06.30.08
Mary Ann Neeley’s Montgomery and the River Region: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Another article for my employer’s monthly publication Reference Notes:
Montgomery and the River Region: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Mary Ann Neely
Ref 976.1
As an educator, author, and scholarly writer, Mary Ann Neely has studied and lovingly documented Montgomery’s history for many years. She is a graduate of Alabama’s own Huntingdon College and Auburn University. As businesses and historic homes change hands, city landscapes are damaged and rebuilt by flood and fire, and philosophies for management of city resources have changed, Mary Ann Neely leads us through a whirlwind tour of Montgomery, Autauga, Elmore, Lowndes, and Macon Counties – and we don’t even have to brave the heat and tired aching feet to see it.
Her extensive knowledge of the history of our community is accompanied by old daguerreotypes of Montgomery then, and critically acclaimed photographer Robert Fouts’ images of Montgomery now. Mr. Fouts spoke alongside Ms Neely at the Alabama Center for the Book’s Book Festival this past April. His dedication for his work shone through. He noted the loving, extremely painstaking work of sorting, cataloging and preserving his mentor John E. Scott Jr’s extensive collection of historic photographs.
Mr. Fouts and Ms Neely then got themselves into many situations that were precarious at best in an effort to reproduce the angles and views in those old photos, to allow the reader to compare then and now. Stories of knocking at the doors of complete strangers in remote areas, ‘not really’ trespassing, and hanging precariously off of bridges or standing in traffic in an effort to get the exact shot added enjoyable detail to their description of the process of writing the book.
Each section of the book details the origins and growth of a section of our community. We see the inevitable losses of time—the Parkmore Drive in is now the site of Advance Auto Parts. Mothers will no longer purchase their daughters’ bridal trousseaux at Al Levy’s.
Court Square here in Montgomery has come a long way from the Wild West look of 1874 to its serene, small-scale urban look today. The “Hog-Wallow in the Square” became the graceful fountain decorated by Hebe, the Goddess of Youth and Cup-Bearer of the Gods, in 1885. Our current downtown revitalizations reflect a similar spirit of progress and awareness of the need for beautification of public places.
Driving around downtown Montgomery on one important errand or another, one might wonder about this or that landmark—the Commerce Street tunnel, for instance—but never have time to follow up on its significance. The tunnel flooded the basements of buildings along Commerce Street in 1929 and was closed for nearly fifty years. Restored and re opened nearly fifty years later, it is the gateway to the River and the Amphitheatre.
Painful moments in our community’s history are documented as well. The city’s effort to make ‘separate but equal’ truly equal after the 1901 constitution was sincere. Mayor William Teague ordered arrest of Montgomery Traction Company officials and employees who refused to create equal trolley routes for blacks. As we know now, this effort deteriorated into the conditions which led to the bus boycott of 1955. But today, improvements to the Court Square area have restored it to a more pedestrian friendly, graceful nod to the area’s original proportions and purposes.
Our riverfront, in 1898 piled high with muddy bales of cotton waiting to be shipped to Mobile, is now a place for outdoor recreation and city-sponsored entertainment.
In the second half of the book, Charles Barnette’s corporate profiles highlight the people and institutions who built our area from the frontier-like towns of 100 years ago to the growing metropolitan region we live in today. The history and the movers and shakers of businesses from hospitals to utilities to churches to higher education to industry remind us of where we’ve been and the potential in our future.
My only complaint about the book is that it leaves me hungry for even more details. As time passes, the marks of the personal and communal history of our community fade. How did the people live who rode those trolleys and built those businesses and boycotted those buses? What was the shipping business centered on our river like, and how much of it remains? How do our citizens live now, so that we can have a record for future books like this one? It would take several volumes, I am sure, for Ms Neely and Mr. Fouts to cover all the many, many changes to Montgomery and other neighborhoods and communities. I hope they are still working on it!
In closing, I quote Mary Ann Neely. She echoes my hunger for additional detail. On pages 19-20 she writes:
‘In some instances, there are images that may be disturbing where once elegant mansions or simpler cottages have given way to industrial sites, car lots, or vacant weed-infested fields, but in others there is a tree, a building, a view that instills that wondrous sense of continuity that gives the viewer such a satisfactory personal feeling of “I have been there, and I like what I see.” That is the purpose of this book—to give the reader the understanding that, yes, we have been there – that all humanity has connections with every other generation. Of course, we wear different clothes, travel in different vehicles, live in different houses, but look into the eyes of an individual in an old photograph, wonder how it felt to live in a dogtrot house in the winter, attend Tuskegee Institute in 1890, wade through Downtown Prattville in the flood of 1939. We are all a part of what we have met, either in this life or through the pictures that reflect the change and the continuity of Central Alabama’s unique and beautiful River Region.”
