Month: June 2012

Gover’s Gardens

There is gardening and then there is something very special

Story by Carol Pappas
Photos by Mike Callahan

Jennifer Gover did not intend to follow in her mother’s footsteps, at least not in the path of a master gardener. But one look at the bountiful gardens that frame her home and property each spring, and it is evident she inherited her mother’s green thumb and a passion for flowers.

“My mother was an avid flower gardener,” she said. “You know how mothers have you busy doing stuff and you say, ‘I’ll never do that.’ ”

Take in the abundance of blossoming azaleas, dogwoods, wisteria, irises, daylilies — they’re all here and more — and you immediately recognize the promise made to herself as a child was never kept.

Her mother’s favorite flower? “All of them,” Jennifer replies without hesitation. She apparently inherited that, too.

The drive leading up to their King’s Circle home in Pell City is quite a welcome mat of color, vibrant azaleas and dogwoods leading the way. Bursts of color in beds found in virtually every corner and along every path on the property show off her handiwork.

The retired Pell City High School principal is quick to point out that she has help. Husband Kenny Gover, whose day job takes him to Coldwater as principal of the elementary school, is “the hands,” she said. “I’m the planner. He’s the worker.”

In the early years, the Govers began with white dogwoods from the wild. She thought, “I’m not going to get into a big yard.” Azaleas followed “little by little.”

A dozen years later, and the Gover home and grounds are a spring color showcase. And they share it with family, friends, neighbors and anyone else who happens to stop by for her “open house” at the peak of their blooming.

Passersby on drives to see spring color will stop and inevitably recognize the legacy and say, “Oh, your mother is the plant lady. We always would go by there.”

One little girl told her, “The colors are so beautiful, I need sunglasses.”

It’s easy to understand the youngster’s sentiment on a tour of the gardens, which saw an average of 20 people a day coming to get a closer look. “Some came back to walk through a second or third time,” she said. “It’s a word-of-mouth thing.” And she greets them not only with her flowers, but with open house fare, like cakes and other refreshments. “I love them coming.”

She is part of a flower group called Mahogany, and its retiree members meet once a month. But their discussions and activities go well beyond blooms and blossoms. “It’s a group of people who like to help each other.”

They clean yards and make an impact. They visit, have lunch with guest speakers — like a registered nurse or a banker — who “impact us individually or as a group.”

They go on trips to learn more about their state and its history. They have been to Gee’s Bend, Brown’s Chapel Church and the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. They traveled to Dexter Avenue in Montgomery to see the church and parsonage of Martin Luther King.

Here at home, Mahogany gets back to the business of flowers, this year naming Gover’s creation a not-too-surprising ‘Yard of the Month.’ “It’s probably month and year,” laughed Gover.

Like a proud mother gathering her young, she is constantly traveling to and fro to flea markets and home centers to add to her collection.

She specializes in bringing distressed plants back to life so that all may enjoy the pleasures of what she has known since childhood. It is not unusual for people to “leave things for me,” she said. They may be irises or daylilies, and they tell her, “I can’t keep this alive. What can you do?”

“They never come back and get them,” she said.

And she gladly accepts the challenge, simply adding to her gardens year after year and thinking of each flower left behind as a gift.

“There is nothing like early morning in the yard,” she said. “There’s a presence of God. A bloom leaf opens. Birds are singing. You reflect, think about life — where you’ve been and where you’re going.”

Her husband enjoys the pleasures of the gardens, too, not just the work, but to sit back and “see what you’ve accomplished.

“It’s a time to bond with each other,” she added.

She tells young people when they build a house, put the plants out now. “You’ll look back and enjoy it in your life,” she said.

Her other piece of advice? “You should love what you’re doing. I love the plants. It should have been my calling.”

One look around Govers’ gardens, and it doesn’t take long to conclude that that is exactly what it is.

Blackwood Gallery

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Springville home to art gallery of national note

Story by Mike Bolton
Photos by Jerry Martin

As college kids in love tend to do, Dean Black and Sharon Williams would hold hands on the front porch of the old house that Black called home in his college days and talk of marriage and exactly how their lives would play out.

What their friends and family chalked up to as a cute couple with big dreams was actually a game plan for the couple who in 1980 became Mr. and Mrs. Dean Black. It was a game plan that has come to fruition with Blackwood Gallery in Springville. “We’d sit at that old house near Auburn and talk about how we’d have an art gallery one day and I’d draw and Dean would make the frames for my artwork,” Sharon Black said in their gallery on US 11 in Springville. “That was our goal in 1977, and that is how it has played out.”

Today, Blackwood Gallery houses the couple’s work as well as the works of more than 40 other craftsmen. Visitors are often surprised to find bronze work, blown glass, leaded glass, handmade furniture and other woodworking treasures from Alabama’s top craftsmen in a place like Springville.

But it was the only location they ever considered for their gallery, both say. Traditional places where you might expect to find an art gallery, like Mountain Brook, lacked that laid-back atmosphere that is so important to both. Besides, many larger cities tend to frown on people riding their horses to work these days.

