Rocket Stalker

Many hours and miles chasing thundering, fireball- spewing space shuttles finally come to an end.

July 21, 2011

All my life I’ve had a fascination of sorts with NASA. Some 20 years ago I decided that I wanted to see a space shuttle launch in person, preferably as a member of the press. Reporters get to stand next to the huge countdown clock in a big field next to a large lagoon inside the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) complex when viewing launches from a surprisingly intimate three-mile distance. They also get to feel the ground shake at blast-off. It’s the reason I decided to become a writer: so I could attend launches at KSC. Needless to say, it was a thrill and privilege to be among a media throng estimated at 1,500 inside America’s spaceport on July 8 to witness the final space shuttle launch ever. Outside the facility, at least a million spectators lined the beaches and highways along what has been dubbed Florida’s “Space Coast.”

My interest in outer space began in 1961 when teachers wheeled televisions into classrooms at Edgewood Elementary in Selma so we could watch Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and a guy with the strange name “Gus Grissom” ride rockets into space. As a first grader, I concluded that there must be something special about astronauts and rockets since they had the power to make teachers bring TV sets to school. My favorite part of launch day was the countdown—a dramatic buildup that my classmates and I loudly recited in unison with the television broadcaster.




Photos courtesy of NASA/Bill Ingalls. (click for larger version)

I grew a little bored with NASA when TV sets no longer showed up at school. But on Christmas Eve, 1968, I stared in awe at a black and white television in our family den as we listened to the Apollo 8 astronauts—the first people to fly around the Moon—read from the book of Genesis while in lunar orbit 240,000 miles away: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth . . .” Less than a year later, I was even more mesmerized when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on live television. My interest in NASA gradually diminished until one morning in 1986 when space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. A routine ride into space was suddenly no longer routine. The seven astronauts killed that day were the first NASA crew to die in flight.

My First Trip
Twenty years after first coveting a front-row seat at a shuttle launch, my wish finally came true when I obtained a media badge for the July 2005 launch of Discovery, the first shuttle to fly since Columbia had blown apart over Texas on its return home in February 2003. NASA officially anointed the STS-114 [Space Transportation System] mission of Discovery as “Return to Flight.” I was extremely excited driving all night to KSC. Arriving at the press center, I was astounded by the wonderland before me: Television monitors showed NASA TV telecasts; miniature models of the shuttle and space station were on display, as were spacecraft designs of the future; pleasant NASA public relations employees usually smiled when explaining the mission or shuttle equipment to inquiring reporters; stacks of information detailing everything from space shuttle history to explanations of safety criteria that must be met before clearing a shuttle for launch were readily available.

That evening, several buses took the media contingent to the launch pad for photo opportunities but we were forced to stay on the buses for two hours as launch pad personnel addressed a structure that had fallen off the shuttle and damaged one of the heat shield tiles that protects the spacecraft as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Once that was resolved, we had to wait another hour after several busloads of astronaut families and assorted VIPs pulled up next to the press buses so that they could take pictures first.. Our NASA media escort warned, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who pointed a camera in the direction of the newly-arrived visitors would have their media badge taken away, then be tossed out of the KSC compound and banned forever. At midnight, we were finally freed from the buses to take pictures and gawk, a mere 100 yards from space shuttle Discovery, majestically illuminated by spotlights. After half an hour, our NASA escort ordered us to return to the buses, warning that lingering reporters who missed the ride back would not only have their media badges revoked, they would also be shot on sight. We all wondered if he was kidding.

Back at the KSC Media Center at sunrise, I walked outside to stare at Discovery bathed in spotlights on the launch pad three miles away as an orange glow creeped onto the horizon. Suddenly, a sexy female voice oozed from the outdoor audio system as NASA TV began its broadcast day: “At 4:45 this morning, space shuttle crew and managers met and gave a ‘go’ to proceed with the tanking operations for the launch attempt this afternoon for the STS-114 Return to Flight mission,” she purred with authority. She sounded like the woman announcing flight schedules on the circular space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Two hours before launch that afternoon, a faulty fuel sensor delayed the Discovery mission for a couple of weeks. I dejectedly drove straight back to Birmingham, though there was one bright spot: That morning I spent 10 minutes interviewing Apollo 13 flight director Gene Kranz face to face in a tiny room. His crew cut and enthusiasm were charming as hell. By the time I arrived in Birmingham, I had been awake for 46 hours.

Blast Off at Last
On July 4th, 2006, I saw my first shuttle launch. Once again, it was spaceship Discovery on the launch pad. The STS-121 crew included robotic arm specialist Lisa Nowak. Less than a year following this mission, Nowak would be arrested in Orlando after reportedly driving all night and day from Houston to Florida while wearing a diaper to avoid bathroom stops in an alleged attempt to kidnap the fiancée of an astronaut with whom Nowak was having an affair. The diaper tale was eventually determined to be a myth. She was fired by NASA a month later. The pilot of STS-121 was Mark Kelly, husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot three months before her husband’s May 2011 mission as commander of Endeavor’s farewell flight.

On that Independence Day five years ago, a half-dozen veteran reporters sat around the NASA press-briefing room killing time, swapping “Buzz Aldrin was an asshole” stories about personal encounters with the grumpiest man to ever walk on the Moon. Several minutes later, the large monitors that telecast NASA TV showed the Discovery crew walking out to the vehicle that would take them to the launch pad for that afternoon’s blast-off. It was quite nerve-racking watching the countdown clock tick away. Discovery did not disappoint. The launch was the most memorable spectacle I’ve ever seen. Just like on television, it appeared to be moving in slow motion the first several seconds after launch. The oddest thing was that I was watching a silent rocket blast off without a roar. Within 12 seconds, however, the noise slowly swept over me, growing louder as the ground began to tremble.




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In April 2011—the day after the most devastating rash of tornadoes in American history passed through Alabama—I set off for Kennedy Space Center once again to watch the final launch of space shuttle Endeavor. I left Birmingham at sunset the day before launch, arriving at sunrise to secure my media badge for the afternoon lift-off. By noon, NASA had scrubbed the launch due to technical problems. Weather cancellations can be turned around the next day, but technical issues can take weeks. I immediately left KSC and, after negotiating the hellacious traffic that packs highways on launch days, drove straight back home to save money on a motel room. I arrived in Birmingham 32 hours after I had left.

This Will Be the Last Time
Black & White publisher Chuck Geiss and I secured media credentials for STS-135, the final flight of space shuttle Atlantis, the last mission before retirement of the three-vehicle fleet permanently. I warned Chuck that due to technical and weather issues, a trip for a launch is about as reliable as throwing dice in a casino.

An hour before lift-off, NASA announced that weather conditions were favorable for launch, though there were concerns about rain showers at the flight runway that shuttles use to return in the event of an emergency. European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel, a 60-year-old NASA veteran who had performed a spacewalk during a 1993 Columbia mission, and who was also on an Atlantis flight in 2008, chatted with me briefly. “I remember it was 80 percent ‘no go’ for Columbia,” Schlegel said in a thick German accent, recalling his first launch that flew without delay. When asked what will become of the astronaut corps with the retirement of the shuttle fleet, as the United States will be forced to pay the Russians $60 million per astronaut to go to the space station, he replied, “The change in astronaut corps is already going on. A lot of pilots have already left, a lot of other pilots decided they wanted to be long-duration crew members. The skill of pilots is still needed and will be even more needed when we develop new systems. It’s a milestone but it’s continuously developing and I hope we have many, many opportunities which we don’t think of yet.” As for his personal future, Schlegel said, “Next for me is I’m shortly before pension. I am passing on my experience, my knowledge, for use to make new European astronauts coming to Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston preparing for their missions. I help them, I advise them, and mentor them. I’m kind of the senior league for them.”

After waiting in line at the merchandise trailer to purchase souvenirs, Chuck and I roamed the field where media congregate to watch the launch. Across the lagoon, Atlantis stood in the distance as clouds continued to shuffle. My anxiety turned to excitement as the crowd began counting down loudly in unison at 10 seconds. Suddenly, vapor clouds quickly blasted up to surround the bottom of the launch pad as Atlantis rose from the ground in slow motion, the blinding flame of the two SRBs [solid rocket boosters] forcing me to put my sunglasses back on. As the spacecraft began to pick up speed, a plume of smoke and vapor was left in the shuttle’s wake, appearing to connect Atlantis to Earth. Then the rumble I had been waiting for five years to hear again began. Creeping up slowly from the distance, invading ears with loud crackles and shaking the ground, the noise rattled my bones. There’s no feeling quite like it. Forty two seconds after blast off, Atlantis disappeared into the overhead clouds.

