, fast feet, and lightning-quick passes that defined the Unitas legend decades ago. Come Super Bowl Sunday, I’ll no doubt once again believe that the Colts’ blue horseshoe logo is actually a “U” for Unitas, just as I had presumed as a kid.

	Johnny Unitas (click for larger version)

Like most fans of the former Baltimore Colts, I had no use for the team after late owner (and alleged drunk) Robert Irsay whisked the franchise out of Baltimore one night in March of 1984. Two months earlier, a reportedly intoxicated Irsay had appeared at a press conference to promise the city that he would not move the franchise out of town, though he did remind fans that “it’s my goddamn team.” Negotiations over improvements to Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium had begun to crumble, prompting the Maryland state legislature to pass a law allowing the city to seize the team under eminent domain when it appeared that the owner might take them elsewhere. At midnight the day after the legislation was passed, Irsay had the team’s equipment and other assets loaded into 15 moving vans bound for Indianapolis. The vans were provided at no cost by the CEO of Mayflower Transit Company, a close pal of then-Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut.

	Peyton Manning (click for larger version)

Irsay acquired the Colts in 1972 in one of the oddest deals in professional sports history: he swapped teams with then-Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, giving Rosenbloom the Los Angeles Rams in exchange. The following year, Irsay committed an unpardonable sin when he traded Unitas to the San Diego Chargers. Rosenbloom, who had signed Unitas for the Colts in 1956 for a mere $7,000, drowned off the coast of Florida in 1979. Though his death was ruled accidental, an episode of the PBS investigative series “Frontline” suggested that mobsters had Rosenbloom murdered. Robert Irsay died in 1997. His son Jim Irsay now owns the team.

It took a quarterback from the Manning clan to rekindle my love for the Colts 14 years after the team moved to Indianapolis. For those not familiar with the Manning football dynasty, patriarch Archie Manning was an All-American at Ole Miss who starred in a 33-32 loss to Alabama in 1969 in the first national telecast of a college football game in prime time. (Bear Bryant once referred to Archie as the greatest college quarterback he ever saw.) The sports world was captivated by a hot-shot quarterback called “Archie” leading a team nicknamed the Rebels whose fans enthusiastically waved Confederate flags. The elder Manning would spend a dozen years as the lone star of the New Orleans Saints during the team’s worst years in the 1970s and ’80s, when fans wore paper sacks over their heads in shame due to the Saints’ dismal performances. (Archie is the father of not only Peyton Manning but also current New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and former Ole Miss receiver Cooper Manning.)

My fondness for the family grew to towering heights in 1996. Archie Manning was a commentator on Saints broadcasts following his retirement from pro ball (he’s now a commentator on CBS college football telecasts). Hoping to score a story for another publication I worked for at the time, I found Manning’s home phone number in the New Orleans directory and rang him up out of the blue one October night during Peyton’s junior season at Tennessee. I didn’t expect Manning to be so accessible, and was amazed when he gladly agreed to an interview.

When the Indianapolis Colts drafted Peyton in 1998, I finally forgave the team for abandoning Baltimore. What the hell, Robert Irsay was dead. Autumn Sunday afternoons once again found me riveted to the TV as the Second Coming of Johnny Unitas soon began displaying dazzling feats of football prowess. Peyton finally won his first Super Bowl in 2007. Younger brother Eli won his first Super Bowl a year later. Both Manning kids grew up playing high school football in New Orleans.

This year marks the first appearance by the New Orleans Saints in a Super Bowl. The early line has the Colts as a 3- to 5.5-point favorite. I’ll take the Colts minus 10 points because Indianapolis has Peyton Manning playing quarterback. It has been reported that the Saints count among their fans a group of New Orleans nuns known to “pray for the Manning brothers” to win on Sundays. Though many Sisters will no doubt be praying for the hometown team on Super Bowl Sunday, I’ll wager that others will wisely place their money on the Colts. They know a Holy Quarterback when they see one. &

January 21, 2010

Susan Atkins
As the cutest of the Manson Girls, Susan Atkins became an overnight sensation in the wake of the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate and her unborn child (as well as the next night’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca). The San Francisco native first met Charles Manson when she took a trip down to Los Angeles. They turned out to be kindred spirits, since Atkins was one of the few Manson Family members who hadn’t emerged from conservative suburbia. The lovely brunette had been raised among the budding San Francisco counterculture. Her pioneering hippie upbringing helped make her a natural thrill-killer. It also made her the least believable of the girls to later renounce Manson in favor of Christianity.