“I grew up in Hueytown on a lake with horses, and Dean lived in Homewood, but he spent a lot of time in Springville around his grandparents’ summer getaway that had a lake and horses,” Sharon said. “When we built the gallery here, in addition to Dean’s woodworking shop he built in the back part of the gallery, he built a stable where we could put the horses when we rode them to work.”

For all their dreams of one day owning a gallery, surely the couple could never have envisioned the success Dean would find in the field of woodworking. In his college days, his woodworking consisted of building custom gun stocks at what he called Deano’s Gun Shop, an out-building at the home he rented in Society Hill.

In those days, being accepted into the prestigious Alabama Designer Craftsmen group and constructing many breathtaking pieces for the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens was even too much for him to imagine.

Chances are you might have seen his work and not even known it.

“I did the columns for the Asian murals at the Birmingham Museum of Art and that opened a lot of doors for me,” he said. “I came back and built the bell stand at the museum from wood that they presented me from the 1939 World’s Fair. I followed that by building the bases for the samurai helmet collection.”

In 1996, the Birmingham Museum of Art had a coup as it became one of a handful of cities in the U.S. to land the traveling Qin collection. The artifacts from the tomb of Qin Shihauangdi, who established the first empire called China, are hailed as one of the most awe-inspiring collections in the world. The collection was taken from a burial site the size of Manhattan and included full-size horses and protecting warriors made from terracotta.

Black was chosen to do much of the accompanying woodwork that supported the treasures. That woodwork was seen by thousands of visitors from across the U.S.

The museum is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Wedgwood pottery in the world and the only collection of its kind in the United States. Black was chosen over other craftsmen to build the supporting woodwork for that, too. He also did the delicate woodwork in the museum’s Korean Room.

As word of his skills spread, Black was also chosen to construct the Tori, a large gate at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

Today, Black says he’s amazed at how word of his work has spread and at the inquiries he receives from across the country. His work has ranged from columns for a hunting lodge belonging to dog-racing magnate Milton McGregor to crosses and offering tables from large churches across the U.S.

All of the work is done in his shop in the back of his gallery in Springville.

“I have equipment that can do pieces substantially larger than many people can do,” he said. “It has opened doors for many of these larger projects.”

Black says he has made some inroads into one project that he really hopes never comes to be. An Auburn graduate and devout Auburn fan, he has offered to build museum-quality pieces for the school free-of-charge from the wood from trees at Toomer’s Corner should they not survive the poisoning.

“I love Auburn, but I haven’t been as diligent as I should have been in sending my money down there,” he said. “This would be a way that I could give something back. I just hope it never comes to that.”

Black said he is a firm believer that small things steer people along the paths of life and if not for a woman and her dog, there probably wouldn’t be a Blackwood Gallery today.

“I grew up an Alabama fan, but I wanted to be a veterinarian,” he said. “I went to Auburn to become a veterinarian and took all the pre-vet classes.

“I was working with a vet down there, and a woman brought in a large sheep dog that had been hit by a car. The vet did everything he could but couldn’t save the dog. He told me that I needed to watch how he handled it because it would be something I would have to do frequently in my career.

“We had this little window in the office, and I watched through the window as he told the woman and kids. I was looking at the back of his head as he was facing them. I saw him shake his head, and I saw them burst into tears.

“I knew I could handle the gory stuff, but I wasn’t prepared for that. I knew in that instant that I couldn’t be a vet. I went in and told my professors that I wasn’t even going to take the final exams because I was changing my major. I lost more than a year’s work but I changed to marketing.

“I will always be glad that I did.”

Winnataska

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Almost a century of fun: Camp boasts spirit and history

Story by Carolyn Stern
Photos by Jerry Martin
Submitted photos

A wild place with a rushing creek and a waterfall; a chance to test your skill in canoes or on horses or to take on a Robin Hood pose by learning to handle a bow and arrow in archery class — the stuff of dreams for a boy or girl stuck in the city in the summer. Wild and wonderful, Camp Winnataska has made those dreams come true for almost 100 years.

The secluded woodland camp close to Prescott in St. Clair County is not pretentious. It has no grand entrance nor elaborate buildings. But this collection of some of the best of the natural world and of human efforts holds a special place in the hearts and minds of those lucky enough to spend time here.

Hundreds of young people flood the camp during June and July, a week at a time. They swim, hike, work on crafts, learn to function as a team and sing, sing, sing. Everything they do during their week is based on the principles on which the camp was founded, but the way they’re presented is pure enjoyment.

A fortunate coincidence laid the groundwork for this dream to come true.

In 1914, Dr. Elwyn Ballard, the first commissioner of Boy Scouts in the Birmingham area, had been looking for an isolated retreat away from the city to establish a Scout camp. One spring day, he and his wife, Florence, took a ride in their Model T from Birmingham out past Grants Mill and through Leeds to Prescott to meet up with friends Lucien Brown and a Scout worker, Hewlett Ansley, at their favorite fishing hole. In the heavily forested area, the road narrowed to just a path between the trees, and they found the friends at Kelly Creek, which would eventually become part of Camp Winnataska.

