Alabama Short Stories

Andrew Jackson Beard was born a slave on a plantation near Pinson, Alabama. After gaining his freedom, he went on to become a farmer, millwright, and prolific inventor. Even though he could not read or write, Beard went on to own patents for plows, rotary engines and was to make trains safer and more efficient, becoming a millionaire in the process. This is his story on the Alabama Short Stories p...

This is our second story about Red Mountain this season and it is about the actual mountain. For decades there had been talk about tunneling through the mountain to help travelers coming from Homewood, Mountain Brook, and towns to the south. Officials even brought in a famous New York tunnel engineer to assess the plans. Finally, someone suggested they cut a slice out of the mountain and the rest...

Tuscumbia native Tom Hendrix had learned about his relatives through the stories his grandmother would tell him. A trip to Oklahoma and a meeting with a woman named Minnie Long would change the course of his life. 8.5 million pounds of stone later, Hendrix had finished a project to honor his great-great-grandmother Te-lah-nay. This is their story on this episode of the Alabama Short Stories podcas...

What do you do when it’s December 31, 1999, and the end of the world is upon you? You celebrate at Birmingham’s iconic The Club of course, where the view of the apocalypse is unsurpassed. This is the story of the private club, “The Club” and the Y2K problem when our robot-overlords would soon rise up. This is the first story of three that happen along Red Mountain in Birmingham on the Alabama Shor...

John Pratt lived in the sleepy town of Centre, Alabama where he was a writer, lawyer, and teacher. He eventually owned and edited the local paper. Pratt wrote a lot in his many careers. So much so that in an effort to cut down on the writer’s cramp, he invented a machine to write for him. In this episode of the Alabama Short Stories podcast, we learn about John Pratt’s road to inventing the typewr...

When you think of ice hockey, you don’t think of Birmingham, Alabama. At least you didn’t in the mid-1970s when the Birmingham Bulls of the WHA came to town. For the next few seasons, some of the greatest hockey players of all time would come to the civic center coliseum including Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, and the subject of this episode, Gordie Howe. In a professional career that started in 1946...

What do Erskine Hawkins, Sun Ra and Cleve Eaton all have in common? They were all students of Fess Whatley, famed Birmingham band leader at A.H. Parker High School. Whatley would end up training musicians that would populate some of the largest bands during his teaching tenure. Learn about Fess Whatley and student Erskine Hawkins in this, the first episode of Season 2 of the Alabama Short Stories...

Welcome to Alabama Short Stories Season 2. I’m your host, Shawn Wright. We have another season of great Alabama short stories that you may not have learned about in your Alabama Civics class or read in books.  We have stories about the inventor of the typewriter and the Janney coupler used on trains. Both men were successful in their own ways, and they came from entirely different backgrounds. I t...

Some of the people we will talk about on Alabama Shorts Stories are inventors. You may be surprised at all the items that were created right here in Alabama. The windshield wiper for instance. This simple idea was a game-changer and today we probably take the windshield wiper for granted. As the saying goes, "you don't miss it until they're gone."  In this final episode of seas...

Birmingham has its share of statues around town. There are statues of people in Kelly Ingram Park, Linn Park, the UAB campus, Samford's Campus, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Five Points South, Rickwood Field, and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. Even Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations is on 4th Avenue North at 18th Street. I could go on and on about statues around town.  The big three in Birm...

In an earlier episode of the Alabama Short Stories podcast, we talked about the painter William Frye. An artist who learned the ways of the masters at Heidelberg University in Prague, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and painted on traditional mediums such as stretched canvas.  In this episode, we learn about Huntsville's own Anne Clopton. A self-taught painter, Clopton took a different path...

My parents have a set of portraits hanging in their living room of Ephraim H. Foster and his wife Susan A. Watkins. My third great-grandparents. Painted before the civil war, these portraits were passed down in the family to their daughter Bettie Foster. To her daughter, Susie Pointer, then to my grandmother Elizabeth Malone and finally to my father. Interest in these portraits was instrumental in...

Sylacauga is known for many things. Most famously for its fine white Madre Cream marble, which has is used in buildings all over the world. In Washington D.C. alone, it has been used in some form in the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the U.S. Supreme Court building, in addition to the state of Alabama Capitol and the State Archives in Montgomery.  And Sylacauga is known as the home...

Not only do we get radio from towers located around the state, but we can also now get it from satellites. We can also get a form of radio as podcasts which you download to your phone or electronic device to listen to at your leisure. Some may argue that podcasts are not radio at all, but we can all agree that radio has been around all our lives. In Alabama, it started almost 100 years ago. There...

In 1974 Homewood High School and its football team were only three years old. The coach was only 26 years old. To think that a team this new, this young, could break into the Alabama State 4A football playoffs was unthinkable. But that was right where they stood after beating rival Mtn. Brook 48-6 to finish with a 9-1 record. At the end of the regular season, Tuscaloosa High School had an identica...

Alabama is lucky to have its share of astronauts who were born in Alabama or while working with NASA, lived here for a time, specifically in Huntsville. There is a chance you could run into an astronaut in Alabama. It's a slim chance but still a possibility.  If you grew up in the '70s and made the annual pilgrimage to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, you have a really good chance to me...

Thirty short years after the first basketball game was played in Springville, Massachusetts, Greenville High School’s basketball season was just getting started. Sports fans in Greenville knew this team was special and that they would go far. The city council appropriated money to have electric lights on the ball court. Everyone in town went to the games. The talk of the town was that these boys w...

University of Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant was featured in many commercials during his time as a coach. None stood out more than one he was in for South Central Bell, the regional phone company. Listen in this podcast about how the commercial came about and where the iconic line about his mama came from. