BEI Lighting and Warning

Retired policeman turns on “blue light” for business

Story by Jackie Romine Walburn
Photos by Graham Hadley

Retired police officer Ed Brasher has found his ideal after-retirement avocation.

Brasher – a former police chief and regional drug task force officer – combined an innate mechanical ability and career-honed knowledge about emergency equipment with a passion for the adrenaline boost of fast, cool vehicles to create a growing electronics, lighting and warning equipment and installation business in Odenville.

BEI Lighting and Warning (BEILW), previously Brasher Electronics, outfits police, fire and emergency vehicles with lights and security features, produces graphics and detailing for business and public vehicles and, most recently, is marketing its own line of LED lighting and sirens.

Today, the business Brasher and son Trey started in 2003 in the family’s two-car garage is the largest supplier of emergency equipment in Alabama with 5,000 square feet of custom work space and three employees.

And, as they expand the business with a new line of lighting and sirens and a growing list of services and clients, the father and son are continuing a family tradition of owning a business – begun by Ed Brasher’s businessman father.

Law enforcement career

After a very short tenure training as a butcher apprentice (too cold and messy, he recalls), Brasher began his three-decade career in law enforcement as a policeman in the small St. Clair town of Whites Chapel, a community that’s now part of the town of Moody. Next, he moved to the Odenville police department and served as police chief for Odenville from 1987 to 1990.

Joining the Pell City police force in 1990, Brasher served as night shift patrolman, then sergeant. He spent the mid-90s as part of the 30th Judicial Circuit’s Drug Task Force. Eventually promoted to captain then assistant police chief with Pell City Police, Brasher officially retired in 2014.

While a police officer, Brasher continued to drive trucks for his father’s business. “Some days I’d park the patrol car at the end of a shift and get in the 18-wheeler for a long haul, then return to start over again,” says Brasher, who noted that many police officers and firefighters supplement their incomes with additional work. “You do what you have to do when you are raising a family.”

Family tradition

Born in Birmingham, Brasher moved with his family to California and spent his childhood on the west coast where his father operated one of his businesses. Returning to Alabama with his family when he was 16, Brasher attended Hueytown High School for six months, then settled in at St. Clair High School, where he would meet his future wife on his first day.

“I sat down behind her in homeroom. I saw this beautiful girl and fell in love,” he says of his wife of 38 years, Kathy Foreman Brasher. “I told my best friend then that I was going to marry Kathy one day.”

And, he did marry Kathy Foreman, who it turns out shares Brasher’s mechanical bend and “adrenaline junkie” passion. They raised two sons, Trey, 33, and Shannon, 30.

Before becoming a police officer and as a sideline income since, Brasher drove long haul trucks for his father’s business, including delivering natural gas in 18-wheel rigs.

While Brasher worked as a police officer and sometimes truck driver, Kathy worked for the St. Clair sheriff’s department as a 911 dispatcher for 10 years and today manages the county’s pistol permit program.

Fast cars, motorcycles and an airplane

Always an “adrenaline junkie,” Brasher first flirted with speed and daring as a drag racer in California as a teen. He’s since had fast cars – a favorite being a 1969 AMX hot rod – and motorcycles, enjoying both the rides and the tinkering with engines and anything mechanical.

When their sons were young, Ed and Kathy Brasher loaded the boys up on their his-and-her big motorcycles and traveled on vacations to the west coast and Canada. Trey recalls these trips with fondness and admits to inheriting the mechanical adventure spirit from his parents.

 Brasher recalls with Trey, who is co-owner of BEILW and the company’s graphic expert, the time his parents had a 350 Chevy V-8 engine up on blocks in the living room, rebuilding it.

Since then, there have been other fast cars, a Piper 235 airplane that he and Trey are both licensed to fly and a new Gold Wing motorcycle, purchased as Brasher’s retirement present to himself.

Try this

The catalyst for what became BEILW was a friend who was selling police equipment but didn’t install the equipment. “He knew I had a background in electronics and asked if I was interested in the installation side of the business,” Brasher says. The friend knew the products would sell better if installation was part of the deal.

One day, Brasher came home to find a Crown Victoria in the driveway with equipment in the seat and a note, “Try this.”

Brasher and Trey installed the equipment on the Crown Vic. Then there were two or three more police cars in the driveway. They soon set up shop in the family garage.

Four years later, in 2007, they built the lobby and first workspace at the current location on Oakley Avenue in Odenville. In 2015, a graphic workspace was added. Then, in 2017, the company added its giant warehouse addition designed to accommodate fire trucks and ladder trucks, even 18-wheelers, with a 12- by 16-foot door. Upstairs is a break room and Brasher’s office. There’s also a parts room. The most recent workspace addition is a converted garage outfitted for painting and powder coating equipment.

Lights, sirens, graphics

Brasher’s company serves a specialty market, installing lights, sirens and other equipment on police, fire and emergency vehicles. The services and products include prisoner partitions, equipment consoles, radar, gun racks, laptop connections and push bumpers for police vehicles. They add towing bars and safety lifts on wreckers. The company creates graphics for the exteriors of emergency vehicles and for Realtors and others businesses. The graphics side of the business also produces signs and banners for the general public as well.

As each job on a vehicle begins, the business digitally records the VIN number and image of each vehicle they work on, before and after. This video databank helps with quality control, warranties and being able to reproduce exactly what the customer wants again.

In addition, video security cameras – and screens in Brasher’s office – work 24/7 patrolling the areas around the business to protect the expensive equipment and the customer’s vehicles.

Smart start

Another service offered by the company is installation, testing and removal of “Smart Start” ignition interlock systems in vehicles as part of court-ordered alcohol monitoring of drivers convicted of driving under the influence. The company is one of the state’s certified installers of the system that analyzes the driver’s breath and locks up if alcohol is detected. The Smart Start program is operated by Alabama’s Department of Forensic Sciences.

LED lights a game changer

LED lights that last longer and shine brighter have changed the world of emergency lighting, Brasher says. “They are compact and more reliable and use less power.”

The company’s new line of lighting and siren products, called BEILW and for sale online at BEILW.com, include products designed by Brasher and son with installation and use in mind. “They are more installer friendly, more functional and more aesthetically pleasing,” Brasher says. The line includes siren speakers, beacon lights, light bars and dash lights.

Emergency lighting on vehicles is color coded. Red is for firefighting vehicles; blue is for police, and amber is for emergency vehicles. “It’s always been against the law to have colored lights on civilian vehicles. The type of lights might change, but the color code is consistent, at least regionally. But, it’s the opposite “up north,” Brasher says, with fire being blue and police red.

Investing back in the business

When Brasher still worked with the police department as the company ramped up, he made sure he met all ethics requirements to not do business with police department he’d work for, and he made sure to funnel company proceeds back into the young business. Today, he says, the company is debt free as it continues to grow and add services. Before he retired and went to work there full time, “we invested everything back into the business,” he says, noting there were many what seemed like “43-hour days and 23-day weeks.”

