Birmingham Photo of the Day [83]: Southern & Athletic Clubs in 1908

An interesting book related to early Birmingham is the 1908 publication Views of Birmingham. Its full title gives a hint of its purpose: Views of Birmingham, Alabama with a Glimpse at some of the Natural Resources of the Birmingham District and the Industries Based thereon. The 64 page book has pages of photos devoted to various buildings such as Union Station, Masonic Temple and St. Vincent Hospital;  street scenes like "Third Avenue at Night", the city water works and various impressive mansions. The publisher was Isidore Newman and Son, bankers in New York and New Orleans. Newman was the owner of street railways in Birmingham and other cities, so this was a natural promotional effort.

I've done blog posts with some details on several of these photos, such as the Morris Hotel, Powell School, the U.S. Weather Bureau building, the Birmingham Water Works Shades Mountain filtration plant and two of the mansions in Glen Iris Park. This one continues that series.

The Views photograph below shows the buildings of two organizations, the Southern and Birmingham Athletic Clubs. The Southern was a private gentleman's club founded as the Komus Club in 1886. This building opened in 1901; the BhamWiki entry has a photo of the club's interior. The organization folded in 1931 during the Great Depression. The Birmingham Red Cross occupied the building from 1943 until 1967, when it was demolished. The AmSouth-Sonat building was constructed on the site. 

Founded in 1886, the Birmingham Athletic Club opened the three story building shown in 1903. The interior, which included a basement, featured everything from a rifle range and bowling alley to a gymnasium and library. In 1892 the BAC put together a football team, and played the new University of Alabama team on November 12 at Lakeview Park. Alabama managed one 4-point touchdown, but BAC founder Joseph Ross kicked a 65-yard, 5-point field goal for the win. Scoring for U.S. football was a bit different at that time. 

In 1925 the BAC constructed a ten story headquarters elsewhere and sold this building to a local Ku Klux Klan organization. The Klan never occupied it and sold it to the YMCA. Later tenants included the YWCA and the Dixie-Carlton Hotel. The structure was demolished in 1955 for a parking lot. 

You can download a PDF of this book at the Internet Archive. A Flickr site has all the pages. 

Below I've included another photo from 1906 and a color postcard of these two buildings. 

Source: BhamWiki

Detroit Publishing Company, ca. 1906

Source: Library of Congress

Color postcard, ca. 1930

SOURCE: Troy University Libraries via Alabama Mosaic

Sara Henderson Hay, Poet

Last year for National Poetry Month  I wrote a couple of blog posts about  anthologies of poems by Alabama authors. One focused on Alabama Poetry published in 1945 and edited by Louise Crenshaw Ray. Another looked at the Anthology of Alabama Poetry 1928 published by the Alabama Writers Conclave. In this post for the annual poetry celebration, I want to discuss a particular poet with state connections, Sara Henderson Hay.

She was born on November 13, 1906 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Anniston. Her parents were Daisy Henderson [Baker] Hay and Ralph Watson Hay. The 1940 U.S. Census gives Daisy's birthplace as Alabama and the year as about 1878; she died in Anniston on August 27, 1966. Ralph was also born in Pittsburgh on February 9, 1873, and died there on February 23, 1938. Hay's parents were married in Anniston on November 15, 1905.

The family seems to have done a lot of back-and-forth between Pennsylvania and Alabama. According to his Find-A-Grave listing, her father was a superintendent with Samuel W. Hay's Sons , & Manufacturers Light & Heat Co. and salesman with Oil Well Supply Co., all in Pittsburgh. Ralph's father was Samuel W. Hay, so presumably that one was the family business. Since Anniston had many metal and pipe industries, Ralph may have lived in both places and travelled back and forth for business interests. 

Sara received her education before college in Anniston. In the 1880's one of Anniston's founders Samuel Noble established two private schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church, Noble Institutes for Boys and Girls. Established in 1886, the Noble Institute for Girls was located at the corner of 11th Street and Leighton Avenue.  The boarding school closed in 1914, and the building later burned. The day school, which Hay presumably attended, closed in 1922. In that same year a new brick Anniston High School opened, which Hay attended. 

At age 10 she had published a poem about golf in Judge Magazine and in high school published in the Anniston Star newspaper. She continued writing and publishing poetry while in college. She left Anniston to enroll at Brenau College in Georgia from 1926 until 1928, then moved to New York City and graduated from Columbia University in 1931. 

Hay worked in the Rare Book Department at Charles Scribner's Sons publisher from 1935 until 1942. After Columbia she had started with the company  as a secretary in the editorial offices and then worked in the firm's bookstore. During this period her poems began to appear in various magazine and anthologies. While there she was an editor on Stevenson's Home Book of Shakespeare Quotations, published by Scribner's in 1937. 

