MOBILE — The Mobile Lions Club announced it would roast former U.S. Congressman H.L. "Sonny" Callahan on Thursday, April 20, 2006, at 6:30 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom on the campus of Corpus Christi Catholic Church, 6300 McKenna Drive, off Hillcrest Road near Airport Boulevard.
The event marked the Lions Club’s third annual celebrity roast. Previous headliners had included then-Mayor Mike Dow and the late Joel Swanson. Proceeds benefited the Lions’ Charity Foundation.
The roasters
The lineup announced at the time included:
- Bob Dawson.
- Colton Coile.
- Bill Yeager, Callahan’s longtime media consultant — the sort of person who knows exactly which stories a candidate spent thirty years hoping nobody would repeat in public.
- David Holloway, the Press-Register’s food writer, billed with characteristic irreverence as its "Doctor of Cuisine" and a recipient of Tony Chachere’s Christmas card.
- Pearl Stringer, or, as the announcement allowed, a less sophisticated relative.
The menu was overseen by Lion and longtime Mobile restaurateur Filippo Milone, formerly of The Pillars — a restaurant that occupied a particular place in the city’s memory as the site of decades of political dinners, wedding receptions and deals.
Tickets were $80 per person until April 7, rising to $85 thereafter, or $800 for a table of ten. Seating was limited. Information was available from Melisa Yeend.
Why Callahan was worth roasting
Sonny Callahan was, by 2006, one of the more remarkable political survivors in south Alabama history. He had served roughly thirty years in elected office at the state and federal levels, and had done so as both a Democrat and a Republican — a party switch that, in the Alabama of the late twentieth century, was less an act of betrayal than an act of demographic realism.
He represented Alabama’s First Congressional District in the U.S. House from 1985 until his retirement in 2003, rising to chair the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. For a district anchored on the Port of Mobile, a seat on Appropriations was not a ceremonial honor; it was the mechanism by which harbor deepening, military installations, roads and federal buildings arrived.
He was also, by wide agreement, a man with a sense of humor about himself — a prerequisite for the evening.
The roast as a local institution
The celebrity roast has a durable place in the civic life of American cities, and Mobile is no exception. It works because it collapses the ordinary distance between the powerful and everyone else for a couple of hours, and because it raises money for causes — in the Lions’ case, principally sight and vision programs — that would otherwise depend on more tedious appeals.
There is a reason the format persists. A luncheon speech by a retired congressman sells a modest number of tickets. A promise that his own media consultant will spend fifteen minutes at a microphone telling the room what really happened sells considerably more.
Callahan, who had by then been out of Congress for three years and remained an active presence in Mobile’s political life — he served as campaign chairman for a candidate in the city’s 2005 mayoral race — was a natural choice. The Grand Ballroom at Corpus Christi was expected to fill.