The press crammed into the small auditorium at the KSC media center for a post-launch press conference 90 minutes after launch. The briefing began with a video message (more or less a pep talk) from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. I was amazed that the top dog at NASA did not attend the post-launch press gathering, considering that this was the final shuttle launch. But four NASA officials were there, where they revealed that after discussing weather concerns, NASA’s mission management team waived some of the criteria for launch, something it had avoided doing in the wake of the Columbia tragedy to the point of being perhaps overly cautious.

“It got a little dicey there a couple of times but we found our way through it,” said Bob Cabana, Kennedy Space Center Director. With regards to the loss of jobs as the shuttle program ends, Cabana commented, “Change is difficult, but you can’t do something else—you can’t do something better—unless you go through change. And all this talk about ‘NASA is adrift, we don’t have a plan’—we do have a plan. We’re enabling commercial space. We have the commercial crew program here at Kennedy supported by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. We have four folks under contract trying to build a vehicle that will take Americans to space supporting our International Space Station— that’s still up there until at least 2020 with Americans onboard—a human spaceflight program.”

“I choke up at every launch. This one, I choked up before launch,” confessed Mike Moses, who oversees the Mission Management Team. “As an engineer, as whatever, I can’t see how anybody who comes down here and sees a shuttle launch doesn’t choke up and just swell with pride at seeing that thing go. It does it to you every time.” He’s right; when that countdown commences, no one is immune. &

Living on Martian Time

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Living on Martian Time

By Ed Reynolds

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June 23, 2011

Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission By Andrew Kessler*Pegasus Books, 341 pages, $27.95

In 2008, NASA successfully landed a robotic machine called Phoenix in the northern polar region of Mars in an attempt to uncover water and organic material from the frozen environment atop the Red Planet. Overseeing the mission was space engineer Peter Smith, a man who disdains his unofficial title as “world’s greatest Martian photographer” (“Don’t call me that . . . It diminishes the science,” Smith is fond of saying) despite his talent for preserving “little Mars vignettes” for all on Earth to see. Smith is also known for other accomplishments, including the device he spent five years building—an excavator that could scoop up Martian soil samples for analysis on command from its operators 200 million miles away, ultimately proving that there was water on Mars in some form. The other epic achievement was his decision to find a fresh voice to tell the story of searching for life forms on other planets. Smith chose Andrew Kessler, a 32-year-old creative director for Huge, a New York design and marketing firm, who holds a degree in mathematics. Kessler may not be a scientist but he was fascinated and understood outer space well enough to co-produce the documentary Mars: The Quest for Life for the Discovery Channel.

Believing that NASA long ago fumbled the task of portraying its scientists and engineers in a dynamic way that could capture the public’s imagination, Kessler was inspired to write a book that reveals the 130-person crew at Mission Control in Tucson, Arizona, as epic space explorers with brilliant minds and quirky personality traits. Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission is a “warts-and-all look at the Phoenix Mars mission from a regular guy who loves space.” Kessler admits from the outset that his is “not the most accurate account” of the Phoenix Mars mission. “Instead, this is an account of winning the nerd lottery: The luckiest fanboy in fandom gets a shot to spend three months with unfettered access to Mission Control,” he writes in the author’s note that prefaces the story.

Kessler assumes the self-deprecating role of an observer who is initially terrified to approach the brains behind the exploratory brawn with what he fears might be dumb questions. Regardless, Kessler has researched his topic well, and leaves little doubt that he knows what he’s writing about.

The author describes how telescopes transformed Mars from “a dot, a speck of light” into a world similar to Earth. “Imaginations ran wild, and before long, rather than seeing vast, wonderful possibilities, we feared a Martian attack. As a war of the worlds loomed, Mars became a source of fear and anxiety.”

A spacecraft named Mariner 4 took photos of the Martian surface in the 1960s and Viking I landed there in the 1970s. Neither revealed that Mars’ environment could support life like Earth’s does, so the planet was more or less abandoned. That is, until the 1990s, when a small chunk of Mars that had found its way to Earth 10 years earlier—due to what Kessler calls a “cosmic collision”—caught scientists’ interest. Discovered in Antarctica, the specimen was eventually sliced open, revealing tiny microbes (“simple little guys with evidence of a few of the basic structures of life, like a cell wall,” explains Kessler) that gave earthlings reason to return to Mars.

Scooping Martian dirt into an oven onboard Phoenix designed to determine soil ingredients is, by Kessler’s telling, a dramatic event. His sense of humor is ever present, serving as a lifeline for readers when things get a little too scientific. He writes: “One of the secrets of Phoenix is that it actually wasn’t born a lander. Well, more precisely, its body was a lander but its internal software started life as an orbiter. Julia [Bell, one of the rocket scientists] engineered the lander reassignment surgery—a robot sex-change operation. That makes her more of a surrogate mother/reconstructive surgeon than engineer to Phoenix.”

He shares behind-the-scenes details, including the Phoenix team’s decision to name one of the trenches from which the robot scoops samples “Dodo” (from Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland) –”Goldilocks.” Kessler explains: “(Peter Smith) wanted the names to appeal to kids, so they named them after fairy tales. ‘On Pathfinder [a 1997 Mars mission that Smith was involved with that included a robotic rover named Sojourner] we named (areas on Mars) after cartoon characters, but NASA worried we would get sued for copyright infringement. I don’t think we ever got sued. Although I think the Cartoon Network sent us some T-shirts. This time we chose characters in the public domain.’”

By making himself a part of the story despite his lack of official scientific credentials, Kessler has indeed provided a fresh path down which novice space fanatics can feel safe venturing. For those who found biology and chemistry to be a drag in high school, Andrew Kessler has arrived as a real space hero to make what was once way over our heads a bit more down to Earth, and downright entertaining. &

Red Planet Redux

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Red Planet Redux

A chat with Martian Summer author Andrew Kessler

By Ed Reynolds

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June 23, 2011

Black & White: You really do come across as a regular guy with a passionate interest in space. Was being in Mission Control nerve-wracking at first?
Andrew Kessler: It was absolutely nerve-wracking. The more you kind of wade in, the more you realize how much you don’t know. Once things actually start happening there’s this “Oh shit!” moment, “This is so over my head.” And then you don’t feel bad about asking questions. You know, when you see scientists ask each other a question, then you realize, “Oh, even these guys [don't know things].” But there’s so many specialties (skill-wise) that are happening. There’s the guys that recalibrate the batteries. There are the guys who are monitoring the power. People monitor software. Even though those guys work closely and are experts in what they do, there’s a big gulf between each of the disciplines.

At what point did you start feeling more comfortable, like you were beginning to fit in and become accepted?
That was sort of a slow process. There was probably a day about a month in where I felt like I understood everything that had happened that day. That was kind of a big deal. And then probably after that, the first time someone asked me what was going on. I felt like I had a purpose, too, because I’m only human. Because even though I was there doing research and writing a book, you wonder if you’re in people’s way. And then I explained to someone why a particular dig (into Martian dirt) had failed. I just felt so proud of myself! I had this kind of silly moment where I really didn’t know all that much but just a little bit of insider info that I was able to provide to someone else who I looked up to. And one of these very smart scientists was like, “You’re part of the team . . .” I actually tried to write this book with more of a serious approach in the beginning because I felt this tremendous burden. I could tell these people’s story well and I felt their story was so important and they worked so hard. And then I found myself falling into that same trap where it was dehumanizing to think that I felt so connected with them. As a matter of fact, it was fun to be out at Mission Control. People are funny, they are quirky, and you relate to them in different ways, and you relate to the lander in different ways. And then I decided, “Oh, I have to tell the story in a more honest way,” which would be for me—which is how I write. I think it worked out for the better. I hope so anyway. I certainly get panned for it sometimes, by people expecting more hard science that are annoyed with my personality. That is the one flaw of the book—that you have to suffer through my personality in order to get excited about space. [laughs]




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You were asked to step out of some meetings when things were deemed too sensitive for outside observers. Were you ever concerned that you would be asked to leave the premises permanently?
Yeah, I was very fearful in the beginning that someone would say that they didn’t want me there. That was kind of a constant fear and it took a while to build up my courage to talk to people. I would have to do this thing that I hated about myself where I would have to make snap judgments about people, about whether they would be friendly on the project or not. I kind of slowly made friends with people. I was very much a wallflower in the beginning, until I felt more secure. Then I had more of a story and I took more risks in asking questions and spending time with people, and really asking them to explain over and over again what it was that they were doing so that I really felt like I understood it.