Atkins was still believable at one attempt in revising the Manson Family history. She always insisted that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was wrong to believe that Manson ordered the Tate-LaBianca killings to start a race war. Atkins maintained that Manson had another motive for framing the Black Panthers for the murders. The idea was to cover up Atkins’ own involvement in the earlier killing of a local drug dealer. She was certainly the most likely member Charlie would trust with that information.

It was less believable when Atkins claimed that she was at the scene of the crimes only because she had a child that Manson was holding hostage. (Linda Kasabian—who had refused to kill anyone during the Tate murders—avoided imprisonment with the same story.) She also kept insisting that she hadn’t really killed Sharon Tate and her unborn child. Atkins continued to get letters from addled fans praising her revolutionary mayhem. She died behind bars, of course—in the same year that fellow Manson Girl Squeaky Fromme (who had tried to kill President Gerald Ford) was released from parole after 34 years in prison. (61, brain cancer) —J.R.T.

Reverend Ike
In the beginning, he was a flamboyant evangelist who looked pretty cool on Atlanta TV back in the 1970s. Reverend Ike—known more formally as The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II—worked the stage like a rock star, and preached that one does not wait for one’s pie in the sky by and by. Rather, one is to enjoy the riches of Earth as God wishes. To make his point, Rev. Ike wore lots of expensive jewelry paid for by his predominantly black congregation.

He had a national audience, but Reverend Ike mostly leeched from thousand of parishioners at the United Church Science of Living Institute. His lack of a Southern accent kept him from receiving the disdain heaped on an Ernest Angley or Jimmy Swaggart. He also conned the national media with something called

“positive self-image psychology.” That didn’t sound any worse than EST. Ike peaked in the 1970s, when his broadcasts could be heard on 1,500 radio stations, but he kept preaching until a merciful stroke in 2006. His death, incidentally, was announced by family spokesman Bishop E. Bernard Jordan—who runs his own scam where he’ll charge $365 for a full year of saying prayers for you. Ike’s sad legacy lives on. (74, complications from a stroke) —J.R.T.

Fred Travelena
2009 was a tough year for impressionists. Danny Gans—whose hugely popular Las Vegas act featured his repertoire of voices—passed away last May. Fred Travelena—who passed away a month later—was a bigger name back in the 1970s. He wasn’t as famous as Rich Little, but Travelena was a regular presence on game shows like “Match Game” and “Super Password.” His broad style—with impressions from Kermit the Frog to Frank Sinatra—was never considered hip, and he was later replaced on the talk-show circuit by the likes of Dana Carvey.

He kept working, though, often secretly re-recording the flubbed dialogue of name actors in major motion pictures. Travelena also kept touring smaller venues. His assorted illnesses (including prostate cancer) inspired old fan David Letterman to bring him on as a guest in 2006. (66, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) —J.R. Taylor

Altovise Davis
Sammy Davis, Jr. left behind more than a wife and child when he passed away in 1990. His widow also had to deal with a tax debt estimated at up to $7 million, plus a $2.5 million mortgage and a late husband’s will that included plenty of charitable bequests. Frank Sinatra reportedly helped Altovise out with a quiet gift of $1 million. She still passed away owing nearly $3 million in back taxes. It’s notable that Altovise never cashed in with a tell-all book. She had seen plenty of decadence during her days with Sammy. We would go into more gossipy detail, but it’s not safe just because the Rat Pack is dead. Shirley MacLaine is still out there. (65, stroke) —J.R.T.

