FABULOUS LEE COUNTY

1. TWINKLE TWINKLE
Question: A truck loaded with six hundred hand-blown glass pieces leaves Seattle, Washington, on a Monday at 10 a.m., travels at an average speed of fifty miles per hour across nine states, scaling mountains, bumping over train tracks, and dodging potholes, and arrives in Auburn, Alabama, on Thursday at 1:00 p.m. How many pieces of glass are broken in the trip?

Answer: Not one.

The truck carried a half-ton of orbs and twirled tubes of glass, wrapped and packed like your grandmother’s Sunday china, in special shipping boxes. Together they would form a six-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle from the Seattle studio of famed contemporary glass artist Dale Chihuly. Named Amber Luster, this seventeen-by-seven-foot chandelier now fills the museum’s forty-five-foot rotunda. Chihuly designed the three-tiered sculpture — a gift from Auburn alumnus John H. Hughes and family — specifically for the space, and today its lavender, olive, yellow and gold-leaf glass shivers in the museum light,

Chihuly relies on a team of glassblowers, artist and artisans to bring his ideas to life. Six glass experts work on each sculpture. He stopped blowing glass after a serious car accident in 1976 left him blind in one eye. The resulting impaired depth perception made blowing glass too dangerous.

The glass artists blew six different shapes to form Amber Luster. Then, still in Seattle, they wired the shapes to a large metal frame. This is no hang-by-number operation. The pieces aren’t assigned spots, so the chandelier takes shape as the artisans work under Chihuly’s direction. Placing each curlicue and globe of glass just so is what makes a Chihuly a Chihuly.

When the work was finished and approved by the museum, all six hundred pieces were taken down, wrapped in bubble wrap and tucked into boxes with special compartments to protect each delicate piece. The studio’s shipping department is good at what it does; only one percent of its shipments ever break.

Three members of the team that built the sculpture ride with it to construct it again in its new home. Since the parts aren’t numbered, no piece goes up the same way it came down, but the traveling artists can reassemble from memory and by eye.

Hanging Amber Luster was a four-day event. Each piece of glass was placed on a thick blanket on the museum floor and organized for the installation. The artists spent days and days at the top of scissor lifts wiring each piece in place. The result was an important acquisition for the museum and dazzling artwork that everyone should see. It’s waiting for you right inside the front door.

2. NOTES TO SWING BY
They’ve played with Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra. Grammy winner Toni Tennille launched her career with them. Some went on to perform with Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Lawrence Welk, and Gene Krupa. In its seventy-nine year history, the Auburn Knights Orchestra launched music careers and paid college tuition for scores of members while it made a name for itself throughout the South.

The group was born in 1930 when student musicians at Alabama Polytechnic Institute decided they could put together a great band with local talent. Today, some believe it to be the oldest big band organizations in the world.

The band toured in the summer and during breaks, playing swing music at clubs and beach resorts, growing in popularity not only with listeners and dancers, but with the professional musicians who came to hear the big band from Alabama.

Jack Dresher of Auburn, who played string bass with the Knight’s from 1950 to 1954, remembers those years as the orchestra’s heyday. From the moment classes ended for the term, the orchestra members rode the bus from venue to venue.

“We worked Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, Baton Rouge, all over the Southeast,” he said.

“When we were not in school we were on the road, sleeping on the bus, staying in motels. We were young enough we could handle it,” he said. Dresher, who retired from advertising and marketing at Callaway Gardens in 1997, still performs, these days with his jazz trio at The Ariccia Restaurant at the hotel at Auburn University.
“I proposed to my wife on the bus in Atlanta, Georgia,” Dresher said. He’d met his wife, Lynn, also an Auburn student, in class. “I popped the question. She said yes, and we’ve been married 55 years.”

During the school year, the Knights had a musical monopoly. “We were the only dance band on campus, and the fraternities and sororities all had spring balls, and we got them all. We worked every Friday and Saturday on campus in March, April, and May. It put me through school, totally,” Dresher said.
Dresher related the story of how orchestra leader Dorsey and crooner Sinatra ended up sitting in with the Auburn Knights in 1942. Both Dorsey’s band and the Knights were playing at clubs in Virginia Beach on a Sunday night. The Dorsey band stopped playing at midnight, while the Knights were just getting started — they were in a town where liquor was banned on Sunday, thus the midnight timing.

Dorsey’s band “heard about the band down the street and Tommy came down, and Frank Sinatra, and Buddy Rich, the drummer,” and all three performed with the group.
Although the Knights is primarily made up of Auburn University students, the band has no formal ties to the school. Membership is open to any community resident, with auditions whenever the band has an opening.

“We had a lot of fun,” Dresher said, and the musicians formed friendships that continue today. “It’s been a very, very close-knit group of people, probably more than any fraternity.”