How did you and Peter Smith meet?
Peter was looking for ways to publicize the mission. He found me through a contact of his. Basically, I went down to meet with him and to talk about different ways to approach the story. And he was interested in a book and he was interested in new voices telling that story. So I just went down and hung out with him for a weekend and we talked a lot. He had his reservations, and then over the course of the year something changed and he decided that since I had spent a lot of time there, I had worked pitching this Discovery documentary about the mission, and he decided it might be fun to write this [from an] outsider['s] perspective.

Did you become fascinated with outer space as a child?
Oh yeah. The first time I learned “Many Very Early Men Ate Juicy Steaks Using No Plates” to memorize the planets—Pluto was still a planet then. I was amazed that there were all these other worlds out there. I was generally curious of science anyway as a little kid. So that’s when this sort of fascination began. I’ve been kind of a casual fan ever since, and it’s kind of waxed and waned over time. But then my mind was blown and I remembered how awesome it was and how much I used to love it when I got into Mission Control. It seemed like, “This is the real deal.”

I think the most exciting stuff NASA does these days are the robotic missions, not the manned missions that the public supposedly craves.
Yeah, I agree. The problem is that we don’t really know our astronauts and we don’t really know what they’re doing. I think NASA could do a better [job] telling that story or connecting us with those astronauts. The people who operate these robots—these robots are doing crazy things; these telescopes are doing crazy, amazing things, taking beautiful pictures. And if we could kind of connect with these artists and these craftsmen who make it possible, I think we’d have this really rich, narrative space to play in. People want stars. I think scientists could be kind of these stars if [NASA] really knew what they were doing [from a public relations standpoint].

While reading the book, I kept thinking I was on Mars observing all this activity of both the robot and the scientists, and I kept forgetting that the scientists were still on Earth.
That’s the best part of Mission Control, when you lose yourself for those brief moments and you really think about what the lander is doing on Mars and you feel this connection to it—it’s more than just a robot. You find yourself rooting for these scoops [of Martian dirt] to happen.

Have any of the people you were hanging out with at Mission Control expressed irritation with you about the book?
There are a few people that were very candid in some of the things they said [during the mission] that maybe have some regrets about saying them. For the most part, it’s been really positive. Maybe people are just not telling me there’s negative feedback. That was the hardest part, right? You can’t write the book for the people in the mission. But they all became very important to me and I felt this real responsibility to them. A lot of them didn’t have time to enjoy it while they were there. That was one nice bit of feedback, that I was able to put them back in that moment and they were able to enjoy it without having the burden of work and long, crushing hours.

You spent a year training for the mission?
NASA requires you to have training sessions where basically you learn how to work together to operate your mission. I also spent a lot of time interviewing the scientists before the project. I did basic Mars research and instrument research just trying to learn so I would not sound like an idiot, which was my biggest fear, on day one when I got there.

Did the engineers in Mission Control frequently refer to signs of possible ice as the “white stuff?”
Yeah, they did. It was funny, kind of a cultural thing where very few people want to commit to new discoveries so they come up with all these euphemisms for things they believe to be true. But they don’t want anyone to say that they were the ones that said “This is ice.” They kind of talk around things in a funny way. They’re a little bit fearful of being the guy who misspeaks because then the press will jump on all these things. In some sense it’s funny. But then other times you see why they do it. There’s a moment where one of the scientists says, “It’s [Martian soil] acidic, you could grow asparagus in it.” Then the headline was “Grow Asparagus on Mars!” I think it’s great when that happens because then it makes people care, they can connect to this thing. But it makes the science team a little nervous when they become known as the guy who was going to grow asparagus on Mars. &

Camp Heaven

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Camp Heaven

A wilderness oasis, Camp McDowell offers environmental education, folk arts, and tranquility.

By Ed Reynolds

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May 26, 2011

For years I’ve seen bumper stickers reading I’d rather be at Camp McDowell on vehicles in the Birmingham area. What is this mysterious place that multitudes apparently prefer, I wondered? Have they been brainwashed? Is it some secret indoctrination facility?

Nah—so much for conspiracy theories—actually, Camp McDowell is a tranquil, lush oasis 15 miles north of Jasper, Alabama, that offers summer camps for youth in addition to an environmental studies program and a folk school that includes instruction in music and folk art crafts. The facility is named after Bishop William G. McDowell, who began early versions of Episcopal retreats at several sites across the state. It’s the official camp and conference center for the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, spanning more than 1,100 acres of woods and creeks.In 1945, the Reverend Scott Eppes was appointed by Bishop C.C.J. Carpenter to build a permanent home for the Episcopal camp that was being held at Oak Mountain State Park in Pelham. [The bishop, who was prominent in Birmingham during the city's civil rights struggles, was one of the pastors Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."] Bishop Carpenter’s son, the Reverend Doug Carpenter, fondly recalls his teenage years helping Eppes build the facility that would become Camp McDowell in 1948 after 160 acres were secured in Winston County for $600.

“I’d spend the whole summer out there, building the camp or taking care of the cattle, pitching hay, putting fences in,” Carpenter says. “Slave labor pretty much built that camp, because they didn’t pay us anything. The Diocese was pretty poor after the Second World War. Scott Eppes, who built the camp, really knew how to make money go a long way. He found out we could buy barracks from Fort McClellan [in Anniston], which was downsizing. The smaller barracks cost $15 apiece. They came apart in eight-foot sections.”




A taste of the natural beauty on display at Camp McDowell. (Photo: Beth Maynor Young.) (click for larger version)

Eppes also purchased longer barracks for $100 each, Carpenter explains. The first camps were fairly primitive, with no running water. The boys would bathe first in the creek, followed by the girls. Barrels of drinking water were brought in from Jasper.

Doug Carpenter, who retired from Saint Stephens Episcopal Church in Cahaba Heights six years ago, recalls a penny campaign his father waged to raise funds for the camp.

“My dad wanted everybody to have some part in it,” Carpenter explains. “He would visit every Episcopal congregation in the state at least once a year. And two weeks before he went, he’d send everybody these paper peanut bags. They were supposed to save all their pennies for two weeks. And he’d come back from his trips with maybe 50 or 60 pounds of pennies. It’s amazing how far that money went in those days but when you’re buying cabins for $15 apiece and land for around three dollars an acre . . . ”




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Carpenter also recalls the thrill of using explosives to clear the land for the camp. “I don’t know why a lot of us didn’t get hurt up there—but nobody ever did—because Scott Eppes loved to use dynamite. You could get it for ten cents a stick in those days. You just go into Jasper and get a big ol’ box of dynamite,” Carpenter says, laughing. “We used probably more than we should have. There was one place where the dynamite hadn’t gone off and somebody had forgotten it. And Mr. Eppes was in town one day at the Army surplus store and found out that he could get flamethrowers. We were clearing a lot of brambles out of the fields. So he thought, ‘Oh, that would be a good idea.’ So he got a couple of flamethrowers. We were using those things and blew up a piece of dynamite. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.”

The dynamite is long gone. These days the serenity of Camp McDowell has made it more than a place to hike, swim, and canoe. The camp has become popular with corporations and groups seeking facilities for meeting retreats. Rev. Mark Johnston has been the camp’s executive director for two decades—only the third director in the camp’s 63-year history.

“I went to Camp McDowell when I was in high school. Then I worked at the camp when I was in college,” Johnston says. “The camp is the spiritual center of our church.” Johnston has seen the camp grow into more than a summer retreat during his tenure. “We teach kids how to live their faith in their everyday life. It’s a real powerful place. We’ve had over 100,000 children come to our residential environmental education program. We’re one of the best in the country. We also have over 300 groups come every year to use our conference center. And we started the Alabama Folk School about three years ago.”

Down-home Curriculum
The folk school has become quite a magnet, attracting participants from across the country. Held throughout the year, it offers courses in such traditional folk arts as playing acoustic instruments, Sacred Harp singing, chair caning, quilting, watercolor, and pottery. A visit to the school this April made this writer realize why the facility is so revered. Local stringed-instrument virtuoso Herb Trotman was one of the instructors that day.

“I’ve been trying to learn how to play the banjo for about 50 years,” says Trotman, laughing. “This is the third session that I’ve done at Camp McDowell teaching banjo and fiddle.” When asked to compare the difficulty in learning banjo as opposed to other instruments, he explains: “Well, here’s the thing about banjo. If you take up the guitar and mandolin, you feel this immediate sense of gratification. But when people say they want to play the banjo, they say they want to do this: [Herb plays a simple but familiar banjo lick]. Well, you don’t get there in a week. So it’s hard to get to that level which you think you’re playing. So I’m always working with people trying to get them to realize they’re playing music; they’re just not playing what they hear the banjo do.”

