Category: St. Clair News

Key to the City

Community pays tribute to ‘Peanut’ Bill Seales

Story by Leigh Pritchett
Photography by Michael Callahan

Aug. 11, 2014, was a run-of-the-mill Monday for probably most people in St. Clair County.

But that was not the case for Bill Seales.

The man lovingly known as “Peanut Bill” had been summoned to the City Council meeting that was to take place that morning.

After the opening prayer and Pledge of Allegiance, Seales was called to the front of the Council chambers, where Mayor Joe Funderburg read a proclamation to “hereby honor a most gallant, courageous son.”

The proclamation calls Seales “a glowing example of determination” and “a model of courage for many Pell Citians.” It notes that he “has demonstrated a strength and desire to overcome many physical restrictions that did not prohibit his willingness and determination to be an independent, productive citizen. … (He) is, and shall always be a respected part of the Pell City family.”

The proclamation further declares Aug. 11, 2014, as “Bill Seales Day” in Pell City.

As Funderburg finished reading the proclamation, thunderous applause and a shout of “We love you, Bill!” erupted, quickly giving way to a standing ovation.

Then, Funderburg presented Seales with a golden key to the city.

Seales flashed his familiar, broad smile and there was another standing ovation.

Though speechless for a moment, Seales graciously responded, “Thank you. Thank you all.”

Cameras from two Birmingham television stations caught the action as an entourage of relatives, friends and well-wishers gathered around Seales outside the Council chambers. Tina Ailor, who is manager of Food Outlet and Seales’ special friend, held his hand.

“We were very honored that Pell City went to this length to recognize him,” said Alice Kennedy, Seales’ cousin.

Through the years, the citizens “were very excited to see Bill” whenever he was selling peanuts “and he was always welcomed with open arms,” Kennedy said.

Seales, who is 66, peddled peanuts around Pell City for nearly 50 years. He started at 17 years of age.

He became part of Pell City’s fabric as he logged thousands of miles on foot or on his three-wheeled cycle, selling his signature items about town. He also had a peanut stand, first at Food World until it permanently closed and then at Food Outlet.

When TV news anchor Mike Royer issued an open forum for anyone to speak, Kathy Phillips of Southside came from the back of the gathering and said she could be silent no longer.

She wiped tears from her eyes as she clipped on a microphone.

Phillips, a cousin, said she and Seales lived in the same house when she was a child.

“Bill has always been an inspiration to me and my family,” Phillips said. “He is one of my lifelong heroes.”

Daily, Seales would go five miles from where they lived on Florida Road into town, walk all around Pell City selling his peanuts and then return home. “That’s how he supported himself,” Phillips said.

Each day, he would bring Phillips a box of Cracker Jacks.

Seales’ independent spirit gave him determination to support himself and his wife, Karen (now deceased). Generously, he has given to his family, the community and the city, Phillips said.

The way Seales has lived is proof that anyone can do anything if the individual tries hard enough, regardless of the adversity he faces, Phillips said.

Shortly after Seales’ birth, a medical situation left him with physical challenges.

Yet, Seales resolved as a child not to allow the challenges to hold him back.

In an article in the February & March 2014 issue of Discover magazine, Seales says he decided early in life to work and support himself.

“I’m going to go forward, if it kills me,” Seales is quoted as saying. “I’ve always wanted to work. The Bible says, ‘Work.’ It never hurt me! … If I hadn’t been peddling peanuts and going and doing, I’d be dead. If you don’t get busy doing something, you won’t make it.”

Seales’ aunt, Geneva Bannister of Pell City, said she could not talk about him without crying. “I love him more than anybody else in the world.”

Funderburg described Seales as “one of the most popular citizens in Pell City” and “an example of courage to a lot of people.”

Because of Seales’ exemplary life, there had been much public support for him to be formally recognized, Funderburg explained. “I felt like (recognition) was something that was overdue.”

When the Council meeting adjourned that morning, the accolades did not end, however.

That afternoon, there was quite a shindig at Golden Living Center in Pell City, which is Seales’ current residence.

The music of Elvis, Bobby Darrin and Chubby Checker created such an upbeat atmosphere that Seales and Gerry Stallworth, the center’s director of rehabilitation, danced together.

After Jamie Lancaster, executive director of Golden Living Center, announced the honor the city had bestowed on Seales, the residents and staff members who filled the dining area applauded heartily.