January 21, 2010

Much of John Updike’s work proves the adage that writers write best about that of which they know. This two-time Pulitzer Prize winner had inauspicious beginnings, growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in a stone farmhouse on 80 acres of land. The area became the setting for many of his novels about middle-class life. Most popular was the “Rabbit” series, including Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, based on the character of the small-town athlete Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.Updike wrote from an early age, working for the high school newspaper and excelling in school; he earned a scholarship to Harvard University. There he wrote and drew satirical cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. The year he graduated, summa cum laude, he wrote and sold a poem to The New Yorker. While studying for a year at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, in London, Updike met E.B. and Katharine White, The New Yorker‘s editors, who encouraged him to apply for a job at the magazine. Updike moved to Manhattan and became a staff writer, a position he maintained for only two years (though he contributed to the magazine throughout his life). Moving his family to Massachusetts, Updike adhered to a strict six-days-a-week writing schedule from his home. Rabbit, Run was Updike’s second novel. His publisher, Knopf, feared that the frank description of Rabbit’s sexual adventures could lead to prosecution for obscenity, but the book was published to widespread acclaim without legal repercussions.

In 1963, Updike received the National Book Award for his novel The Centaur, a modern myth inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was invited by the State Department to tour Eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. Updike’s novel Couples created a national sensation with its portrayal of the relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs. During the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador. Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest were published in 1981 and 1991, respectively. He published 60 books in his lifetime, working in a wide range of genres from essays to criticisms to poetry. (76, lung cancer) —C.C.

Paul Hemphill
Birmingham native Paul Hemphill wrote of a world filled with stock cars, college football, preachers, whiskey, and all-around hell-raisers that defined Southern culture. Hemphill’s newspaper columns were among his most controversial, condemning racism at a time when the subject was frequently overlooked in the Deep South. He had a knack for capturing the essence of the underbelly of Dixieland, where he admittedly consorted with prostitutes and moonshine swillers.

A former intern at the Birmingham News, Hemphill found work as a sportswriter after his semi-pro baseball career fizzled out. Eventually, he became a daily columnist for the Atlanta Journal, where his columns about the common man became a hit with readers. He authored The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, which is viewed as one of the best accounts of the country music world. Hemphill wrote with simple, blunt honesty as he described the sins of his native region, including a memoir of the strained relationship with his racist, truck-driving father called Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son. (73, throat cancer) —Ed Reynolds

William Safire
William Safire, presidential speechwriter, political columnist, and author, had the unique misfortune of being both a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and a target of national security wiretaps authorized by the former president. Safire was best known for his syndicated column in the New York Times, his regular appearances on TV’s “Meet the Press,” and his writing on language and etymology. A college dropout, he entered politics by way of public relations; while exhibiting a model home at an American trade fair in Moscow in 1959, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debated there (in what later become known as the “kitchen debate”) over the merits of capitalism versus communism. Safire photographed the event and later joined Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns. In 1973, he became a political columnist for the New York Times. In addition to writing several books and novels, from 1979 through the month of his death, Safire wrote the “On Language” column for the New York Times Magazine. (79, pancreatic cancer) —C.C.

	Frank McCourt (click for larger version)

Frank McCourt
Although he spent most of his life as a teacher, it is for his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, that author Frank McCourt will be remembered. McCourt was born in Brooklyn, but his family returned to Ireland soon after his birth, where they fell into even deeper poverty. Angela’s Ashes recounts those years spent in the shadow of his father, an unemployed alcoholic whose habits kept the family broke. Three of McCourt’s six siblings died of diseases brought on in part by squalor and malnutrition; McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever at age 10. His book describes the awful circumstances of his daily life in Ireland, yet manages to inject humor and lightness throughout the tale. At 19, McCourt returned to the United States only to be drafted into the Korean War; on his return he talked his way into New York University (despite having never graduated high school). He graduated and got a job teaching creative writing in the New York City Public School system, which he did for 27 years. It was at his students’ urging over the years that he began writing and sharing his work with his classes. He finally wrote his memoir, which was published in 1996. It has sold more than 4 million copies, been translated into dozens of languages, and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. (78, meningitis) —Christina Crowe

