For several years now I've been doing these "What's Coming" posts. You can read the 2020 post here. I include a wish list of topics I hope to cover, and look at past lists to see which ones I managed to write and which I didn't. So, here we are for 2021.
I've chosen five subjects I'd really like to get done this year. Back in the summer of 2016 I did five posts on "Beulah Vee's Cedar Chest." My dad's older sister died in 1939 just a few months after high school graduation; naturally I never met her. My grandmother Rosa Mae Wright kept a large cedar chest filled with her daughter's memorabilia. Most of those contents were recently donated to the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery; they form a sort of time capsule of one person's life in Gadsden, Alabama, in the 1920's and 1930's. I plan a post to describe that donation process and bring the story to a close.
Another topic I'd like to cover is Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. I've done a pretty bogus post connecting MM and Alabama, but this one is a bit stronger. I also hope to take a look at Anthony M. Rud's short story "Ooze" which was published in the very first issue of the legendary Weird Tales pulp magazine in 1923. The story is set in "the piney woods jungle of southern Alabama". Oh, that reminds me, I also need to do a piece on Birmingham native Mary Elizabeth Counselman, who published several stories in Weird Tales.
I also want to start this year what will probably be a long series of blog posts. A number of natives or people with state connections have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and I could follow that piece with ones on people from the state who have won Oscars, Emmys and Tony awards.
I actually did complete four topics from the 2020 list: the USS Birmingham and Early Flight, Tallulah Does Birmingham and visits to Scottsboro and Arab [but not Clanton and Calera!]. Posts listed but not written [and these have appeared in previous years] include very busy actors R.G. Armstrong [a Pleasant Grove native] and Harry Townes [Huntsville]. I also didn't do something on the strange writing career of Clement Wood or on Florence Maybrick--did the Mobile native really kill her English husband?
This coming year I'm sure I'll do new entries in ongoing series, such as films with Alabama connections, the usual crop of posts on "let's connect [fill in the blank] to Alabama!" and the usual stuff I haven't even thought of yet.
2019-110
A total of 657 posts so far....sheesh....makes me tired just thinking about that...
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