In 1935 while at Scribner's Hay was able to tour Europe as secretary to Gladys Baker, a syndicated newspaper columnist. Baker had moved to the Magic City in 1926 to begin working for the Birmingham News. Small world, isn't it? I've yet to discover how the two women met, but on the tour they met with Pope Pius XI, Mussolini, Ataturk and other notables. 

Hay resumed work at Scribner's, continued writing poetry and published poetry and fiction reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature. In 1939 her second book was published by Alfred A. Knopf, another major New York publisher. I have included a number of images from This, My Letter below, including two from her "To My Small Son" series about an imaginary child. 

In 1938 and 1940 she recorded 28 of her poems at the City College of New York; they are listed at that link. In 1953 they were copied for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress. 

During the 1950's and 1960's Hay continued to publish collections of poetry. The Delicate Balance [Scribner] appeared in 1951 and The Stone and the Shell [University of Pittsburgh Press] in 1959. In 1963 Doubleday published The Story Hour; see some comments about it below. Doubleday also published her final book The Footing on the Earth in 1966.

The 1951 collection The Delicate Balance won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Kentucky Poetry Review published an issue devoted to her work in 1980. 

Hay was married twice. Her first husband was Raymond Holden [1894-1972], a novelist, poet and publisher she married in 1937. Hay was the third of his four wives and the union apparently did not last long. On January 27, 1951, she married Nikolai Lopatnikoff, and they remained together until his death in 1976. He was a composer, and you can see a photo of him in the classroom taken by famed photographer W. Eugene Smith here. He taught music composition at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1945 until 1969. I have found no indication that Hay had any children. 

Sara Henderson Hay died on July 7, 1987, in Pittsburgh. Her death was covered by the New York Times. She and her second husband are buried in Homewood Cemetery in that city. 

I have found these two items of scholarship on Hay's work:

Joyce, Christa Mastrangelo. "Contemporary Women Poets and the Fairy Tale." Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings (2009): 31-43.

Wilson, Dorothy Ann. Irony and Satire in the Poetry of Sara Henderson Hay. Diss. Indiana State College (Pa.), 1964.

I also found an essay by Alabama's eighth poet laureate, Helen F. Blackshear, "The Poetry of Sara Henderson Hay" in her collection Southern Smorgasbord [1982]. 

Images and some more commentary are below. I have included many from Hay's second poetry collection, since that is the only book of hers I own. I've also included one related to a mystery I've yet to solve. 

 I looked at Ancestry.com and found a Michael Actis-Grand in the 1930 U.S. Census. He was 37, living in Yonkers, New York. His profession? He was a hair dresser who owned a beauty shop. Could this be the Michael of this dedication?

Hay was obviously still married to Holden when this book was published. 

As this page demonstrates, by 1939 Hay's poems had appeared in a wide variety of publications. 

I can sympathize with the situation in this sonnet. Once when very young our daughter Becca acted like this "Beloved Sphinx" as Dianne and I, her brother, the photographer and other parents and children waiting tried to coax a smile from her. 

This collection contains fairy tales retold in sonnet form. The foreword is by poet Miller Williams. Reprinted from the 1963 Doubleday edition.

This special issue of Sagetrieb published in 2000 featured Hay on the cover in a photo taken in 1973. 

Alabama marriage certificate for Willa Baker Hay. Note the address as 1124 Quintard Avenue in Anniston, the same location identified below as Hay's "childhood home" and listed in various sources as her mother Daisy's residence for some years.

 In one obituary for Ralph Hay his children are listed as "Ray H. Holden; Willa Baker Hay". Just a simple error? Yet here's a marriage certificate for Willa listing her parents as Sara's parents and the Quintard address [see below]. At this time, June 1939, Sara was in New York City still working for Scribner's. 

And what about Ray? Beats me; by this time I gave up in confusion. More research is required to sort all this out. 

."

This Anniston newspaper article notes Hay's visit in 1950 to the city to visit her mother in her childhood home at 1124 Quintard Avenue. She also gave a talk to the European Study Club. 

Source: Anniston Star 22 October 1950 

Alabama's Organ Transplant Pioneer

Many of us in Alabama are aware of the organ transplant program at UAB School of Medicine and its success over the years. After all, about 400 organs are transplanted every year and more than 14,000 such operations have been performed since 1968. Some people may not know that one of the world's transplant pioneers was born in a small town in Shelby County. Let's investigate. 

A summary of James D. Hardy, Jr.'s career and accomplishments can be read below in the text from his historical marker in Calera. Luckily for us Dr. Hardy published an autobiography in 2002; the first chapter describes his years growing up in Calera. 

