Alabama Connections of Actor Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis is one of the most recognizable movie stars working today. His film career began in 1980 with a bit part in The First Deadly Sin starring Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway. The part is uncredited; he plays "Man Entering Diner." 

Since then he has found great success in such films as the Die Hard franchise, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, Looper and many others. He has worked very little in television, except for Moonlighting, the 1985-1989 series with Cybill Shepherd that made him a star. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his role in the light-hearted detective show.

Back in March of this year an announcement appeared noting that Willis will make his Broadway debut this fall in an adaptation by William Goldman of Stephen King's novel Misery. The production is scheduled to open in November and run into early February 2016. 

Willis is no stranger to the stage. Early in his career he acted in such Off-Broadway productions as Heaven and Earth and Bullpen. 

So-what connections does Willis have to Alabama? 

In the past couple of years he has been to Mobile filming several movies. The Prince was released in 2014 and Vice earlier this year. A third film, Extraction, has been filmed but not yet released. He and Nicholas Cage seem to be regulars in the port city lately.

Another connection? One of his daughters is named Tallulah Belle--perhaps after legendary Alabama actress Tallulah Bankhead??

And there is yet another connection from very early in his acting career. In 1981 he played the Sheriff in the Labor Theater's production of Railroad Bill at St. Peters Hall in New York City. The play was written and directed by Charles Portz, co-founder of the Labor Theater. The story was based on the brief career of black Alabama train robber Morris Slater--better known in song and story as "Railroad Bill." 

Death of Railroad Bill
Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama

So there you have them--the tenuous but fun connections of Bruce Willis to Alabama. 

In a future post I want to explore the long career of Railroad Bill in blues and folk music over the past century. 

Bruce Willis at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006
Source: Wikipedia

Old Alabama Stuff (6): "Black Belt of Alabama" in 1920

In its December 1920 issue the Georgraphical Review published an article entitled "The Black Belt of Alabama". The author was Herdman F. Cleland and under his name was "Williams College." Why was this faculty member at a small private college in Massachusetts writing about a region of Alabama? Let's investigate.

Cleland was born in Milan, Illinois, in July 1869. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1894 and spent several years teaching natural science at Gates College. In 1900 he earned a Ph.D. from Yale University and briefly taught geology at Cornell University. In 1901 he began teaching geology and botany at Williams College where he remained until his death in 1935. He died in the January 24 sinking of the Mallory Line's passenger and cargo vessel Mohawk after a collison with the Norwegian freighter Talisman.  

Cleland's article on Alabama's Black Belt is one of his professional publications. Cleland published various other geological articles, including "Some Little-Known Mexican Volcanoes" in Popular Science Monthly in 1907. By 1920 he had also published such articles as "The Effects of Deforestation in New England" in Science in 1910 and "The New England Geological Excursion" in the same journal in 1912. Various other publications related to his expertise followed in the years before his death.

This article focuses on Greensboro as a "typical" town of the Black Belt; about 2000 people lived there at the time. Cleland divides it into several sections:

 

-A Typical Black Belt Town

-The "Mansion" of the Cotton Planter

-The Poorer Quarters and Negro Cabins

-Main Street and the Old Market

-What is the Black Belt?

-Physiography of the Black Belt

-Early History

-The Plantations

-Social Relations and Culture

-"The Lost Cause"

-Recent Changes in the Black Belt

 

 

The article is a fascinating and sympathetic portrait of the region fifty-five years after the end of the Civil War. His final section, "Recent Changes in the Black Belt," is a clear-eyed yet nostaligic attempt to predict the future. You can read it in the final image below. Cleland does not discuss in his article what prompted his interest in the Alabama Black Belt.

 

Twenty years later Renwick C. Kennedy, a pastor from Camden in Wilcox County, wrote an article called "Alabama Black Belt" published on pages 282-289 of the Fall 1940 issue of the Alabama Historical Quarterly. Kennedy offers a more prickly defense of the area, its history and people.  

Herdman F. Cleland, Ph.D. [Yale]
[1869-1935]
Source: Find-A-Grave

Ghostly Signs of Pelham's Video Past

Spotting ghost advertising and other signs is a popular pastime these days, and there are still plenty to find in Alabama. Vintage signs that no longer exist are also of interest. Local examples of the first group are discussed in Fading Ads of Birmingham by Charles Buchanan and Jonathan Purvis. Tim Hollis covers some in the latter group in Vintage Birmingham Signs.  

As I've noted in a previous post, the city of Pelham has been around for a long time and dates from its founding as Shelbyville in the Alabama Territory in 1818. Despite that long history, Pelham has very few "old" buildings and thus few ghost and vintage signs from the past. One of the oldest places in town currently houses Riverchase Carpet and Flooring near the intersection of US31 and Valleydale Road. Built in the early 1950's, the structure was originally a service station of the Pan-American oil company.

Dianne and I are frequent visitors to Kai's Koffee in Pelham, and as we were leaving the shop recently she pointed out the item below on the wall to the left of Kai's entrance. We have lived in Pelham since 1985, so we began chatting about the video stores we used to visit back in the day when the children were much younger, roughly the decade of the 90's. My notes on these gone-but-not-fogotten places are below.