In her book, “Winnataska Remembered,” Katherine Price Garmon, daughter of future camp Director D.R. Price, quotes Florence Ballard, who was her aunt. “We fell in love with the place; the small pool, the falls, and the big pool below with towering cliffs … but its inaccessibility was one of its greatest charms.”

With Dr. Ballard’s strong endorsement, the Boy Scouts purchased some of the property, leased other acres and used it for overnight camping for two years. By 1918, however, the leaders decided that a camp closer to Birmingham was more suitable for their needs.

As luck would have it, the interdenominational Birmingham Sunday School Association had been thinking about starting a pioneer effort in religious camps for boys, and Dr. Ballard was able to bring the two groups together. The association board agreed to sponsor the program to accomplish “the fourfold goals of the association: physical, mental, spiritual and religious development.”

However, Rosa Strickland, a board member and a respected Birmingham teacher and Sunday school worker, had an objection to the plan. She insisted that a similar camp should be provided for girls. D.R. Price said, “Nobody argued with Miss Rosa.”

Other camps established around this time were taking Indian names, and Mrs. Ballard was asked to choose a name from a list of Indian words. Considering the waterfall was (and is) a primary feature of the camp, she chose Winnataska, which means “laughing water.” The number of arrowheads found on the property, along with the fact that there’s plenty of water at Kelly creek for use and to draw game to the area, indicated there had been a sizable settlement. This connection made using an Indian name even more fitting for this ancient land.

Affirming Price’s prediction, Miss Rosa’s proposal for a girls’ camp was accepted and had outstanding results when the first Sunday School Association camp took place in 1918. Out of an expected 75 boys, aged 12 through 15, only 31 registered. To be fair, some boys this age were already working. In contrast, the girls’ registration had to be stopped at 108, leaving some disappointed.

The earliest female campers (aged 15 to 17) boarded a train at Birmingham’s Terminal Station on July 17, 1918, got off at the Brompton stop and walked the final five miles to Winnataska, dressed in the long skirts and the hats of the day. (A photograph in Stockham Hall at the camp shows smiles on many faces and skeptical looks on others.)

As time passed, school-type buses were used to pick up campers at designated sites around Birmingham. Today, automobiles filled with whatever the camper feels is necessary (no cell phones are allowed) crowd the parking lot on registration days. Then the fun begins.

The camper’s huts are named for Indian tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw and Navajo. At the time camps for younger children began, the Sunday School Council was helping a religious education camp in Mexico. Winnataska began sending their Sunday worship offerings to that camp and used Spanish words to name the Chico (“little one”) cabins (ages 6 to 8): Siesta, Casa Nueva, Tienda and Adobe.

Each hut has leaders who encourage their groups to take pride in themselves and their surroundings. A simple task (to some campers) is to keep their hut clean. The fun comes when they are required to sing or cheer (loudly) whenever they’re walking outdoors. Each tribe has special songs and are encouraged to drown out the others.

“I’m Chickasaw born and Chickasaw bred/And when I die I’m Chickasaw dead./So, rah, rah for Chickasaw/rah, rah for Chickasaw/Rah, rah, rah./Bum-diddly-um-dum. Chickasaw!”

Staff members, Blackfeet (for boys) and Comanches (for girls), plan activities that encourage competition as well as teamwork — swimming, riding horses, canoeing and rope climbing. Campers take part with enthusiasm, all with the hope of being named the Honor Hut on the last day of camp.

Each day begins with Bible study in the 1930 Branscomb Chapel and ends at Hillside (which overlooks the waterfall) with an inspirational talk or a short worship service. Through all these specially planned activities, the camp continues to fulfill the fourfold purpose of the Sunday School Association — physical, mental, spiritual and religious development.

Mary Margaret Shephard is director of the summer camps, and Courtney Bean is the programs director. In 1922, D.R. Price became the first director. The camp was growing so quickly it was clear a formal leader was needed to oversee the property and activities.

Price held the position for 35 years. His immediate priority was to replace or update the existing housing for leaders and campers. Some structures were usable, and they were made more comfortable by being fitted with screens and new bunk beds. Before the luxury of the new beds, the 1920s girls sang a song about their old double-decker bunks, which had straw mattresses.

“In our bunk, in our bunk, where the hay comes trickling down, ‘till it hits you in the crown, in our bunk, in our bunk.”

In 1930, property was cleared for Branscomb chapel, a circular open-air stone structure. Lester Coupland, a stonemason and carpenter who lived near Branchville, was the principal builder. Coupland’s son, Carl, says his father and his father’s uncle, Sam Simpson, rode their mules eight miles to the job.

As construction moved along, campers were recruited to gather rocks for the walls. Price reminded them that some rocks with color or distinct shapes were more attractive than others. He always told them to get the “pretty rocks,” his daughter says. The floor and seats are made with flat stone pieces from the creek below the waterfall.

