A Foley love story: 40 years, a crop duster, and a lifetime building the Gulf Coast

FOLEY, Ala. — Some love stories never leave home. The story of Albert and Denise Stewart has unfolded almost entirely within a few miles of the Baldwin County farmland where it began, and after more than 40 years of life together, the couple’s roots in the Alabama Gulf Coast run as deep as any in the area. Both grew up in Foley, both built careers tied to the community, and both have watched the coastline of their childhood transform into one of the busiest stretches of the Gulf.

Albert — known to nearly everyone as “AJ” — was the son of a Foley farmer, raised in an era when agriculture defined much of inland Baldwin County. His days began before sunrise with chores that had to be finished before school and picked back up again in the afternoon. It was a childhood of early alarms and long hours, the kind of upbringing that leaves a permanent mark on a person’s habits. Neighbors in the farming community knew the Stewart family the way small towns always know their farm families: by their land, their work and their word.

Farming in the Foley area has always demanded more than tractor work. Row crops that once covered the fields around town needed timely protection from pests and weather, and that meant calling on crop-dusting pilots who treated fields from the air. AJ eventually took to the cockpit himself, running a crop-dusting plane for the family business. The job meant threading low across fields at first light, timing passes between wind shifts and working around the weather — a trade that demanded precision, nerve and the willingness to fly when the work needed doing.

The flying also produced one of his favorite memories. Among the passengers he carried over the years was Denise, his future wife, who rode along as AJ flew down a Gulf shoreline that was still largely undeveloped. In those days the coast was a landscape of dunes, open sand and scattered beach houses rather than the unbroken line of condominiums and high-rises that defines it now. For two people who grew up an hour from the water, seeing it from the air before the boom arrived became a shared memory neither of them has let go of.

From farm fields to fairways

AJ parlayed his eye for land into a successful construction career, one that specialized in golf courses. Shaping a golf course is a particular craft — it takes heavy equipment operated with a sculptor’s touch to turn raw ground into greens, bunkers and fairways that drain right and play fair. AJ became known in the industry as one of the people who could do it, traveling from project to project and leaving his fingerprints on courses across the country.

The highest compliment of his career came from the game itself. Golf legend Arnold Palmer once called AJ the best golf shaper in the business — praise that carries special weight coming from a man whose name is attached to courses around the world. Over the course of his career, AJ contributed work to more than 400 clubs across the country, a body of work that spans resort layouts, private clubs and daily-fee courses from the Gulf Coast to far beyond it.

For all the miles, one of his favorite projects sits close to home. Gulf Links Golf Center in Foley was designed and built by AJ himself, a facility that gives local golfers and beginners a place to practice and play without leaving town. For a man who learned work ethic on a Foley farm, building a golf facility in the town that raised him closed a circle that decades of cross-country travel never did.

Denise built a reputation of her own. A Foley native like her husband, she became a criminal defense lawyer, a profession that places a person at the center of other people’s worst days and demands steady judgment under pressure. Her work has kept her actively involved in the community, in courtrooms and civic life alike, and she has long been a familiar presence in local legal circles. Between a golf course builder and a defense attorney, the Stewart dinner table has rarely lacked for stories.

Together the couple has witnessed the dramatic changes along the Gulf Coast that younger residents can only read about. The beaches AJ once flew over as open shoreline now carry condominium towers, and the small farming towns of southern Baldwin County — Foley chief among them — have grown into some of the fastest-developing communities in Alabama. Retail corridors, subdivisions and schools have replaced field after field, and the population growth that followed has reshaped everything from traffic on Highway 98 to the character of the coastline itself. Few couples can say they saw the before and the after from the air and from the ground.

Facing hard times together

The Stewarts’ story has not been without hardship. In recent years the couple has endured serious health challenges and personal losses that strained their finances, the kind of compounding troubles that can wear down even the strongest households. A lifetime of hard physical labor has taken its toll on AJ, whose body reflects decades in cockpits, on construction sites and behind the controls of heavy equipment.