Dominick Dunne
Crime writer Dominick Dunne could be considered the forefather to such celebrity “news” outlets as TV’s E! network or TMZ.com. His life took him from wealth to the throes of addiction, from fatherhood to the grief of outliving his own daughters (two of whom died in infancy), from New York to Hollywood, all the while developing a career in investigative journalism. This born-rich Irish Catholic boy grew to become a TV executive and film producer in mid-1970s Hollywood, where he nearly crashed from alcohol and drug addiction. A period of self-exile from society resulted in his first book, The Winners. The murder of his daughter, TV actress Dominique Dunne, and the subsequent trial of her killer resulted in the legal journalism for which Dunne would come to be known.

He wrote an article titled, “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer” for Vanity Fair, after which he became a contributing writer for the magazine. In the same genre, Dunne took several real-life murders, such as that of department store magnate Alfred Bloomingdale’s mistress, and fictionalized them in what became best-selling books. On the now-defunct CourtTV cable network, Dunne hosted a series called “Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice,” in which he covered celebrity trials including those of Phil Spector, the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Skakel, among others. In 2008, at age 82, Dunne traveled to Las Vegas to cover O.J. Simpson’s kidnapping trial for Vanity Fair. Clearly not wishing to be forgotten in death, Dunne wrote several memoirs and autobiographies and produced a film about his own life. (83, bladder cancer) —Christina Crowe

Donald Westlake
“Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.” —Elmore Leonard.

There’s an endorsement that makes sense. Most of Donald Westlake’s gritty crime thrillers conjure the same grim world one encounters in Elmore Leonard’s dark yarns. The three-time Edgar Award-winning mystery writer used more than a dozen pen names, Richard Stark being the most prolific. His were stories of heists gone wrong, betrayals, and curious coincidences that set bad men on bad paths to destruction. When adapted to the screen—and several were—Westlake’s tales called for genuine troublemakers and two-fisted anti-heroes such as Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and certainly Lee Marvin, who starred in the especially brutal Point Blank. For undistilled ugliness, however, Westlake’s screen adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters remains untouched. (75, heart attack) —David Pelfrey

December 10, 2009 

Mighty by Sacrifice: The Destruction of an American Bomber Squadron, August 29, 1944
By James L. Noles and James L. Noles Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 277 pages; $34.95

“Fighters coming up. Probably are friendly,” tail gunner Robert Donahue reported to pilot Bill Tune from his rear perch on a B-17 bomber dubbed Tail End Charlie. The assumption that the approaching aircraft were Allied fighter planes assigned to escort U.S. “Flying Fortress” bombers to their targets in Czechoslovakia on August 29, 1944, quickly proved incorrect. Speculation that the bombing raid would be a relatively easy mission—often known as a “milk run”—immediately disappeared. There were no Allied fighter planes to help the bombers defend themselves as the “friendly”

fighters opened fire on the 28 airplanes that comprised the 2nd Bombardment Group of the 15th Air Force.

The ensuing mayhem is described by Birmingham attorney, author, and former army helicopter pilot Jim Noles, and his father, retired army Brigadier General (and Vietnam veteran) Jim Noles Sr. in their thoroughly researched Mighty by Sacrifice. The book is a history of the lives and deaths of the crews of the 20th Squadron, one of four units that comprised the 2nd Bombardment Group. The 15th Air Force sent more than 500 aircraft into combat the day the 20th Squadron was decimated, with the majority attacking the Czech city of Moravska Ostrava. The 20th Squadron lost all seven of its B-17s on a raid of oil refineries and railway yards that August day.

The authors were inspired to write a history of the doomed squadron after Noles, Sr., learned that fellow Florence, Alabama, resident Bill Tune—originally from Carbon Hill—had a fascinating war story to tell. Tune, pilot of Tail End Charlie, along with the plane’s navigator, had self-published a booklet about the final mission. The Noles wanted to share more than the crews’ combat experience, though, revealing the background of crewmen in the 20th Squadron and their individual journeys that led them aboard B-17s fighting the Nazis. The result is a surprisingly honest portrayal of World War II vets not necessarily driven by patriotism, as many might assume, especially considering that the authors are veterans themselves.

The Noles relate the ever-present desire of American soldiers to get “duty to country” over with as soon as possible. (An aviator’s tour of duty was complete only after flying 50 combat missions, a leap from earlier requirements that required 25, then later 35 missions.) The group medical history, penned in June of 1944, noted that some men required psychotherapy to complete their quota.

Refreshingly for a World War II book, the authors share less than glorious portrayals of how spoiled many airmen were. The medical history offers a jaded, somewhat startling observation: “Combat crews often have to be treated with ‘kid gloves’; they expect much and at times their requests and complaints are unreasonable and selfish in the eyes of the ground personnel. The majority of those who fly combat have but one thing in mind and that is to fly their required number of missions and get back to the U.S. They protest any major or minor discomforts. They are the first to complain. They have been the ‘fair haired’ boys ever since they got their wings.”

The burnishing of war facts and figures is noted by the authors when writing of the “Combined Bomber Offensive,” the joint effort of U.S. and British air forces. Reports of “daylight precision bombing” were rather misleading.

“It was certainly daylight and it was certainly bombing, but it was hardly precise.” The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s postwar review found less than impressive results. “For every hundred bombs dropped against such targets, one hit an oil pipeline, two hit production facilities, two failed to explode, three hit decoy plants, eight landed in open terrain inside the target area, and eighty-four missed the target altogether.”

By 1944, Allied escort fighters were no longer flying close to bomber squadrons because flying with the slow-moving bombers allowed the Germans to decide when and where to attack. The AAF’s new tactic sent fighters ahead of a bombing unit so that the Allies could either pick off or delay Luftwaffe fighter planes as they became airborne or before they could assemble as a group in the sky. The process was called “clearing the air.” The problem with that scheme, however, was that it left bombers vulnerable. The day the 20th Squadron lost all its bombers, the 306th Allied Fighter Wing was miles ahead, looking for Nazi fighters.

Riveting accounts of frightened yet determined young men make Mighty by Sacrifice a dramatic read that complements the book’s historical aspect. The authors interviewed Bill Tune (and other survivors of the 20th Squadron), who confessed the fear involved in learning to fly an airplane. Tune, for example, flew his initial solo mission in a P-17 biplane a mere eight hours after his first lesson in that World War I-era fighter.

Of the crewmen in the squadron, 40 were killed the day all the bombers were lost, and 46 survivors were captured and remained POWs for the final year of the war. Four escaped capture, including Tail End Charlie tail gunner Robert Donahue. Donahue was changing from his awkward leather flight boots into his army brogans when he received the order to bail out of the plane, parachuting to Earth in his sock feet. He ran from would-be captors and hid in dense brush, so terrified that he “thought for sure they could hear my heart pounding,” he later said. A Czech couple sympathetic to the Allies picked him up in their horse-drawn wagon and carried him to a nearby town. Donahue was outfitted in a Slovak soldier’s uniform, which allowed him to freely continue his escape with a simple salute whenever he encountered the enemy. He ended up in the home of an elderly couple working with the Czech resistance. The next day, he continued his trip to freedom, only later learning that the elderly couple who had given him refuge for the night had been shot by German soldiers after their sanctuary for anti-Nazi Slovak rebels had been discovered.

Tune, originally a B-24 pilot, had no choice but to learn to fly quickly. His first combat mission was also his first time piloting a B-17 bomber because there was no time for non-combat training flights. The bombing raid that destroyed the 20th Squadron was Tune’s 48th mission. His escape from his damaged plane is among the most dramatic anecdotes in the book. Rendered unconscious either by an enemy shell or lack of oxygen, Tune appeared doomed. Two crewmen shoved his unconscious body from the aircraft. “Caught in the slipstream, Tune’s limp body flew back and smacked into the ball turret, breaking his leg. He bounced off the bomber and tumbled earthward.”