Mrs. Garmon says the building’s round shape was chosen because Native Americans revered that shape, and Winnataska’s founders wanted to honor their tradition. Another custom, also thought to be from Indian lore, has continued to dictate movement in the chapel. One doesn’t walk straight across the floor from one doorway to another. To do so is believed to be unlucky. Movement goes around the circle.

Lester Coupland was asked to be caretaker of the camp in 1935, and he moved his family from their farm near Branchville to the premises. He remained caretaker until 1940. Friends of many years, Carl Coupland and Mrs. Garmon laugh about the times they and Garmon’s sisters played in the sand pile and all around the camp when their fathers were at work. Coupland says, “I was always smaller and the girls picked on me.”

The “big hole” at the foot of the waterfall is a really good place to fish, Coupland says, but his favorite memory of living at Camp Winnataska is not about the fish. “I was able to hear the water rushing over the falls every night,” he says. “There’s no better sound in the world to put you to sleep.”

Kelly Creek runs through the property and eventually into the Cahaba River. Over the years, a number of bridges were built to join the two parts of the campgrounds, but heavy rains that raised the level of the rushing water washed them away. Finally, John Elon Stanley (caretaker of the camp from 1940 to 1961) and architect Walter Holmquist, with help from Roy Connor and Blackfeet Bingham Ballard and Fletcher Yielding, completed the bridge that carries campers over the falls today. The bridge was officially named for him at the camp’s 50th anniversary celebration.

The bridge isn’t the only sign of Stanley’s creative talent. He had been a railroad bridge builder and his impressive techniques can also be seen in the ceilings in Stockham Hall and Brewer Chapel. The beautiful and sturdy ceiling rafters were made of wood harvested from Winnataska land.

A number of structures and markers on the property honor those who have been key to the growth of the camp and in keeping alive what D.R. Price called “The Winnataska Spirit”.

They include Branscomb Chapel, Brewer Chapel, Reimel Hall, Stockham Hall, the Stanley Bridge, Rosa Strickland Lodge, Price Lodge, Norton Flagpole, Grayson Lodge and Grace Lake.

The present caretaker, Mark Buerhaus, was a Blackfoot from 1994 to 1998, and he just couldn’t stay away. He’s responsible for management of the 1,400 acres of camp property and for 55 structures that encompass 87,000 square feet. He says he couldn’t possibly do it all without his assistant, J.T. Braxton.

Buerhaus is a busy man with a family on the property and is on call 24-7. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of Winnataska and knows where the campers are at almost any time of the day or night. Yes, night: neon (ask a camper) and pirate nights, mission impossible hide-and-seek, country night and Indian night. All include some sort of costumes and the absolutely necessary singing and dancing. Wherever Mark is needed, he goes. Even if it’s into the night activities.

Mrs. Garmon, as the daughter of the camp’s first director, a camper herself and a niece of the Ballards, who found the property, feels a family responsibility about retaining the camp legacy. She tells about walking around the grounds one summer day and hearing very loud music coming from Stockham Hall. “I went over to check on the activities. The girls were being taught line-dancing.” She wasn’t quite sure about that or the music. But one little dancer caught her eye: “I thought, ‘If doing this gives her the feeling she’s a real dancer, that’s a good thing.’”

To date, more than 100,000 campers have sung the songs, hiked the trails and established friendships that last through the years. “Many campers are fourth-, fifth- and sixth-generations of families,” says Mrs. Garmon, “mostly from the Birmingham area. They wouldn’t think of going anywhere else.”

At a celebration of Winnataska’s 50th year, D.R. Price quoted a postcard sent home by a Chico camper: “Dear Mother, went swimming in the morning. I almost drowned. Camp is fun. This afternoon, I’m going to play with snakes.”

Why do kids like to go to camp? That about sums it up.

For a first-person account of what it was like to live at Camp Winnataska during the depression, check out the full edition Discover, The Essence of St. Clair online at ISSUU or in print.

Hell and Back Again

Movie gets special Pell City premiere

Story by Carol Pappas
Photo by Jerry Martin

It was a phrase and a sentiment Sgt. Matt Bein borrowed after multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine sergeant, but he says it describes life after war best. “We were ready for anything … until we came home.”

He had been wounded by IEDs, improvised explosive devices, more than once on his deployments, but it never deterred him from the fight until the last one.

On a foot patrol in Afghanistan, he set off what he now believes to have been a remote IED, and he suffered brain injury. “I remember waking up in a corn field … soggy mud. My right leg was buried in the mud, and I thought I had lost it.”

When medics put him on the stretcher, he could feel that his leg was still intact, and he thought, “Thank God, I still had all my limbs. I’ve got everything. I’m good. I’m good,” he told them, and he got off the stretcher to walk the rest of the way.

He took one step, “fell flat on my face,” and then noticed the ground covered in blood.

A medivac helicopter was on site within 20 minutes, and he was on his way to medical care. “I was in and out of it from there. The only thing I could think about was just breathe, just breathe,” he said.