When Seales got a glimpse of the peanut-shaped cake that awaited him and the bowls of peanuts surrounding it, his big, broad smile flashed once more.

On a Mission

Christy Minor follows in her grandparents’ footsteps

Story by Carol Pappas
Photos by Michael Callahan
Submitted photos by Christy Minor

It’s a legacy of mission work that has taken Christy Church Minor halfway around the world and back again — six times. But it’s a calling to a continent she seems to have been destined to fulfill.

Her grandparents Clyde and Anneli Dotson were missionaries in Africa for 40 years. Her mother, Margaret, grew up as the daughter of those missionary parents in Rhodesia. And although Minor is a judge’s wife, a mother of two and an elementary school librarian in Pell City, Alabama, Africa has become a place that beckons her every summer.

Fresh from a mission trip to Swaziland, a tiny country in South Africa, Minor shares her experience from the comfort of Coosa Valley Elementary’s library, surrounded by Pell City children eager to hear her story about this faraway land.

A month earlier, she was wrapped nearly head to toe with the warmest clothes she could find. It’s winter there while Alabama children swelter in the heat of the summer sun. As a member of the Pell City First Baptist Church mission team, her work at an orphanage in Bulembu was getting its library in order in a building with no heat.

By the end of the week, neat shelves packed with books in orderly fashion replaced the titanic piles of books strewn about the floor that Minor had encountered upon arrival. She went through them all, discarding what wasn’t needed or was out of date and then transformed it into a real, usable library. “They were very happy to have a librarian,” she notes.

And just like she does on a regular basis at Coosa Valley, she would read to the children of Bulembu. Their favorite, just like back home, was “No, David!” And as Minor recounts to the Coosa Valley children about sharing the children’s book with their counterparts a world away, the look of familiarity is evident in their faces.

While where she was in Bulembu was an orphanage, careful attention is given to avoid the stigma of children with no family. They live in individual homes with “aunties” caring for them. She lived in one of the nearby homes, visiting the children each afternoon after school and working with them. She , too, became known as “Auntie Christy,” she tells her students in the best South African accent she can muster.

But by the end of the week, when the Bulembu children would see her on the playground, they reminded her of the joy they found in what they learned from the book she had shared. If imitation is the best form of flattery, they certainly discovered it. They would smile, hold up a single finger and say, “No, David!” to her as she passed.

Bulembu is actually a real-life lesson to be learned in and of itself. It was a deserted mining town bought by the not-for-profit Bulembu Ministries Swaziland just seven years ago. Swaziland fell victim to the AIDS pandemic and has the highest incidence in the world of this deadly disease. As a result, thousands of children have been left orphaned.

Bulembu, in which Global Teen Challenge plays a major role, was created with a vision to make it self-sustaining to give those children a chance to rise above the abject poverty that has controlled their region for generations. And it’s working. It is now 30 percent self-sustainable through a dairy operation, bottling honey, a bakery, a water bottling plant and timber sales.

“It is very encouraging,” Minor says. Teachers come from all over the world. “They said, ‘We just came here for a few months’ ” and seven years later, they’re still there.” She is convinced in seeing firsthand what goes on there — a challenging curriculum, medical care, love and guidance — “they will be the future leaders of the country.”

Because of this ministry, the benefits and accommodations were not what she had come to expect from previous trips. “I am used to going to remote, really destitute areas” — places where Malaria reigns and swollen bellies from malnutrition are the norm. But in Bulembu, “It was truly a trip of hope to see what can happen when God’s people come together to help children.”

It also made her see that she is needed elsewhere, in places where the visitors aren’t as numerous nor the opportunities as plentiful.

She wants to go back to those remote areas “where they need medical attention and where they have never heard the word of Jesus Christ.” That is her calling, she says, just like her grandparents before her.

Just after Minor returned to Alabama, her grandmother was to give a talk about missionary work at her Oxford church and asked her granddaughter to share her experience as well. “She was able to share about what was happening 50 years ago, and I shared what was happening five days ago.”

To them, it is a legacy of love and compassion that lives on. “I have always felt called to the continent of Africa,” Minor says, her eyes reflecting an unmistakable longing to return.

For her, it is an obvious conclusion. “My heart is intertwined.”

