Outdoor Cooking

Latest entertaining trend
going strong in St. Clair County

Story by Mike Bolton
Photos by Jerry Martin

Turn on the DIY Network or HGTV, and you don’t have to watch very long before you’ll see another outdoor kitchen under construction. A number of homeowners are now skipping the patios and decks that have long been a staple of home ownership in favor of elaborate outdoor kitchens designed to entertain family and friends.

That trend hasn’t bypassed St. Clair County. All across the county, builders are adding outdoor kitchens to the backyards of homes. Backyard tailgating has become the rage with many outdoor kitchens, hosting dozens of guests as college football teams play on television on Saturdays.

When Kenny St. John told his wife Jamie a decade ago about his dreams of building an outdoor kitchen, the fad was fairly new. She said she couldn’t even picture what he was talking about.

Today she is a fan. Their beautiful cedar-clad, outdoor pavilion in Springville gets used for everything year-round, she says.

“Kenny has a vision for things that I don’t have,” she said. “I didn’t realize just how much we would get out of it.”

Their facility has anything anyone could ask for. It overlooks a beautiful pond where Canada geese swim as white-tailed deer frolic nearby. In the background is towering Straight Mountain.

Their outdoor living pavilion includes a 55-inch big screen television and a sitting area where visitors can take in football games on Saturdays, Sundays and Monday nights. The cooking area has a Big Green Egg, a smoker, a gas grill and a cook top stove.

There is also a meadow where their kids and visitor’s kids can play football, an enormous outdoors fireplace with its own television and a large hot tub. Visitors can also fish for catfish in the pond if they like.

“This is where I live,” Kenny St. John said as he lounged in the outdoor kitchen with an NFL pre-season game playing on the big screen television. “I stay out here all the time.

“I always wanted something like this growing up. We use it year-round. We have the fireplace and propane heaters that will keep you warm late in the football season when the weather gets cold.”

The St. Johns’ backyard kitchen has understandably become the spot to be on football Saturdays and for family gatherings.

“I have six brothers and sisters and my mother lives in a garden home so we have the only place really big enough to have everyone on Thanksgiving,” Jamie St. John said. “We had my nephew’s rehearsal dinner here. A few weeks ago we had 75 people out here for my daughter’s birthday party.”

The entertaining is nice, but what would an outdoor kitchen be without food? Kenny St. John is the master chef for all events with his wife handling all the non-meat items. He cooks turkeys and hams for Thanksgiving, but it’s his barbecue, steaks and fish fries that draw rave reviews throughout football season.

“We cook a lot of pork butts and ribs,” he said. “My wife makes potato salad, fried green tomatoes and a lot of Rotel dip and a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”

If it’s a sport it gets watched at the St. John outdoor kitchen. There’s NASCAR, drag racing and NFL football, but it all hinges around college football on Saturdays. The St. Johns are big Alabama fans and most parties revolve around watching Crimson Tide games.

“We watch everything, including Wheel of Fortune, out here, but college football is what we live for,” Jamie St. John said.

Living in such a rural area does have its advantages for really rabid football fans, the husband and wife team agreed.

“We have a cannon that we fire every time Alabama scores a touchdown,” Kenny St. John said. “One of our neighbors said he doesn’t even have to watch the game because he knows every time Alabama scores.”

If you’re wondering why in the world someone with a 7,000-square-foot home would need an outdoor kitchen, you obviously haven’t seen the view from Johnny Grimes’ Pell City backyard. And besides, who wants 100 people milling around inside their home no matter how big it is?

Grimes’ outdoor kitchen, which overlooks Lake Logan Martin and Stemley Bridge, is headquarters for many Pell City area Auburn fans on football Saturdays. A crowd of 75 people on game day is not that unusual, and the record stands at 105. Crowds are so big in fact that those who arrive by vehicle must park in a designated area away from his home, and they are brought to the party in a 15-passenger van. Some choose to arrive via the Coosa River and park their boats in Grimes’ covered slips on the water.

Once there, visitors can watch Auburn on one of two big screen televisions at the lavish cypress bar in the outdoor kitchen, or they can listen to the game as they lounge around the 52-foot saltwater pool, which has a walk-in beach. The pool is surrounded by immaculately manicured gardens and fed by a waterfall.