While civilians might think the rest of the story is a ticket home and return to normal life, for soldiers like Bein, there is a new definition for normal. Coming home is a whole new battleground for them, full of challenges, adjustments, coping and simply trying to survive.

Today, Bein is involved in helping other veterans come home, to talk about their experiences, their fears and get them the resources they need. He is part of a program called MAPS, Military Assistance Personal Support, and the St. Clair County-based group may be the first of its kind.

For Bein, the road has been a long one. For two years, he never spoke of the horrors he had seen, the buddies he lost. He had lived for deployments, fighting, “avenging and honoring” his fallen brothers.

His injuries were so severe doctors couldn’t believe he was still walking. He had a blood clot in his brain. “‘With your brain injury you should be almost paralyzed,’” Bein said one physician told him when he walked into the office.

Through it all, he still believed that one day he would deploy again. He had friends who were deploying, and when he went to see them off, he took his young son with him. “When the white buses pulled up, my son started screaming frantically, ‘Don’t go, Dad! I don’t want you to go!’ He knew what the buses meant — you’re coming back or you’re leaving.”

It was at that point that he decided to cooperate. The husband and father of three told himself, “I don’t need to do this to my kids and family anymore.”

He began to talk to his doctors. “I lost four friends. That’s why I was so intent on avenging and honoring their deaths. I can’t do my job in the civilian world.”

But one doctor’s response gave him pause, helped him see a different path. “He asked me, ‘If those guys were still here what would they say?’ ”

And Bein found the answer he is living today: “The best way to honor them is not to fight but to spread awareness about where we have been and find people that need help.”

Bein and others are hoping that awareness will come through a new, award-winning documentary set to be premier in Bein’s hometown of Pell City. Hell and Back Again is the story of a marine platoon in Afghanistan — Bein’s platoon. It is the true story of what he and his platoon encountered in war, but it’s the rest of the story, too, the hellish, real-life drama of coming home.

It is the Alabama premier of the Academy-Award-nominated film that won the Sundance Film Festival, showing at the Pell City Center on June 14. A reception will honor the veterans at 6 p.m., followed by the film at 7.

Afterward, Bein and Sgt. Nathan Harris will hold a panel discussion for the audience, yet another avenue for building understanding.

A film producer was embedded with this platoon in Afghanistan in 2009, which was part of the surge ordered by President Barack Obama. The film is about war through the eyes of the platoon, but when Harris was shot, the film turns to the new battleground for him and centers on his nightmare of a journey home.

“We have done research, and 500,000 veterans will come home mentally or physically distraught — basically disabled,” Bein said. “We need to make our best effort to reach out to them and get hem the help they deserve.”

Being able to talk about it “eventually made me see how I could honor the guys who died.

“It was an amazing time — one of the greatest times of our lives. If given the opportunity, I’d do it again,” Bein said.

But he noted that he tries to encourage fellow soldiers with a poignant piece of advice: “We all did great things on our deployments. Don’t let that be the best thing we have ever done.”

Visit the official Hell and Back Movie Site

How to get involved

Features

The Ark Restaurant

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From skirting liquor laws to finding fame as the place for catfish

Story by Jerry C. Smith
Photos by Jerry Martin
Submitted photos

St. Clair folks are passionate about two basic food groups: barbecue and catfish. While the debate still rages among barbecue aficionados, the Pell City/Riverside area hosts a restaurant called The Ark, which has for decades set a gold standard in the catfish genre.

They also serve steaks, frog legs, shrimp and other fine fare, but the owner attests that about 60 percent of Ark customers ask for catfish. In fact, you can decline a menu and simply hold up one, two or three fingers to indicate how many fillets you want with your fries, slaw and hushpuppies.

Their Alabama pond-raised, deep-fried catfish entrees are excruciatingly delicious and served in a warm, home-style venue whose long, colorful heritage dates back to the Roaring Twenties. The Ark’s bio is like a story made for Hollywood.

At one time, St. Clair County was dry. If you wanted alcoholic spirits, you either went to Jefferson County or to a local bootlegger. Things got even tighter during Prohibition, when alcohol became illegal everywhere.

But E.O. “Red” Thompson had a better idea. He bought an old dredge barge at salvage, formerly used for deepening river channels and clearing debris, refitted it as a speakeasy, and christened it The Ark.

Thompson anchored it about 30 feet from the west bank of the Coosa River, near present-day US Highway 78. The Coosa borderlines St. Clair and Talladega counties, so The Ark was technically in either (or neither) county, depending on from which direction the law was coming.

It was known to be a rip-roaring establishment, catering to most any vice you can name. Patrons boarded The Ark from their boats, or they could use a 4-foot-wide catwalk. In a 1990 Birmingham News story by Marie West Cromer, George Scisson of Riverside related, “More than one inebriated customer had trouble getting back to shore on that walkway.”