Roland White is the folk school’s most famous music instructor. White played guitar with the late Bill Monroe. (His brother was the late Clarence White, who played with The Byrds.) Having someone of White’s skills teaching mandolin has been an asset to Camp McDowell. The musician participates in similar musical retreats around the country with his wife. “Camp McDowell is a very nice setting,” says White, resting in a rocking chair on a cabin porch, waiting to teach another class. “I have an advanced class this year, which is unusual. Usually I have beginner and intermediate, which is kind of my favorite thing to do because I like to get beginners who are starting but who are doing it wrong. I like to correct that and they become better players. We have a lot of fun.” Asked if he teaches his students any Bill Monroe songs, White quips, “Yeah, I always include one or two, he’s my favorite. Bill Monroe is our father who art in heaven—I hope.”

Danielle Dunbar, director of the folk school, explains that the Alabama State Council on the Arts maintains a list of master artists in Alabama, which is where the Folk School finds many of its instructors. Prices for the school range from $255 to $515, depending on occupancy preferences and length of stay. The music classes are the most popular, Dunbar says.

“Music is just one of those types of activities where it draws community and it builds community, because people are really drawn to coming together and playing music together, whether it’s fiddle or jazz or mandolin.”

The real attraction at this year’s folk school, however, are women representing the famous Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective. Among the dozen or so women attending a recent class were several Californians lured by the opportunity to learn to sew quilts under the tutelage of the Gee’s Bend quilters. A Wall Street Journal reporter who lives in Los Angeles saw the Folk School featured on Salon.com.

“My mother always wanted to quilt,” says Alexandra Berzon, who decided to bring her mother Marsha to Alabama for a “quilting” vacation. “My mother had gone to a Gee’s Bend exhibit, and later I learned about them,” she explains. “I’ve never sewn before, let alone quilted. I’m still kind of messy.” Her mother Marsha adds: “The challenging and interesting part is visualizing how the pieces [of the quilt] fit together. They said we didn’t need to bring anything, so we didn’t bring any fabrics like some did. The Gee’s Bend women and others brought some fabrics so we just kind of scrounged those, but I think that made it better in a way because we didn’t have any visual when we started. We just had to deal with whatever was available.”

Dara McLaughlin, also from Los Angeles, has been quilting for six years. She has wanted to study under the Gee’s Bend women for years. “The Gee’s Bend quilters have a very different style from traditional quilting,” she says. “Their approach is ‘Don’t measure so much. Just kind of do something!’ Normally I do a lot more measuring and trying to line it all up perfect, but not this time.”

Mary Ann and China Pettway of the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective are instructing at the camp for a second year. “My mother taught me how to quilt when I was 11 years old,” says China, who says she’s related to Mary Ann but she is not sure how. “The quilts when I learned wasn’t made from new material, they was made from old clothes that me and my sister and brother had worn out,” she explains. “We didn’t have no money to go to the store to buy material. If we was walking along the road and seen a piece of scrap, we picked it up and took it home and washed it just to get a quilt going.”




Quilting is one of the more popular crafts that can be learned at Camp McDowell’s Folk School. (Photo: Rachel Dobson.) (click for larger version)

Mary Ann Pettway also recalls the poverty in which she was raised. “Back then we didn’t have tile or rugs, it was just the naked floor. So we had to make quilts to lay on the floor,” Mary Ann explains of her introduction to quilting as a child. She grew up in a house with 11 brothers and sisters. “We still do all our quilting by hand. There are a lot of people who do them by sewing machines but I always like to do mine by hand because it’s very relaxing and it takes your mind off a lot of stuff. You got to have patience, and if you don’t have patience to do it I wouldn’t suggest that anybody start on a quilt.”

The Environmental Center at Camp McDowell has been there for 18 years. Held during the school year, the environmental program allows teachers from around the country to bring their classes and choose from a list of studies. Maggie Johnston, wife of Camp McDowell director Mark Johnston, formerly taught at the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega. She brought her students to the environmental program for years before becoming director of the Environmental Center seven years go. It was her husband’s idea to start the program; Mark Johnston had not only observed cabins being unused nine months out of the year when Summer Camp was not in session, he also saw the opportunity to educate local kids in environmentalism.

“The folk school and the adult groups stay in hotel-style lodging. But there are 14 summer camp cabins down the hill where the school groups stay when they come here,” explains Maggie Johnston. “From Monday to Friday we have school groups here all through the year. Most of them stay three days—Monday to Wednesday or Wednesday to Friday. A few stay the whole week. It depends on the school. We have around 7,000 participants who come through the program [annually].” The kids who attend range from grades four through eight. There are 20 instructors on staff. Among the most popular classes are pond and stream, Native American studies, and geology classes.

Spiritual Nourishment
Doug Carpenter says his favorite thing about going to Camp McDowell as a camper each summer was the opportunity to meet other teens from across the state. The retired priest has a deep love of the uniqueness of the Episcopal Church.

“I’ve always loved the Episcopal Church, and partly because we’ve got such a freedom to question things,” he says. “And that was always true at Camp McDowell, too. It’s not who’s got the right or wrong belief—let’s talk about it and explore it, because if you have all the answers about God, it’s probably not God. He’s too mysterious.”

Some camp alumni say they found a spirituality there that they weren’t able to find in church. Wendy Riggs is a 51-year old Tuscaloosa resident who went to Camp McDowell from age six to 19.

“My mom went to Camp McDowell before I went to Camp McDowell, so part of the reason I always went was tradition. But ever since I was little, we were friends with the Eppes, who used to run the camp. So we kind of went there before I was supposed to go, to be honest,” she says, laughing. “My grandmother used to tell me she was going to hide up in a tree and figure out why I like it so much because she always said, ‘There’s no horses there, there’s nothing there, it’s in the middle of nowhere.’ But I think the biggest thing was that it gave me real positive experiences, religiously, because I could not figure out how to connect with the Episcopal Church. What I’m looking for in church is what I found at camp.”

For Doug Carpenter, Camp McDowell is no doubt the closest thing on earth bearing any resemblance to the Heaven that he believes awaits him when he passes away. He admits he has to temper his enthusiasm for the camp from time to time. “I see stickers all over Birmingham that say I’d Rather Be at Camp McDowell,” he says. “I never put one on my car because I didn’t want people in my parish to think I’d [rather] be at Camp McDowell than in church.” &

Camp McDowell is located at 105 DeLong Road near Nauvoo, Alabama. For information on upcoming programs and lodging availabilities, go to www.campmcdowell.co or call 387-1806.

The Alabama Gang in a Fine Art Museum?

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The Alabama Gang in a Fine Art Museum?

By Ed Reynolds

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Donnie, Eddie, and Bobby Allison, c. 1960. (Photo: Collection of Bobby Allison Museum, Hueytown.) (click for larger version)

May 26, 2011

Currently on exhibit at the Huntsville Museum of Art is a collection of photographs, trophies, and other racing memorabilia celebrating the careers of three of the finest drivers in auto-racing history. After moving from Miami to Hueytown, Alabama, in 1960, Bobby Allison, his little brother Donnie Allison, and Red Farmer became a feared trio that ruled racing circuits throughout the South. They quickly earned the nickname The Alabama Gang. Among their stomping grounds is the recently renovated Huntsville Speedway, a tiny quarter-mile racetrack at the foot of Green Mountain that featured drivers who would go on to high-octane glory, including Richard Petty, who won the 1962 Rocket City 200 on his way to the NASCAR Grand National Championship that year.

The collection, on display through July 24, includes the number 312 Legends Car, a 3/4-scale replica of Bobby Allison’s 1937 Chevrolet coupe that he drove in the early 1960s. Allison’s induction this year into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, prompted the exhibit, titled Fast, Loose, and Out of Control: Bobby Allison and The Alabama Gang. On Father’s Day, June 19, the three racing legends will sign autographs from 1 to 3 p.m. at the museum’s Great Hall.




	(Photo: Huntsville Museum of Art.) (click for larger version)

Also on display through July 24 is Future Retro: Drawings from the Great Age of American Automobiles. The exhibit features more than 100 works showcasing American automotive design during the decades following World War II, a landmark period in car styling. Works range from preliminary sketches to fully rendered drawings, providing a rare glimpse into the creative process.

Tickets to the autograph signing are $20 adults ages 12+, $10 children 6–11. Huntsville Museum of Art, 300 Church Street SW, Huntsville; www.hsvmuseum.org; (256) 535-4350, ext. 201. &

To read more about the Alabama Gang, visit: www.bwcitypaper.com/Articles-i-2009-04-16-228449.113121-The-End-of-an-Era.html.

Ghost Dogs Update

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Ghost Dogs Update

The stray dogs who make Oak Hill Cemetery their home are finding more permanent dwellings.