3. PARSLEY HAWTHORN
Crataegus marshalii

The leaves that often look just like Italian parsley gave this flowering tree its common name, says Dee Smith, curator for Auburn University’s Donald E. Davis Arboretum. But the tree with the pretty peeling bark is a member of the rose family, with an early spring bloom reminiscent of an apple or peach blossom. A few birds like the red fruit that follows the flowers, and so do larval gray hairstreak butterflies, a lovely little blue-gray butterfly with bright orange patches on its hindwing. That wing also has a little tail. The butterfly is not often seen in Lee County. So when homeowners plant this tree, they’re encouraging not only a native species of plant, but an uncommon butterfly as well. “Plant choice can really make an impact on a lot of things,” Smith said. The shrubby tree will grow to 20 feet and does best in shade.

4. ROGER BROWN
When they were boys in Opelika, growing up on Glenn Street, Roger Brown and his brother Greg would make cars out of cardboard boxes. Other boxes became television sets or puppet theaters.
And as Roger Brown grew up, he took that play of his childhood, mixed it with an abiding love of Alabama and Southern culture, and turned it into internationally celebrated artwork, collected by experts and museums, and twice published as Time magazine covers.

“What he liked to do as a kid influenced his later work – comic books and stamp collections and chemistry sets, and liking to go to Godzilla movies,” says Greg, an artist who lives in Montgomery.
The figures in Roger Brown’s paintings often seem like they’re on stage: They’re often silhouettes in windows, like the silhouetted figures in the windows of old toys, Greg says.
When Roger Brown died in 1997 just before his 56th birthday, he was about to complete another chapter tying together his art and his Southern heritage. He was a week from signing the papers on what the Brown brothers called The Rock House, an 1870s stone house in Beulah that Roger had grown up admiring.

“We always called it the Rock House when we were kids. When he was a teenager, I remember, we’d go inside. It was abandoned. He was always kind of fascinated by it. Both of us thought, wouldn’t it be great to have this and restore it?”

But Roger was dying from complications arising from human immunodeficiency virus.

“I was with him a day or two before he died,” Greg said. “It was one of his death-bed things. I said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to get the Rock House,’” and Greg and his father, James Brown, bought and restored the building, staying as close to Roger’s plans as possible. Roger’s father owned James Brown Groceries, as well as a restaurant, down the street from the Lee County Courthouse. Both parents are dead, his father in 2008, his mother Elizabeth Palmer Brown in 2006.

Today, Brown's work is in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Hirshhorn hosted major retrospectives of his work. And today, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago maintains a study collection of Brown’s work.

Greg says his brother was influenced by the conservative Church of Christ upbringing, the handmade goods of his extended family, and nurtured by a mother who saved every scrap of artwork the brothers produced. Both brothers were influenced by their Opelika teacher, Loneta Mason.

Also influential was Roger Brown’s persistent study of family history. He compiled three one-inch thick volumes documenting the family for 500 years. Some of that genealogy turned into paintings, most notably a painting of the maps of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee inscribed with a family tree, with one branch leading to Alabama and a portrait of the artist, and the other to Mississippi and a portrait of Elvis.

“On my mother’s side, five or six generations back, in the early 1800s, we had a great, great, great grandmother named Mourning Dove, who was a Cherokee Indian.” Mourning Dove was also the ancestor of Elvis Presley.

“It really isn’t all that uncommon,” Greg says. “With everybody having twelve kids, multiply twelve by twelve by twelve, that’s a lot of people over several generations.”

What was really important about that discovery, and all the discoveries in the varied family tree, was the sense of personal history it created.

“I think Roger understood what kind of principles, what kind of values, where the creativity and aesthetics and where the imagination came from. It came from pioneer people, people who built cabins with their bare hands, who quilted, who made things,” Greg says.

"He was always proud to be from Alabama. He always identified with the creative people from Alabama, like Truman Capote and Hank Williams. He had the strength of character; he had a sense of goodness and sharing that Alabama gives you.”

5. SOARING LEE COUNTY STYLE
When it’s gameday in Auburn, the skies bear witness, and tiny Auburn-Opelika Airport fills with more than 200 planes bringing Auburn University fans home to cheer for the Tigers.

The airport off Glenn Road is an Auburn University-owned gem, even though people tend to forget it’s there. Auburn football, yes. The Airport? Not so much.

Bill Hutto, the airport director since 2001, says the ease of access the airport provides is incentive to large corporations hoping to bring manufacturing plants and jobs to the Lee County area. Representatives for large companies like Briggs and Stratton and Michelin Tire regularly fly in and out of the airport.