But now the retired police officer tries to hold his work days to five-day weeks, leaving him time for adrenaline-inducing fast cars, motorcycles and airplane rides.

Doris Munkus

Organizer extraordinaire puts skills,
compassion to work for good causes

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Michael Callahan
Submitted Photos

Doris Munkus likes to organize. When she’s not organizing line dancers, senior citizens and fundraisers, she turns to her own household.

“I color-code everything,” she confesses, not the least bit sheepishly. “I have five grandchildren, and I color-code their towels, their bedding, their chairs, even their toothbrushes and drink cups. They can’t change them, either. I don’t have to buy name tags at Christmas, I just wrap their gifts in their colors.”

Freud might call her anal about organizing, but folks around Pell City call her genius. Over the past six years, her organizational skills have helped raise more than $150,000 for various charities and first responders in her community. Her main claim to fame is Dancing With Our Stars. This annual competition mimics television’s Dancing With The Stars, pairing experienced dancers with local bankers, professionals, business owners, elected and school officials, firefighters, police officers and others.

But Doris’ organizational skills go back much further than the 2014 debut of DWOS, however. “I organized a float to represent Dallas County for former Gov. Guy Hunt’s inauguration parade,” says Doris, who taught art in that county’s school system when she lived in Selma. “I staged an Invention Convention for the school children, too. I like to organize big things.”

In 2001 former Pell City Councilwoman and fellow church member Betty Turner picked up on Doris’ organizational abilities and asked her to start an exercise class at their church, Cropwell Baptist. “I couldn’t then because my mom lived with me and I was taking care of her,” Doris recounts. “She died in 2002, so in 2003 I started that class. It was free and open to anyone.”

 After seven or eight years, the exercising hour got a little too long. Doris had taught line dancing as activities director at the Pell City Senior Citizen Center in the late 1990s, so she suggested adding that to the mix. Everyone involved agreed.

“We did a half hour of exercise, half hour of line dancing for several years, then we dropped the exercise portion and just did line dancing,” Doris explains. In 2009, the classmoved to Celebrations, and Doris added a$4 charge per class to cover the expenses of renting Celebrations, buying the music, the signage, the DVD player and other incidentals. The rolls show 50 people, but the average attendance is about 30.

While the class was still at Cropwell, the late Kathy Patterson was on the board of the St. Clair County Relay for Life and asked whether Doris’ line dancers might want to raise money for cancer research. “That first year we raised $2,000, and dancing wasn’t even involved,” Doris says. True to form, shestarted thinking bigger, and the class held sock hops the next year. People responded well, so Melinda Williams, the American Cancer Society representative for St. Clair and several other counties, suggested the dancers hold a Dancing With Our Stars as another fundraiser.

“Our first was February 14, 2014,” Doris says. “February seems to be best month, but we have done it in March and April. In February of this year, we raised $23,111 and those numbers are still climbing because we’re selling DVDs from the show.”

Deserved rave reviews

Tim Kurzejeski is a battalion chief and one of four members of the Pell City Fire Department who line-danced to the 1977 Bee Gees hit, Stayin’ Alive, at the first DWOS – in full protective gear. He has nothing but praise for Doris and the DWOS event.

“Thefire department here in Pell City has had a dance team at Dancing With Our Stars every year since that first year,” Kurzejeski says. “Doris is great. She’s very energetic, she just tries to do the best and most she can to give back to the community. She’s very easy to work with, and it’s actually fun.”

Dancing With Our Stars no longer raises funds for Relay for Life. Instead, the money goes to a different organization each year. In 2016 it benefitted Children’s Hospital of Alabama, in 2017, it was the Pell City Fire Department, in 2018 the Pell City Police Department, and this year, it was for the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department. Next year, DWOS will raise money for the St. Clair County Children’s Advocacy Center. “The dancers and people who buy tickets respond well to local charities,” Doris says. “People call us and ask us to raise money for their charity, and we put them on a list. We check them out, and the entire committee must agree on them. We’ll never do it for an individual, though.”

She has a committee of eight line dancers who do much of the planning for the event. “We already have the menu for next year,” she says. “Vickie Potter, who’s in charge of the food, already has next year’s food court and theme. It will be a hobo theme in 2020.”

Other committee members include Donna McAlister, photo and technical coordinator; Kathie Dunn; Kathy Hunter; Lavelle Willingham, treasurer; Martha Hill; Paulette Israel and Sue Nickens, Silent Auction coordinators. Jeremy Gossett has been emcee, and Jamison Taylor has been the disc jockey for the event since its inception. Griffin Harris is the tech guru who sets up the text line the audience uses to vote for favorites. “It’s all run by volunteers,” Doris says.

Recruiting dancers was hard the first year, but it’s much easier now. In fact, people often call Doris asking to participate. “It’s amazing how much talent we have in this area,” she says. This year, 600 people paid $25 each to eat dinner and watch the show at Celebrations, where all but one DWOS has been held. Next year, it will move to the CEPA building, on the gym side, which holds 2,000 people. “There’s more parking space there, too,” Doris says.

St. Clair County Sheriff Billy J.Murray readily admits that Doris is one of two people he just can’t say “no” to. (The other is his wife.) “Doris has a tremendous work ethic, and she’s very organized,” he says. “There’s always a lot of stuff that comes up that someone has to handle in preparing for the show, and she steps up to the role of managing the chaos.”

Although dancing is out of his comfort zone, he has already signed up for next year because Doris makes it so much fun. “I know how to be sheriff, but I don’t know how to dance,” Murray says. “We (the sheriff’s department) had nearly 30 people helping in some capacity this year, dancing, building props, helping with costumes and makeup. I wouldn’t hesitate to partner with Doris and her line dancers again.”

Joanna Murphree, the executive assistant to the administrator of St. Vincent’s St. Clair, has worked with Doris on DWOS for the past three years, and she, too, has high praise for this wonder woman. “The hospital has had a team in the group division, the Dance Fevers team,” she says. “Doris’s organizational skills are phenomenal. She’s pleasant to work with, too, and very thorough.”

Destination: Worthy cause

When she’s not working on DWOS, Dorisorganizes short, one day or overnight trips for the St. Clair County Baptist Association as a volunteer, as well as cruises and one- and two-week bus trips under the banner of her Pell City Cruisers. This sideline began in 1998, when she worked at the senior center. She charters the buses, plans the itineraries and the meals, books the hotels, the whole shebang. “I did one 14-day bus trip where we flew into Las Vegas and toured 12-14 national parks in nine states,” she says. She has done tours to Canada, Colorado, Montana, Utah, the Ark in Kentucky and the Panama Canal Zone. She makes photo books of each trip, just like she does with each DWOS event. “All of these trips and cruises are open to anyone of any age or denomination,” she says.