By Ed Reynolds

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May 12, 2011

It’s been nearly a year since an eight-year-old girl named Mina Oates sent Black & White a story that she had written about the homeless dogs that roam Oak Hill Cemetery downtown where her father, Stuart Oates, is executive director. Her story was included in a July 8, 2010, Black & White feature about what Mina had dubbed the “graveyard dogs.” Last October, self-proclaimed dog lover Ellen Chisholm organized an effort to find homes for the stray and abandoned creatures haunting the grounds of Oak Hill.

“It’s a group of approximately 10 or 15 people. We got together last fall and had a meeting to try and help these particular dogs,” Chisholm says. “We started talking with Stuart Oates to see how we could help. Our group just stays in contact by emails and stuff like that; we don’t have an actual name. All of us are volunteers who are animal lovers.”




Baby Doll serves as the Ghost Dogs’ unofficial mascot. (Photo: David Young.) (click for larger version)

Chisholm’s efforts caught the interest of Birmingham’s Animal Adoption and Rescue Center (BAARC), which has donated time and effort to care for the dogs until homes can be found, as well as having the animals spayed or neutered, usually at the Alabama Spay/Neuter Clinic.

“BAARC Rescue is helping us with housing and socializing some of the dogs, as is a local company called Creative Dog Training,” Chisholm explains. “And there are several vets in the area that have been helping us out, either with medications or with actual visits that the dogs have needed for one medical reason or another.”

The group has rescued five dogs from the cemetery and the surrounding area in the past six months, and found homes for two of them. Three others await adoption. “We’re doing everything we can to give them fresh lives, and try and help with the local stray population as well,” Chisholm says. “It took us a while to get different organizations who would be willing to help. Everybody is basically doing it on a pro bono basis. We’ve found some great organizations. But we’re limited, so we can’t take in too many dogs at one time.” According to Chisholm, their efforts appear to be paying off. “We really have not had a whole lot of dogs come through the cemetery recently,” she says. “Now it’s just an occasional dog that runs through there. So we’re doing pretty good so far, getting things under control. But there are always going to be strays.”




Seger was a homeless dog rescued from the Oak Hill Cemetery. (Photo: David Young.) (click for larger version)

The group catches the strays thanks to a dog trap contributed by local animal-advocacy organization Friends of Cats and Dogs Foundation. “We don’t set the trap up on bad weather days,” Chisholm explains. “During the wintertime . . . we had to be really careful so that we didn’t have a dog trapped in there during a super cold day.” Once a dog is caught, it’s usually taken to BAARC’s no-kill facility in Irondale.

“My greatest relief is that we haven’t really had to have animal control come in to deal with situations, so far,” says the cemetery’s director Stuart Oates. “The only time we would have animal control come in is if we get an aggressive animal that was imposing a danger on other animals or people in here.”

Oates says he has noticed fewer stray dogs at the cemetery in recent months. “I can’t really say what accounts for that because, generally, what I would observe is when you’ve dealt with one pack of animals that would come in and you got rid of them, another pack would move in within a short time. And we really haven’t seen that. Our only constant out here has been Baby Doll, who is also called Wrinkles or whatever . . . she’s got a million names. I think she should be the poster child of this whole thing.”




	Lump was the name given to this water-loving Ghost Dog. (Photo: Melanie Tumlin.) (click for larger version)

Oates says he has been impressed with Chisholm’s dedication in spearheading the effort to find homes for the “ghost dogs.”

“She’s doing a magnificent job of communicating and getting other people organized. That’s what it takes. You’ve got something to inspire somebody to take a step in a certain direction. That’s the beautiful thing—you never know what the consequence of any of your actions is going to be. It can sometimes be a casual comment or a little essay by an eight-year-old girl that inspires people.” &

For information on adopting one of the Ghost Dogs, go to http://birminghamghostdogs.wordpress.com/ or contact ghstdgadopt@aol.com.

Flying First Class

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Flying First Class

Piloting private planes, volunteers deliver precious live cargo in the form of pets.

By Ed Reynolds

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May 12, 2011

Since February 2008, dogs and cats in desperate need of homes have received aid from Pilots N Paws, a nonprofit organization that is a network of pilots who donate their time and resources to flying abandoned pets—often doomed to euthanasia in animal shelters—to new homes across the United States. Based in South Carolina, the association has participated in the rescue of hundreds of animals through the efforts of volunteers, via the Pilots N Paws website, pilotsnpaws.org. It is described as “a meeting place for those who rescue, shelter or foster animals, and pilots and plane owners willing to assist with the transportation of animals.”

Debi Boies, a retired nurse living in South Carolina, is the co-founder of Pilots N Paws. “I’ve been doing Doberman rescue for a number of years. And when we lost our 12-year-old Dobie to cancer, I adopted a rescue dog that was in Florida,” says Boies. “You have to kind of search for a rescue dog that might fit your home, and rescue [organizations] are very good about doing that. The problem always is that if they are a fair distance away from you, how do you get them? Either you have to drive there or meet someone (volunteer couriers involved in dog transport). I put a little e-mail out to several of our friends who travel in [RV-style] motor coaches and asked, ‘Hey! If any of you are coming through Florida and heading to the Carolinas, would you think about bringing my rescue dog on board with you?’ Jon Wehrenberg, my cofounder, said, ‘How about if I pick up your [rescue dog] by flying down there?’ So I said, ‘Wow! That is so extremely generous!’ And he said, ‘Oh Debi, pilots love to fly. Just let me do this for you.’”

After Boies shared with Wehrenberg that thousands of animals face euthanasia in regions of the country where spay and neuter laws and practices are often lax, the pair started Pilots N Paws.




Angel is one of the thousands of animals flown by pilots donating their time to transport them to adoptive homes around the country. (click for larger version)

“We started a [website] place where general aviation and volunteer pilots could connect with [animal] shelters and help each other out. We basically just created a meeting place for them [online],” Boies explains. Dog rescuers post requests for homeless pets in need of transportation on the online bulletin boards. Pilots available to fly a dog or cat contact the person seeking help. “Everything is in their hands, the pilot has control over the date, the time, the location, and the rescues do their best to abide by that because pilots are controlled by weather and distance,” Boies says. Those piloting volunteer flights cannot accept money for their efforts, as FAA regulations forbid noncommercial pilots from receiving compensation. However, because Pilots N Paws is a 501(c)(3) organization, pilots can write flight expenses off on their income taxes.

The average distance for a Pilots N Paws rescue flight is 300 nautical (straight-line) miles. It’s not unusual for airplanes to relay an animal to a destination where another volunteer then continues the creature’s journey to a new home. The organization has transported thousands of animals over the past three years. There are more than 1,500 pilots currently signed on for rescue flights, as well as more than 4,000 animal shelters and other volunteers registered with the program. The group also transports cats and kittens, and some flights have carried snakes and lizards to wildlife rescue habitats. One pilot flew a pot-bellied pig and a baby chick on the same plane (in separate crates). Navy SEALs rescued an Afghan eagle during the war there and brought it back to the United States, where Pilots N Paws volunteers flew it on to a rehab center, the Berkshire Bird Sanctuary in New York. There, the rescued bird chose an American eagle as its companion.

“We did a huge rescue out of New Orleans where we transported 171 dogs. There were 54 planes, and the pilots involved in that rescue flew out in three different directions,” explains Boies. “Many of these animals had been displaced from the oil spill—their owners could no longer afford them—and the shelters are still overrun. I was on a plane that had 31 dogs on the way to Washington, D.C., and they all fell asleep, [we] didn’t hear a peep out of them.”

Pilots N Paws depends on the generosity of sponsors for funding. The organization’s primary partners are Subaru and the pet products company Petmate, which designed the first pet carrier approved for air travel in 1964. Petmate supplies the crates for all Pilots N Paws transports. For the recent New Orleans rescue effort, Subaru arranged for ground transportation, and provided hotel rooms and meals for volunteers.

Pilots N Paws has assisted with dogs that U.S. soldiers have adopted and brought back from Afghanistan or Iraq. “When they get back to the States . . . then our pilots step up and offer to fly them on to the soldiers’ homes,” Boies says. The families of soldiers are the official adopters, as it is against the military’s policy for soldiers to take in dogs while serving. “There have been cases where some of these dogs have been honored because they have saved soldiers’ lives,” Boies says. “One story that was in the news was about five dogs within a base camp in Afghanistan that soldiers had befriended, and a suicide bomber was sneaking up to the camp and the dogs alerted the soldiers. I think there were only about five injuries, none life-threatening. One dog lost her life doing it and the rest of the dogs were brought back to this country. . . . The dogs are usually mixed breeds, but there are also Afghan hounds and a couple of other breeds that are specific to Afghanistan and Iraq.” Dogs are reportedly very mistreated in those countries, often stoned or burned to death, with feral dogs running amuck, according to Boies.