“People don’t realize how much commerce aviation facilities generate,” Hutto said. “It’s an economic development tool.” In fact, the airport generates $19.3 million in economic benefit around Lee County, according to a 2002 study by the Alabama Department of Transportation.

With nearly 6,500 takeoffs and landings each year, the Auburn-Opelika Airport is a bustling member of the community.

“We try to be a good neighbor,” Hutto said. The airport generates most of its $3.3 million budget through fuel sales and airport services, although it does receive about $20,000 from Auburn, additional funding from Opelika and $30,000 from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The airport is undergoing a face-lift: a new terminal building to replace the dinky 1950s-era building.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Hutto said. “We always want to put our best foot forward, and right now we are not leaving a good impression of the community. We hope the new building will make a great impression.”

Hutto said that many more projects are on the drawing board to improve the community airport. He’s hoping the plans include commercial flights to keep East Alabamians from commuting nearly two hours to the nearest commercial airport in Atlanta or Birmingham.
The airport is home to aspiring pilots as well. Auburn University’s aviation program students earn their wings at the airport. The airport also hosts pilot training for people who don’t belong to the university.

“I get to interact with many wonderful people on local and state levels,” Hutto said. “It’s not a boring job. It’s different everyday and full of wonderful challenges.”

6. CREATING CHEWACLA

Pete Turnham wanted to go to college. But he graduated from high school in 1939, and like millions of others living in the shadow of the Great Depression, college was an impossible dream.
His family needed him to help farm forty acres and some rented land in Chambers County. Like everybody else, they were poor.

Still, he appealed to his parents. “I told them I wanted to go to college real bad, and if they could release me from the farm, I would go to the CCC camp.” The CCC — the Civilian Conservation Corps — was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to keep Americans working. On March 31, 1933, Roosevelt created this peacetime army under the management of the War Department. Four thousand temporary and permanent CCC camps were scattered across the nation manned by three million recruits carrying picks and shovels instead of rifles, and building America’s state and national parks, bridges, dams, fish hatcheries, fire towers, roads, and lakes.

Alabama was home to one hundred of these camps, and Pete Turnham landed in the one just outside of Auburn, Camp # 4448 SP-12, established to build Chewacla State Park. Another CCC camp was on South College Street about a mile from downtown Auburn, according to a publication from The Heritage of Lee County.
Single, unemployed males, ages 18 to 25, could enlist in the CCC. For Turnham, it was near paradise.

“CCC was so much easier than farming. I sort of considered it a luxury. I was getting free clothes and free meals, and then getting paid for it. That was something,” he says. And each month, his parents received twenty-two dollars from his thirty-dollar pay, which made up a bit for losing one farm laborer.

Turnham, who went on to represent Lee County in the Alabama House of Representative for a record-breaking forty years, spent eighteen months as a CCC recruit at the Chewacla Camp. In the evening, he took classes at Auburn Polytechnic Institute. When his service ended, he worked as a night watchman at the camp, and went to school during the day.

“I bought a bicycle and rode from Chewacla to Auburn over gravel roads. … It was one of those things where you had to suffer a little bit to get what you wanted.” He wasn’t the only one attending college A Lee County Heritage publication showed men in both Lee County camps attended API.

The camps were organized like the military.

“At the beginning, it was like basic training,” Turnham explained. “We wore uniforms and were taught proper hygiene. We had to keep the barracks spotless, and couldn’t leave in the morning until our bunks were perfect,” he said.

The CCC boys ate in a mess hall and had three good meals a day. “For most of us, these were the first balanced meals of our lives,” Turnham said. “I think I weighed 115 when I joined the CCC. When I got out I weighed about 135.”

There was an infirmary with medics and a doctor on call, a library, movie nights, tennis courts, baseball and basketball. Local laymen held church services and Sunday school for the men in camp. There were chickens and hogs to care for — part of a training program that included basic reading and high school academics.
In the forty-hour work week, the men built parking lots, fireplaces, dams and bridges. They quarried stone, inspected trees for pests, built picnic tables, and created a lake. The men in the Auburn camp planted pine trees and kudzu for erosion control.

The Chewacla Camp closed in March, 1941, when the state park was completed. The “boys” had matured into men and their craftsmanship left a remarkable visual legacy that changed Lee County’s landscape.

7. AZALEA FOR EARLY SPRING
Piedmont azalea
Rhododendron canescens

Lee County is in bloom almost all year long with one species of native azalea or another, but the Piedmont azalea is among the first, opening its fragrant blossoms in March.

These sweet-smelling blooms range from white to pink to purple, but they’re most commonly pink. “They’re rather promiscuous,” says Dee Smith, curator for Auburn University’s Donald E. Davis Arboretum. “They’ll cross with each other easily, and sometimes they’re difficult to identify because the distinctive characteristics get mixed.” These azaleas will grow to about 15 feet.