The reader might find it odd that a crew would shove an unconscious comrade out of an airplane. In an interview, Jim Noles, Jr., admitted curiosity about such: “The same thought crossed my mind and I never could get to the bottom of that. I don’t think that you could physically jump with somebody and exit the plane and pull the rip cord for them. Throwing him out and hoping for the best might sound sort of harsh but in that situation, with the plane on fire and people just trying to get out, they knew he would stand no chance of surviving if he remained in the plane.”

The authors know how to tell an exciting story, leaving the reader with the image of an unconscious Bill Tune plunging to his death before eventually picking up the pilot’s freefall two chapters later, when Tune regained consciousness 6,000 feet above Czechoslovakia. Yes, he finally got his parachute open and lived to tell of his adventure. &

October 15, 2009

Self-described on his web site as “a mad genius always exploring the sonic boundaries and ripping holes through time and space,” local entrepreneur and guitarist Emanual Ellinas has found a niche selling a series of custom-built guitar effects pedals that he markets nationally under the name Sitori Sonics. (An effects pedal converts an electric guitar’s basic sound into any one of dozens of sonic tones.) Guitar noise gods Sonic Youth currently own pedals made by Ellinas, as do The Flaming Lips, The White Stripes, Annie Clark (formerly of The Polyphonic Spree, now solo as St. Vincent), and Scottish band Mogwai.

“I don’t know if it was out of curiosity or simply being cheap, but I’ve always tried to fix all my own guitar equipment when it was broken,” explains the 37-year-old Ellinas, who was born in Atlanta. “I’ve been building guitar pedals [professionally] for about three years. I got started learning how to put a new battery connection on a pedal when it broke, and that gave me the confidence to change out the input jack when that broke.”

 

	Emanual Ellinas has found a niche selling a series of custom-built guitar effects pedals. (Photographs by Brian Francis.) (click for larger version)

His propensity for tinkering was evident at an early age. “When I was in third or fourth grade, I would do things like take a microwave apart when my parents would leave, and check the parts out. If I could put it all back together before they got home—so I wouldn’t get in trouble—I knew I was getting better at it. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew enough to know how to unscrew things and screw ‘em back in. And most of the time, my parents never knew that anything had happened. I soon learned how microwaves work. Then I ventured into more and more things.”

Get Rhythm
Before delving into guitars and pedals, Ellinas developed a passion for making African-style drums. “I started making drums around ’93 or ’94. I had a small store in Little Five Points in Atlanta. Actually, I shared a shop with a couple who did [body] piercings. It was drums and piercings—all of your primitive needs. I’d literally be selling a drum and you’d hear somebody scream. It was pretty funny.” He soon began selling his drums on the music festival circuit, manning a booth next to those offering T-shirts and the like. He opened a drum shop after moving to Humboldt County in northern California.

“This was pre-internet and it was a small town. Soon, I had pretty much sold drums to everybody that was gonna buy one. So it was time to move on,” Ellinas recalls.

“I always tell people it takes three days and ten years to make a drum. It took a long time, like ten years, to be able to make them that quickly. And honestly, if you don’t count the drying time—the glue, letting the skin dry—if you don’t count any of the waiting around time, I’ve got it down to about three hours, start to finish,” he explains. “But literally, it took a decade to hone the process. And it’s always just been me. I’ve had a helper or two every now and then, but mostly because I’d gotten bored and just wanted somebody to talk to. I did it all from scratch; I would cut all the wood and hammer all the steel rods into rings and weld them, shape the goatskin. Even ate a couple of the goats [laughs]. That was kind of strange, but they were good!”

