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

This photo from the state archives digital collections site features Gunn's Pharmacy around 1915. The store was then located at the corner of 3rd Avenue North and 18th Street. That corner was a busy one. We can see not only Gunn's, but Covell Photo Studio which is advertising "Copies" and "Enlargements." Is that someone in the window near the "ES" of "Copies"? Take a closer look at the archives site linked below.

We can also see a sign for "Starr Pianos" on the extreme left and an advertisement for the "Alabama State Fair: Tickets For Sale Here". The sidewalks are busy and a policeman [?] stands in the intersection gazing at that new-fangled horseless carriage passing through. 

We can also see banners that say simply "Salome." Are these advertisements for a performance of the Oscar Wilde play which originally premiered in 1891? Or perhaps the Richard Strauss opera from 1905? Or maybe it's a brand of soap available at Gunn's Pharmacy.  

The pharmacy dates to 1895, when William Gunn bought the Ellis Drug Company. You can learn more about this business, and see a photograph of the interior, at the always-fascinating BhamWiki site.

 Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History



A Quick Visit to Mobile, Alabama (2)

Back in July we visited Mobile for a family gathering. We stayed at the Battle House Hotel and ventured up and down Dauphin Street when we had a chance and despite the heat. I covered some of what we saw in an earlier post. Here are some more of the sites along one of the city's iconic streets.

Cathedral Square is a city park across the street from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which was built between 1850 and 1884. The Square was once a Catholic Cemetery but most graves were moved in 1819.

Located across another street from Cathedral Square is the Bishop Portier House. Mobile's first Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Portier lived here from 1834 until 1859.

 

These two institutions are across the street from Cathedral Square. I found the juxtaposition interesting. More information can be found at the Mobile Arts Council web site and a 2009 article about the Police Museum. 

 

 

We could not resist getting something salty and something sweet from this business in operation since 1947.

 

 

I'm always ready to visit local bookstores, and several of us made it to Bienville Books just across from the Square on Dauphin Street. Book lovers can spend some serious browsing time in this two-story haven. I especially enjoyed the local history section.

 

 

 

 

 

We were all excited to come across this classic American icon from the film A Christmas Story in the barber shop across the street from the Battle House.

 

 

More than 25 sites now make up the Alabama Oyster Trail. Painted by local artists, the statues are meant to highlight restoration efforts in Mobile Bay.  

 

 

Beautiful Bienville Square is near the hotel. The entire block is now the park, but it started out as a plot of land deeded by the U.S. government to the city if used as a park. Over the years the city purchased the remaining land in the block and owned it all by 1849. At one time the Spanish Hospital stood in this block. The Square is named for the city's founder.

Even the squirrels seemed to be feeling the heat that day

 

This building near the hotel is another example of the wonderful architecture being restored in that part of Mobile.

 

 

 

Opened in January 1927, the Saenger Theatre was the 61st facility in a chain throughout the South started by two brothers in New Orleans. The theater was built to resemble opera houses in Europe. Like so many theaters built in that era, the Saenger had many uses over the years and faced imminent destruction in 1970. Luckily the Saenger survived to entertain another day.

Newlyweds at a 1950 Auburn Football Game

I recently came across the aerial shot below in one of the Auburn University Libraries digital collections. The photo of the Cliff Hare football stadium in 1950 with the homecoming game in progress grabbed my attention because my parents were living in Auburn at the time. Mom tells me they were probably at this homecoming game since they attended home football games regularly that fall.

Mom and dad had been married in September 1950 and returned to campus so dad could finish the final semester of his degree. The football team had a discouraging season that year under coach Earl Brown. In fact, Auburn did not score at all in seven games and lost that homecoming game 41-0 to #11 Clemson. The team finished 0-10. Brown was fired and Shug Jordan hired. Mom tells me about the only thing Auburn fans had to cheer about during the games that year were first downs. 

Of course, Auburn University was actually the Alabama Polytechnic Institute or API at this time, but mom said no one called it that. The school was known then and had been for a long time as "Auburn". Founded in 1856 as the East Alabama Male College, the school was renamed Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama in 1872 when it became the state's first land-grant university. 

In 1892 Auburn became the first four-year coeducational school in Alabama. Renamed API in 1899, that name held officially until 1960 when the change to Auburn University was finally made. AU is now one of the few American universities that has land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant research designations.

Today, the football stadium is a bit bigger.

Source: Auburn University Digital Library 

Action during the 1950 homecoming game

Source: Auburn University Digital Library

Source: Wright family scrapbook

Mom and dad pose at their wedding cake at the First Methodist Church in Haleyville on September 10, 1950. The town's other claim to fame is the nation's first 911 emergency service that began in February 1968. 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (37): The Birmingham Infirmary

I recently looked at a couple of old issues of the Southern Medical Journal from  1911 and 1919 and found several advertisements for Alabama health care institutions. I'll cover some more in another post, but the two related ones below jumped up first. Many such issues of the SMJ can be found at the Internet Archive. The journal, a service of the Southern Medical Association, continues publication today from it's office on Lakeshore Drive in Homewood.