8. OUR MOUTH FROM THE SOUTH

Auburn’s influence goes all the way up to the White House with Robert Gibbs, the trusted adviser and press secretary for the 44th President, Barack Obama.

Gibbs was born on March 29, 1971, in Auburn and spent his childhood and teenage years in the college town. Just take a look at the Facebook group, “I knew Robert Gibbs Back When…” and you’ll see how many friends he made during his years in Auburn. Betty Burgess, a member of the group and an English teacher at Auburn High School, described Gibbs as “very witty – a real sparkplug in the classroom.” Other friends from the Facebook group recall Gibbs accidentally running over a fishing boat while pulling skiers as a camp counselor at Camp Mac in Alabama’s Cheaha Mountains. Now Gibbs is known for being a sparkplug in the Democrat political arena. The New York Times reported last year during the Obama campaign that Gibbs is not known to have “his boss’s steady temperament.”

Gibbs started in politics during his time at North Carolina State University, serving as an intern to U.S. Rep. Glenn Browder, the Democrat who represented Alabama’s third district, which includes Lee County. After graduation, Gibbs became press secretary to Democrat U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge of North Carolina and U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings, D., North Carolina, in 1997 and 1998. In 2003, Gibbs served on John Kerry’s presidential campaign as an official spokesman. According to U.S. News and World Report, Gibbs quit Kerry’s campaign after Kerry fired a friend.
Gibbs went on to work for Obama in 2004 as an adviser during his senatorial campaign. Gibbs became close to the Obama family — in fact, the Obamas baby-sat Gibbs' son, Ethan, in August 2008. Obama brought Gibbs back on during his bid for the 2009 presidency as a communications director. Gibbs was quickly promoted to senior strategist.

Gibbs’ parents, Robert and Nancy, involved the budding Democrat in politics early on by taking him along to voting and election events. During his high school years, Gibbs played goalie on the Auburn High School Tigers team, the saxophone in the high school “B” band and railed his opponents on the debate team.

He graduated from college cum laude with a degree in political science.

Gibbs is known for his political prowess and passion. He showed what makes him a valuable spokesman when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity during Obama’s campaign. Hannity, who has a conservative talk show on the Fox News, said Obama was tainted because he served on the board of a charitable foundation with 1960s radical William Ayers. Ayers has never expressed regret for the violent actions of the Weather Underground, although Obama has publicly repudiated Ayers’ radical past. But Gibbs held Hannity to his own standard during the interview, suggesting the talk show host could be considered guilty of anti-Semitism by association. Hannity had built an entire episode of his show around an interview of a man named Andy Martin, a conspiracy theorist who has been widely quoted for making anti-Semitic comments.

In an article on Huffington Post.com, Jason Linkins described the exchange between Gibbs and Hannity as “precisely the sort of parry one wanted to see.”
As White House press secretary, Gibbs is responsible for all of the president’s official statements and press reports, but he is still a true Southerner telling the New York Times, “We help people understand the importance of college football and college basketball.”

9. LITTLE CHURCH ON THE HILL

Today, the white clapboard building with the square tower on East Thach Avenue is a Unitarian Universalist church, but its construction marked an important birth in the changing Southern landscape — the growth of the African-American church. After the Civil War, newly freed African-Americans built the community’s first black church around 1870.

In the years of slavery, most African-Americans worshipped either in secret meetings or on the periphery of the churches their “owners” took them to, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. The Cyclopedia of Colored Baptists of Alabama names Columbus, Georgia, native Thomas Glenn as pastor of Auburn’s first black congregation, and says the minister was “respected and trusted no less by his white neighbors then by his own people for his genuine piety and honorable life.”

The newborn church played a role in the growing black Baptist movement, sending delegates to the first Colored Baptist Convention in 1868, and supporting the construction of Selma University, first created to educate black clergy and freedmen. Later this congregation would support the establishment of a black school in Opelika, according to the Cyclopedia.
At the base of the slope beneath the church grew the city’s first cemetery used exclusively by blacks. Many of the more than 500 graves are unmarked, but the oldest date to 1879. Some stones are inscribed “born into slavery” or note that the grave was placed at the expense of a former master. Although the cemetery took its name from the nearby church, members of other African-American congregations are also buried there.

The cemetery is still used, and the city of Auburn maintains it, but its ownership is unknown.

Ebenezer Baptist Church held services on Thach Avenue until 1969 when the congregation moved to a new building on Pitt Street. The Auburn Heritage Association restored the old building, and the church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Baptist Hill Cemetery was added to the Alabama Register in 1994.