Grimes, who owns Johnny’s Electric in Pell City, is the chef and he prepares ribs, chickens, hamburgers, steaks and crawfish boils from his $6,500 Viking gas grill that is located just feet from the 10-seat bar. The outdoor kitchen also has a freezer, refrigerator and deep fryer.

An air-conditioned and heated bathroom is located just off the flagstone patio of the kitchen.

“This keeps all the mess outside,” Grimes said. “We cook the main dishes in the outdoor kitchen, and the breads and all the sides are cooked in the house.

“People just feel more comfortable and enjoy being outdoors on game day. They can whoop and holler and mingle, and it is a lot more pleasant for them to be out here. I built this kitchen five years ago, and everyone just loves it.”

Fourth of July celebrations were huge at Don Farmer’s home when he was a boy growing up in Springville. Literally hundreds of people would show up over a two-day period to eat barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.

“I was born on July 3 so for the longest time as a kid I thought everybody was coming to my birthday party,” Farmer said with a laugh. “With my dad now gone, I now have great memories of all those family members and friends coming to our house like that.”

Farmer says it is those memories that spurred the building of his outdoor kitchen. He says it was a project that started out small, but he admits that it kept growing until it turned into a monster.

Farmer’s outdoor facility atop Simmons Mountain is indeed monstrous. The L-shaped structure is 30 feet by 40 feet on one side and has the same dimensions on the other. It is complemented with a swimming pool and a hot tub that seats 10 people.

It features beautiful brickwork arches and stamped concrete floors and countertops. A big-screen television is the focal point every Saturday during football season. The double pavilion is designed to entertain a lot of people and it does that whenever Alabama is playing on television.

“For some of the bigger games like Tennessee, it’s nothing to have 80 people here,” Farmer said. “We’ve had people we don’t know just be driving by and stop. They just say they see all the cars on Saturdays and wonder what is going on.”

Farmer is an excavator by trade. He says no engineers were involved in the massive project, and no plans were ever put on paper. He said it was “just all in my head. It all began when my granddaughter Chassidy said she wanted a swimming pool,” Farmer said. “I told her Nana would run down to Wal-Mart and get her one. She came inside a little while later and said she didn’t want that kind of pool. She said she wanted one in the ground.

“I started digging the next week.”

Farmer first built the pool and then decided to add a pavilion on the side so his mother and mother-in-law could get out of the sun. It would also serve as an area under the cover so he could grill.

“That was okay but my wife decided she wanted to enclose it and make it part of the house,” he said. “I decided I was going to have me a place where I could cook.

“My wife said if I would build it that she would take care of it. I got it in my mind what I wanted but I didn’t realize how big it was going to be until we actually started building it. It has about become a full-time job for my wife to take care of it now.”

Farmer says he did some research and got some very good advice early. “Somebody said don’t put anything into the construction of an outdoor kitchen that didn’t come from the earth. It’s almost all stone, brick and concrete – even the walls. The only wood in it are the gable ends and the exposed beams.”

Farmer loves kids, and he didn’t want a place where kids weren’t welcome. He says he made everything “kid friendly.” There is a playhouse, and parents can watch their kids in the pool and the hot tub from the raised kitchen that looks down on both.

The rules to attend a get-together at the Farmer’s outdoor kitchen are simple. You can bring a dish if you like, but Farmer and his son Heath provide the meat and do the cooking. Boston butts, pork ribs, different sausages and steaks are their specialty. The kitchen has a smoker, a broiler, a griddle, a stovetop, a grill and a barbecue pit.

When the weather cools late in the season, a fireplace keeps the area warm. Blinds can be lowered to keep everything cozy.

“We’ve had 140 people here on July 3 and about 80 the next day,” Farmer’s wife, Deniase, said. “We just stay up all night and celebrate Don’s birthday and July 4th.”

Farmer says his goals in building an outdoor kitchen were simple even though the final outcome was not.

“I wanted a place that would keep the foot traffic out of the house,” he said. “I wanted a place where somebody could spill a drink or drop a meatball on the floor, and it wasn’t a big deal.”

A Day at the Rodeo

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.