In addition, she and the Pell City Line Dancers perform at community events, such as the Halloween Festival at Old Baker’s Farm in Shelby County, Homestead Hollow in Springville and the Pell City Block Party. They dance monthly at the Colonel Robert L. Howard State Veterans Home in Pell City, at the Village at Cook Springs, and at Danbury in Inverness in Shelby County.

When she isn’t traveling or organizing something, she helps her husband, Victor, who is retired from National Cement in Ragland, with Munk’s Renovations. They remodel apartments, refurbish the cabinets they remove and resell them. The couple has been married for 22 years, and yes, she organizes his life, too. But he doesn’t mind at all.

“She’s a wonderful lady, she’s sweet, lovable, real thoughtful,” he gushes. Victor says she organizes his closet, too. “I have a section for work shirts, for dress shirts, for shoes, socks, pants and underwear,” he says. “She has tags, so I’ll know where everything’s supposed to go. She doesn’t like for me to leave my shoes or clothes lying around, and she’ll come behind me and pick them up. I’ve been living with her for almost 23 years, and I guess neither of us is going to change.”

Editor’s Note: For a video or DVD of still pictures of the 2019 Dancing With Our Stars, call Doris at 205-473-4063. They are $10 each.

You may also call her for more information about her trips.

Line dancing classes meet at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays, with beginner classes following at 10 a.m. on the same days. Payment is on the honor system, with a box set out to collect the $4 per person charge. l

Guardians of the River

Coosa Riverkeeper and lake associations work to protect treasured waterways

Story by Paul South

Submitted photos

Even in the bleak midwinter, in a season of heavy rain and rising water, Gene Phifer, Linda Ruethemann and Frank Chitwood can almost set clocks by the nature’s magic on the Coosa River.

For Phifer, president of the Neely Henry Lake Association, the White American Pelican returns to entertain each winter, nesting near Phifer’s Neely Henry Lake home. For Ruethemann, a board member and past president of the Logan Martin Lake Protection Association, small black ducks – Ruethemann calls her feathered neighbors “diving ducks” – plunge for food under the Army khaki green water in the mornings, delighting a human audience.

And for Frank Chitwood, the Staff Riverkeeper and founder of the environmental watchdog group Coosa Riverkeeper, anytime is a good time on the river. But the special times are when the sun rises or sets, painting an ever-changing pallet, the moon is full and glowing, or in those seasons when colors, not crowds, clamor for attention.

The lake associations and the Coosa Riverkeeper are united in a singular mission – to protect the Coosa River system that runs through Alabama, downstream from the river’s headwaters at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers near Rome, Ga. The heart of the mission – to protect the quality and quantity of the waters of Coosa and its six lakes and by extension, the overall environment and economy.

Phifer calls Neely Henry, the Coosa and its sister lakes, “a treasure.” The three organizations are carrying on a love affair with the water.

“It’s really a treasure to have something like this, Phifer said. “There’s no other way to put it. We’re so fortunate. We have a river system that flows through the center of Gadsden and then on downstream. With a river like this with all the recreational and all the aesthetic and environmental benefits of it, goodness, it’s a treasure to have this. You don’t see this when you go across the United States.

 Native peoples called the Coosa home long before Hernando DeSoto became the first European to see the river in the 16th century. Neely Henry and Logan Martin were man-made bodies of water, the result of Alabama Power’s construction of hydroelectric dams in the 1960s. While these days, the river and lakes are in better health, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when Logan Martin, Neely Henry and its parent river were a dumping ground for all manner of human refuse from beer cans to busted refrigerators.

“The river system years ago was a biological eyesore as far as the way the water was being treated at that time. Something needed to be done,” Phifer said. “Things weren’t being done the way they should have been done by residents and the communities. Renew Our Rivers moved to the cities and counties, and a groundswell of law enforcement, schools, businesses and the media got involved, too. Etowah, St. Clair and Calhoun all got involved.”

The result was Renew Our Rivers. Started in 1998 on Neely Henry and quickly spreading to other Alabama waterways. On Neely Henry alone, some 500 tons to debris has been cleaned out of the river. On Logan Martin, the first year saw tons of debris pulled from the lake. The amount has decreased over the years, thanks to increased awareness throughout the water system.

Team work

Keeping the Coosa River system clean is only part of the story. For example, an all-volunteer army of trained Logan Martin residents take to the river monthly to test the waters. The effort springs from an Auburn University initiative called Alabama Water Watch.

 Since 1996, the water tests have been carried on come rain or sun, sleet or snow. Ruethemann is a trainer for the testing effort, which looks for warning signs in the water. “You don’t have to be a chemist to be a tester,” she says. “If you can follow a recipe, you can do this.”

Testers don’t worry much about weekly reports but search for trends in quality.

“When I’m out testing and someone sees me, they say, ‘Is the water good?’ And I can tell you what the numbers are today. But what you’re really looking for are the trends,” she says. “Is the water quality getting better? Is it getting worse? Do you suddenly see changes in certain areas of water quality that we need to take notice of and say, ‘Something’s changed here, what is that?’ Then you start going upstream to where the issue started.”

Like the associations, Coosa Riverkeeper is focused on water quantity and quality. Chitwood, founder of Coosa Riverkeeper and the retiring staff riverkeeper for the organization, patrols the waters in a quest to safeguard the river. He founded Coosa Riverkeeper in 2010 after volunteering for other Riverkeeper organizations around the country.

Like the Neely Henry and Logan Martin citizen groups, Coosa Riverkeeper is an advocate for the river system. While unlike the other organizations, Riverkeeper has a small paid staff, the goals of the groups are the same.

“What we do is patrol the river, educate the public and advocate on behalf of the river. Citizen-based, nonprofit,” Chitwood said. “We do a lot of the work that people expect the government does, but they don’t. In a sense, we are a watchdog organization. We do things like monitor water quality to make sure it’s safe to swim and to fish. We respond to citizen complaints. We go and speak to school groups or civic groups about the river and its importance. We monitor pollution sources and seek to reduce those sources of pollution.”

The public perception of the organization among river residents has changed since its early days.

“When we first started, not many people knew what the Coosa River was,” Chitwood said. “They thought of it as individual lakes. So, we talked to people on Logan Martin about the Coosa and they’d say, “We don’t know where that is, and we’d say, it’s right here.” That has changed a lot. They are more aware of the connectivity between systems and between the lakes and how we’re impacted by what people upstream of us are doing. That’s one big change.”

The other is changing the general perception that the Coosa is unsafe for swimming because it does have such a polluted history, especially on Logan Martin because of the PCB issue. What we did was start a program called Swim Guide, where we do water quality testing all over the river every week in the summer. We post that information free so people can see if it’s safe or not to swim that week in their location, instead of just speculation and hearsay. That has been really huge. A lot of people have been reassured about the safety of swimming in the river. But a lot more people are assured about the safety of the water.”

And Coosa Riverkeeper isn’t shy about using the legal system to protect the waterway.

While the lake associations closely monitor water issues and advocate and educate on behalf of the river system to schools, civic groups and government agencies, Coosa Riverkeeper will put its legal muscle behind its efforts.