10. A SCENT OF LEMON IN APRIL
Alabama azalea
Rhododendron alabamense

This native species blooms in april with white flowers with a prominent yellow blotch and a faint lemon scent. Some consider it the most fragrant of the native azaleas.

It grows to 15 or 20 feet. Canoers on local creeks probably don’t realize they’re floating under these big shrubs if the azalea isn’t in bloom, says Dee Smith, curator for Auburn University’s Donald E. Davis Arboretum.

11. THE REAL DEAL
You might be surprised to find down-home country cooking just like your mama made in a strip mall on South College Street.

Pannie-George’s Kitchen, owned by Mary Counts and her mother, Lorine Askew, is named for Mary’s grandparents, Pannie and George Taylor. Her sisters Jereline Askew and Rewa Ford are part of the team. Jereline is in charge of public relations, and Rewa is the restaurant manager.

The three sisters and their mom do everything themselves—cook, serve, and clean. If you go in on a Thursday or Friday, Pannie will be there, but don’t expect to see her. She’ll be in the back, helping.
Ten years ago the women were pursuing careers with no thought of owning a restaurant. But they loved to cook and decided to fund a family reunion by selling meals to businesses. When they had all the money they needed, their customers wouldn’t let them quit, so the fund-raiser became a side business that had them cooking on their days off.
“We had first and second shifts because of our regular jobs,” said Mary Counts, a registered nurse in cardiology. “I was working ten-hour days at the hospital.”
The sales from this part-time endeavor provided the money for the restaurant that is now their livelihood. July marked its fifth anniversary.

Counts loves to cook; always has.

“It’s a God-given talent,” she says. She’s collected cookware and cookbooks for years. Although she uses recipes, she makes them her own. She calls herself a “recipe creator.”
The restaurant hasn’t stopped her from cooking at home. “I might cook linguini with clam sauce,” she said. “I have this kind of food all week.”

Counts’ mother and grandmother taught her to cook and she spent hours standing on a stool stirring pots on the stove. “Granny was a fantastic cook,” Mary said. When she, Rewa and Jerelene were children, they stayed with her at night while their mom worked. In the daytime, Mary watched her mother cook.

Their dad, Joe Askew, was a farmer in Camp Hill. Every season, he grew all they ate plus a little extra for people to steal, for deer to browse, and for donations to people in need. They canned and made preserves. The sisters learned all of these skills plus their dad’s work ethic.

“Running a restaurant is consuming,” Mary said. “You have to love it and find joy in it. We all have a passion for what we do.”

Although they’re closed on Saturday, they do a lot of catering. They’ve catered meals for as many as 2,000, but cater small events too.

The failing economy hasn’t hurt Pannie-Geroge’s Kitchen at all. “God has sustained this business,” Counts said.

If you grew up in the South, their meals will satisfy your longing for comfort food. And if you’re from some other part of the country, it’ll be a glorious christening into the world of authentic deep-South culinary delights.

12. A HOUSE WITH DEEP ROOTS

The original pine flooring in the Webster House on Highway 14 may have been trod by the Creek Indians who inhabited the area long before its current owners, Paul and Beverly Webster, were even born.

Deed records show that the first owners of the Webster House land were two Creek Indians Hick-co-ge and So-fum-gar. So-fum-gar, a Creek woman, acquired 332 acres of land in the Creek Treaty of 1832 during a time in which women did not own property, especially women of color.

Hand-cut logs in the attic of the two front rooms appear to reveal the workmanship of the home’s original Creek owners.

The Webster House passed through the hands of many more owners until Joe Webster bought it Sept. 4, 1922. He, his wife, and a herd of six boys kept the nearly 1,000 acre farm running, said Beverly Webster, its caretaker and next-door neighbor.

Paul, the youngest Webster son and current owner of the house, milked the family’s cows each morning and sold the milk to the Carnation Co. The family sold the harvest of its vegetable garden to local grocers and Auburn University fraternities.

During the Webster family’s 85-year ownership, six sharecropping families lived on the land. The Websters added a Greek Revival-style parlor, an entrance hall, a bedroom, a dining room and a sun porch to the original two rooms. They also built several buildings for farm equipment.

In 1977, Paul Webster’s wife, Beverly, and her parents, Berneece and B.C. Robertson, bought the house from Joe Webster’s estate to keep it in the family. The Websters maintain the house and host weddings, receptions, family reunions and other events there.

What’s the next step for an old family home that’s stood for 200 years?

“We’re trying to get it listed on the state historic register,” Beverly said.

13. THE STUTTERING COMIC

You might be from Opelika if …

You remember a policeman on a three-wheel motorcycle named Bye Bye Holt.

You remember when all the stores downtown closed on Wednesday afternoons.

You ever “parked” near the airport to make out.

