Jim Hildenbrand
Hurricane Frances & Jeanne Survivor
Melbourne, FL

It’s 93 degrees and the sun is pounding down on Osceola County, which has the miserable distinction of being in the path of three hurricanes. Branches litter the side of the road, signs are blown over, and tarps cover numerous roofs. Cops patrol the area in swarms. Driving down the highway gives a sensation of vertigo because the trees lean left and right, distorting your sense of what is up.

Further south in Melbourne, the story is much the same. The Red Cross is running four shelters for displaced families, and the Salvation Army and other charities are dispensing food, water and ice. Power hasn’t been restored fully, and the electric company is announcing that another week may pass before power is back to all residences.

There is definite destruction, but having toured the area, I think the media has a tendency to show the worst of the worst -- The house with no roof and one wall, the people getting around their street in a boat. The reality is that $8 billion in damage isn’t a whole community of houses that no longer exist. It’s a roof here, a car there, etc. And the structures that had fallen over completely that I witnessed were generally old and poorly constructed. That isn’t to downplay the destruction because clearly, thousands of people are severely affected, like Jim Hildenbrand who lost two roofs to Jeanne and Frances. It’s simply proof of man’s need for sensationalism, which is fed and fueled by the media.

The flip side of this partial exploitation is the enormous goodwill that is generated by these events. Clear Channel Outdoors loaded up old vinyl signs on a truck and drove them down from Charlotte as Jeanne, the tropical depression, moved northward, to hand out in Melbourne at a Clear Channel radio station for free. People were lined up to get these large pieces of vinyl to use as tarps on their houses.

Across the parking lot, volunteers had showed up to wash down cots that were being transferred from one facility to another. A Greensboro Salvation Army chapter left a food truck at a nearby mall so that volunteers from Cocoa, FL could help serve the residence of Melbourne.

Normalcy will eventually return and as one commentator pointed out, things tend to be better after disasters because of the “Jacuzzi Effect,” – i.e. people figure as long as their rebuilding, they might as well thrown in the Jacuzzi as well. Hopefully, Florida will be spared for the rest of the season, although by everyone’s account, they are getting awfully adept at managing crises. They might need that skill when election time rolls around…

Juan O. Perkins
Kelly Ingram Park
Birmingham, AL

I’ve been to many museums in my lifetime. Of course, New York has dozens of the world’s best, and I’ve made trips to DC and to places around the world, but none has struck me as being so profound as the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham. I entered the facility on a Sunday, and was immediately ushered into a small theater to watch an introductory film. Suddenly the screen lifted to reveal the exhibit hall, and an elderly black man was waiting for us.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether he was going to guide us through the exhibit, and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to be led. But I stuck with him for a few minutes as he explained how restaurants were segregated (yeah, yeah), and water fountains (yeah, yeah). Then he came to a picture of two children being followed by there father. They were contesting the rights of blacks to attend a white school in Birmingham in 1957. The father was James Armstrong, our guide.

He fought for the right of his children to attend schools following the Brown v. Board of Education landmark ruling, and it wasn’t until 6 years later that his second set of children were finally allowed into a school, disputing the notion that “separate but equal” approached anything remotely fair and just.

The experience would be akin to going to the Holocaust Museum in DC and being greeted by survivors, but of course, they are too old now. But the Civil Rights movement was only 40 years ago, and the thousands of young men and women who took a part in the marches are still very much alive and well, and fortunate to see how much Birmingham has changed since the 60s.

The last part of the exhibit was a looped broadcast of the “I Have a Dream” speech. I had never seen more than the last few sound bites. The speech, in its entirety, is amazing not only for what it says, but because King was such a magnificent speaker, and at a time when the notion of a “sound bite” didn’t even exist. He had no professional speech writer. He had no teleprompter, and he barely references his notes. He spoke from the heart in front of 200,000 people, and changed the world.

As I went back to Kelly Ingram Park, the site of so many civil rights incidences (like the unleashing of German Shepards on the black activists), a homeless came up to me to take me on a tour (of course, he expected some compensation at the end). He alleges to have taken a part in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) march in May of 1963, when the children of Birmingham were called to take action because the adults of the movement were depleted from arrests. Juan O. Perkins later joined the Air Force and spent two years in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, and two years in Europe before returning to the US. He followed a circuitous path that took him to San Francisco to earn an Associates degree in accounting, then back to Birmingham where he raised a family, and worked in various capacities. But times have been hard as the once industrial city has turned more high tech, and for the past year, he has slept on the streets, awaiting notification from the Veterans Association to treat his prostate cancer.

Perkins knew quite a bit about the origins of the park, which was reborn as a memorial park in the early 80s. It features a number of sculptures including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and numerous references to the four young girls killed when a bomb was detonated at the 16th Street Baptist Church. He even walked me over to the Church to show me the cracks in the wall that was rebuilt. The irony, he claims, was that the Church rejected him as a member because in the early 60s, its membership consisted of affluent and lighter-skinned blacks, but as a result of the bombing, it became a symbol of the fight against oppression.