Return of a classic

Argo Drive-In introducing a new
generation to an American movie tradition

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Michael Callahan

As a child growing up in north Alabama, Faye Riggs, 65, often went to the drive-in with her parents and sisters. They paid by the carload, with some money left over for snacks and drinks.

“We’d drive around until we found a speaker that worked, then Mom and Dad would sit on the hood of the car, while we girls played on the swings in front of the screen,” recalls Riggs, who now lives in Tallahassee, Florida. “They watched the movie and kept an eye on us at the same time. We kids loved being outdoors where we could run around and not get bored.”

Those were simpler times, before shopping malls and multiplex screens, before you had to sign away your birthright to pay for a night at the movies.

It was this affordability factor that motivated Brian Skinner to build the Argo Drive-In. At a church meeting, he and friends talked about the expense of going to the movies, and how much cheaper it had been to go to a drive-in. “That’s when the idea was born,” says Skinner, 51, owner of the Crawford and Skinner Insurance agency in Springville.

He tracked down a newspaper article he had read about a new drive-in on the West Coast, contacted the owner, and asked a lot of questions. He found 3 acres of undeveloped land on Angus Street, just off U.S. 11 in Argo. He got help from an elderly gentleman in Trussville who used to build billboards. “The screen is nothing but a giant billboard anyway,” Skinner says.

His first feature, “Titanic,” drew 171 cars opening night, May 22, 1998. Back then, he showed movies seven nights a week, all year round, charging $10 per carload, except on Wednesdays, when the price dropped to $5. He was very successful. “We’d have mini-vans with five or six people in them,” Skinner recalls. “The public loved it.” The distributors didn’t. They said the carload pricing cheapened their product. So three years ago, Skinner was forced to transition to individual pricing to get the first-run movies he shows. Now open Fridays and Saturdays only, “the nights we can make some money,” he charges $5 per adult, $2 for children under 12, and nothing for children in car seats. He operates from early May through September, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, weather permitting. Sometimes, on a Thursday or Sunday night, someone will rent the theater for a church group, office party, birthday party or customer appreciation night.

Drive-ins were born 80 years ago in Camden, N.J., invented by Richard Hollingshead Jr., who capitalized on the success of drive-in restaurants. They became immensely popular because parents could take children in their pajamas and moms could leave their hair in curlers. Later, they became a hangout for teenagers, who could make out in cars without parental interference. Their popularity peaked in 1958 with almost 5,000 across the United States. Then televisions began popping up in every household, and shopping malls became teenage hangouts, throwing drive-ins into a slow, steady decline. As of March 13, 2013, there were 357 drive-ins with 604 screens (many are twinplexes) in the U.S., according to the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association (UDITOA). The industry has seen several signs of growth over the past decade as families rediscover their affordable concessions and double-feature admissions.

Alabama has 10 drive-in sites with 16 screens, according to the UDITOA, including the three that Skinner owns — Argo, the Starlite in Anniston and a twinplex in Harpersville. The Starlite closed indefinitely when a storm flattened the screen last spring. That same storm twisted Argo’s marquee, but didn’t damage the 26-foot-by-60-foot screen. Made up of some 66 sheets of corrugated tin covered in a flat-enamel paint, it’s built tough, Skinner says.

Looking like a giant, gravel parking lot dotted with orange cones, Argo’s capacity is 175 cars if all are parked correctly, i.e., two between each set of cones. More can be accommodated if parked fender-to-fender, as they were for the theater’s 208-car viewing of “Dr. Doolittle,” starring Eddie Murphy. “That was a record-breaking night,” says Alex Bosworth, the 19-year-old Jefferson State Community College freshman who works the gate at Argo. “People were parked all along Angus Drive, up Highway 11, in the fields, everywhere. They were walking in carrying lawn chairs.”

Noticeably absent are the stands mounted with speakers that movie-goers used to pull into their cars — and often pulled off with. Gone, too, are their scratchy sounds, now that car radios and boom boxes pick up the movie’s audio from the small FM transmitter in the projection booth. “Today’s sound is as good as your radio,” says Skinner, who uses 89.1 on the FM dial.

A small, two-story cinderblock building at the back of the parking lot houses the concession stand on the first level, the projection booth on the second. Popcorn sells for $3 and $4 a bag, hot dogs for $2, soft drinks for $2 and $3. “A family of four can come in and have a good time on $20,” Skinner says.