Jody Fuller knows he’s from Opelika and isn’t afraid to say it all over the country and beyond.

This 36-year-old Opelika native has put his life on the line for the nation two times as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, dealt with a lifetime of stuttering, and manages to be pretty hilarious at the same time.

Fuller is a comedian with his own website, www.jodyfuller.com, where you can find his complete list of all the possible signs of being from Opelika.
When he was growing up, wise-cracking his way through school, people always told Fuller he should be a comedian.

You might be from Opelika if…

You know that “Fast Time” is Eastern Standard Time.

You hunted for candy Easter eggs in the Monkey Park.

You wondered why pizza from the school cafeteria was rectangular andalways served with whole kernel corn.

He finally took the recommendation to heart while serving in Iraq. His friends encouraged him to send a video in to the Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant Funniest Comic online competition. He made the top five and became known as The Stuttering Comic.

“That was cool,” Fuller said. “We rubbed shoulders with more experienced comics.”

Fuller plans to return to Opelika by the end of the year, just before he heads to Afghanistan for his third tour as an Army Reservist. At the moment, he’s dog-sitting in Shreveport, Louisianna.

You might be from Opelika if…
You ever saw someone with an address that included Lee Road and a number and thought to yourself, “Dang! A lot of people live on that road!”

When people called Auburn and Opelika the Twin Cities and you called Auburnthe “evil twin.”

You knew at least one kid who blew a couple of fingers off playing with a blasting cap.

He is always on the run. In February, Fuller went on a 25-date comedy tour to entertain overseas troops.
“Because of my ties to the military, it’s kind of my specialty,” the Army captain said.
He always represents his hometown, though, by wearing an Opelika T-shirt on nearly every comedy tour. He even wore it during his interview with Lee Magazine.
Fuller would like to return to his community after his time in Afghanistan, settle down and raise a family. He’s single and has a 12-year-old Labrador retriever named Chynna.
“My friends think that traveling and doing the comedy thing is cool, but they don’t see that they get to play catch with their son,” Fuller explains.

You might be from Opelika if…
You ever snuck through the woods at the end of Jollit Avene to try to sneak a peek at “Norma Rae” being filmed in those old white houses.

You remember going to school on a Saturday in 1983. It was to make up for a snow day.

You were introduced to Mexican food via the taco salad in an Opelika CitySchool System lunch room.

The Stuttering Comic would have much to teach a son of his own through his own life lessons and struggles with stuttering.

He and his older brother both grew up with a stuttering problem, but his brother suddenly grew out of it at the age of 12. Fuller thought he would too, but that day never came.
He overcame his shyness and insecurities by volunteering to read aloud in class during his younger years and by coming up with funny quips to combat bullies.
“I decided that it was something that was going to be with me forever, so I took control of myself,” Fuller said.

Now he travels on his comedy tours bringing laughter and inspiration to others through his personal conquest.

“It’s a blessing to inspire others,” he said.

You might be from Opelika if…
You ever rode in the Santa rocket-mobile.

You got your wrists slapped with two spit-covered fingers because you lost atrocks, papers, scissors.

You remember taking the test in Mrs. Boothe’s class where she emphasized that we read the directions first. No one did in my class. They said we didn’t have to take the test.

You get free tires because you have family out at the plant.

You remember when the tornado blew the air conditioner off the roof at Uniroyal.

You ever washed your car the Goo Goo..

You know Opelika is mentioned in the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been EverywhereMan.” It’s in the sixth verse, just past the 2 minute mark. “Chaska, Nebraska, Alaska, Opelika.”

You recognize all of the film sites in “Norma Rae.”

You remember that The Commodores played for the Opelika High School prom in 1974 right before they hit it big with “Brick House.”

You knew Opelika meant “Big Swamp” before Harley Davidson came to town.

You’ve ever heard the word “only-est.”

You remember Hurricane Eloise in 1975.

You heard the mill horn going off at 3 p.m. and sped through because you didn’t want to get caught up in the mill traffic.

You know more than five guys named Bubba. — List by Jody Fuller.

14. SUMMER SWEETIE
Sweet Hammock Azalea
Rhododendron arborescens

Reputed to have the strongest and sweetest scent of all the native azaleas, this Lee County native blooms in May and June. Found as far north as Pennsylvania, the petals of these smallish blooms are white, sometimes with a blush of pink, and the stamens and stigma are red.

15. THE ROCKY BROOK ROCKET

It’s a toy, right?

It’s little, right?

So, how much work can it be to keep a pipsqueak train choo-chooing?

“It takes a good ten to twelve person team to keep it running and do the maintenance and do the actual driving and everything in between,” says Reed Pope, Opelika municipal area supervisor.
If you grew up any time during the last 54 years in Lee County, you probably remember your first ride on the Rocky Brook Rocket. But this charming train that rolls through Opelika Municipal Park, into a tunnel, and over Rocky Brook Creek, actually requires a lot of TLC.