Another war dog story involves a canine named Molly who appeared one day at an American army base in Afghanistan. Since military personnel are not allowed to keep pets, Molly was given to a child in a nearby village. However, the dog preferred the soldiers’ company and walked back to the base, some 20 miles from the village. A Pilots N Paws rescue volunteer, Joanne Kubacki, arranged for foster homes and flights for Molly so that she could come to Kentucky, where she was adopted by the parents of a soldier who doted on Molly while she hung around the army base in Afghanistan.

Don Hull is a 62-year-old aerospace engineer who lives in Decatur, Alabama, where he and his wife have a pecan- selling business. After undergoing heart surgery, Hull eventually regained medical clearance from the FAA to fly again (all pilots, commercial and private, are required to pass medical exams, according to FAA regulations). A dog lover who has a terrier that loves to fly, Hull was so grateful for the opportunity to once again pilot a plane that he felt compelled to get involved in charitable flights.

“I noticed on the Internet that there were people from north Alabama—a couple of them that I knew—that were flying with Pilots N Paws,” Hull says. “My first flight was to Kentucky to pick up a Boston terrier that somebody decided they didn’t want any more and that the shelter there was going to put to sleep. That’s what I really like to do, to help dogs that are going to be put down, to give them another chance. It’s a very rewarding experience.” Hull began to get pilot friends involved in the rescue program. “It’s amazing, this network of people that gets together to make Pilots N Paws work.”

Hull always transports dogs in a crate, though he has seen pilots who allow dogs to either be tethered in the rear seat or to lie in a pilot’s lap. “The dogs put their heads in their laps and go to sleep while they are flying,” he says, laughing. “I could comfortably put five dogs in my plane. I fly dogs in crates in my plane’s backseat, and we attach a cord to the seatbelt to secure the crate. Every dog I’ve transported has been so good and calm, they just go to sleep back there.” &

20th Century Boy

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20th Century Boy

By Ed Reynolds

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April 14, 2011

Hugh Martin: The Boy Next Door
By Hugh Martin. Trolley Press. 409 pages, $29.95

Damn that Eddie Fisher for telling the world that his pianist—composer Hugh Martin—got him hooked on speed. It’s hard enough to imagine that the fellow who wrote “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was addicted to amphetamines for 10 years without further tarnishing his image into that of a dealer pushing dope to some half-assed pop singer. But not to worry; Hugh Martin was duped by the wicked Dr. Max Jacobson, who convinced his star-studded clientele that they were being injected with liquid vitamins, not speed. (President Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote were among Jacobson’s patients. Of the doctor, Martin wrote: “Sometimes it seemed as if Truman Capote were giving one of his galas in the doctor’s office.”)

With impeccable timing, Martin wrote his autobiography Hugh Martin: The Boy Next Door a year before his death this March, at age 96. The Birmingham-raised Martin was a master at vocal arrangement and piano accompaniment.




	(click for larger version)

He tells the story of his charmed show-business life with amusing self-deprecation. Martin was smitten with music and theater as a child. His mother often left him in the care of his grandmother for months at a time so that she could go to New York City to indulge her fondness for the arts, particularly Broadway musicals. She instilled in the young Martin an infatuation with the magic of show business, and in his memoir he repeatedly praises her for nourishing that passion. His world always revolved around show biz—whether as a child in love with movies and musicals; performing with vocal groups as a teen; accompanying Judy Garland on piano for her triumphant two-week run at The Palace in New York City in 1951; or, while engaged in bayonet training at a World War II boot camp, imagining he was stabbing the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz

Born in Birmingham in 1914, Martin headed to New York City in 1934 for his first attempt at breaking into the entertainment world. Making the rounds of radio and other entertainment venues earned the singing piano player numerous rejections, but apparently he got someone’s attention because the still-unknown Martin soon got a phone call from Mae West. She became agitated when Martin assumed the call was a friend impersonating the starlet to play a prank on him. The embarrassed Martin apologized profusely but West simply let him off the hook with: “Never mind. Skip the apologies. I have a hard time sometimes convincing people that I am who I am.” She had called looking for a pianist and vocal arranger to tour with her for six months. When Martin turned her down because he didn’t want to leave New York City West got mad, shouting, “How dare you turn down Mae West . . . you’re insane!”

Many thought he was indeed insane when his repeated attempts to enlist for combat in World War II finally came to fruition (Martin had been earlier rejected for being underweight). After the war ended in Europe, Martin was stationed near Paris where he indulged his love of music and theater. He recalls an evening spent with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

“The ladies felt an urge to do their patriotic bit for us friendly troops, so they opened their famous residence at 27 Rue de Fleurs one night a week. Two lucky soldiers would show up at 8 p.m., and Gertie and Alice would entertain them with hors d’oeuvres and wine and some really classic conversation . . . We sat directly beneath Picasso’s famous portrait of Miss Stein, which made us feel somehow part of history. While she was fixing some tidbits for us in the kitchen, Alice leaned forward surreptitiously and whispered, ‘Gertrude is in one of her anti-capitalist cycles at the moment. Oh, I do hope she lets me have one more afternoon in Macy’s basement!’”

Martin’s circle of friends and peers reads like show biz archives: Ed Wynn, Tony Bennett (he called Martin his favorite songwriter), Irving Berlin (who Martin did not particularly like), Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer (Martin’s first song was in collaboration with Mercer), Rodgers and Hart, an unknown Carmen Miranda. Hugh Martin writes of the good fortune show business brought his way in dramatic style, and seems eternally grateful that he got to work with legends. Midway through his autobiography, Martin shares snippets of chatter with famous friends that pop into his head from time to time. Gore Vidal once asked Martin, after Princess Diana’s death, “Do we really want Elton John to sing at our funerals?” Besides being Judy Garland’s vocal coach, Hugh Martin also tutored the great Lena Horne, who once told him: “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’d just as soon not sing that lyric you wrote about darkies loving cornbread.”

Hugh Martin was in love with life and joyously shares every dramatic moment. Reading The Boy Next Door is forthright and intimate; it’s as if Martin invited the reader over to his front porch for a cup of tea to hear about the good ol’ days of show biz. &

String Plucker

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String Plucker

For 30 years, local guitarist Tim Boykin has been singing for his supper.

By Ed Reynolds

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April 14, 2011

Tim Boykin has been playing guitar for a living since he was 15. Though Boykin once disdained the “have guitar, will travel” notion of performing whatever was necessary to pay the bills, he eventually discovered that such work wasn’t a bad way to earn his keep. He was born in Birmingham but because his father was in the military, Boykin moved frequently, returning to Alabama as a teen. He became a guitar wizard adept at playing practically any style of music, transforming from a teenage punk rocker to a versatile guitar sideman and respected studio musician over the past three decades.

“At that time [the early 1990s] there was still actually a real blues scene [in town] and Topper Price and the Upsetters were playing at the Nick,” recalls Boykin. “Leif [Bondarenko, legendary local drummer] asked if I would come play some gigs with the Upsetters and my dumb ass was like, ‘Well, man, I don’t know. You guys are a bar band, you’re a cover band. I don’t think I can do that.’ Leif called again and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ I went and played a gig with Topper and made like $30 and I was like, ‘Oh wow, I can actually get paid for playing music.’ So that ushered in this era of stability. I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’m playing, I’m doing what I love to do, and it’s like a jobby job.’ The Upsetters weren’t making huge money but it was steady money.”

Boykin knew early on what he wanted to do with his life. His first guitar was an acoustic instrument his mother had brought home for him when he was 12 years old. He soon learned “Psychotic Reaction” by the Count Five. Though he has taken a few lessons, Boykin is mostly self-taught.




	Tim Boykin. (Photo: Scott Johnson) (click for larger version)

“I didn’t know that it was called this but there’s a part of ‘Psychotic Reaction’ where the rhythm guitarist makes what you call ‘ghost notes,’ where he’s just doing a purely rhythmic thing and not really playing notes on the guitar,” Boykin recalls. “And I figured out how to cop that and just thought that was incredibly fine and went crazy with it and broke all the picks I had.”

Boykin quickly latched onto the Ramones and Sex Pistols but also listened to classic rock like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. “The first two albums I bought on my 13th birthday were Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Armed Forces and Ted Nugent’s Weekend Warrior at the PX on Fort Bragg.”