In the projection booth, the 35 mm film whirs through the Cinemascope projector, which sends its beam through a tiny, stationary window pane toward the giant screen 275 feet away. The whirring sound comes from the fans that blow antifreeze over the 4,000-watt bulb to keep it cool. Three giant metal platters hold up to three hours of film, which comes in via UPS in 20-minute reels that must be spliced together, then taken apart before shipping out again. “One of the funniest things was when we spliced a movie out of sequence,” says Skinner. “Very few people knew it. My biggest worry was whether the credits were at the end!”

Argo caters to families, which make up 75 percent of its patrons. Looking through movie choices on his order form, perusing trade papers for ticket grosses, Skinner knows not to select anything intense. “Cartoons, comedies and action-adventure do best at a drive-in,” he says. Saturday nights draw the most cars, he adds, but people buy more food on Friday nights, when they come straight from work without dinner.

Showtime starts at dusk, usually around 8 p.m. One warm Friday night last summer, cars were backed up to Highway 11 when the gate opened at 7:30. More than 50 vehicles spread out across the lot, most parked with their rear-ends facing the screen, their tailgates down or their rear hatches propped up. Dressed in shorts and flip-flops, jeans and hospital scrubs, patrons set up lawn chairs in truck beds and on the ground, then tossed Frisbees and softballs before the movie started. These “ozoners,” as drive-in patrons were once called, came from St. Clair, Etowah, Jefferson and Shelby counties for the al-fresco viewing experience.

Nine-year-old Ashton Hutcherson, son of Cynthia and Robert Hutcherson of Argo and a student at Springville Elementary, loves propping up on pillows in the back of his family’s SUV, where he doesn’t have to peer over people’s heads to see the screen.

Karla Lowery and Kathy Arrington, sisters from Gadsden, have been to the Argo several times. They park close to the concession building to be near the bathrooms and so their smoking doesn’t bother anyone. This night, they brought along Karla’s kids,11-year-old Austin and 7-year-old Heather.

“We love it,” says Kathy. “You can have a conversation about the movie without disturbing the person next to you.” She doesn’t mind the trains that rumble through several times each night, passing so close behind the concession stand you can almost touch the box cars and tankers.

Amy Roy of Argo brought her son, Axel, 3, and daughter Chloe, 10, plus some friends from Hoover. “I had never been to a drive-in until we moved to Argo from Atlanta nine years ago,” she says. “My mom has been with us, and she went many times as a child and teen.”

After his 60-40 gate split with distributors, Skinner barely keeps his head above water at Argo. The industry is moving toward a digital format, and he prays that 35 mm film will be available for a few more years because the switch is expensive. He makes money at Harpersville, though, and reasons that Argo gives teenagers jobs and families a good time.

“It’s fun, and it gives me pleasure to see families here,” he says. “It’s very entertaining.”

Features

A Day at the Rodeo

[Show as slideshow]

Project organizers hope to ultimately
create a major regional attraction

Story by Loyd McIntosh
Photos by Jerry Martin

The sun beats down on a stretch of gravel road and grass near Odenville as two men sit on some wooden bleachers next to a structure they hope will become the best unkept secret in St. Clair County.

Lude Mashburn, an agriculture teacher at Odenville High School, and Herschel Phillips, a retiree and Argo resident, are two of five members of the St. Clair Parks and Recreation Board, a body formed in 2011. They’re braving the early July heat to talk about the St. Clair Arena, originally built as a private horse arena that they are working to turn into an attraction for everything from rodeos to church revivals and everything in between.

For Mashburn, the acquisition was a long time coming. “I teach ag out here, and I’ve been trying to get one for 40 years and never could get one,” he says.

The 125,000-square-foot structure went on the market a couple of years ago, and Mashburn saw an opportunity and convinced county officials to purchase the facility and put it to public use. The purchase price was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000, but early demand for outside groups looking to rent the facility gives them hope that the St. Clair Arena will pay for itself.

The arena already has hosted a semi-pro rodeo circuit as well as a junior rodeo, where close to 400 people came out to watch kids ages 2 to 16 ride sheep and goats for the crowd. A local church brought its horse ministry to the arena, attracting several hundred people as well. But before they can really begin marketing the arena, the Board needs to address the sparseness of the facility in order to meet the needs of groups interested in investing in rent.

“Our mission right now is to get this up and running because we know people are wanting to rent the place,” says Phillips.