Ellinas obtained the goatskins from a neighbor. “He had goats for milk and to trim his backyard,” Ellinas recalls. “Then he came over one day and said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna slaughter these goats, do you want the skins?’ And I said sure, so he showed up the next morning with the skins and some meat. I cooked it up the best I knew how. I don’t know if there’s a wrong way to cook goat, but it was tasty. Usually, I’d get skins from Africa or Pakistan because I was probably making 5 to 10 drums a week, at the least. In California, there were a lot of goat farms because it’s kind of a different scene out there. But I would far outstrip the local supply.”

Ellinas eventually tired of making percussion instruments and shifted his skills to building guitar amps and effects pedals, though his interest in drums has recently been rekindled after a long break. “I’ve just started back making drums. I was doing really well selling them on eBay years ago, and then guys in Africa kinda figured out eBay and started pawning off terrible tourists’ drums that you could get for a third of the price of mine,” he says, laughing. “All the [customers] were like, ‘Oh, these are authentic African drums!’ But they were just junk, quality-wise. I couldn’t compete with that, though I tried to. I started making drums out of pine and stuff instead of mahogany, trying to cut corners. [Cheap wood such as pine doesn't resonate as well as more exotic ones.] But it was still just as much work. I quit doing that for a good while and started importing sitars and stuff from India. I just started doing the drums again. I put a couple out at Highland Music [where he's currently employed] just to see if anybody noticed them. Lots of people have shown interest.”

Pedal Pusher
“I’m a big pedal freak. At one point I was buying two or three a day on eBay,” Ellinas says of his fascination with guitar gadgets. “And I’d play them and within two or three minutes I’d figure out what I hated about them. I’d re-list them on eBay and would usually make money because I’m good at selling stuff,” he boasts without a pause. Indeed, his web site offers a bit of comical arrogance, especially when touting his Reel Repeat effects pedal: “Tired of the same old delay [pedal] you’ve heard on every U2 song since 1985? We are. . . . Use [Reel Repeat] once and you’ll box up that old tape delay [pedal] and toss it in the attic. Better yet, sell it to some moron on eBay for way too much.”

	(click for larger version)

Regarding his motivation to build his own effects pedals, Ellinas explains: “There wasn’t really anything out there that was doing what I wanted it to do that was under $300 or $400. I couldn’t afford that much for a pedal. My car cost $500 [laughs]. So I made a delay pedal and an overdrive pedal, a fuzz pedal, and a phaser pedal. One day I stopped in Highland Music to see what they thought about them and they bought one on the spot, and two other guys in the store bought two more. The store said they would stock them, and that’s how I ended up working at Highland Music.”

“Emanual is making guitar pedals like they made them in the ’60s, all hand-wired, high-quality,” explains Highland Music owner Don Murdoch. “In a nutshell, the big corporations would have to charge $300 to $400 for pedals like these. Emanual’s selling most of his pedals for $168.” Ellinas’ enthusiasm for his creations is one of his strengths, as well. “He’s such a great salesman,” says Murdoch. “He’s got a knack for making people really like him. He could be selling whatever. . . . And he’s a damn good guitar amp maker, too.

Ellinas says the pedal sales really took off when members of Sonic Youth mentioned on their web site that they were using his pedals. “After that, I started selling eight or nine a day—beginning, like, that night.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon at Highland Music, Ellinas’ wife Valerie, who plays with him in their band Nag Hammadi (described on the band’s MySpace page as “Middle Eastern space rock”), holds their three-month-old daughter while good-naturedly scolding her husband for a recent email he sent to Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. “One of Sonic Youth’s two bass players, Mark Ibold, also played in the band Pavement, which was a loud band, and Sonic Youth is a loud band. Ibold was worried that my bass fuzz pedal was too loud and was going to break his amp,” Ellinas says, offering up another dose of his infectious laughter. “Ranaldo had emailed me about the pedal and I answered all the questions about the pedal and at the end, I literally told him to tell Mark to ‘put his big-boy pants on and play the fuzz [pedal] as it was.’ Sonic Youth and I were swapping emails every other day or so, and then I didn’t hear from them for like two weeks. I kinda thought that I had messed up. But I always just assume everybody has the same sense of humor that I do. And then eventually I wondered, ‘Well, maybe they don’t. Maybe it turns out I am a jerk. But it turned out they had gone to Japan and they weren’t mad at me at all.” &

To see examples of Ellinas’ guitar pedals, visit www.sitorisonics.com or drop by Highland Music (254-3288, hlandmusic.com) at 3000 Clairmont Avenue South on Southside.