Scisson continued, “They served river catfish and hushpuppies and all the beer you wanted, and neither St. Clair or Talladega law could touch them because it wasn’t located in either county. … I was too young to buy beer then, but I drank it on the old Ark. Beer was 15 cents a can, and a sign said, ‘All the catfish and hushpuppies you can eat, 60 cents.’ They put more fish in a sandwich for 35 cents back then than you get on a platter today.”

Eventually, the original Ark caught fire, burned and sank. Undaunted, Mr. Thompson built a new log building on the river’s west bank. In Cromer’s story, the late Bob Cornett described this second Ark, “It was a rustic building … breezes from the river whistled through cracks in the floor and walls. … Some customers came by boat, and some were served from a pier.”

Ferry boats were used in those days to cross the Coosa, which was much narrower than today’s impounded waterway. In 1938, a new highway bridge was built on US 78. Because the bridge had replaced a ferry, it was opened as a toll bridge at first. In fact, Cornett’s father, Sam Cornett, operated the tollbooth.

Thompson was described as a “gruff old gentleman who ran a tight ship.” Cornett told of two men who told the cashier their food was no good and walked out without paying their bill. Thompson forcibly brought them back in, and told them, “Now pay the lady for what you done et.”

Waitress Hazel Castleberry, who invented The Ark’s special fish sauce that’s still in use today, recalls her days of service with Thompson. “Menus were not used back then. Customers just told us what they wanted, and we wrote it down quick and got away from them as fast as we could because Thompson didn’t believe in his hired help socializing with customers.”

But, alas, this new Ark also burned. Thompson built yet another roadhouse on the other side of US 78, where today’s Ark is located, and renamed it Red’s Place. It was a true Southern hangout in every sense, much like the Boar’s Nest on Dukes of Hazzard. They say Thompson was much like Boss Hogg, and Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane also had a counterpart at Red’s. Many St. Clair middle-agers will tell you Red’s did almost as much business from the back door as from the front.

Eventually, the aforementioned Mr. Cornett purchased Red’s Place, and named it The Ark once again. That was some 34 years ago, just a few days after Bob and Sylvia Cornett were wed. Before long, the Cornetts’ Ark had built a reputation for fine food, atmosphere and community appreciation that still prevails today.

The Ark’s ambience is something you just have to experience for yourselves. In an Anniston Star item by George Smith, Cornett described The Ark’s decor: “This is no hoity-toity joint. Anyone is welcome here. Our only requirement is that you wear a shirt and shoes, and the reason for that is the health department. Shoot, if it were not for [them], we probably wouldn’t worry about shoes or shirts.”

Smith added, “The walls are Ponderosa pine paneling, the ceiling is plywood and batten, the tables wear checkered oilcloth, and the booths are hard as any church bench you can remember.”

It’s always been blessed with loyal, long-term employees. Hazel Castleberry’s daughter, Alesia Moore; her sister, Tammy Truss; and Tammy’s daughter Sheree Smith, have worked there for years.

Considering its present atmosphere and colorful past, The Ark might well be described as a road house for catfish lovers. Autographed photos, media clippings and other memorabilia cover every inch of wall space.

It’s been written up in a host of local and national newspapers and food and travel magazines. The Ark’s catfish platter is listed on the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel’s coveted “100 Dishes to Eat Before You Die” list. The Ark was also pictured in a 1995 New York Times story by a photographer sent here when St. Clair first went Republican.

It has been featured in USA Today’s “Top Ten Catfish Restaurants In The Nation,” an annual list compiled by the Catfish Institute of America. In a 1997 St. Clair News-Aegis story by Stan Griffin, Bob Cornett said, “Anyone who wouldn’t take a national honor like that seriously would be very foolish. I feel very fortunate, and we try to maintain the quality of our food service to justify such a ranking.”

In a recent interview, current owner Sylvia Cornett named a few celebrities she and her late husband, Bob, have hosted. They include former Gov. Don Seigelman, former state Sen. Larry Means, movie director Terry Gilliam, “Little Jim” Folsom, Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy (George C. Wallace’s son-in-law), the Temptations on tour and CNN reporter John King.

Practically every major NASCAR driver has graced their tables, including Richard and Kyle Petty, Jim and Bill France, Neil Bonnett, Ryan Newman, Buddy “Leadfoot” Baker, the legendary Red Farmer who built Talladega Speedway, Mario Andretti, Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhart Jr., and Bobby and Davey Allison, to mention a few.

They’ve hosted large business groups from Norway and Japan, including the Honda folks. In fact, the deal that brought the Honda assembly plant to Lincoln was signed over a catfish dinner at The Ark.

In all its various incarnations, The Ark has long been an integral part of eastern St. Clair’s civic persona. Many families have dined there for several generations. In fact, two of the restaurant’s most loyal patrons, Jim and Ann Riddle Burton of Low Gap, became engaged to wed while driving to The Ark in Jim’s new ‘65 Corvette.

They’ve been together ever since and are still devout Arkies. When asked how Jim and Ann have lived together so happily for more than 47 years, he replied, “We’ve never had an argument. But sometimes neighbors a block away can hear us reasoning together.”

