Mobile Renamed Dixie Street for a Civil Rights Pioneer and Druggist
The Mobile City Council voted in July 2007 to rename Dixie Street for Dr. James H. Finley, an early civil rights leader whose drugstore chain served the city's Black community…
Keep the Fires Burning: A Mobile Family Memoir Reaches Its Close
The sixth and final chapter of Sister Marie Emilie's memoir carried the Walsh family from a Spring Hill summer in 1900 through loss, vocation and a sheaf of poems written…
A Yellow Fever Scare and a Train to Canada: A Mobile Childhood Recalled
A serialized memoir by Sister Marie Emilie, born Elizabeth Zoe Walsh in 1892, recalled a yellow fever scare that sent her north by rail and a Mobile childhood spent between…
A Fairhope Lawyer’s Campaign to Give Dixey Bar Its Proper Name
In March 2005, Fairhope attorney David Bagwell asked federal geographers to make Dixey Bar official, tracing its name to a clipper ship lost in a hurricane at the mouth of…
Phone Booths at the Battle House: A Mobile Broker’s Secret Courtship of a Cotton King
In a serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile, a group of stockbrokers plotting to leave a tyrannical boss found a backer in a courtly New Orleans financier who once cornered…
Cold Feet on the Coast: A Mobile Broker’s Conscience Nearly Sinks the Plot
The fourteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir finds the conspirators summoned to a financier's beach house, an office secured in the Waterman Building, and one man losing his nerve.
The Contract, the Confrontation and the Green-Faced Boss: A Mobile Walkout Remembered
The fifteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir delivers the payoff: a suspiciously generous contract, a coordinated resignation, and a boss confronted at his club.
A Mother’s Notes to a Son: An Election, a Wedding, and a Mobile Household in 2004
A collection of e-mails from a Mobile mother to her grown son captures the 2004 election season as it was lived in one Alabama household: gloom, gallows humor, wedding logistics…
Lessons From a Hospital Bed: How a Mobile Stockbroker Learned to Stop Chasing the Last Dollar
The concluding installment of a Mobile memoir: a foul-mouthed doctor diagnoses a pulmonary embolism, a broker survives, and a man decides that a million-dollar year is not what he will…
Passed Over at 48: A Mobile Broker’s Account of Losing the Manager’s Job He Had Earned
In the next installment of his recollections, a Mobile stockbroker described reaching the top of his profession in 1968, then being displaced as office manager the following year by a…