The train came to be when Opelika’s first full-time director of parks and recreation, W.C. “Bill” Calhoun, wanted to create a unique attraction after I.J. Scott Winston Smith T Sr. donated a 21-acre wooded lot to Opelika in 1951. Seven Opelika civic clubs paid for the train and created the Opelika Civic Clubs Scenic Railroad Association, with one member of each club forming the board.

Some ten thousand dollars was pledged for the project to purchase of a 43-foot train, 1,130 feet of track, and materials to put the train in operation. The Miniature Train & Railroad Company in Indiana made every detail of it to a 16-to-1 ratio of the modern diesel locomotive of the time. “Central of Georgia” donated cross-ties, built the bridges, and laid the track at no cost to the city. By 1955, the train was running.

Fifth-grader David McGinty submitted the winning name for the train, winning a one-year pass. The train was christened with a bottle of fresh, cool creek water from the park at the opening ceremony on July 8, 1955.

H.J. Freeman, a 34-year employee of the railroad ran the train, maintained it, and repaired the track. The price for a ride was 15-cents for three trips around the park. Between July ’55 and Oct. ’55, the train made $602.25.

Keeping the train running requires just as much cooperation as it did getting it started. There just aren’t many parts available for a 54-year-old train, although the engine can use some auto shop parts, Pope said.

Chuck Sanders spent 43 years working for the Norfolk Southern Railroad, inspecting and repairing track, and these days he does the same for the rocket. In 2008 he Curtis “Bruno” Prince inspected the track and replaced seventy-five percent of the crossties with the help of the city and financial support of the Rotary Club.

When the ties rot and the tracks slip, the train may slip off the track. It was often out of commission during the 1990s. Although it returned to service last year, it was sidelined again for a few weeks this summer when it jumped the tracks, damaging the drive shaft and the brakes, Pope said.

But with the right amount of babying, the train chugs on. Every day the crew checks the track to make sure there are no obstructions — children occasionally stack stones on the track. “Ninety-nine percent of the time that doesn’t hurt anything,” Pope says. “We just like to be careful.” Often Prince and Sanders inspect the rail to make sure it’s stable. Then when the kids hop on for a ride, the Rocket doesn’t exactly rocket.

“We don’t race it. We don’t try to race the kids as they run beside us. We have to take it easy on the curve.”

16. A JEWEL OF A PARK

An expanse of green grass, tall trees and damp, wooded walking trails make up part of the 124 acres of Kiesel Park in Lee County.

It’s not just two-and-a-quarter miles of trail strolling. For dogs, it’s paradise at Kiesel’s doggie off-leash playground, complete with obstacle course. But it’s strictly BYOF (Bring Your Own Frisbee). When the weather is fine, you’ll find more dogs in this fenced area than you’ll find in the entire Petco chain.

If you want to escape all that noisy barking, the Nunn-Winston House on the park grounds is worth a look. This antebellum Greek Revival was built in the 1850s on South Gay Street in Auburn but moved to this location in 1996. Samuel Nunn built the Gay Street home for his family when they moved to Auburn from Tuskegee. Nunn, one of Auburn’s first settlers, was an early trustee of Auburn Male College, a predecessor of Auburn University. The Winston in the home name comes from Civil War veteran Thomas Harris Winston and his wife Cathleen Shealy Winston who moved to the home in 1887 from Cusseta.

17. AUTUMN BEAUTY
Plum Leaf Azalea
Rhododendron prunifolium

The rarest of the Lee County azaleas, the plum leaf azalea puts out its orange-red blossoms in the fall — unusual for azaleas. It grows only along the Alabama-Georgia border, and reaches about 18 feet., says Dee Smith, curator of Auburn University’s Donald E. Davis Arboretum.

It was unknown until roughly the early 1900s. Unlike earlier blooming species, this azalea is fairly stable, since there no other azalea blooms late in year prohibiting any cross pollination.

18. CAN’T TOP THIS

It’s the best. Everyone says so.

Golf World Magazine readers made it official when they voted Robert Trent Jones at Grand National the No. 1 public golf course in the country this year. Readers judged everything from value and playability to the clubhouse and dining. Results: They love us! They really love us!

Grand National is just one of ten golf clubs in the Robert Trent Jones Trail. Creating a string of top-quality courses was the brainstorm of Dr. David Booner, chief executive officer of the state retirement system. He saw a necklace of top-notch golf courses as a tourist magnet. To make his plan work, he knew he needed the best golf course architect. Premier designer Robert Trent Jones came out of semi-retirement to take on the challenge of building the trail’s ten clubs.

