Lions Club Prepares to Roast the Outgoing Mayor of Mobile
The Mobile Lions Club scheduled a March 31, 2005 roast of retiring Mayor Mike Dow, with allies and old critics alike lined up to take their turn at the microphone.
Consultants, Strategists and a Defection: Mobile’s Mayoral Campaigns Staff Up
By March 2005, Mobile's mayoral candidates were assembling professional campaign teams, and one veteran local adman crossed the aisle from John Peavy's camp to Ann Bedsole's.
Mon Louis Island and a Servant’s Reward: The French Roots of a Mobile Family
The second installment of a Mobile family memoir traces a French line back to Bienville's settlers, to land between Bayou La Batre and Coden, and to how Mon Louis Island…
The Boy Who Rowed Out to Farragut’s Fleet: A Mobile Family’s Memoir Begins
A memoir by Sister Marie Emilie, a Mobile-born nun, opens with an Irish immigrant on the docks, a wounded Confederate prisoner, and a boy summoned home by Admiral Farragut himself.
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.
Dow’s Exit Sets Off a Scramble: The 2005 Race for Mayor of Mobile Takes Shape
With Mayor Mike Dow preparing to confirm he would not seek a fifth term, Mobile's 2005 mayoral field began to form around Ann Bedsole, Sam Jones, John Peavy and Bess…
Is Mobile’s Golden Age Right Now? A Realtor Makes the Case for the Present Tense
Oyster stands on Government Street, the Lyric Theatre, wartime shipyards running around the clock -- all had a claim. But in the third entry of a series on Mobile's golden…
Mobile’s Golden Age: A Retired Banker Traces the City’s Rise, Its Missed Container Revolution and Its Long Plateau
Asked to name Mobile's golden age, a 76-year-old retired banker names three, then explains how the city that hosted the inventor of the container ship failed to capitalize on it…