“Are you clean?” I asked before handing him some money.

“You mean drugs? I don’t even drink…I do smoke reefer though.”

I laughed. If all he told me was true, then perhaps he earned the right to smoke a little reefer now and then.

Birmingham isn’t at all what I expected. The downtown area is a bit depressed, as downtowns of old cities tend to be. But the outlying suburbs sprawl for miles and are quite cosmopolitan in nature, where upscale malls near new developments are du jour.

Mercedes Benz has its only US-based manufacturing plant in nearby Vance, in Tuscaloosa county where they produce the M-Class SUV. Interestingly enough, the Tuscaloosa plant wasn’t the first. That distinction belongs to the only other Mercedes plant that was formerly located on Long Island, NY, courtesy of William Steinway of piano fame, who licensed the engine technology from Gottlieb Daimler. The “American Mercedes” was produced in the plant from 1904 to 1907 when a fire destroyed the factory.

Miss Daisy
277 Muddy Bayou Rd
Rodney, MS

The only road through Rodney, MS is made of dirt, just like all the roads that lead to Rodney (there are two). And near the end of the road is an old house with a tin roof that has stood since 1935 when Miss Daisy moved to Rodney. Life was different back then, when the Mississippi rolled a little closer to the small town, and the street was lined with houses and even a drug store, but no more. Miss Daisy surmises that after World War II, all the white folk left for the cities, and even the “colored” folk followed.

That’s how it is down here near the Mississippi.

A hundred miles north lies the Mississippi Delta, the most fertile region west of the Nile, with topsoil some 27 feet deep in some areas. Cotton grows in abundance in towns with immensely rich histories of Southern grandeur and wealth, as well as the undercurrent of racism that permeated and came to an apex in the civil rights battle of the 1960s.

Miss Daisy was, understandably, surprised to see me. My friend, Suzy, told me about Rodney several months ago when I told her about “America Is.” More recently, she told me to take some chew toys for Miss Daisy’s dog. So I stopped by the Wal-Mart and picked up some rawhide and Milkbones, and when I stopped to ask where Miss Daisy lived, she called at me from the porch, and exclaimed, “I’m Daisy!”

We spoke for about 20 minutes and she recanted stories of her youth, and she marveled at how the machines picked and baled cotton nowadays, in contrast to toiling in the fields with a sack slung over her back. Finally, she got tired and headed into her home. I joked with her that maybe I would see her again, and she replied with a smile, “You probably will. I ain’t going anywhere.”

Sports Illustrated’s Bill Frakes went to Ole Miss for law school in the 70s, and when he heard that I was driving through his old stomping grounds, he promptly directed me to Oxford, MS over to City Grocery for lunch (Verdict? Delicious), and Square Books to pick up “Sons of Mississippi.” He told me that if I was off to Rodney “on a lark,” that the book would help contextualize the things I would see on my way down there.


I stopped at a local community center in Port Gibson, the town that U.S. Grant allegedly claimed was “too beautiful to burn.” Patricia Crosby started the center 25 years ago with her husband, who had received a professorship at the Alcorn State College down the road. The white couple in a predominantly black community, enrolled their two children in the all-Black school, and Gibson created the Mississippi Cultural Crossroads to “promote the educational, cultural and economic development of the citizens of Claiborne County.” But times are tough, and their state budget was slashed from $25,000/year to $10,000, while their city budget was cut from $10,000 to nothing. Unable to make her payroll for the upcoming week, she shrugs her shoulders a bit. “The people in the community are deeply religious,” she tells me. They expect a gift from God to save the center, but don’t realize that Patty is the catalyst for fundraising.

On my way southbound, I landed on the Natchez Trace Parkway, an old Indian trail turned scenic highway. Think Pacific Coast Highway meets the lush Mississippi forest. The drive was truly beautiful, and like the PCH, there is very little traffic.

I crossed the bridge from Natchez over to Vidalia, LA to watch the Vidalia Vikings play the Rayville Hornets in a lopsided, Friday night prep football game. It was my first high school football game, played on a dark field, while the home band played in what could only be accurately described as desafinado, or slightly out-of-tune. Like my arena football, my high school football photography needs work.

It’s good to be back on the road again. I took the same path from New York to Memphis on the way down that John and I drove for the World Championships of Barbeque in May. I watched a spectacular fall sunset in West Virginia as I did a year earlier, and ate at the Boston Beanery restaurant in Morgantown.

I cruised by Vanderbilt University, and ate at Fido’s in Nashville. I sped on the police-free Bluegrass Parkway at odd hours of the morning, passing New Haven and Boston, Kentucky. And much to the chagrin of my stomach, I ate a Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal at McDonald’s.

I'm a sucker for little towns with cool names. The final pic: The little red schoolhouse from Little Red Schoolhouse, MS.