“I really think this will provide. If we’re able to do our job the way we should, we will be able to provide a lot of activity for people to come from Birmingham or anywhere else around here,” Phillips adds. “I really believe that. People are starved for something to do.”

“(The County) is going to give us some money where we can fix it up where we can have some bleachers, a concession stand and bathrooms,” adds Mashburn. “We’re going to get it going, and we can have car shows, anything we want to have.”

Plans have already been drawn for these, and other expansions and are expected to be bid soon. “The arena’s pavilion, which includes concession, restroom and showers, is designed to be octagonal rather than the typical rectangular park building,” according to Kelley Keeton Taft, whose company, the Kelley Group, drew the plans. “This design was chosen to reflect the octagonal era of barn construction from 1850 to 1900,” she says. “The pavilion, crested with a cupola, will set a theme for the arena.”

Focusing on the Commission and the Board’s vision to attract a variety of events, Taft says the design “utilizes existing structures while incorporating the necessary improvements to take the venue to the next level of event capabilities. The design integrates connectivity and focuses on safety for spectators, trailered vehicles and animals.”

Other features include entrance and exit roads, designated parking and pedestrian pathways, lighting, covered sidewalks, covered extensions of the arena with bleachers to seat approximately 600 and an area for vendors or exhibitors to set up during events.

The county is committed to making the arena a success and will set the budget based on what the payments will be for the planned upgrades, says Commission Chairman Stan Batemon. “As those upgrades become an attraction to that facility, then we’ll know more about what kind of events that the Park and Rec board can have there that will generate some revenue and operate the facility.”

The goal is not necessarily for the arena to recoup the initial $500,000 spent to acquire the facility, the additional 18 acres and smaller buildings on the property. Nor is it expected to be a cash cow for the county. As long as the arena is being used, people are enjoying it and it’s paying its future expenses, that’s fine with him and the rest of the County Commission, Batemon says.

“We’re still a small county, and this is our first venture,” he says. “The goal is that it will be self-sustaining, but not necessarily drive revenue back to the county. If it is self-sustaining, the County Commission will be completely satisfied with that. The main goal is that it will eventually operate itself.”

Since the board’s inception, county leaders have been busy expanding outdoor recreational opportunities throughout unincorporated St. Clair County. And officials are investigating areas that might be accessed for multipurpose trails for horseback riding, hiking and mountain biking throughout the county. This could include areas along the 80 miles of river shoreline that may qualify for federal funds. However, the jewel, so far, in the county’s crown is the St. Clair Arena.

The end goal, say Phillips and Mashburn, is to bring people from Birmingham and beyond to St. Clair County to enjoy rural type entertainment and programs in one of the very few covered arenas in north Alabama. Mashburn’s additional hope is that the arena will help reignite interest and passion for farming and agriculture among the youths and future generations of St. Clair countians.

Mashburn says it is important to get as many kids as possible interested in rural lifestyles, which he fears are being lost. He and Phillips agree there aren’t enough activities available for area kids who aren’t involved in mainstream sports but are hungry for activities in which to participate and thrive.

“What do they have to do other than football games, baseball games and basketball games? What are their opportunities other than those three sports?” asks Mashburn. “I see kids that didn’t know anything about animals. Once you get them around a horse or a cow, they realize it’s not a bad animal, and they get excited about it.”

Mashburn’s main concern is the future of farming. The number of people choosing agriculture as a career gets smaller every year and the amount of land used for farming is dwindling, too. He thinks the arena can be used to help introduce a new generation of kids to agriculture through recreational activities, like rodeo and horsemanship.

“There’s not too many of them that are going to be everyday hog farmers or poultry farmers. You’ve got to have all that stuff, so you’ve got to bring new kids in. If we don’t, we’re going to be in trouble,” says Mashburn.

The arena just may be that first step in bridging the gap.

Features

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

Shoal Creek A Year Later

Tragedy, triumphs mark life in the valley

Story by Carol Pappas
Photos by Jerry Martin

Folks around Shoal Creek Valley have said it often enough over the past 12 months — “getting back to normal.”

But in this St. Clair County valley, normal has a new meaning since a tornado’s fury swept all the way through it, shattering homes and destroying lives in its path.

Tears find their own trail down Buford Sanders’ weathered face. With a determined gaze, he raises a single finger and vows this will be the last time he tells his own story of loss. “It’s time to look forward, not back.”