06.22.08
to make bruschetta sauce
Someone didn’t cage the tomatoes in our suburban backyard raised bed, despite my good advice… but we still got a good size haul of them, enough to freeze several quarts. And we have a few lovely red bell peppers, which are just ridiculously expensive and not even that good at the grocery store.
So, I had to figure out something to do to use some of these delicious blessings from our garden. You need:
Red Bell Peppers.
Tomatoes.
Fresh Basil.
Garlic.
Salt.
Balsamic Vinegar.
French, Italian or Focaccia bread.
Heat oven to 450. Wash and seed red bell peppers, and slice them into big chunks. Coat red peppers and pan generously in olive oil and roast in oven as long as desired– I do not like my roast peppers burned, but Carrabbas’ bruschetta has a little bit of burned pepper skins in it. It’s just what you like.
As the red bell peppers begin to smell sweet and look close to done (the skin wrinkles up), throw in some minced garlic (not too much), stir up, and roast a bit longer.
Chop up fresh tomatoes and get most of the seeds out. You want about twice as much tomatoes, or three times as much, as you have of the red peppers. Slice up fresh basil, as much as you can get– no more than about 1/4 your quantity of peppers– very, very fine. If you don’t have enough fresh basil you can supplement with dried.
When the peppers are roasted, pull them out of the hot oil to cool. Throw the tomatoes into the roasting pan, add a bit more olive oil, slice up the roasted pepper slices very fine and throw them back into the pan, and roast the tomatoes with the red pepper for a little bit.
Start adding basil til it looks like enough. Roast a few more minutes. Taste to make sure you have enough basil.
While roasting, stir together some more olive oil with some more minced fresh garlic. Slice plain French or Italian bread, or focaccia bread, or both, pretty thin. Lightly soak both sides of the slices in the olive oil/garlic mixture and put on a cookie sheet. Roast with the bruschetta sauce until very lightly crisped/browned but still tender. Put any leftover olive oil/garlic mixture into the sauce.
When the bruschetta sauce appears to be roasted well enough that the flavors have blended and the juices have come out, take it out of the oven and add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of salt, and taste. Continue adding small splashes of balsamic vinegar and sprinkles of salt until it tastes good to you. It may also need a few more splashes of olive oil. Olive oil is good for you and also holds the nutrients into the veggies and makes the consistency of the sauce so much more pleasing.
Serve warm in a bowl with a spoon to spread on the rounds or slices of toasted bread. Damn, damn, damn good!
I imagine it would be almost as good with a can of diced tomatoes, canned roasted red peppers which are very cheap at the dollar tree, and some fresh basil from the produce section… and we have frozen tomatoes we can use for this, this winter.
06.21.08
A Quiet Emergency
This is a slightly longer version of the little article I wrote for my library’s monthly Reference Notes–
Every time we use a cell phone, a computer, an electric light, heat or cool our home or drive to work, approximately 80% or more of the energy (depending on where we live in the world) comes from non-renewable resource fossil fuels. Our appliances, even when not in use, are leaching power for tiny lights or clocks or sleep mode or pilot lights.
Demand for fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) is rising quickly, and production is becoming more expensive. The Economist points to nationalist and political tensions and the challenges of accessing oil in difficult terrain.
In spite of our concerns about the environment and global warming, pollution’s toll on our health, rising costs, and dependence on foreign resources in unstable regions, America’s cars and houses are getting bigger and bigger. The decline of urban quality of life and business opportunity creates suburban sprawl. We commute to work and school, and drive across town to get groceries that have been transported across our nation or around the world. Families relocate to find jobs or affordable housing, and we lose small local communities and must drive long distances to spend time with friends and loved ones.
Meanwhile, rising superpowers China and India extend American-style fossil fuel burning amenities to their immense populations.
Soaring gas prices are a major problem for working families who are also facing the foreclosure crisis and rising food prices. Each year Americans die because they cannot afford to heat or cool their homes. In Fueling our Future, Robert Evans notes that pollution from fossil fuel burning has been linked to heart disease and cancer, and a 2001 study at Harvard linked it to infertility and early menopause as well. The International Panel on Climate Change found that as the earth’s temperature rises worldwide drought is not certain, but likely (Evans 13).
For those of us not profiting from the fossil fuel energy industry, this is all a bit of a worry.
In The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook, Greg Pahl’s expert sources predict that a horrific energy crisis could be upon us any time between 2010 and 2037. Visions of California’s rolling blackouts, or of the gas lines of that made the US look like a struggling Communist bloc nation during the 70’s dance in our heads.