Guitar provided him with an identity while growing up in North Carolina. “I had found my niche in my high school social life. It was really different culturally up there,” he says. “People were more interested in what you did than what you had. Word got around that I was a good guitar player. And so within my little group of stoner friends up there, it was like, ‘Kevin’s a good fighter, Steve can fix cars, and Tim can play guitar.’” When he moved back to Birmingham in his mid-teens, however, his new classmates weren’t very impressed that he was a musician. “When I was going to Berry [High School], the rules were all different. It didn’t matter what you could do, it mattered what you had, how much money your parents had, that kind of shit,” he says. “People knew I played guitar but they didn’t care. They were like, ‘Oh yeah? Well, I have a Z28 Camaro.’”

Boykin soon trumped his classmates, however, joining up with local punk outfit the Ether Dogs, and for the first time earning money playing his guitar. “Getting in the Ether Dogs while I was in high school brought me into this whole other social scene with older people and this whole other deal that was going on. So to me that was the real world.”

Boykin embraced the punk credo that stipulated attitude over ability. “I remember reading stuff where [music writer] Lester Bangs was saying, ‘You need to just get a guitar and go do this now. You don’t need to wait around until you’re good enough. You need to get a guitar, learn three chords, get on stage, and be playing now. Worry about the finer points later.’ And I took that to heart,” he says. “By the time I was 15 years old I was playing in bands and clubs and stuff. And I felt like that’s what I was supposed to be doing. So I was hearing the Ramones and going, ‘OK, cool. I can go ahead and be doing this. It was more about energy than finesse.’”

His first band was the Dead End Kids, which played parties at the homes of Mountain Brook teens since the band’s drummer was from that area of town. Boykin then joined the Ether Dogs and played regularly at The Cavern on Morris Avenue in the early 1980s. By 1984 he formed Carnival Season with Brad Quinn playing bass and Mark Reynolds on drums. (Disclosure: Ed Reynolds, author of this story, played guitar with Carnival Season briefly.)

“Tim was the most authentically punk-rock kid I’d ever met,” Quinn says of Boykin, with whom he shared a deep fondness for remedial algebra when the two were in school together. “He was an army brat and had moved around a lot with his family, and he was really steeped in the history of punk and its precursors—The Stooges, MC5, The New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground—all the stuff that everybody nowadays claimed they loved all along, even though they were probably listening to Yes or something. Tim was into Lester Bangs and had read a lot of the seminal rock writers, and so he was really thoughtful about rock ‘n’ roll. He was fairly class-conscious and saw things in a more politicized way than a lot of kids around Birmingham, at least. He was a big influence on me and a lot of other kids at the time. I’m sure he probably felt like a misfit, but that’s partly why it worked.”

Boykin’s ability to write catchy melodies and sing his own songs became evident when he joined Carnival Season at 18, right after graduating from high school. This was also his introduction to making records, with the band recording demo sessions for MCA Records before signing with U.K. indie label What Goes On. (Arena Rock Records reissued much of Carnival Season’s catalog on CD in 2010.) Underground pop phenomenon Tommy Keene produced the sessions that led to Carnival Season’s lone full-length album.

“That was the first album I’d done with anybody. It was very stressful,” Boykin recalls of those sessions. “We were young and everybody felt that there was a lot at stake. There was a lot of tension and conflict . . . some about creative decisions and stuff . . . Tommy kinda had this ’60s rootsy thing, which we had kinda moved away from. We had become more of a hard-rocking band. I had this little solid state Marshall half-stack that wasn’t real versatile but it was this sound [Tim loved]. That was my sound. That was kinda where my head was at, at that point, a lot of that early ’70s British rock kind of stuff. And Tommy was like, ‘Well, man, I have some perfectly nice amplifiers here. We can get you a good guitar sound. Here’s this lovely Fender Deluxe amp—which is a bitchin’ amp, a great amp—but it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine because I’ll just pack up my shit and go home.’ And I’m glad now that I held my ground about that stuff, but then on the other end of things I learned a lot of stuff and had some real first-time experiences. Tommy was real good at getting vocal performances. He made us work real hard. And you didn’t have any kind of [vocal enhancement] toys at that point [in time]. You couldn’t make a bad singer sound good, you really couldn’t. When you hear the Go Go’s and Belinda Carlisle singing on pitch? It’s because they made that poor child do take after take. A couple of vocal performances from me were like, ‘Yeah, we did that by the sweat of our brows.’ And I didn’t know before that that’s how you did that.”

The band lasted five years.

“After Carnival Season, it was kind of a learning process. I was still really young. When I quit Carnival Season, I was 23,” Boykin says. “At that point I felt like I had really been around the block. Initially, I thought that I had to be in a band that has a record deal. So I ended up being in the Barking Tribe—they had a record deal and got out on the road and worked real hard and made zero dollars. It kind of helped me assess more what my goals were and what I wanted to be doing.”

After a couple of years with Barking Tribe, Boykin began writing music again, forming Pinky the Stabber and then the Shame Idols, which caught the ear of Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows and REM. McCaughey hooked the Shame Idols up with Frontier Records, where the band recorded two critically-acclaimed albums. Boykin figured he had the best of both worlds, making money with one band and finding a creative outlet for his songwriting talents with his own group.

“I was making money playing with Topper [Price],” he says. “Then I’d tell him the Shame Idols were flying out to L.A. to play and that I’d be gone for a couple of dates. My spot [with the Upsetters] was secure. I’d either line up a sub or they’d get somebody to sub. I’d go play rock star and then come back home and get back to work. It was great.”

By 1998, Frontier Records no longer existed so Boykin decided to record a third Shame Idols album at his own expense.

“The Shame Idols always had a real strong pop sensibility. But the first couple of albums are really heavy guitar things, to me,” he explains. “At the time Frontier folded I was listening to a lot of more kind of power pop–oriented stuff like the Flamin’ Groovies, that kind of thing. I was getting more of a ’60s kind of vibe.”

The band broke up in the process of recording and Boykin decided to record the new material as the Lolas—his dog’s name. Around this time he also started the Tim Boykin Blues Band.

“It was me basically trying to still do what I had been doing when I was playing with Topper and doing the Shame Idols,” he explains—using one band to make a living and the other for his songwriting talents. “Boy, I was just trying to book my own life at that point. I was booking the blues band all over the place and at a lot of the same clubs I was actually booking the Lolas in there, too. And man, at some of those clubs the Lolas were a hard sell. We were doing covers but we weren’t doing the bullshit covers that they liked to hear down there. We were doing the Flamin’ Groovies and shit and they were like, ‘What the hell is that?’”

Boykin currently plays with Birmingham blues singer Shar Baby, recording her album Shar-Baby’s 11 O’Clock Blues at Boykin’s home recording studio, Bushido Sound.

“I think Tim’s one of the greatest guitar players here in the state of Alabama,” says Shar Baby. “That boy is somethin’ else. That guy is true. He’s over the top—off the chain, as they say.”

Boykin’s old bands rarely completely die; rather they seem to be in a temporary cryogenic state, ready for thawing out every few years to record a new CD or play a show. Carnival Season has done recent reunion gigs and there has been chatter among band members about a new record. The Lolas and Shame Idols rear their heads from time to time as well. When the Lolas “started to fizzle out” a few years ago, Boykin sought a different direction.

“I was starting to repeat myself and I was wanting to do something kind of different,” he says. “I initially got excited about what was going on with stoner rock, desert rock, doom metal, that kind of stuff. I was partly attracted to it because it was more of a grassroots, death metal scene that seemed analogous to the way the whole punk scene was. It seemed like indie rock had become this whole status quo. So I was really looking for something that kind of seemed counter culture.”

Moving in a metal band direction, Boykin worked with Annexed Asylum before forming Throng of Shaggoths with former GNP [Grossest National Product] guitarist Chris Hendrix on drums. “Annexed Asylum was a lot of fast stuff, showing off chops with various degrees of success,” he says, laughing. “Throng of Shoggoths is a slower, heavier band with weird time signatures. The songs are based in H.P. Lovecraft. It’s very weird stuff.”

There is a misperception that musicians must move away from Birmingham to truly be successful, Boykin says. However, he has found that living here has certain advantages, especially financially.

“I’m traveling so much. San Francisco is a beautiful city but people who live there will tell you that it’s absolutely brutal to live there. You have to work three jobs and you’re still almost living on skid row. There are other places that are a lot more laid back, like Seattle, Indianapolis. And those places are kind of like Birmingham. . . . There are big cities that I like but I’m not necessarily pissed off that I don’t live in them.” &

To contact Tim Boykin for guitar lessons and to access his performance schedule, go to http://timmehworld.com.

Hitting the Mat

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Hitting the Mat

Memphis-style wrestling was once the real king of the ring.