Through it all, they have leaned on each other and on the support of their church and neighbors. In communities like Foley, that support network is more than sentiment — it is casseroles and rides to appointments, prayers and phone calls, and the practical help that arrives without being asked for. The Stewarts’ experience is a familiar one for long-married couples: illness and loss test a marriage in ways nothing else does, and getting through them is rarely a solo act.

AJ, for his part, says he looks forward to recovering his health so he can return to the work he loves. After a lifetime spent shaping land and building things, the desire to get back to it says as much about the man as any résumé could. Work, for people like the Stewarts, was never just a paycheck — it was identity.

Deep roots on the Gulf Coast

Stories like the Stewarts’ are common across the Gulf Coast even when they go untold. Baldwin County’s older generation includes farm families, boat crews, builders and small-business owners whose lives trace the region’s transformation from a rural, agricultural strip into one of the nation’s fastest-growing coastal areas. Their memories — of open shoreline, of two-lane highways, of towns where everyone knew the farmers — are part of the area’s history as surely as any museum exhibit.

They are also a reminder of what holds communities together when times get hard. The same churches and neighbors who show up for a family in crisis are the ones who show up for flood victims after a hurricane, for a widow after a funeral, and for a farmer after a bad season. On the Alabama Gulf Coast, that instinct to show up for one’s own has survived every wave of growth and change.

For AJ and Denise Stewart, 40 years of marriage has spanned crop dusters and golf courses, courtrooms and coastlines, good seasons and hard ones. It is, in the end, a distinctly local love story — one rooted in Foley soil and carried forward by two people who never really left it.

What their story means for the community

Longtime families like the Stewarts serve as living connective tissue in fast-growing towns. As new subdivisions fill with arrivals from other states, residents who remember Foley as a farming town carry the institutional memory of the place — where the old fields were, which families farmed them, and how the community pulled together before growth arrived. That memory matters when towns face decisions about growth, land use and the character they want to keep.

The Stewarts’ careers also reflect the two economic engines that carried Baldwin County through its transformation. Agriculture built the inland towns, and the tourism-and-construction economy — golf courses chief among them — built much of what visitors see today. AJ’s path from crop duster to golf course shaper traces that shift in a single working life, moving from the industry that fed the region to the one that draws millions of visitors to it each year.

Golf’s role on the Gulf Coast has grown steadily since the days when open farmland dominated the landscape. Resort and daily-fee courses across Baldwin County now anchor a golf tourism trade that brings players from across the country, and the craftsmen who shape those courses — people trained in the exacting work AJ specialized in — remain a small, sought-after group within the construction industry.

Denise’s legal career, meanwhile, reflects another side of a growing community: as populations rise, so does the demand for professionals who serve people directly. Criminal defense work in particular puts an attorney at the intersection of the courts, law enforcement and ordinary families, and attorneys who stay active in civic life help bind a community’s institutions together.

Looking ahead

For now, the Stewarts’ focus is on health and family. AJ’s hope of returning to the work he loves — whether that means time around golf facilities or simply hands-on projects of his own — speaks to the same drive that carried him from pre-dawn chores as a boy to a career recognized by Arnold Palmer. Recovery, for someone built like that, is just another job to work through.

The couple’s ties to their church and neighbors remain the center of their support system, as they have been through every season of their lives together. And their story — a Foley boy who flew over an undeveloped coast, a Foley girl who knew he was the one, and four decades of building a life in the place that raised them — stands as a quiet piece of Gulf Coast history in its own right.

It is also a story many local families will recognize. The Gulf Coast is full of couples who met young, stayed close to home, built careers with their hands and their wits, and weathered the hard years with the help of the people around them. The Stewarts’ four decades together are a testament to that enduring pattern — deep roots, steady work, and a community that shows up for its own.