Living Moody’s amazing history for 92 years
Story by Joe Whitten
Submitted Photos
Come, travel the backroads to meet a 92-year-old lady whose life has exhibited the love, joy and peace of God throughout the years.
Eleanor Shirley Isbell always has a ready smile and a chuckle or laugh as she reminisces about her life.
Although born in Acmar on August 18, 1934, her birth certificate lists Atmore, Alabama, as her place of birth.
“Mamas didn’t go to the hospital to have babies in those days,” she explained. “So, on my birth certificate, they’ve got Atmore because in Montgomery, they had never heard of Acmar.”
Clyde and Edith Bishop Shirley lived in the St. Clair County coal mining community of Acmar when Eleanor was born, and Clyde worked the mines. Sisters Linda, Margaret and Mary arrived at regular intervals.
From Acmar, the family moved to a house in today’s city of Moody. She remembers well living there. “In one side of the house was mama and daddy and us kids, and in the other side was my grandmother and grandfather Bishop. I spent a lot of time running back and forth,” she chuckled. “And I remember grandmother had this wood cookstove. It had a warmer on it above the stovetop, and after breakfast, she would put the leftover biscuits in the warmer. So, when I was going through there, she would take a biscuit and put some sugar in the biscuit for me,” she smiled, relishing the memory. “It’s a wonder somebody didn’t give us a whipping for running through there!”
The Shirley family moved a few times, and then Clyde built a house on today’s U.S. 411, a dirt road in those days. Eleanor described Clyde’s method of construction. “When my daddy built something, he just built it. No measurements. No nothing,” she said. “At this house he built, it had a grocery store in front, and we lived in the back. But, again, not a professional builder,” she emphasized.
Her sister Margaret’s room was next to the store, and the plank wall had knotholes. The flickering shadows that came from the store through the knotholes frightened Margaret every night.
It seems Clyde enjoyed building because Eleanor remembers living in other houses he built with his “saw it and nail it” method. He may have been a little like the self-taught country carpenter whose policy was, “It may be a little cattywampus, but it’ll all come out in the wash.”
She attended Moody Elementary and Middle School, graduating from the ninth grade there. For high school, she rode the bus to St. Clair County High School in Odenville, where she graduated in 1953.
In 1954, she married Milton Isbell – and that’s a story of its own.
“You know how in Junior High there’s always one male student that all the girls are in love with,” she began. “There was no way that I was ever gonna get to date that one because his father made whiskey.”
With eyes still twinkling, she continued. “Here’s the deal. Milton was friends with the boy that all the girls were in love with, so my first date with Milton was a double date with the whiskey maker’s son – who was the driver – and his girlfriend. Me and Milton were in the back, and I dated him because the other boy was in the front seat.
“We dated a few more times – and Milton used to say I chased him, but I don’t remember chasing him. Anyway, we got married after he joined the Navy.” And the marriage lasted until Milton’s death, August 28, 2018 – 64 years.
Milton was in the Navy when they married and stationed in Alameda, California, so Eleanor bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
Crossing the US to California, she recalled, “I didn’t think much about it until I got that one-way ticket, and I thought, ‘Oh, no! I may never be coming back to Alabama!’”
Her fear was unfounded, though. About a year later, Milton was reassigned to Pensacola, Florida, where he worked in the print shop. He worked at that job until he was discharged from the Navy, and he kept the same print shop job as a civilian when he was discharged from the Navy.
Their son, Tim, was born in 1955 in Pensacola, and the Isbells lived there until he was about a year-and-a-half old. On the weekends, they would head back to Moody.
“One time when we were going back from Moody to Pensacola, and we hit a mule. I was in the front seat holding Tim – back then babies didn’t have to be in the back seat like they do today. We hit the mule, and it went up in the air, and it came back down, through the windshield the side I was on. And that mule got up, shook itself and ran off.”
Trying to locate the owner of the mule was a lost cause. “Nobody owned that mule,” she laughed. “Nobody claimed it, and of course we had to have a lot of work done on the car.”