The Burtons weren’t the only folks to link The Ark to matrimony. Gloria Anderson, who still works at The Ark, was married there. Bob Cornett himself gave away the bride, who wore a long, flowing white gown. After the ceremony, The Ark opened for business as usual.

Sylvia’s son, Warren Smith, related a story about the time when The Ark served dinner to a monkey. Other customers and wait staff did double takes as the little simian, about the size of a two-year-old child and well-dressed in a shirt and shorts, sat beside his (human) lady companion while sipping a drink.

Actually, he was a service monkey whose sole job was to push a medic alert button worn on a chain around his neck in the event his mistress had a sudden seizure. Smith said. “He had medical papers and everything, just like a seeing-eye dog, but nobody else knew that.”

The Cornett family is of St. Clair pioneer stock, almost from the time Pell City began. Cornett House Hotel was a frontier hostelry located near the railway in Pell City. It was heavily damaged in 1902 when a huge store of dynamite in a railroad warehouse blew up, doing some $1,500 worth of harm to the hotel (a very substantial sum more than a hundred years ago), also wrecking much of Pell City.

Mentored by noted Ashville author/historian Mattie Lou Teague Crow, Bob Cornett operated a popular local newspaper, the St. Clair Observer, before investing in The Ark. The Observer was later sold and absorbed into the present day St. Clair News-Aegis. Always the entrepreneur, Cornett had also owned a bar called The Fatted Calf, which he opened in 1967, just after St. Clair County voted to go ‘wet.’

Today’s Ark hosts a multitude of catfish fans, some of them third or fourth generation customers. The place teems with action during Race Week at Talladega. Regular customers often come from as far away as Georgia.

The Ark’s daily attendance is amazing, considering that they have only one tiny, time-worn sign out front, partially hidden by bushes. Like with any really successful restaurant, word of mouth is everything.

Features

St. Clair Horse Country

[Show as slideshow]

Lusitanos, Arabians find home in St. Clair

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Jerry Martin

From the deserts of ancient Arabia and the bullfighting rings of Portugal, two distinctly different yet equally majestic horse breeds have made their way to St. Clair County. World-class Arabians prance and play at Don Olvey’s Aradon Farm in Odenville, while purebred Lusitanos strut and cavort at Robert and Carolyn Crum’s Shangrila Farm in Gallant.

The owners of both farms started their breeding programs for the same reason: They fell in love with a breed. Olvey’s passion started with a day at a friend’s barn, while the Crums began by admiring an exhibition horse. In each case, a spark was ignited instantly, and their encounters changed the course of their lives.

“I had a friend in the Arabian horse business, and he had an Open Barn with food and tours and invited me to come out,” says Olvey, 76, who rode American Quarter Horses as a child. “I saw these beautiful Arabians, a breed I had never seen before. I decided then and there to get into raising them.”

Olvey bought his first Arabian in 1985 while living in Hoover. He built a barn on his stepfather’s farm in Tuscaloosa County, where he kept his horses until he could find a place of his own. He considers his discovery of the land that was to become Aradon Farm as something magical.

“I wasn’t familiar with this side of town,” he says of Odenville. “I went to Pell City one day, looked on a map and saw Highway 174. I thought I would ride through there on my way home. Through the trees I saw this beautiful pasture, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, would I love to have that.’ I drove another block, and saw a for-sale sign. I called the Realtor immediately and signed the contract that day. It was just what I wanted.”

That first horse Olvey purchased was a stallion, because “every man thinks he wants a stallion,” he says. Then he bought four mares out of Missouri and had them shipped to Alabama. He did a lot of research to learn the industry, studying national Arabian horse publications to get familiar with the bloodlines. “Even in the Arabian breed, there are several different bloodlines,” says Olvey. “You’ve got the Egyptian strain, the Polish, the Russian, the Spanish, and the American strain — called domestic because we’ve taken all those others and blended them together.”

Although his original horses were either sold or died, they gave Olvey his start toward becoming one of the largest Arabian breeders in the Southeast. He has two domestic Arabian stallions, both of them champions. Giaccomo was a Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show Champion 2-year-old colt, a U.S. National Top Ten Yearling Colt and a Region 15 Champion Stallion. PS Andiamo is a U.S. and Canada Top Ten Stallion. Both were sired by Marwan Al Shaquab, who is “the hottest thing in the (Arabian) breeds right now,” according to Olvey.

His two stallions and 12 broodmares produce six to 10 foals per year, which are weaned at four months and sell for $5,000 to $80,000 each. He also breeds to other people’s stallions, and ships semen from his own stallions to other breeders for a $2,500 stud fee. He has eight babies due next year. “We breed for halter horses, and that’s what we mainly show,” Olvey says.

Charlie Watts, one of the Rolling Stones rock group, bought one of Olvey’s mares and flew her to England. Olvey has spent time around Wayne Newton, one of the top Arabian breeders in the country, as well as the late actor Patrick Swayze. “At a horse show, everybody is just an Arabian horse person,” Olvey says. “Even Swayze you wouldn’t have thought was anybody special. He was there because he loved the horse and he wanted to compete and blend in.”