“That’s why I’m really proud of our group because we’re standing up and doing something about it. And we’re making progress. It just takes people to stand up against industry and the government that are insanely powerful in Alabama and say that’s not really how we want things to happen in Alabama,” he noted.

“There are people out there that they know what they’re doing is not right. And they know that what they’re doing has an impact. But if they don’t get fined for it and they’re not going to spend however much money it is to do the right thing, there’s no consequence. It takes more than one approach to really address all these issues. That’s what sets our group apart. We’re willing to go toe-to-toe with industry, and we’re willing to call in the lawyers and file a lawsuit. There aren’t a lot of groups willing to do that. I think that we have to be willing to do that. If we don’t, we’re never going to change the status quo.”

Perhaps the dominant issue – one that would impact the three-legged stool of the lake associations’ mission to protect water quality, quantity and property values – are the so-called “Water Wars” among Alabama. Georgia and Florida.

In an effort to get more water for a thirsty, growing Metropolitan Atlanta area, Georgia wants to dam the waters that flow into the Coosa, which is downriver from the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula. Its impact reaches far beyond the Coosa, to the Tallapoosa and the Alabama Rivers. The Alabama is a navigable waterway, critical for barge traffic to the Port of Mobile.

Choking the flow of water to the Coosa, however, would damage a fragile ecosystem and parch the local economy. If you want an idea of how brittle the Coosa and its lakes are, consider indigenous beavers in the wake of February flooding. While it’s the opposite effect compared to lower water levels, the lesson here is environmental impact.

“Any change in the water level is going to affect the environment,” Ruethemann says. “While it’s the opposite of that, in the flood, beavers were wandering in people’s yards, and they were scared, not sure where to go.”

All of the Coosa advocacy groups are closely monitoring the mountain of litigation related to the water wars, Phifer said.

“We can’t continue to lose a lot of water without damaging us downstream in dry season. When nutrient levels in the water get too high, you have the potential for the nutrients to cause rapid algae growth and when the algae die, it sucks oxygen from the river system, damaging quality of life for the river. When you have dissolved oxygen, it becomes a pollution problem.”

In the years ahead, if the waters of the Cahaba – from which Birmingham derives much of its water – begins to run dry – there is concern that a parched Magic City might turn to the Coosa for water, putting the Coosa in the crossfire of two fronts in the water wars.

“That’s not just a battle for Alabama, Florida and Georgia, but there’s going to be a battle between Birmingham and the Coosa,” Chitwood says. “It’s only going to be so long before Birmingham comes for the Coosa. They’ve talked about it before.”

“When I train people in these (water testing) classes, I tell them, water in not a limitless quality,” Ruethemann says. “You can’t make new water. People say, ‘Why don’t you go to the Birmingham Water Works and get more water? Well, where do you think they get that water?”

One of her water testing students took a biblical view, she says. “Yup, that’s the same water that floated Noah’s boat.”

Ruethemann adds, “As it gets more limited and as we have more people, and we start growing more in urban areas like Atlanta and in the outskirts of Birmingham, people are going to be fighting for that limited amount of water.”

Other development-related issues, like sediment runoff from construction sites, sewerage and stormwater runoff concern the Coosa River organizations of Weiss, Neely Henry, Logan Martin, Lay, Jordan and Mitchell that make up what Ruethemann calls, “The Coalition.”

But another point of advocacy for Coosa Riverkeeper and the Neely Henry and Logan Martin groups is the development of a statewide comprehensive water management plan. Currently, Alabama is the only state in the Southeast without a water management blueprint.

“In my opinion, (if) we get to a courtroom, it’s hard for us to say (water) is of utmost importance when we don’t have a plan together. I think that plays against us tremendously.”

What happens to the Coosa if Alabama loses the water fight?

“We always think the worst. I think human nature is (to think) that everything will fall apart. I don’t know. There are many places on this lake that if the water stayed at 460 (feet), that a lot of people would not have waterfront property at all. You’d still see the diving ducks and the pelicans, but in these narrow sloughs, a lot of people would not have waterfront at all.”

Water quality and quantity should be on the minds of folks along the Coosa and across Alabama, as neighboring Georgia builds more reservoirs at the headwaters of the river.

“I would bet you if you talk to 90 percent of the people in this state, they don’t even think about water, Ruethemann says. “They turn on the faucet, and it’s there. They go to the beach or lake or river of their choice, and it’s there. We have a lot of water in Alabama – today.”

Should they think about it?

“Oh yeah,” she says. “At some point in time, it’s going to become an issue.”

 Meanwhile the groups collaborate, educate and advocate for the river system, pushing for clean, ample water, effective policies and responsible development. The reason is simple. “Anyone who spends time on our waterways in Alabama is going to appreciate them,” Chitwood says. “You’re not going to go kayaking on Big Canoe Creek and say, ‘Who really cares about that creek? ‘You’re going to say ‘Wow, that’s something worth protecting.”

LakeFest

Back bigger and better than ever

Story by Leigh Pritchett

Submitted Photos

Logan Martin LakeFest & Boat Show returns in May with more entertainment, more vendors, more boats, impressive giveaways and even an extra day to enjoy it all.

The weekend of events May 17-19 will mark the ninth year for LakeFest, an event that celebrates lake life.

This year, a pontoon boat and an all-terrain vehicle are among the many giveaways.

The free, family-friendly LakeFest – to be held at Lakeside Park at the Pell City Civic Center complex – is the largest in-water boat show in the Southeast, according to event coordinators Eric Housh and Justin Hogeland.

To date, the annual fundraiser has generated $250,000 that has been given to about 40 different charities, said Hogeland, a board member of LakeFest’s parent, Logan Martin Charity Foundation.

This year, LakeFest will again have a three-day format after having a two-day schedule for a few years. “We’re adding back a Sunday this year,” said Housh, who is also a foundation board member.

The hours of LakeFest are noon to 9 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

During LakeFest, five boat dealers will display a total of 15 brands of vessels.

“Some of those boats will be in the water and people (who qualify) will be able to test drive, which is unique,” Housh said.

The personal watercraft vendor Speed Zone will have Sea Doos, Yamaha Wave Runners and Kawasaki jet skis that those who qualify can take for a spin.

“That will be a lot of fun,” Housh said.

In addition, Riders Harley-Davidson will show off motorcycles, and enthusiasts will get to experience the power, speed and thrill through a simulator.

On-site financing to purchase a land or water vessel will be offered by America’s First Federal Credit Union, LakeFest’s presenting sponsor.

In the beginning…

Jerry Woods of Woods Surfside Marina, Fred Casey of Tradesman Co., and Lee Holmes of Sylacauga Marine & ATV brought the first LakeFest to life, said Mark Hildebrant, Woods’ son-in-law.

“Jerry was one of the main forces behind the event,” said Housh. “… He was the brain of the original idea.”