The weekends traveling back and forth grew old, so the family moved to Leeds. Later, they moved in with Milton’s mom and stepfather. That house was right up the hill from the new Civic Center in Moody. Eleanor and Milton had two rooms at the back of the house and daughter Susan was born there in 1958.
Their next house was built by a company who just put up the outside walls. “So, that’s what we got,” Eleanor recalled. “We moved into that house and wasn’t anything done inside but studders. Not anything, and Milton gradually got it fixed, and we lived there 49 years.”
Father knows best
Pop, Clyde Shirley, could give good, blunt advice. Eleanor told of a time he kept her and Milton focused. “Daddy gave us a lot next door to them. So, we got the foundation built, and somebody was going to Florida, and we wanted to go. We didn’t have any money, so I went to my daddy to ask for money to go to Florida, and he said, ‘Do you want to go to Florida, or do you want to build a house?’” After a hearty laugh, she added, “So, we didn’t go to Florida.”
Career paths
Including the Navy, Milton held down several different jobs. He worked for a little while at Ft. McClellan until they had a huge layoff. He was a milkman for a while and then he worked at Murry’s Garage. Then he went to work at Greystone Golf Course. Eleanor enjoyed several tournaments and met some famous golfers while Milton worked there. That ended one day when Milton had a confrontation with his boss, picked up his toolbox and said, “I’m going home.”
The very next day, Milton went to work at the Cahaba Country Club golf course, where his son Tim was employed. Tim had started working there when he was 14 years old. Milton worked there until he retired.
Eleanor also held several jobs during her working years. She spent 20 years with Dun and Bradstreet. “I worked a little while in every department,” she said. “Over the years, I must have been private secretary for eight or nine men at Dun and Bradstreet.” When she asked to be in sales because she knew those men earned the most, they refused her request, and she left the firm.
From there she spent 15 years in real estate. Then she tried retail sales for a while but quickly grew tired of that job. But that led to work she probably enjoyed the most.
The family was members of Leeds Assembly of God where Dan Ronsisvalle was pastor. One day she was at the church with others to go visit the sick and shut-ins of the church. The pastor pulled her aside and asked her if she would be his secretary. The secretary, his wife, wanted to give up the job. Eleanor agreed to take that church position
After she had been there for some months, she had surgery. As she recuperated at home, Pastor Ronsisvalle called and said, “I don’t like bookkeeping. I want you to be the church bookkeeper.” Eleanor said, “Well, I’ll have to pray about that.” Ronsisvalle replied, “You don’t need to pray about that.”
She became the bookkeeper, but it wasn’t long until the church needed a treasurer, and he asked her to take that job, and she did.
“At Leeds Assembly of God,” she reminisced, “I was secretary, I was bookkeeper and treasurer – and I did everything but sweep the floors,” she said. “I really enjoyed working for Ronsisvalle. I would go dragging in some days, and he’d come bouncing in, singing and carrying on, and say, ‘Good morning, Sunshine!’ And here I was with my head on my desk. He was always so happy.”
She paused and added quietly, “And I miss him, I miss him. I worked for my church for over 20 years. I worked until I was 81. My last day was July 4, and I turned 81 in August.”
Chronicling history
Eleanor wrote an article titled, “Moody, Alabama, “Then and Now,” which was published in Cherish, The Quarterly Journal of the St. Clair County Historical Society in October 1993. In it, she told how Benjamin Epps Moody arrived in St. Clair County. “He came with his family from the hills of North Carolina in 1820 to homestead a section of land granted to him when James Monroe was the country’s president.
“Mr. Moody built a one-room log cabin with a chimney at one end. He worked many long hours at building his chimney, digging the clay from his own land and molding the bricks by hand and baking them in an open fire. Years later, when the growth of his family demanded more room, the log cabin was torn down from around the chimney and a new house was built in its place.” The house has been reworked several times, but it and the chimney still stand in 2026.
Other families came to the area. “The good news had spread to North Carolina,” Eleanor wrote. “Soon there were homes belonging to the Moores, Kerrs, Lamberts, Taylors, Spruiells, Kirks, Adkins, Hawkins and Fulmers. Many of these family descendants live in Moody presently… These [early] folks were hardworking and loved liberty and opposed slavery. Not a single family owned slaves.”