As he recounts the details of April 27, 2011, it is with the freshness of a memory made — not a year — but a moment ago. “It was 6:30 p.m. We saw it was coming. We lived at the top of the hill. My wife and I had no place safe to go, so we simply hunkered down in the middle of the house.”

The storm first hit the west end of his house overlooking Shoal Creek Road, blowing away a room, a porch and the roof. “It came back and blew off the east end,” he said. All that was left was a sturdy piece of wall where the couple crouched.

“We were thinking everything was OK,” Sanders said. The house had been lost, but they were safe. Just then, two of their grandchildren were “coming up the hill, hollering and crying that they needed help.”

The flow of tears comes in waves from this point as he tells what happened next. His son and daughter-in-law and one of their daughters had been blown 75 yards from their home into a blueberry patch.

The death of his daughter-in-law, Angie, came quickly. His son, Albert, lasted three or four hours. “He told me he thought he was going to die. I told him, ‘No, son, I love you too much.’

“ ‘I love you, too, Daddy,’ he told me, and those were his last words. It was just a matter of time, and he was gone.”

During Albert’s final hours, all Sanders could do was keep his son comfortable. No medical help was able to get there because the tornado so devastated the valley that it was virtually blocked from one end to the other. “We could hear the chainsaws running in both directions,” he said.

The Sanders family were like many in Shoal Creek Valley. They lived near one another; their generational ties strong. “We worked on things together,” he said of his son, Albert. “He was my buddy. It was sad his life came to an end.”

Buford Sanders and his sons raised their families on the same property, a single driveway leading to all three homes. In an instant, all three homes were swept away.

His other son had been thrown from his home by the winds, but he recovered and is doing well, his father said. His granddaughter, Cassie, spent five weeks in the hospital undergoing 12 to 15 surgeries and has little memory of what happened in the hours and weeks that followed the storm.

She used to be a runner. “She loved to run,” Sanders said. “She ran track. We had a track for her around the hay field.” Her recovery since April 27 has been painful and slow, but she is beginning to run again, entering 5K races, a proud grandfather noted, underscoring her resiliency.

He, too, is beginning to return to some semblance of routine. He and his wife have been back in their new home for about six months, he said. “If I just lost the house, I could feel good.

“But every step I take, I see the tragedy.” Just outside his back door still lay hundreds of acres of downed trees across the mountainside, a constant reminder of a storm so mighty and strong it could wipe out a forest and kill a dozen people in a matter of moments. “If it had just left all my family intact, I’d be the happiest man on earth.”

Just before the storm hit, he said he called both of his sons and told them to go to their safe places. “They did what I asked them to, but it wasn’t good enough.”

Sanders’ conversation vacillates between past and future. “The hurt of losing some of your blood is bad,” he said. “But the community and I are looking forward and looking ahead, not back. You have to suck it up and say this is the way it is. Keep going,” he said.

“So many people befriended us. They helped cleaning up. It was dangerous even to walk around. You lean on one another in times like that. So many people were so good to us.

“A fella I had never known built those kitchen cabinets,” he said, pointing across the room to what could only be described as the intricate work of a master craftsman. “When I went to pay him, he didn’t charge me. Things like that. A lot of people I had never seen before came and helped. I made lifelong friends. I’m grateful for that.”

Looking to the future, he said, “I guess from now on it will get somewhat better. It will be a long time. I have a strong little wife. We’re Christian people. We believe the Lord will take care of us through the battle and there will be a reward at the end.”

He shares a special kinship with the community that has suffered so much. The community came together “in mind and spirit” through the storm and the months of a painful aftermath, he said.

But the lesson from all of this, he said, lies not in the homes destroyed nor does it dwell in the material possessions snatched away by a greedy gust of wind. “The tragedy of all this is the lives that were lost in the twinkling of an eye.

“I would have loved to have swapped places.” Albert was 44. Angie was 43, and they had three daughters. “They had a lot to look forward to.”

Now it is up to Sanders to look forward, he said. “The important thing is the lives that were lost in this valley. The devastation of property is bad, but the other things are a lot worse.

“We have to look forward. You know, onward, Christian soldiers.”

• For more on Shoal Creek, read Building for the future amid remembrances of past and Pell City engineering firm rebuilds after direct hit in this month’s edition of Discover, The Essence of St. Clair Magazine.