Until recently, his resident trainer, Les Sichini, handled the horses at shows. But three years ago Olvey started showing as an amateur with two of his Aradon-bred colts, Pysnario and Phantasy. He started winning right out of the chute.

“I’ve never had so much fun,” he admits. “I won in Scottsdale, won the Region 12 (a big Southeast show) and at National, I was in the top 10 out of 29 horses. I was thrilled with that.”

While he used to enjoy trail riding, he can’t ride anymore due to back surgery. His carpet business, Don’s Carpet One, keeps him pretty busy, and so does his fight with cancer. “In 2003 I was told I had two years to live,” he says. “Three and a half years later, I was told that again. I’ve been undergoing treatments for nine years, and I’m still in the battle. I’m really a strong believer, I’m a Christian, and I’m at peace with whatever God wants.”

Portuguese roots planted in Gallant

Robert and Carolyn Crum were living in West Palm Beach, Fla., when they saw their first Andalusian horse. “He was a gorgeous black exhibition horse, and we started talking to his trainer,” Carolyn relates. “We decided to start breeding Andalusians.”

In 2001, they went to Mexico to get married on the farm of a breeder of Andalusians and Lusitanos. Intending to buy an Andalusian, they came home with a Lusitano stallion and mare instead.

The Andalusian and the Lusitano are related, both having come originally from Spain, according to Carolyn. That country used them for bullfighting. When Spain outlawed bullfighting, there was nothing for the Spanish horse to do. So Spaniards started breeding them for beauty and elegance. The Portuguese still used these horses for bullfighting and trained them for the ring by having them work cattle in the fields.

“The Portuguese horse stayed more true to its roots than the Andalusian did,” Carolyn says. “The Lusitano is from Portugal.”

Originally from Birmingham, Carolyn was an attorney in Atlanta for several years when she decided to make a change and moved to Florida. That’s where she met Robert, who was in the construction business. It was a second marriage for both of them, and they shared a common interest in horses.

For the next 10 years, the Crums bred, trained and showed their horses. They concentrated on quality, rather than quantity, and their two stallions and two broodmares produced one or two babies each year. But they usually had half a dozen foals, colts and fillies of various ages and levels of training. Then the economy went sour, construction work dried up, and their health took a turn for the worse. The Crums had to make a difficult decision. “We almost got out of the horse business,” Carolyn says. “But we enjoy being able to see them every day. So we downsized to a smaller operation and changed our focus to breeding only.”

They also decided to leave Florida. With Carolyn’s roots in Alabama, they looked in this state and in Tennessee for some farmland and found a place in Gallant that was already set up for breeding warmbloods. They moved there in January, bringing trainer Whitney Wenzel, an Auburn University graduate from South Carolina, with them.

“It was a difficult move for 11 horses and all that equipment,” says Carolyn. “Half of my furniture is still in my guest house in Florida.” The Crums live in an apartment that’s part of their 17-stall barn, with plans to build a house one day.

Their breeding stock now includes three stallions and two broodmares. The grand old man of Shangrila Farms is Exaustivo, a 27-year-old who was born and trained at the Alter Real Stud in Portugal. The Alter Real was founded by the king of Portugal in the 1500s to breed classical equitation horses. Veneno Imperial is their 10-year-old exotic, buckskin-colored stallion imported from Brazil. Bolero (nicknamed Muffin) is a 6-year-old Shangrila Farm baby, whose grandsire was an international champion jumper, Novilheiro, ridden by famed British horseman John Whittaker. Bolero and Veneno have been featured in several international equine calendars.

They also have a couple of pets, including a rescued thoroughbred and a miniature horse named Cooper who loves to escape his corral and do laps around the barn. In addition, Whitney has five horses of her own.

At seven months, the Shangrila foals are weaned and ready to be matched up with a buyer, if they haven’t already been sold in-utero (before birth). The latter sell for $6,000, while the foals go for $8,000 and the weanlings for $10,000. The average would be $18,000 for a 2- to 3-year old, $22,000 – $25,000 for a 4-year-old under saddle with basic training. It isn’t unusual, however, for a Lusitano with great bloodlines and basic dressage training to go for $45,000, while one at the Grand Prix level of dressage could command $125,000.

“Lusitanos are used primarily for dressage. That’s where the market is,” Carolyn says. “They make wonderful cow horses, but no one wants one for that. They are too expensive for that discipline.”

After two heart surgeries, Carolyn, 75, can no longer ride. Neither does Robert, 72. The horses keep them young in mind and heart, though. They produce a calming effect on Carolyn, whether she’s rubbing their necks or watching them frolic in the pasture. The babies are her biggest joy, and she’s looking forward to a new crop next year.

“We haven’t had any babies for the last two years because of the economy, ” she says. “The number of our semen shipments are down, too. Horses are a reflection of the economy. But I‘m optimistic about this year.”

Features