A comfortable lifestyle using less energy and using energy that does not create pollution or greenhouse gases and does not depend upon tense relationships with antagonistic foreign nations is possible now.
But energy is a commodity-to be produced, bought and sold in the greatest quantities and at the highest profit possible. This model is not just incorrect for our energy future (no pun intended). It is a dangerous gamble.
Scientists and entrepreneurs with excellent ideas are struggling to gain a financial toehold to launch and improve sustainable, pollution- and waste-free technologies to run our homes, industry and transportation with renewable or sustainable resources.
Resources at Montgomery City County Public Libraries sum up the advantages and disadvantages of renewable or sustainable energy.
At this time it actually costs more fossil fuel energy to create biomass and biofuel than they yield. They produce carbon dioxide and may compete with food production for land. If they are managed as commodities like fossil fuels energy, consumers risk the same vulnerabilities we face today- severe weather and other events can result in shortage and drive up price
Hydrogen fuel cells are incredibly efficient, but cost more to produce than they yield.
Solar power is endlessly renewable and free of pollution but requires large surface areas to yield power even approaching the scale of fossil fuels.
Many are opposed to the stately ranks of giant sculpture like windmills needed to produce wind electricity on any great scale. Storage of any renewable energy produced is an important issue still to be solved. Daytime and evening demand must be more carefully balanced with renewable energy resources to insure an adequate supply.
Nuclear power and our long term dream, nuclear fusion, are incredibly efficient, with no greenhouse emissions. Much like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on a purely statistical basis this seems to be our best bet. Evans details ways nuclear power production has become much safer (124-26) But the millennia-long legacy of nuclear waste, the dangers of uranium mining, and the tragedies at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island make many wonder if it is worth the price.
If we don’t own profitable stock in an energy trader, what can we do?
Evans states that we must reduce demand / consumption and work for greater
efficiency (174). In the wake of the 2001 energy crisis, California’s efficiency mandates and credits for using alternative energy created both great grumbling and great opportunity.
California is now a worldwide model for reduced consumption, but its hugely profitable Sempra Energy, for example, is still building infrastructure for and trading huge amounts of natural gas in the unregulated energy industry. Efficiency and reduced consumption are key, but not enough. According Evans and Pahl’s sources, the transition from mostly oil, coal and natural gas to mostly renewable energy must go forward quickly.
Sustainable profit is possible.
Even as pollution caused by China’s industrial revolution - fueled mostly by coal and other fossil fuels - spawns whole ‘cancer villages’ within China and washes up onto America’s shores, the richest man in China is worth 4.8 billion dollars because he can barely keep up with demand for his solar modules.
But until policymakers and consumers make a move on a massive, nationwide scale, our best chance for improving our health and saving our endangered ice caps, species, and pocketbooks is one family, one business, one building at a time.
Montgomery Public Library offers many excellent books on creating homes, buildings and lifestyles that employ alternative energy or greatly reduce dependence on fossil fuel energy, from Solar Power your Home for Dummies (690.83 DEGUN) to Eco-Renovation the Ecological Home Improvement Guide (643.47 HARLAN).
Greg Pahl takes it even further. He supports the Community Supported Energy (CSE) Model. Consumers can choose local energy just as they are choosing to purchase local food to improve nutrition and reduce environmental toll, animal cruelty and disease outbreaks (for more on the advantages of local food, see Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 641.973).
Pahl notes that hydroelectric power on a massive scale is very powerful, but major sites in America have already been developed (causing great disruption and damage to the environment. However, on a local,community scale, where geography and river flow permit, hydroelectric power would be excellent and environmentally benign (Evans 104). Evans even mentions burning solid waste or capturing methane gas from landfills (102).
Solar power is also much better suited to a distributed application. On a community or local level, fields of mirrors the size of Rhode Island would not be necessary for solar power to make a huge difference, and in places like Arizona, peak production would coincide with peak need.
My money is on solar power, based on an episode of National Public Radio’s Science Friday program. But local communities can make the best decisions based on their unique resources, geography and values. Community energy requires greater responsibility, but it also keeps 3 to 4 times more money circulating in the local economy than absentee ownership (Pahl 267).
“Local communities… tend to be better stewards of their immediate environments because they know that if they are going to continue to thrive they need to conserve those local resources… While the global free-market economy has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no soul or compassion, most communities by contrast are blessed with both (Pahl 268).”
Take advantage of the resources the library offers to learn how to live well while consuming less. Learn about the various options and voice your informed opinion within your community.