The goal was to raise money for charitable causes, particularly Logan Martin Lake Protection Association (LMLPA), said Housh and Hogeland.

“Jerry’s dream was to give back to the community and have an event that showcased the lake and lake life,” said Hildebrant, a foundation board member and current owner of Woods Surfside Marina.

The event itself would be free, but sponsorship from boat manufacturers and local businesses would generate the funds that would go toward LMLPA projects and other community endeavors.

The inaugural LakeFest was held at a shoreline subdivision. The event brought together three boat dealers, about 20 vendors and a crowd estimated at 2,000. Three acts provided entertainment, with no stage and only a small public address system. About $2,000 was raised for LMLPA, funds that went toward constructing the wetlands boardwalk at Lakeside Park, Hogeland said.

The early years of LakeFest were a struggle because it was a new event, and being outdoors, it was at the mercy of the weather. In fact, rain canceled it one year.

But Woods and the foundation board members believed in LakeFest and its mission.

More boat manufacturers and local businesses gave their sponsorship, and the event expanded significantly.

When LakeFest relocated to Lakeside Park, the celebration really blossomed, greatly increasing the number of acts, vendors, dealers, attendees and the amount of money raised for charities.

The upcoming LakeFest will feature more than a dozen musical acts, performing on a 24-foot stage with professional lighting and sound. On Saturday, comedian Darren Knight – also known as “Southern Momma” – will make a special appearance.

In addition to the motorcycle and boat dealers, auto dealers will be on site. The inflatables and water slides in Kid Zone will keep the younger set entertained on Friday and Saturday. As many as 50 vendors will sell all sorts of items – from jewelry, art and furniture to food, food and more food.

One vendor even comes from Florida to sell crab cakes.

“The food is always a highlight,” Housh said.

This year’s LakeFest is on target to be the largest in the celebration’s history.

“We have exceeded our growth this year,” Hogeland said. “We actually have a waiting list of boat vendors.”

Housh added that the space for other vendors is at capacity as well. “We have to turn vendors away every year. We have to turn sponsors away every year.”

Even a place to dock a boat has become a premium, Housh said. His advice to those planning to go to LakeFest by water is to arrive early to secure a spot.

The appeal of LakeFest draws people from Birmingham, Montgomery, Anniston, Oxford, Huntsville and event Atlanta, Ga., Hogeland said.

“I like to see people coming here from other places because this is an idyllic getaway,” Housh said.

He noted that Pell City is, first of all, fortunate to have a large and attractive Lakeside Park that can accommodate an event such as LakeFest. In addition to that, it is unique to have an in-water boat show where people may test-drive models, talk to experts, and get on-site financing.

“Having LakeFest at Lakeside Park has been a wonderful experience,” said Brian Muenger, city manager for the City of Pell City. “It is a great community-building event, as well as a means of promoting the city and the lake in general. Last year was the biggest event yet. …”

Housh estimates the 2018 LakeFest attendance at 15,000.

“Any time you can bring that many people to the area, it’s a great thing,” Muenger said. “The lake is our biggest draw in terms of new residents, and LakeFest provides a huge amount of exposure for the city.”

LakeFest has provided about $50,000 for charities each of the last three years and while many charitable causes have benefited from LakeFest funds, Hogeland said Lakeside Park and the City of Pell City are two of the main recipients.

“The Logan Martin Charity Foundation has … been a generous supporter of (the) Fire and Police Departments, which we are thankful for,” Muenger said. “They have also partnered with the city to expand the docks at the park, which was a $50,000 project. We are working towards further improvements in the years to come, and with the continual growth of the event, I know its impact on the community will continue to expand.”

Tonja Ramey, LMLPA president, said LakeFest gives exposure to and promotes LMLPA’s work of keeping the lake clean and teaching about the lake’s impact upon humans, ecology and economy.

“The primary purpose of LMLPA is to educate the public on issues and activities that impact the use and vitality of Logan Martin Lake,” Ramey said. “… (At LakeFest,) we are able to set up a booth, mingle with the vendors and share information with the visitors about the importance of making improvements for the safety of swimmers and boaters, as well as protecting the quality of our lake. And it also gives us the opportunity to share information and possibly recruit anyone that may be interested in learning to be a water monitor. Events like LakeFest are also a great opportunity to sign up new members to LMLPA.”

A legacy remembered

Year after year, Woods’ influence continued to be a positive force in LakeFest.

Then, just four days before the 2017 LakeFest, Woods died, Hildebrant said.

Hogeland and Housh said it was very difficult to continue with LakeFest that year, but the group did so for Woods’ sake.

The activities this year will begin with a time of remembering Woods’ vision and commitment.

On Friday evening will be another time of remembrance, as LakeFest honors some residents of Col. Robert L. Howard Veterans Home in Pell City. The veterans will be transported in a procession to LakeFest, where they will be treated in the VIP tent (sponsored by State Farm agents Bart Perry and Brandon Tate) to dinner, followed by a fireworks spectacular (sponsored by Bennington, a maker of pontoon boats).

Speaking of pontoons, an 18-foot Avalon with a 50-horsepower Honda motor and an estimated value of $23,000 will be given away Saturday evening. So will an $8,500 Tracker ATV.

“I think that’s going to be pretty popular,” Housh said of those two giveaways at 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

“Everyone who attends LakeFest gets a ticket free,” Housh said. The ticket allows each person to register at the LakeFest tent for the hourly giveaways.

Coordinating LakeFest is an undertaking that keeps Housh and Hogeland rather busy for many months. Nonetheless, “this is my favorite time of year,” Housh said, noting that it is gratifying to see the way the community shows support by attending LakeFest.

“One of the perks is the check presentations to charities,” Hogeland added. Giving those, he said, is reward for all the work.

Check out Logan Martin LakeFest & Boat Show on Facebook. To get sponsor and vendor information and applications, directions to the park, or a schedule of events, visit loganmartinLakeFest.com. In addition to Housh, Hogeland and Hildebrant, Logan Martin Charity Foundation’s other board members are Fred Casey and Lee Holmes. Judy Carr is the financial officer. The foundation is a 501(c)3 organization.

You gotta beat the fish

Bain, Colley set to defend the Alabama Bass Trail Series title

Story by Paul South

Submitted photos

When it comes to fishing, Adam Bain and Kris Colley hold to a simple truth, the same flame that burned bright in classic literature and on classic TV.

Whether it’s Melville’s Ishmael, or Mayberry’s Andy and Opie Taylor, it’s not about victory over another angler. It’s man vs. fish.

“It’s kind of like a little puzzle. You have to figure out what the fish are doing and the time of the year, the depth they’re in and what they’re biting,” Bain says. “It’s just you and the fish. It’s not necessarily you against everybody else, it’s you against the fish. There’s as much competition there, as there is to figuring out if you can beat everybody else. You gotta beat the fish.”

Bain from Pell City and Colley of Ashville beat the fish and everybody else in 2018, capturing the Alabama Bass Trail Championship in their home county on Neely Henry Lake.