By Ed Reynolds

write the author

August 04, 2011

Before Vince McMahon debased professional wrestling by creating a circus of steroid-enhanced clowns and stamping the sport with mass appeal, wrestling once had a dignity capable of mesmerizing fans into suspended disbelief. There were no fireworks or guys swinging on ropes like Tarzan on a vine. The plots were simple and frills non-existent, with wrestlers sporting briefs, wrestling boots, and perhaps a mask if they were playing a “heel” (bad guy).

Prior to McMahon, professional wrestling thrived in territories scattered across America. Former wrestler and promoter Jerry Jarrett, founder Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, ruled the legendary Memphis territory in the 1970s. Memphis’s rabid fans rendered it among the country’s most exciting towns for wrestling in the 1960s and ’70s, as crowds of more than 10,000 routinely sold out the city’s Mid-South Coliseum.

On Friday, August 5, the film Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’, will be shown at the Alabama Theatre downtown. The documentary highlights the glory days of Jarrett, Jerry Lawler, Andy Kaufman, Tojo Yamamoto, Sputnik Monroe, and other stars who sparkled, strutted, and slapped one another shamelessly in the ring. Sherman Willmott, the film’s producer, began the endeavor in 2009 to publicize his friend Ron Hall’s coffee-table book Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: Early Days of Memphis Wrestling, which features some 300 images of heroes and villains. Willmott recently shared his opinion regarding what made Memphis wrestling unique: “You had some really creative minds, with Jerry Jarrett at the top,” he explained. “You had one of the greats of all time—Jerry Lawler—who was great at being a heel but also great at being a good guy. It was a great combination of story lines and talent. The main thing was having a TV show that they could send out to all the territory. And in Memphis, because there was no major sports team, wrestling kind of took over.”




	Wrestling pre-WWE: Jerry Jarrett and Tojo Yamamoto. (Photo courtesy of Chris Swisher) (click for larger version)

Birmingham’s Nick Gulas, arguably the Southeast’s leading wrestling promoter, hired seven-year-old Jerry Jarrett to sell programs at wrestling matches in the late 1940s. In 1956, at age 14, Jarrett promoted his first bout. He went on to referee and eventually became a wrestler himself at the insistence of Tojo Yamamoto, his tag-team partner. Perhaps the best known of Jarrett’s promotional feats was comedian Andy Kaufman’s foray into wrestling. Kaufman refused to wrestle men, instead wrestling women. He was never beaten and declared himself the “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.” Jarrett spent a recent afternoon discussing the good old days of wrestling; Andy Kaufman; and the renowned Sputnik Monroe, a white wrestler who is considered by some to be the real guy who broke segregation in Memphis when he refused to wrestle unless black patrons at his matches had access to the same seats as whites. Jarrett has been quoted as saying that black Memphians had three portraits on their living room walls: Jesus, Martin Luther King, and Sputnik Monroe. &

The film Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’ will screened at the Alabama Theatre, 1817 Third Avenue North, at 7 p.m. For details, call 252-2262 or go to www.alabamatheatre.com. Jerry Jarrett will be on hand to sign his autobiography Jerry Jarrett’s Story: The Best of Times. Admission is $8.

Black & White: Working in the wrestling business as a kid must have been pretty exciting.
Jarrett: I was seven or eight years old when I started selling programs and then I went from there to taking up tickets. That was my beginning in the business. When I was 14, I got a license to drive on a hardship license case, and Nick and Roy started letting me promote the little country towns. If you can just picture a kid in the late ’50s walking around with a couple hundred dollars . . . I was a wealthy guy. [laughs]

How did the setups work, planning out rivalries ahead of time?
There was a period that was called ‘kayfabe’ where we allowed the fans to suspend their disbelief so that they could enjoy like they would when they go to the movie. [Note: "kayfabe" is defined as the portrayal of professional wrestling, in particular the competition and rivalries between participants, as being genuine] But today everybody realizes that it’s choreographed completely. Yeah, you worked out tight spots and moves and where do you go into the finish of the match. Today they go even farther. The guys get to the arena early and get in the ring and actually go through the spots, which I think hurts the business because it takes away the spontaneity of it . . .Today, it’s pretty much choreographed like a script.

Did anybody ever really get mad and tempers flare, where wrestlers were really out to get one another?
Yeah, on occasion. It didn’t happen much; about like it would in your business if you were able to fight and not get fired. I’m sure there’s some people at the office you’d like to bust. [laughs] So on occasion that would happen.

Were you afraid when you started wrestling?
Well, yeah, I was real nervous. You know, I had played football, basketball, and baseball—I had played sports. But you work out in the gym on the mat and then all of a sudden you’re in front of several hundred people, it’s nerve-racking. And you know if you screw up, back in those days, your opponent would knock you upside the head and pretty much eat you up, because he didn’t want to expose the business. So it was a lot of pressure when I first started.

Any memories of wrestling in Birmingham come to mind?
Yes, Joe Tennenberg had a pawn shop there. Joe was Nick Gulas’s partner. I bought my wife’s engagement ring from Joe and he was just a really sweet, nice man. I remember the fans were very, very passionate. The Birmingham trips were real fun. One of Nick’s brothers had a hot dog stand and we’d always go over there and eat a good hot dog before the matches when we got to town.

Do you remember Birmingham wrestling television studio announcer Sterling Brewer?
Oh, sure! Sterling was the announcer and Birmingham TV [live wrestling] didn’t come on until 10 o’clock at night. And so we’d usually run down from Chattanooga and make the late night TV [in Birmingham].



	Famed Memphis wrestler Sputnik Monroe. (Photo courtesy Memphis Heat!)

I’m amazed how many times you wrestled in a single day, in different cities.
Yeah, we’d wrestle Memphis TV Saturday morning. Then we would drive from there to Huntsville and wrestle on Saturday afternoon. And then we’d run to Chattanooga, and Chattanooga TV came on at 5 o’clock, we’d wrestle there. Then we’d get to eat a bite and then go wrestle the house show, do one of the preliminary matches in Chattanooga if we were going to Birmingham. We’d get to Birmingham and dress in the car. Sterling would announce, “Well, it’s time for our next match!” and we’d run right into the ring. [laughs]

You were affiliated with the matches in Memphis when Andy Kaufman was wrestling women, declaring himself the undefeated Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion.
Yes, I promoted that series of matches. Andy was extremely talented. And if he had wanted to and stayed in the wrestling business he would have made a lot of money because he had great psychology and he understood the business. And was a really, really nice guy. And, really, the people would hate him because he would make fun of us as southerners. And he knew how to project that so that the people thought, “This son of a gun is not acting. He really feels that way.” And of course, that’s what a great actor does. Andy was great at that.

You gave Hulk Hogan his first break?
A guy named Louie Gillette called me and said, “I’ve got a kid down here that looks like the Incredible Hulk and I think that if you take the time to teach to him to wrestle, he can draw you some money.” So I told him to send him up. And Hulk Hogan came to my house and of course he’s a giant of a man. So I took him to Tupelo, Mississippi, where there was a ring set up and I could be out of the sight of the fans and we worked out. He never was a great wrestler but he had great charisma, and drew a lot of money all over the world.

Did Sputnik Monroe really help to integrate Memphis?
Sputnik was way ahead of his time as far as prejudices.. And he would go down on Beale Street and have a drink at the black clubs—have a beer with the black people. Well, back in those days, they arrested him, said you can’t do that. He went to court, hired the top black attorney in town. They lost. Sputnik paid the $50 fine, went back to the beer joint, and continued drinking. Word spread, and he started drawing a whole lot of blacks. And one night he told the promoter—they had the Crow’s Nest where the black people sat. And the balcony [where white patrons sat] had empty seats. There was no more room in the Crow’s Nest so Sputnik told the promoter, “If you don’t let my black fans sit in the balcony, I’m not gonna wrestle.” And of course, he was the main event, so this forced the issue. And then what they ended up doing, they opened up the upper deck of Ellis Auditorium and they had it half black and half white. The black people respected Sputnik because he was helping their cause.

Can you share some of the tricks wrestlers used to create a badly bleeding wound when they received what might be construed as a less-than-severe blow to the face?
Back in those days we took a little corner of a razor blade and wrapped tape around one end of it where just the point was out. And we’d stick it in our tights or in our jaw—which was quite dangerous ’cause you could swallow it. But anyway, we’d take it out and you could cut your forehead. We had a product called “New Skin” that you would put over it and it would kind of seal it. And then we’d put a Band-Aid over that. Well, back in those days you wrestled one night and another night and another night. So to keep from having to cut yourself again, you could just take the Band-Aid off and when you hit that New Skin, the skin would break open again and you’d bleed again.

Was there any kind of wrestling school in those days to learn the trade?
Well, there is now, but back in those days you had to get a wrestler to break you in. It was kind of a brotherhood—unless a wrestler teamed [up with] you, you didn’t get in. &