It would be the largest golf course construction project in the world. To move that amount of earth, it took all seven hundred pieces of heavy equipment in the state. It was the Woodstock of bulldozers.

Grand National includes three courses, Link, Lake, and The Short Course. That’s fifty-four challenging holes skirting a six-hundred-acre, golf-ball eating lake. According to golf.com, when the course was finished, Jones called it the most spectacular golf site in the world.

Keeping its lush velvet beauty is no easy feat. It takes thirty groundskeepers, working every day, using thirty different kinds of mowers, eight tractors, and rollers.

The design takes advantage of the natural terrain, with the courses draped over hills and valleys that were already there. Look outside the backdoor of the clubhouse to see what was here before the golf course grew. There, a stone chimney and hearth is testament to Henry Lipscomb, the newly freed slave who bought this land for a dollar an acre. The chimney is all that’s left of the home where his son Johnny and Johnny’s wife, Bessie, raised seventeen children. The family probably grew corn and cotton on the six-hundred acres.

In the 1940s, the Lipscomb family sold parcels of the property to the Opelika Water Works Board. When Grand National was proposed, the board donated the land for the project. That generosity brought the area the best public golf course in the country.

But the people who worked that long-ago farm continue to leave their mark. The Dowdell family: father Pompy, wife Susan, and children Silas, Pompy, and Mary, were freed slaves who worked for Johnny Lipscomb. Tucked in a strip of woods between the Lake’s 17th and 18th hole is Mary Dowdell’s grave. The sweet little tombstone says that she died in 1905 at the age of ninety-five. Legend has it that Mary is a golfing force to contend with, and golfers often blame her for their poor play. They should be nice to Mary Dowdell. After all, she got there first.

19. PLANTING HISTORY

In 1896 cotton covered Lee County.

“It’s hard for us to imagine today, but Lee County probably had 60,000 acres of cotton. Today, there are probably less than two thousand,” said Charles C. Mitchell Jr., professor of agronomy and soils with the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service at Auburn University.

But even with all that cotton, farmers were going broke, Mitchell said. That’s why J.F. Duggar started a crop experiment that continues today. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. This single acre is more than history. The Old Rotation, along with the Cullers Rotation — which will have its one hundredth birthday in two years — have grown heaps of knowledge, knowledge that folks like Mitchell continue to harvest.

In its 113-year history, The Old Rotation revolutionized cotton farming, perhaps most profoundly in how it demonstrated what Duggar said right from the start: “Alabama agriculture will come into its own when her fields are green in winter.”

“It’s taken us a hundred years to realize he was right,” Mitchell said. “But if you plant something in wintertime, it holds the soil together, it adds nutrients. He demonstrated that rather quickly. It took almost a hundred years for farmers to adopt it.”

Among the things the Old Rotation showed:
•Crop rotation doesn’t do much to improve cotton yields, although it’s essential for corn and soybeans.
•Cotton does not wear out the soil, as everyone thought. “It wasn’t the crop that was hard on the land; it was the way they farmed.” In the long run, this led to no-till farming, which spares the soil.
•Irrigation can make a dramatic difference in multi-year droughts, but deep-rooted cotton can get along without it for longer than most crops.
•The more organic material the soil contains — plants and roots from previous seasons — the better the crop yield.

The Cullers Rotation was created to look at the benefit of fertilizer. It proved that potassium — in the form of potash — was an essential soil amendment.
“It created the fertilizer industry,” Mitchell said.

“Visitors from all over the world come here and that’s what they want to see, they want to see these two experiments,” Mitchell said. In fact, with improved farming practices throughout the South, the Cullers Rotation is one of the few places you can see what potassium deficiency looks like.

The Old Rotation is the oldest continuous experimental cotton field in the world. The very oldest experimental field for any crop is in England, and was created in 1843.

20 BLUEBERRIES !

Out along Lee County Road 54 there is a small sign that says “BLUEBERRIES,” with an arrow pointing to a gravel drive. It’s a modest sign but the bounty at the end of that gravel drive is fabulous. Zack Randle and his family own Randle Farms, 9215 Society Hill Road, and what they offer is far more than just the sweet blue morsel. Looking out over the rolling hills of their property is so peaceful, it’s no wonder spring brings a pilgrimage of blueberry pickers to indulge in this crop.

Randle’s offers baked goods on several Saturdays in late spring, made by Pat Randle with the homegrown blueberries. They offer fresh eggs, pork sausage and seasonal vegetables. One more plus in this little heaven is Reba Williams, also known as, “The Bread Lady,” who has a table loaded with wonderful fresh breads. Not only did she bake the loaves, she processed the grain herself. Can anyone say YUM?