The ads below can be found in the November 1919 issue. Dr. W. C. Gewin, "Surgeon in Charge," owned the facility on Tuscaloosa Avenue in West End which consisted of a former residence and an addition. He had also been a Professor of Hygiene at Birmingham Medical College. I've yet to determine when Dr. Gewin opened his clinic. 

In November 1921 the Birmingham Baptist Association purchased the Infirmary and the following month Birmingham Baptist Hospital was incorporated. Baptist Hospital Princeton currently occupies the site. You can read more about its history at BhamWiki. Howard Holley's A History of Medicine in Alabama has more history on page 69.

Halloweens Past in Alabama

Variations of Halloween are celebrated in many countries. In the U.S., it's mostly a chance for lots of kids and adults to have some fun and for many companies to sell stuff. Below are some photos old and not so old related to Halloween in Alabama. 

I have fond memories of Halloween both as a kid and as a parent of two children. Back in the day friends and I would roam the neighborhood freely collecting pounds of goodies we could later sort and trade. One year several of us rang the bell and after the lady of the house had given us our haul, she asked "Would you boys do something for me?" Without waiting for an answer, she reached inside and handed us several bars of soap. "See that house next door with no one home?" We did. "Please use this soap on their windows." I plead the fifth on what happened next.

A lot of new memories were created taking my kids around the neighborhood when they were younger and seeing what they brought home when they could go out by themselves with friends. One year my daughter had to come home and dump her heavy haul before heading out again. A neighbor had been giving trick-or-treaters six packs of soft drinks.

I guess today someone would call the police.

Halloween party at Huntingdon College in Montgomery in October 1946

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History Digital Collections 

Halloween window display for Foremost Dairies at the J.J. Newberry store on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery on October 29, 1952

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History Digital Collections

Students at the Edgemont Avenue City Kindergarten in Montgomery on October 30, 1953

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History Digital Collections

Children at a house in Montgomery on October 29, 1954

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History Digital Collections

Haunting the office of Birmingham Mayor David Vann on October 19, 1977

Back in July strange forces were already gathering in the stores. 

Going through some old family photos recently I found a few related to Halloween. 

Back in the day when the kids were younger we used to do some significant decorating.

Dianne liked to make gingerbread houses with the kids, and at least one Halloween they made one of these. 

Here are the kids ready to hit the streets for some serious candy collection. I hope they forgive me for this posting. 

Alabama Book Covers (4): Wyatt Blassingame

After looking at the first six book covers below, you'd be excused from thinking that Wyatt Blassingame [1909-1985] might have been primarily an author of non-fiction books for juvenile males. That's pretty much what he did from the early 1950's until the early 1980's. These covers only give a small sample; he published dozens of such titles.

Yet in the 1930's Blassingame published hundreds of stories in pulp magazines. Many of the works fell into the "weird menace" category of horror and shudder pulps. These stories often provided readers with jolts of the supernatural as well as various permutations of murder, torture and women in peril. Many of the magazine covers patched all those characteristics together into a wonderfully lurid visual feast. 

Blassingame was born in Demopolis and educated at Howard College [now Samford University in Homewood; then located in Birmingham], the University of Alabama and New York University. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and several of his non-fiction works relfect that experience. He also wrote a number of novels, including several for adults.

I'll be doing a longer post on Blassingame in the future; meanwhile, enjoy the covers below. John Pelan's introduction to the current reprint of many of Blassingame's early stories can be found here. 

Movies with Alabama Connections (2): 100 Rifles

OK, ok, this "connection" is pretty minor, but get used to it; there will be more such postings. After all, there are a number of films where the state or one of its cities pops up briefly--Tuscaloosa as a joke in a Marx Brothers film, for instance.

That city appears in a joke in another movie, House of Bones. A crew of ghost hunters for a TV show are setting up their equipment in a haunted house, and two of them begin a discussion about the reality of supernatural phenomenon. One guy says to the other something along the lines of "The scariest thing I ever saw was a girl in a bar in Tuscaloosa."

Well. Don't you envy the kind of research I have to do to come up with this stuff?

Meanwhile, let's move along. Today's example of a fleeting Alabama film reference comes from 100 Rifles. This 1969 western was based on a novel by Robert MacLeod published three years earlier and stars Raquel Welch and two former football players, Jim Brown and Burt Reynolds.

Brown's gridiron career lasted a bit longer than Reynolds' did; in 2002, Sporting News declared him to be the greatest professional foootball player ever. Reynolds' college career ended with an injury in his first game at Florida State. However, both have done a fair amount of acting over the years.

Brown plays a deputy sheriff from Arizona who crosses into Mexico to find and arrest Reynolds' character, Yaqui Joe. Joe has robbed an Arizona bank to buy rifles for the Yaquis to help fight Mexican government repression. Yaqui Joe is actually a half-breed; his mother was Yaqui, but his father hailed from Alabama.

And there you have it. You can read more details about the film's story and behind the scenes during filming at the Wikipedia article linked above or the film's entry in the Spaghetti Western Database. I haven't seen the movie in a long time, but I remember it as being pretty good. I do happen to like westerns, but the presence of Raquel Welch is reason enough to watch.

  

Source: Wikipedia