They’ve won twice on the ABT circuit over the years, once at Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River, and the ABT title on Neely Henry last year. The pair finished second in 2017, narrowly missing the ABT title on Logan Martin, their day’s catch losing by slightly more than two pounds.

Sanctioned by the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, the Alabama Bass Trail Tournament Series features two divisions. Each division –North and South – includes five tournaments on five different lakes. As many as 225 two-man boats can compete in each tournament.

Bain, a Realtor and Colley, who works in the railway industry, have made waves on the ABT circuit with their winning ways that combine old-school fishing techniques with high technology in the ever-evolving world of competitive angling.

While the ABT is considered an amateur circuit, each tournament champion wins a $10,000 grand prize, with $47,000 in prizes going to the top 40 teams. In recognition of Alabama’s Bicentennial in 2019, the 200th-place finisher will earn a $200 bonus. The total prize money for the 2019 ABT Series circuit is $568,000.

But for Colley and Bain, it’s not about the money. While they’ve knocked around the idea of moving to a higher level of competitive fishing, family comes first.

“There’s so much money at the local level now that you can stay around the house and win. But we don’t necessarily do it for the money, but for the competition. The money is an added bonus. The more money, the more competition.”

Colley agrees. The rush of the tug on a line is enough.

“We’re both competitive in that we always want to win. It’s not that we fish against each other, but we joke around and make fun of it. You know, fishing is fun. Between the both of us, we never take it to the point where it’s so serious that we take the fun out of it. Honestly, if it ever got to that point, I’d probably quit.”

That fun and love of fishing has helped hook a strong friendship. The two have fished together for about a decade. And their fishing style, forged since childhood on the stained Army-khaki waters of Weiss Lake, Logan Martin and Neely Henry complements each other.

“He’s probably a little more patient than I am. I like to throw stuff and wind it in, Bain says of his angling teammate. “I use a spinner bait or a crank bait. He will take a jig or a piece of plastic and flip it. He thinks that if I’m up there and catching fish that are active, he can fish maybe a different part of the water column.”

While most fishermen would probably never admit it, especially in the age of high-technology depth finders and trolling motors linked to smartphones and sonar-laced lures, luck takes a hand.

But when Colley is on his game, Bain has a simple strategy.

“When he’s on and when he’s getting bites and catching fish, I just stay out of his way. He’s kind of the same way with me. It may be his day a little more often than it is mine. He really does catch a lot of fish.”

Asked his own strengths on the team, Bain quips: “I run the dip net really well.”

While Colley can flip plastic lures into the tall grasses near the shoreline or under docks, Bain is the deep-water specialist, hooking big catches on spinner and crank baits. In the summertime, he generally does well because he catches them deep,” Colley says.

He adds, “We both kind of fish fast, but we do it different ways. When you have that and have two ways of looking at it, if one way’s not working, we’re really quick to switch to another. At the end of the day, you might fish the same, but it’s somewhat different.”

Like most kids who grow up near the lake, fishing has always been a simple pursuit. Joy can be had with a cane pole, a box of worms or a cage of crickets. But as with the rest of the world, technology snagged competitive fishing in its net.

The days of paper topographic maps of bodies of water are no more. Water temperature, depth, barometric pressure, the phases of the moon, all figure into fishing. And the new depth finders make learning an unfamiliar lake easier,

“They call it video game fishing,” Bain says. “As you’re trolling around, and you see a fish directly below you on your depth finder, you can drop a little worm straight down and watch the fish bite on the monitor. There are people who fish like that a lot. We’ve never gotten into that. Because we’re from and fish predominately on the Coosa River, which is shallow, the water stays kind of stained and the fish, most of the year live shallower than in other river systems. So, to fish competitively, you don’t necessarily have to fish out deep the majority of the year. Obviously, there are times you have to go out (deep) to win, even on Logan Martin and Neely Henry, but not as often (on those lakes) as some of the others.”

Colley is excited by the new technology.

“I think it’s great. It’s changed fishing. It’s sort of created a wide range of how to catch fish. You see people who fish on the bank and still win, and then you see people who grew up in the age of technology, and they know how to use it to their advantage, and they’re able to catch them offshore.

It’s changed the way that everybody fishes because at some point in time – we’re not the best in electronics – you’ve got to be able to read them to be competitive. Some of the lengths we go to, you have to know how to read them, or you’re going to get beat.”

Fishing, it seems, is booming. Bain, who learned angling from his father and grandfather, remembers fishing junior tournaments with only three competitive boats. Now fishing flourishes at the prep, amateur, collegiate and pro level. More than 200 boats compete on the ABT circuit, and some of the pros show up at those events. And amateurs compete in some of the professional “open” tourneys.

Bain believes the internet, technology advertising, money and media coverage have boosted the popularity of a sport that once seemed to be gasping for air on the rocks. And as a result, the competition is tough

“The fishermen have gotten good. Your average fisherman is a lot better now than he used to be. Whether that’s the depth finders or the material that’s he’s able to get to and read about and see the new techniques and all this stuff, the average fisherman has gotten much better than he was 20 years ago. It’s got to be the technology that’s doing that.”

Defending champs

Technology aside, Colley and Bain are philosophical as they begin the defense of their 2018 Alabama Bass Trail Series. Colley doesn’t see a bullseye on their backs as the new season began.

“It’s not. We look forward to being able to defend. We’re not going to change anything up. If we go out and do the best we can and if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

He adds, “We both have our strengths as far as what we like to do and how we do it. If it’s a bait or a certain thing he likes to do, he runs the boat. It just depends on crank or jerk bait like Adam does, or flipping a bait, that’s more my kind of deal. We try to keep each other up. You’re going to lose a big fish here and there, and when we do, we just try to make fun of it. We don’t really get down, we just make fun of and nag each other the rest of the day.”

Asked if the fishing friends are like an old married couple, Colley chuckles.

“Pretty much,” he says.

The pair calls the ABT championship their biggest thrill and their biggest victory in fishing. But even in these days of tournaments and tough competition, where anglers on the ABT try to land five fat keepers, the story always circles back to childhood and the thrill of that first big fish, fun and friendship

“We don’t do a whole lot different than anybody else,” Bain says. “Kris is an outstanding fisherman. I’m probably very lucky to be fishing with him. We’ve taken our lumps over the years, but we’ve put a lot of time in and worked really hard at it. We’ve paid our dues.

“Now that we do have families we aren’t able to fish all the time during the week, like we did growing up. But what success we have now, I can attribute to those days as a kid, fishing for hours, not knowing what you were doing, but just learning. Eventually, years down the road, that stuff does pay off.”

Gee’s Bend in St. Clair

Quilts and quilters have compelling stories to tell

Story by Joe Whitten
Photos by Susan Wall
Submitted Photos

Gee’s Bend quilts, vibrant and spontaneous, have been exhibited and written about around the world, but for Claudia Pettway Charley, born in Gee’s Bend and now living in Pell City, quilts have been an everyday fact of life.