Hardy and twin brother Julian were born on May 14, 1918, at St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham. James was named after his paternal grandfather James D. Hardy, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. 

The family lived next to the Newala Lime Plant in Calera, owned by the elder James who had been in Alabama since at least 1882. In 1883 Hardy, his younger brother John and two other lime kiln owners formed the Alabama Lime Company. "Newala" is a pure type of limestone found in Shelby County; lime plants continue to operate there. 

At the time of the twins' birth, mother Julia taught Latin at the Girls' Technical Institute, now the University of Montevallo. A graduate of the University of Alabama and Columbia University in New York City, she eventually married an older widower, Fred Hardy, a University of Tennessee graduate who already had three children. 

Hardy's maternal grandfather Diggs Poyner was a Virginia Military Institute graduate who taught military topics at the University of Alabama during the Civil War. After the war he bought property in Mt Hebron, where Julia was born. 

After marriage the new couple and Fred's sons settled in what Hardy described as their drafty house that nonetheless provided "a home and a solid refuge." The 1930 U.S. Census notes they lived in Montevallo on state highway 25. Hardy claims the house was called "Newala" and reflected his parents' states of origins, New York and Alabama. 

In the first chapter of his memoir, Hardy paints his childhood and teen years with vivid details. His father was a stern disciplinarian with the twins, and his mother was too--with half-hearted switchings and shaming. He recalls his mother's home schooling of Julian and himself, since the family obviously valued education, and she was unhappy with the quality of local public schools. Hardy also mentions berry picking trips with her.

Many other memories are included: his first "ghost" sighting, jobs he had around the house, 4-H Club, Christmas foods and celebrations, his bout with pneumonia, their dogs and cows, and the Great Depression. In high school he played trombone and Julian played sax in a dance orchestra, the Bama Skippers. He includes a long section on the medical lessons he learned at home while growing up. 

The twins graduated from the University of Alabama on May 24, 1938, in a very hot football stadium. In early September James boarded a train in Birmingham for Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Two fellow Alabamians in the school were waiting for him at the station.

Hardy left Alabama for medical training because the state only had a two-year medical program in Tuscaloosa at the time. He would have had to go elsewhere to complete his M.D. anyway. The four-year Medical College of Alabama did not open in Birmingham until September 1946.  

Hardy's historical marker notes he published over 500 articles in medical journals. You can see a list of most of them here. That marker is one of only nine in Shelby County. He was inducted into the Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame in 1998. Hardy has an extensive Wikipedia page; the University of Mississippi Medical Center also has one 

Hardy's historical marker is in Calera

Source: Historical Marker Database

Side 1
James Daniel Hardy
May 14, 1918 – February 19, 2003


James Hardy and his twin brother, Julian, were born and reared in Newala, Alabama, 3 miles east of Montevallo. He attended the consolidated grammar school nearby which had 3 rooms for the 6 grades, then attended high school in Montevallo. James received his BA from the University of Alabama in 1938, and his MD in 1942 from the University of Pennsylvania, and continued there for his surgical residency and junior faculty experience. In 1951, he became Director of Surgical Research at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. Three years later he became the first chairman of the Department of Surgery at the new University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson, serving in that capacity until his retirement in 1987.
As a surgeon, researcher, teacher, and author Dr. Hardy made signal contributions to medicine over his long career.


Side 2
James Daniel Hardy
May 14, 1918 – February 19, 2003


In 1963 Dr. Hardy and co-workers did the first human lung transplant. In 1964 he and co-workers excised a living human heart for the first time and performed the first heart transplant in a human utilizing a chimpanzee heart. The procedure emphasized the need for generally accepted criteria for brain death so donor organs could be secured.

Dr. Hardy trained over 200 surgeons. He authored, co-authored, or edited 23 books, including 2 that became standard surgical texts, and 2 autobiographies; published over 500 articles in medical journals; and served on numerous editorial boards and as editor-in-chief of the World Journal of Surgery.  Among numerous other honors James Hardy served as president of the Southern Surgical Association, the American Surgical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the International Surgical Society, and the Society of University Surgeons. [2012: 7444 Hwy. 25 South, Calera]

St. Vincent Hospital, Birmingham in 1908

Source: Alabama Mosaic

Photo of Shelby County Newala limestone taken by Charles Butts in 1924

Source: U.S. Geological Survey

Old Alabama Stuff (15): A 1903 Souvenir of Birmingham, pt. 2

This post is part 2 of my exploration of Souvenir of Birmingham, Ala. published in the city in 1903. I've looked at some of the photos included in the book in part 1, and we'll see some more here. As I noted in that first part, a number of photos I haven't covered are also in the book, which was probably issued as a promotion of the city to potential investors. Also in part 1, I discussed the provenance of this particular copy of the book. 