Architectural Eye Candy

Living in a work of art

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Jerry Martin

Jimmie Nell Miller is an artist and former interior decorator who likes to go to open houses and read Architectural Digest for the eye candy. But the Pell City home she shares with husband, Ray, is like eye candy to visitors, because its wide hallways, huge bathrooms and very modern kitchen are filled with Jimmie Nell’s colorful artwork. From tulips to Tuscany, cornices to credenzas, every inch of the Country French chateau reflects Jimmie Nell’s personality and her love for entertaining family and friends.

“It’s like an art gallery in here,” Jimmie Nell admits.

Atlanta architect Frank Jova designed this “art gallery,” which the Millers first spotted as a Southern Living Idea House in Chateau Elan outside of Atlanta in 1994. Jimmie Nell fell in love with its French influence, while Ray liked the way it flowed. Both appreciated the roominess of its 5,000 square feet, which may seem superfluous for two people. But Jimmie Nell says they use every square foot of it. “We entertain lots of functions, and have lots of family visits,” she says. “We live in the whole house.”

Built on a former dairy farm, the house is awash with European influences. Its wide hallways represent streets of old Europe, for example, and the extra depth of the tray ceiling in the entry hall is painted blue to keep the ghosts away. “It’s supposed to fool them into thinking it’s daytime,” Jimmie Nell explains.

The gallery tour begins in this entrance hall, where Jimmie Nell’s acrylic painting of Glen Coe, Scotland, one of seven inspired by her trip to that country earlier this year, rests on a stand. Her oil paintings of lemon trees flank the front door, along with sculptured fruits made of composite materials resembling stone, which she purchased.

Turning right, you come face-to-face with sunflowers and peppers in a red vase, done in oils, while the butler’s pantry features another oil painting of a rooster in bright plumage of blue, gold and red.

Kitchen cabinets are made of cherry, countertops are granite, and the appliances are Bosch and Kitchen Aid. The refrigerator is disguised as a tall cabinet, and an appliance garage hides the toaster, mixer and electric can opener. Bunnies nibble cabbage from a ceramic pot on the wall behind the gas range, thanks to Jimmie Nell’s ingenuity. She painted the tiles, then installed them herself because she didn’t trust the tile man to get the ears on the bunnies right.

“I designed my kitchen because I wanted the cabinets to look like little pieces of furniture,” Jimmie Nell says. “My cabinet maker said he’d build them that way, but he didn’t think I would like them. When he finished, he liked them, too.”

Pell City artist John Lonergan did the portrait of Ray, their son Adam when he was 12, and Adam’s dog that hangs over the fireplace in the den. That portrait and the 106-year-old watercolor duo by Ray’s great-grandmother that hang in the music room are among the handful of artwork in the house that weren’t done by Jimmie Nell.

She has a glass table with eight upholstered chairs in her formal dining room, which she uses a lot. Her china cabinet, housed behind mahogany doors, holds Noritake china, cut-glass and redneck wine glasses (small Mason jars on stems). Jimmie Nell’s favorite piece of furniture is in this dining room, and it, too, features some of her artwork. It’s a bar made of two separate pieces that probably weren’t originally meant to be together. The bottom portion is a mahogany cabinet, while the top is a pine hutch with stained-glass tulips and a center canvas on which Jimmie Nell painted more tulips before installing it between the glass panels. “We bought this from an antiques dealer who used to be in St. Clair Springs,” she says. “We had it in our house before we moved here.”

Another painting of tulips, this one in acrylics, hangs between the dining room and music room, because “tulips are easy to paint,” says Jimmie Nell. She has had the room’s baby grand piano more than 40 years and believes it was built in the 1930s. While neither she nor Ray play piano, their two daughters, one son-in-law and a granddaughter do. Nevertheless, the music room happens to be her favorite, the place where she loves to curl up with a good book or take a nap.

From the screened porch off the dining room, the sound of ceiling fans overhead and an Italian bronze garden fountain outside soothe the soul. The peaceful garden features knock-out roses, daylilies, limelight hydrangeas, magnolias and blue point juniper spirals. Both Ray and Jimmie Nell work in the garden, but Ray, a retired banker, trims the 10-year-old topiaries himself.