If you know of other "old" buildings in Pelham and/or ghost or vintage signs, let us all know in the comments section!

For more about the video store phenomenon, see Daniel Herbert's 2014 book, Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store.

You can see this tape drop on the brick wall between Kai's Koffee and the Linda Hair Salon in the Victoria Plaza on US31 across from the post office. An independent video rental store used to occupy one of these areas and was the only such place in town we don't remember ever visiting.

The location in the Village at Pelham on US31 now occupied by a florist used to be a Video xPress store. That chain of video rental stores began in Bessemer in 1983 and had 85 locations by the time Movie Gallery bought it in 1994. The stores were apparently open most holidays. I remember coming here one Christmas Day afternoon once the kids--and the adults--in the family had finished examining and playing with the holiday haul. I don't remember what we rented, but I bet it was suitable for kids.

In the early 1990's one of these storefronts in the Shelby Mart was occupied by an independent video rental store. I remember visiting there only a few times, even though at that time we lived in the neighborhood behind this commercial strip. I don't think the store operated more than a couple of years. 

Finally we come to the location of Pelham's Movie Gallery, which operated in this currently empty store between Dollar Tree and a barbecue place at the junction of AL119 and US31. Founded in Dothan, Movie Gallery became the second-largest video rental chain by the time it liquidated in 2010. The final stores closed in August of that year.



Alabama on Some U.S. Postage Stamps (5): Some More People & Topics

This post completes the series on U.S. postage stamps related to Alabama.

Previous posts can be found here, here, here and here.  

More about U.S. stamps and postal history can be found here.




Andrew Jackson has been featured on numerous stamps; this one dates from 1870. You can read about his role in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend here.




Issued May 18, 1983. TVA has certainly been important in Alabama history.




Issued June 13, 2002. This stamp features a photograph taken by Walker Evans in the Floyd Burroughs' home in Hale County in the 1930's. Evans and writer James Agee documented the life of sharecroppers there in the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 

Issued February 1962. Facilities in Huntsville were an important part of the Mercury Space Project.

The stamps celebrating streetcar transportation included one featuring Montgomery as the location of the first electric streetcar in the U.S.

Sequoyah lived much of his life in northeastern Alabama where he developed a written version of the spoken Cherokee language. This stamp was issued on December 27, 1980.

 

An Alabama native, Black served in the U.S. Senate and for 34 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Alabama Joe"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930] is best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. However, Doyle wrote a vast amount of material unrelated to the great detective. His Professor Challenger tales enter the realms of fantasy and science fiction. The Lost World, first published in 1912, features the discovery of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals living in South America. He wrote numerous other novels and short stories. Doyle was a physician by training and that background appears in a collection of stories, Round the Red Lamp.  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Source: Wikipedia

Scottsman Doyle used America, specifically Utah, prominently in the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. He would finally visit the United States in 1914.

Source: Wikipedia

Much earlier in his career Doyle wrote a short story featuring a character named after Alabama. In 1880 his second published story, "The American's Story", appeared anonymously in the journal London Society. Narrated by Jefferson Adams, the story describes the death of Joe Hawkins in Montana. "Alabama Joe as he was called thereabouts. A regular out and outer he was, 'bout the darndest Skunk as ever man clapt eyes on", Adams tells us. You can read the entire story here.

Like so many in Great Britain at that time, Doyle was probably fascinated with that brash young country across the ocean that had such close ties to his own yet appeared so different. "Alabama" may have seemed just the right nickname for his "Skunk" of a character. Note that the narrator is named after two early U.S. presidents.

Doyle wrote the story in one of the medical notebooks he used during his training in 1879 and 1880. That notebook is held by the Library and Archive of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.



Alabama on Some U.S. Postage Stamps (4): More People & Topics

This post continues the series on U.S. postage stamps related to Alabama. 

The previous three posts can be found here, here and here.  

More about U.S. stamps and postal history can be found here. 







Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan were featured on this stamp, issued June 27, 1980. 







Helen Keller has also been featured on stamps around the world. Below are ones from Liberia, Spain, Nicaragua, Japan and India.  

This stamp was issued to honor the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird's publication.

Issued June 29, 1995. Semmes was both a Confederate rear admiral and brigadier general best known as captain of the CSS Alabama raider. 

Issued July 25, 1977, in honor of the storied coach's career

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

In the previous post in this series I covered the Holy Family Hospital in Ensley. Here are photos of three other Birmingham that have experienced tremendous growth in the city over the years. I'll continue this series in future posts. 

You can find historical information on many hospitals in Howard L. Holley's A History of Medicine in Alabama [1982]. The Bhamwiki site also has entries on many local hospitals.

Hillman Hospital in 1908. See also my post from last year, "Hillman Hospital & How It Became UAB Hospital."

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

St. Vincent's Hospital in the Lakeview District in 1908.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Baptist Medical Center on Montclair Road in the 1970's. The facility is now Trinity Medical Center. 

Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives & History Digital Collections