Let's begin..

Is this the Ensley Works or Sloss Furnace, which are shown below, or Thomas Furnace, which is featured in the book but I have not included here? The book itself doesn't identify the cover photograph. 

Capitol Park is one of four names given to the public space now known as Linn Park. In the Elyton Land Company's original design for the city, the area was designated Central Park. The park was given a new name soon after to match the city's interest in getting Alabama's state capitol moved from Montgomery to Birmingham. Whatever happened with that?

In December 1918 during Woodrow Wilson's second term, the park was renamed after the President. In October 1988 the park was rededicated and named after banker and industrialist Charles Linn. 

St. Vincent's Hospital was founded in 1898 by a Catholic priest and four sisters of the Daughters of Charity of St.Vincent's DePaul. Until this building was dedicated in November 1900, the hospital operated in a rented mansion. The facility continues to operate as St. Vincent's Birmingham in modern buildings on the same site.

Hillman Hospital began operation in 1888 to meet the medical care needs of the city's poor whites and blacks. The hospital acquired its name in 1896 to honor benefactor Thomas Hillman, an important local businessman. The building shown above was dedicated in July 1903 and remains a landmark on the UAB campus. 

Construction on Highland Avenue began in the mid-1880's by the Elyton Land Company, which wanted to open up 1500 acres it owned for residential development. Over the years the long and winding road has seen dummy railroad lines, streetcars, parks, and a golf course as well as stately mansions and businesses along its route. The town of Highland included some of the street upon its formation in 1887; the entire area became part of Birmingham in 1893. 

Avondale Mills was founded in 1897 by Braxton Bragg Comer, future Governor of Alabama. The mill was constructed on 1st Avenue North in what became the suburb of Avondale and later a Birmingham neighborhood. The company eventually operated as many as 18 mills around the state employing 7000 people. The company survived until 2006.

This Birmingham mill became controversial in the early 20th century because it employed numerous children. The mill eventually closed in 1971 and was torn down in 1976.  

Sloss Furnace produced pig iron near downtown Birmingham from 1882 until 1971. Once abandoned, the site is now a National Historic Landmark and almost as iconic as Vulcan or the Civil Rights Institute. The Sloss Furnace Company was the work of James Withers Sloss, one of the founders of Birmingham.

The giant Ensley Works was an open-hearth steel mill opened in 1888 and operating until 1976. The plant was originally owned by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company which became a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in 1907. For many years the mill was the largest producer of ingots and rails in the Southeastern United States. 

James B. Helm operated a successful portrait studio in Woodlawn. You can see his house here. In the 1920 U.S. Census a James B. Helm is listed as living on 1st Avenue and identified his profession as "portraits and framer." I presume he was this Helm buried in Birmingham's Forest Hill Cemetery.

L.P. Hill of Ensley, an independent town until annexed into Birmingham in 1910, and photographer R.T. Boyett were the publishers of this booklet. One of Boyett's students was famed local photographer O.V. Hunt. I have so far been unable to find more information on either Hill or Boyett. 

This page and several following give more detailed information about the economy, real estate, and institutions of the city. 

Medical History in Birmingham: The List

I recently worked on a blog item fitting this general topic, and it dawned on me how many such posts I've done since I start this blog in March 2014. I've also published relevant items in other venues. I decided to bring them together in a single posting with links; perhaps I'll be doing something similar in other subjects. I'll try to keep this one updated as well.

So here we go....

Birmingham's "Heaviest" Medical Block

Birmingham Medical College 1894-1915 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (34): Some More Hospitals

Birmingham Photos of the Day (35): Even More Hospitals

Birmingham Photo of the Day (9): McAdory Home & Infirmary in 1910

Birmingham Photo of the Day (18): St. Vincent's Hospital in 1908 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (33): Holy Family Hospital

Dr. John Payne Murdered in Birmingham in 1901 

Medical History Panels in Jefferson Tower at UAB 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (38): Gunn's Pharmacy ca. 1915

Two Early Medical Libraries in Birmingham

Hektoen International series on "Famous Hospitals: Hillman Hospital

Profile of Dr. Lloyd Noland 
Important to public health in Birmingham for many years

Standing Tall at UAB: The Statue of Dr. William E.B. Davis 

Early black physician in Birmingham: Dr. Arthur McKinnon Brown 

Alice McNeal, MD: Alabama's First Female Anesthesiologist

UAB's Anesthesiology Library 1983-2015

A Plaque in UAB's Jefferson Tower