She grew up nurtured by the women whose quilts would one day be showcased in museums across the globe. It was a legacy, an art learned from her mother, Tinnie Pettway; her grandmother, Malissia Pettway; her aunt, Minnie Pettway; and other quilters of the close-knit community.

Sewn by descendants of slaves from a plantation on the Alabama River, these quilts have made Gee’s Bend and the quilters internationally famous.

From The Times of London — “The women of Gee’s Bend … have shattered artistic boundaries. Their bold, vibrant designs are as radically different from orthodox quilt patterns as Picasso was from anyone who preceded him.”

From The New York Times —  “What makes this (Gee’s Bend) tradition so compelling is that unlike most quilts in the European-American tradition, which favor uniformity, harmony and precision, Gee’s Bend quilts include wild, improvisatory elements: broken patterns, high color contrasts, dissonance, asymmetry and syncopation. …”

Quilting originated in the Orient as padded garments, then made its way to Europe by way of returning 13th century crusaders, and eventually evolved into bedding.

Quilts came to the New World with the first settlers and were necessary in the home well into the 20th century.

In the second half of the 20th century, there burst upon both the quilting world and the art world the phenomena of Gee’s Bend quilts. In 2018 the Bend’s quilts again came to prominence through the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama painted by Amy Sherald of Baltimore. Mrs. Obama’s portrait gown features quilt blocks associated with Gee’s Bend quilts. In 2018, Sherald visited Gee’s Bend quilters and had a grand time in Tinnie Pettway’s home hearing stories from the past told by Tinnie and her sister Minnie.

Gee’s Bend quilter and entrepreneur, Claudia Pettway Charley, is partner in the family-owned business and currently owns the registered trademark for that business, That’s Sew Gee’s Bend. In a recent interview at the Pell City Library, among an array of her quilts as well as her mother’s, she talked about her process of making a quilt. “Everything comes from the head and the heart — what the feeling is at that moment, that time when you put a piece together. No patterns, nothing like that.”

The fascination and beauty of a Gee’s Bend quilt is its spontaneity. Each quilt is a serendipity of seemingly haphazard colors and shapes that harmonize into a thing of beauty which sings to the observer’s soul.

A New York Times reporter wrote that the earliest Bend quilts “…came into being alongside gospel, blues, ragtime and jazz,” an era when strict rules of music composition were tossed aside. Think of trumpeter Louie Armstrong or pianist Thelonious Monk departing from the written notes and improvising his mood of the moment into improvisations.

Now look at a Gee’s Bend quilt and realize the placement of color, fabric texture and shape speak a language of mood or emotion, unhampered by strict adherence to geometrical pattern and form. The green-bordered Double Glory quilt by Tinnie Pettway (Claudia’s mother) is as lively as New Orleans jazz vibrating the night.

Claudia acknowledged her quilts to be both improvisational and abstract — each quilt “is true to itself,” she said.

When asked her thoughts when beginning a new quilt, Claudia replied: “It could be your mood at that particular time; the weather; how you are feeling. If you’re feeling excited and happy, you may choose a lot of bright (colors) for the piece — I’m speaking of myself now. You just kind of know the direction you want the piece to go. It’s not just one thing; it could be a multitude of things that would make you choose certain fabrics and colors.”

Tinnie Pettway’s thoughts on starting a quilt correspond with her daughter’s. “Fabric is not the problem,” she said. “My problem is the design — and I have no special design (in mind) when I’m making a quilt. I think of how I want it, and sometimes that don’t work out, and I just let that go. I take a portion of the quilt, and I lay it out on the floor, and I look at it. I turn it around, and whatever looks the best to me when I place it together, then that’s the way I sew it.” Her yellow-bordered Multi Block Crossroads quilt is a striking example of how successfully she works this technique.

The Bend quilters do have “traditional patterns,” Tinnie said; “…things like Grandma’s Dream, Nine Patch, String, or the one we call House Top — those are regular quilts that everybody makes. But I have no particular pattern. I just sew pieces together. If they look good, I sew the pieces together.

“And everybody who sees one (of our quilts) knows that that’s a Gee’s Bend quilt. It’s put together just as our mind tells us — most time with no set form and no set pattern. That’s how we do it.”

How did they get here from there?

To understand Gee’s Bend quilts, you need to answer the question, “How did Gee’s Bend quilts originate?” To answer that, you must know some of the history of this particular bend in the Alabama River. And to appreciate the abstract beauty of the quilts, you must understand the pervasive tension between despair and hope in their lives.

Joseph Gee, from North Carolina, settled in the Bend around 1816 and established a plantation in the rich, fertile river-bottom land. According to Harvey H. Jackson II in his Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama, Joseph died in 1824 and left the plantation and 47 slaves to his nephews still living in the east. One nephew, Charles Gee, moved to Alabama and ran the plantation until the 1840s. At that time, to settle a debt, Charles and his brother deeded everything to Mark H. Pettway. In 1846, Pettway and family with more than a hundred slaves made the journey through the Carolinas and Georgia and into what by then was called Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Pettway brought change. Jackson writes, “… His slaves cleared more land, planted more cotton and built their master a ‘big house,’ which he named Sandy Hill. Gee’s Bend became, according to one student of the region (Nancy Callahan), ‘a dukedom in the vast Southern cotton empire,’ and there Pettway lived in splendid isolation. Deep in the heart of a bulb-shaped peninsula, almost entirely surrounded by the river, Mark Pettway was free to do whatever he wished, and he did.”

When emancipation freed the slaves, they all took the Pettway surname whether blood-related or not, and all stayed on the Pettway plantation, working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In 1895, Pettway sold the land to Adrian Sebastian Van De Graff, a Tuscaloosa attorney who ran the farm as an absentee landowner.

By the 1920s, Gee’s Bend was an isolated African-American community. Farmers sold their cotton to a merchant in Camden. The price of cotton dropped in the late 1920s, and without telling the farmers, the merchant held the cotton hoping the price would go up in a few years. All the while, he kept account of what they bought, to be paid for when the cotton sold.

The price of cotton did not go up before he died. His heirs saw only what the farmers owed — and the farmers’ held cotton had “disappeared.”

In 1932, the merchant’s heirs sent men to Gee’s Bend to collect. And collect they did, taking everything — household goods, cows, mules, pigs, seed for next-year’s planting. The pillaging left the people destitute.

Jackson quotes a Christian Century article by Rev. Renwick C. Kennedy, “In October and November, 68 families, 368 people, were ‘broken up’ or ‘closed out’ — Alabama phrases that described both a physical condition and a psychological state.”

The stricken people faced the winter with the real prospect of starvation. Jackson writes that they survived through the help of both the Red Cross and a compassionate Wilcox County plantation owner who provided assistance with cornmeal and food.