October 15, 2009
For those addicted to the challenge, physical benefits, and sheer exhilaration of rock climbing, the greater Birmingham area now has a world-class indoor climbing gym. In August of 2009 First Avenue Rocks opened in downtown Birmingham’s industrial district, which has blossomed into a funky commercial sector in recent years. The 4,000-square-foot gymnasium features several 15-foot-tall simulated rock formations that include hundreds of “holds” (plastic structures functioning as grips for hands and steps for feet as climbers attempt to scale the angular, fabricated stone façades). Each week, on one wall of each boulder, the “holds” are unscrewed from the surfaces and rearranged to provide a new climbing challenge. Climbers may continue to confront scaling dilemmas for a while when a particular rock formation proves too difficult to conquer in a short time.

Aware of Alabama’s reputation among climbing enthusiasts, Joe Ortega and partner Adam Henry opened First Avenue Rocks for climbers who don’t always have time to visit popular Alabama rock-climbing settings such as Horse Pens 40, Hoover’s Moss Rock Preserve, or Little River Canyon.

“People come from all over the world to climb in Alabama,” says Ortega, a Californian who has been a climbing enthusiast for decades. “There are more foreign languages being spoken at Horse Pens 40 in the winter than there is English,” he claims as he explains why he chose Birmingham for such a facility. “People come from literally everywhere. From France, Canada, South Africa, from all over South America. Birmingham really is an international bouldering destination, believe it or not.” First Avenue Rocks will soon conduct group expeditions to some of the state’s best climbing spots. “We’re going to start doing outdoor trips in November,” he says. “We currently take scout groups and others out to property near Oneonta that is set up to teach people to climb outside.”

	First Avenue Rocks will soon lead group climbing expeditions to sites such as Little River Canyon (above), Horse Pens 40, and Moss Rock Preserve. (Photo: Randy Lee.) (click for larger version)

First Avenue Rocks offers recreational climbing (including instruction) for those with or without experience. The gym has wall space specifically designed for “top rope climbing” (an introductory level often used by beginners that employs harnesses and rope). “We’re not here to serve only experienced rock climbers,” he explains. “We’re here to get new climbers interested. It helps if you’re in shape, but it’s not a requirement. Climbing doesn’t require a whole lot of upper body strength to start out. Beginners are always surprised at how much they have to use their legs.”

Climbers are allowed to participate in tennis shoes (barefoot climbing is forbidden). Specially designed climbing shoes are available for rent or purchase. The flooring in the climbing areas consists of 10 inches of foam cushioning for safety. Colored tape on the boulder walls suggests routes to reach the top of each structure. “Boulder routes are called problems,” explains Ortega.

“Climbing is not simply going up and down a ladder. There are decisions to be made to figure out how to reach the top.”

Free Wi-Fi, a foosball table, couches, and a TV are available for those content to lounge while friends or family members work out. The gym also offers a small weight room, as well as cross-fit training instruction and a yoga studio that offers daily classes.

Located at 2417 First Avenue South, First Avenue Rocks is open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Call 320-2277 or go to firstaverocks.com for more information.

• • •Though primarily a store selling outdoor gear, Alabama Outdoors offers a climbing wall at its Homewood location (3054 Independence Drive). Top rope climbing with harnesses is one option; another is scaling the 25-foot wall via holds. A small cave-like area beneath a stairwell can be used for bouldering. Climbing shoes must be worn and are included in the $8 price to participate. Climbing hours are 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. Call 870-1919 for more information. &