Phillip Tutor

26th September 2020

Meet the men behind Anniston's historic Russell Brothers photographs

In 1880, a dapper eccentric with a Wild West beard and a dramatic flair named Ben Wittick opened a photography studio in the New Mexico territory town of Sante Fe. With him was his apprentice, a young Tennessean named Robert Wiley Russell.

The Anniston Star • 26th September 2020

Calhoun County is littered with place names that are fading into history

Way up in Calhoun County’s northeastern hills, hard against the western edges of the Wolf and August Mine mountain ridges, is a pinprick of a place called Philadelphia. Its heartbeat, Philadelphia Baptist Church, has dispensed sermons since 1888. Along the drive there from Piedmont is a visual of rural Alabama: rusted barns and pasturelands, summertime crops and a smattering of ranch-style homes, a canopy of oaks and pines shading the winding, twisting road.

24th September 2020

Anniston’s quirky connection to Maryland’s pro-Confederate state song

James Ryder Randall is embedded so deeply in Anniston lore that he is a veritable ghost, unseen and forgotten. He wasn’t born here. He didn’t die here. He isn’t buried here. His fame, lasting as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with Anniston.

5th June 2020

Ayers family's history in local newspapers is long

On Aug. 25, 1894, T.W. Ayers scratched an itch and told the people of Calhoun County about it. He’d owned two Georgia newspapers, sold them for profit and moved to Anniston to run a drug store. He went to medical school. He became a doctor. He opened his practice.

5th June 2020

An advocate for the outcast, Anniston pastor Dale Clem announces retirement

Strangers are unopened books to the Rev. Dale Clem, each with chapters to devour and stories to absorb. Strangers aren’t strangers to him. They’re people, flesh and blood, members of a collective world, whether white or black or gay or straight or absurdly rich or demonstrably poor.

5th June 2020

IN MEMORY OF MOLLY: She never gave up. She never gave in.

I dug a hole this morning.

The Hardball Times • 25th June 2020

A Ballpark and a History Worth Remembering

One of the misfortunes of baseball’s past is how the game’s demolished parks are remembered. Often they aren’t, save for a placard here or a signpost there that reminds us of the greatness that once occupied these places. The repurposing of real estate is too lucrative to linger in historic nostalgia.

5th June 2020

How to toss a pizza: Behind the scenes at Oxford’s Mellow Mushroom

OXFORD — Rusty Newman doesn’t merely make pizzas. He slaps them, tosses them, designs them, perhaps even imagines them as public demonstrations of gastronomic art. Yes, it’s about pie. But it’s also about performance. “I’ve always enjoyed handling dough,” he says.

The Hardball Times • 25th June 2020

An Angell at Spring Training

What I know about spring training I know because of Roger Angell. With conversational elegance and a tireless spirit, he has described this annual baseball ritual as a romantic interlude, more experience than sport, that surely can’t be as romantic as Angell makes it seem.

5th June 2020

Last known Confederate combat casualty will get a new burial in Munford 155 years after death

MUNFORD — As a child, Jo Ann Fambrough never heard of Confederate Lt. Andrew Jackson Buttram or his battlefield death along a road not far from today’s Munford Town Hall. She was raised in Munford, schooled in Munford and now she’s Munford’s mayor. For years, though, she was oblivious.

The Hardball Times • 25th June 2020

Baseball, You Make It Hard to Love You

One afternoon last week I opened my laptop and spent way too much money on tickets to far too many spring training games and an overpriced West Palm Beach, Fla., hotel room for my upcoming baseball holiday. And then I read the news.

5th June 2020

Before he was Santa, LaFain Freeman was a first-hand witness to Alabama’s tumultuous ’60s

Let’s ask Santa Claus how old he is. “I’m older than dirt,” he says, which is neither self-deprecating nor a pejorative. “As Santa Claus, I’m 1,784 (years old), born in 235 A.D. in a small town called Myra in east Asia. It’s now in Turkey and the town is called Demre. Now that’s as Santa.” Let’s again ask Santa Claus how old he is. “As a man, I’m 79.”

5th June 2020

AT A LATER DATE: For years after Alabama's statehood, Native Americans held on to sovereignty in the east

Even Alabama’s bicentennial celebration is typical Alabama: complicated and complex, prone to historical revisionisms and grade-school explanations. If 200 years of Alabama history are fraught with shades of gray — in civil rights, in politics — the observance of the state’s birth is just as murky.

5th June 2020

Veterans Day 2019: A century ago, with Congress' blessing, immigrants became soldiers

On two May weekdays in 1918, hundreds of men gathered at one of Camp McClellan’s newly built post exchanges. Their voices gave them away, Poles and Russians and Greeks and Italians along with the sounds of other native accents. They were soldiers in the U.S. Army. They wore American uniforms. But they weren’t Americans.

5th June 2020

Barber seminary a landmark institution for Anniston's black citizens

On a spring day in 1896, Daisy Reese stood high atop an Anniston hill alongside a notable gathering of white pastors and Northern Presbyterians and black residents who lived nearby. The westward view was exquisite. Reese was about 10, her parents born in Georgia before the Civil War and likely into slavery. Daisy was “a little negro girl,” as one of the city’s newspapers, The Hot Blast, described her.

5th June 2020

FORGOTTEN DEAD: Commissioner wants to preserve site where soldiers were buried two centuries ago

RAGLAND — There’s a spot along the Coosa River, not far from a dynamited lock and an Alabama Power Co. dam, where the bones of dead soldiers in pinch-toe coffins are arranged in military rows below the wooded surface of St. Clair County. Getting there requires permission, a tour guide, a machete and a gallon of insect repellant.

5th June 2020

FOOTBALL SPOUSES: Being married to the coach has its ups and downs

There’s so much that Rachel Smith could say about being the wife of a high school football coach. It would be part explanation, part joyous affirmation, even a slight warning about the hours and the pressure, the Friday nights and the comments, mostly polite, the victories and losses and lifetime friendships made along the way. But no one is prepared for it. It’s impossible.

5th June 2020

Here’s the steeple! Calhoun County churches differ on what’s up top

The steeple atop Pastor Ronny Moore’s sanctuary was tall and sleek, a skyward beacon easily seen among the hills surrounding West Point Baptist Church in Jacksonville. Its color mimicked the clouds above. Windows adorned each side. At its apex stood a simple cross. Today, it’s gone, a casualty of the March 2018 tornado that devastated much of northern Calhoun County.

25th June 2020

Home Run: Kerry Cobb

When Kerry Cobb talks baseball, his pace quickens and his voice rises. Here calls his first hit in T-ball. He reminisces about controlling games from the mound. He admires baseball’s nuances and strategies and the tough-love lessons it teaches about failure and redemption.

5th June 2020

Horses, iron and Anniston: Sam Noble’s aging scrapbook is a window into the city father's mind

Samuel Noble, the English-born industrialist who built cannons for the Confederacy before building Anniston, was a scrapbooker. Who knew?