From this poverty came the quilters thrift of salvaging still usable portions of worn-out overalls and clothing to make cover to pile on beds for warmth in an unheated, cardboard-thin house. These quilts are documented in Gee’s Bend: The Women and their Quilts and The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.

Tinnie Pettway commented about this use of worn-out clothing, saying, “…In those old quilts, to have a different color…they would rip seams (of overalls), and where the seams had been folded, (it was) still holding its color. They’d sew it together.” This gave them shades of blue in the pieces.

She also told of the competition between the quilters. “They wanted to see which one could make the best quilt — even out of those ragged pieces they had. In spite of the lack of material, they used whatever they could find.” Tinnie and her sister, Minnie, made the quilt, Robust, of worn overall denim scraps. Note the splash of red in the lower right — a counterpoint of hope in a field of lonesome blue.

Claudia was asked, “Do you think any of the quilts reflected the distress of what the people were going through?”

She responded thoughtfully, “It’s possible. (When) you look at some of the old quilts and what they used for material — croaker sacks … overalls. … I think it was according to the attitude of the time, … using what they had available. They said to themselves, ‘We’re gonna survive regardless of what anyone says or what anyone does.’

“You know, growing up in the country like that, it makes you a survivor. Gee’s Bend was like a forgotten community — totally. So, we depended on each other. We depended on the farming, eating off the land, doing anything we could do at that time for survival. And it makes today seem simple.”

In Claudia’s quilt, Crimson Blues, she has created a sense of tension in the shapes and placement of red, blue and black pieces. The themes of despair and hope seem to throb through Gee’s Bend quilters’ blood and come to life in their quilts.

Drive for more than quilt-making

Not only was there a determination to survive physically, but there was also the struggle for basic citizen’s rights, such as the right to vote.

Tinnie Pettway remembers that well. “I went over to register to vote, and they put me in a little room in the courthouse. It just had one door. Finally, it got dark, and I looked up, and there was these three men standing right in the door looking at me. I just looked at them, and they backed out. I don’t know why they was looking at me, trying to frighten me or not. I don’t know. But they backed out, and finally I was able to register to vote. They sent me my card saying that I qualified.”

Claudia’s aunt, Minnie Pettway, recalled the same intimidation and that the officials threw away her first registration forms. “Threw them in the garbage!” But she kept trying. “A lot of people wouldn’t go. I guess they were somewhat afraid, but my daddy wasn’t afraid of nothing, so I just went along with him.” Finally, as a result of a court hearing in Selma, Minnie was a registered voter. “When we were declared registered voters, whenever there was an election, we went to the polls and voted.”

Tinnie, Minnie, and others from Gee’s Bend marched in Camden, the county seat for the right to vote. “Most of the people who was marching was not the educated people … many of them were afraid to march. They were afraid of their jobs — that they would lose their jobs,” Minnie remembered. “My daddy (Eddie Pettway Sr.), used to get truckloads of people and take them to Camden to register to vote, and they would put them all in jail. Then a day or two later, my daddy would go back with his truck and try to bond them out of jail. … Daddy went to get them, but they would go back a day or two later protesting again.”

Eddie Pettway Sr., who was Claudia’s grandfather, marched at Edmund Pettus Bridge with others from Gee’s Bend. “They ran over them with horses,” Minnie recalled, “and would spray them with tear gas. My daddy would drag the ladies out of the area where the tear gas was strong.”

The determination to keep on until rights were won seems to be sewn in Tinnie’s Gee’s Bend Geometric Trails quilt of multi-colored panels bordered by panels of red and gray — no curves in these trails, they lead straight ahead to the goal.

When asked if the young folk today realized the struggles of their grandparents, she replied, “They don’t, really. My grandkids, Claudia’s kids, they enjoy listening to the stories, but they just can’t imagine going through that.”

Not only could the younger generation not comprehend what the struggle had been, but neither could the crowds at the museums when Gee’s Bend quilters appeared at exhibits.

The women traveled from museum to museum for each exhibit of their “works of art” in galleries across the USA. “We would talk,” Tinnie remembered, “and tell the people how it was coming up in Gee’s Bend and the struggle we had here. … What we were telling (about our lives) was unimaginable (to them).

“When our bus would come in (to a museum), they’d be standing out like the president was coming. And they would just hug us, and some of ‘em were crying, and I thought, ‘My God, these are just quilts!’ … We had lived with these quilts a lifetime. They wasn’t art to us as (they were) to the people we were taking them to.

“It was almost unbelievable,” she remembered. “That’s when I had my first flight — to a museum in California. That’s the first time I got on a plane, and I’m telling you, that was something. I was kind of afraid when I got on there, but once that plane took off, I thought, ‘Well, I might as well settle down, cause I’m up here now, and they’re not gonna take me back.’”

She chuckled at the memory and continued. “It was joyous time. I had my first time to eat goat cheese on one of those trips. … A lot of those quilters didn’t like that goat cheese, but I liked that goat cheese, and I’d say, well give me your goat cheese!”

Claudia’s wish is that upcoming generations will find hope and success because of  the struggles of the past and that they will continue the quilting heritage of Gee’s Bend. “We don’t want it to become a dying art. We want to continue to keep the quilting in the forefront of not just artists but quilters and everyday people. We (quilters) have to find like-minded people to know where that place is, and from there it grows.”

She is hopeful that soon, innovative and spontaneous quilting will take root in Pell City and St. Clair County.

Remembrance of past, hope for future

In their interviews, both Claudia and her Mom talked about Gee’s Bend’s isolation, poverty, struggle for survival, and the progress that had been made by the community’s determination and resourcefulness.

“Things are much better now,” Tinnie said. “Education is much better. We’ve got some very good kids that have grown up here — doctors, lawyers, nurses — that came from Gee’s Bend in spite of its beginnings.”

The post-slavery trials and tribulations of our African-American citizens in Wilcox County’s Gee’s Bend, with its injustice and inhumanity, echo in all of Alabama’s counties. A little delving into St. Clair County’s 19th Century estate records expose that inhumanity. However, the subtlety of injustice lies in the fact that it may fall upon anyone, regardless of race, color or belief.

But like those brilliant colors splashing through Gee’s Bend quilts, hope brightens the future. And this must be a determined hope for all.

Tinnie expressed it this way in a poem:

I’m not giving up in this life
Although there may be some strife
It may be sometime I have to wait
I know it’s never too late.

From this life I won’t retire
To be productive is a lifelong desire
I’ll go on, no, I won’t die
A new lease of life I have acquired

I feel now I’m more blessed
And I truly know I fear less
I also know I have to press
I want what I want and won’t settle for less

I will achieve, I see my goals
I won’t stop, no I won’t fold
Through the wind storm, rain or cold
To my faith and His hand I’ll continue to hold.

In this poem, Determined, from her book, Gee’s Bend Experience, Tinnie expresses hope, faith and determination. And in her quilts and daughter Claudia’s quilts, the careful observer can hear those three harmonies swirling in a crescendo of cloth and color to proclaim to the world Hallelujah! Amen! l