People on foot, horses and wagons wore trails in four directions from the Moody home, and the community began to be called Moody’s Cross Roads.
Eleanor herself has lived and remembers a great deal of Moody’s history, since her dad, Clyde, rallied forces to found the town of Moody. Eleanor calls it “Pop’s last adventure.”
In 1962, Moody citizens learned that Leeds was interested in annexing the Moody area into the city of Leeds. Clyde went into action. He chose a group of men, one of them an attorney, who went to Montgomery and had the City of Moody incorporated.
“You’ll laugh at this,” Eleanor chuckled, “Pop hand-picked the first mayor and five counselors, and the election was without opposition. Mayor, A. E. Moore, and as counselors, he was counselor number one. Then, Hermon Waid, Hubert Adkins, Rodney Miles, and Jimmy DeShazo.” Milton Isbell was the first City Clerk, but that only lasted about two meetings, and he knew that job was not for him.
The first Town Hall was an addition to Clyde Shirley’s Swap Shop. “Remember, Daddy was not a good carpenter,” Eleanor laughed. “He just threw things up, you know. No measuring tape or anything. Well, that’s what the Swap Shop was – just thrown up. So, for the first Town Hall, Daddy just added a little more to the Swap Shop.” She paused and added nostalgically, “My daddy was something else!”
Living history
In 1980, Eleanor herself made Moody history for being the first woman elected to the Moody City Council. She recalled that she was preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when “a still small voice said, ‘Run for Moody City Council.’ ‘Why would I do that,’ I wondered, but I knew my Pop would love me serving on City Council.” She got her name on the ballot with two others who were campaigning for the office. The general election ended in a runoff. Eleanor won the runoff.
After winning, she had a lot to learn. She spent many hours reading legal papers and learning laws and procedures. She credits then City Attorney Jim Hill as helping her the most in learning the ropes.
She ran for re-election, losing by 35 votes in a run-off. During that election, she recollected, “My mom said, ‘I will vote for you, but I pray that you lose.’” She laughed, and added, “God delivered me from politics!”
In her Cherish article, Eleanor pondered the future of Moody. “Who knows,” she wrote, “where the [present] growth will end? My dad paid $300 for seven plus acres in 1948. A couple of years ago, an acre of that same land sold for nearly one hundred thousand dollars. No one can be certain how much bigger Moody will get. There are rumors of a large discount store such as Wal-Mart or K-Mart coming to Moody. The rumors come and go. However, no matter how big it grows or how busy it gets (thousands of cars traveling daily on Highway 411), I still can close my eyes and picture two dirt roads known as Moody’s Cross Roads, where there was little traffic and only two stores, Hannon’s and Forman’s groceries, and a few friendly folks. It was home then, and come what may, Moody will probably always be home sweet home to me.”
In God’s providence, Eleanor has lived to see and know how the City of Moody has grown. She recently expressed her joy, by saying, “In thinking back to the add-on first Town Hall, I stand in awe of our lovely City Hall today, the great library and Civic Center.”
Although she deals with several health issues, Eleanor is the same cheerful Eleanor she has always been. Retired St. Clair County Judge and current State Rep. Jim Hill’s observations about her suit her well.
“When I think of Eleanor Isbell, it makes me smile, because every time I saw her, she had a smile on her face. She had a great outlook on life and was a pleasure to see and to be with.
“I met Eleanor probably 40 years ago. She was a Realtor in the Leeds/Moody area. I was a young lawyer, and a fair amount of my practice was real estate. Many times in church, we talk about the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, etc. Eleanor not only knew what they were, she exhibited them and lived them.
“I would be remiss if I did not mention Eleanor’s husband, Milton, who was just like her. They were a wonderful couple and perfectly matched.
“They say everyone makes you happy. Some people when you see them coming, and some when you see them going. Eleanor always made you happy when you saw her coming. She is truly a special person. If the world were full of Eleanor Isbells, it would have a lot less problems than it has now and be a much better place to live.”
And all who know her agree. Thank you, Eleanor, for your 92 years of blessing the lives of others.