Back indoors, the art tour continues down the hall from the entryway into the powder room, where Jimmie Nell has an old credenza on which she depicted parrots, monkeys and a leopard “back when jungle themes were so popular.” Nearby is the media room, where a 72-inch wide-screen TV is set into a niche in one wall. Movie posters of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood adorn other walls and a bronze replica of Remington’s Mountain Man dominates the center. Two leather couches and four mission-style gliding rockers with fake-leather bottom cushions and Southwestern-print back cushions provide ample seating. Jimmie Nell made the glider’s back cushions and the room’s matching cornices herself. The media room happens to be Ray’s favorite in the house, a place where he keeps up with the news and email via television and computer.

The master bedroom is near the media room and features another tray ceiling, a portrait of Jimmie Nell done in 1986 by Pell City artist Evelyn Whatley, and a huge bathroom with his-and-hers sinks and vanities on opposite sides of the room. The vanities are separated by a glass-enclosed shower, and Ray and Jimmie Nell have separate closets, too. More of Jimmie Nell’s artwork is featured in a buffet from her old dining room suite that has panels she painted with shell designs.

Upstairs are two guest bedrooms, one with a 100-year-old washstand on which Jimmie Nell painted a Colonial couple at a fence, and a doll house made from a kit one of her daughters gave her 20 years ago. An open balcony connects the two bedrooms and overlooks the dining room on one side, with a glass-less window overlooking the entry hall on the other.

In the second upstairs bedroom Jimmie Nell used French toile for the bed’s coronet and a chair skirt, but a nautically-themed fabric on the bed pillows and valance.

After 12 years in the house, the Millers still find it very livable. “We like the way it flows,” says Ray. Jimmie Nell agrees. “I like the roominess of it, and the private areas where we can get away from each other,” she says, with a wink. “That has probably saved our marriage.”

Barn Owls on the Lake

Story by Carol Pappas
Photos by Jerry Martin
and Kathy Henry

Hagan, the last of the barn owls to leave their roost in July, flew the coop from an unlikely perch — the rafters of a covered pier on Pell City’s Logan Martin Lake.

He, his brothers and mother took up residence some weeks earlier. The mother first, of course, and brothers coming along later, hatching a few days apart.

They didn’t seem to give a hoot about their unusual surroundings of water instead of land. In fact, barn owls don’t hoot at all. Their vocal repertoire is more like a blood-curdling scream, the kind Alfred Hitchcock might fancy to play a role in a terrifying scene.

It seems only fitting that a ghoulish face and silent wings in flight, swooping toward their prey at night, would make this scene complete. Hitchcock would be proud.

For Kathy Henry, owner of the last known address for Hagan and his older brothers, Aaron and Mit, her visitors haven’t been frightening at all. That is, unless you count the time one night when the mother silently swooped down behind Henry and friends, letting out that scream because she thought her young were in danger.

The owl lunged toward the family boxer, “and he took off running like a sane person — as did we. She screamed four times until we got to the door,” Henry said.

Other than that near miss, owl watching has been an entertaining pastime around the Henry property. She rigged a Wingscapes BirdCam she dubbed “owl cam” to a PVC pipe to watch as the family grew. She named them. “The first born was Aaron, after the friend that found them. The middle born was Mit, after a friend of ours who has overcome an extreme fear of birds and now loves birds. And the youngest was named after the 4-year-old grandson of our favorite neighbor.

“Hagan, the owl, was hatched about five days after we found the first two, and Hagan, the human, climbed up and was the first to see it,” Henry said.

Barn owls hatch their young in the order the eggs were laid, so when the youngster climbed the ladder to look and came down saying there were three, she tried to correct him. When he didn’t give up, she ascended the ladder to see for herself and discovered the trio staring back at her.

Over the owls’ month-long stay, Henry, a pharmacist by trade, has learned all about her winged friends. “They nest in caves, hollowed trees and old buildings,” she said. But somehow, they took a turn across the water and ended up at Henry’s lakeside place. “I think it was because she (the mother) knew they would be safe. At least I like to tell myself that.”

She has taken dozens of photos and hours of footage, studied their habits and shared her knowledge with other curious onlookers. But it never seemed to faze those being looked upon.

Perhaps Henry’s right. They knew they were safe. “It’s been fun,” she said. “I really enjoyed it. I hope they come back.”

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

The Ark Restaurant

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.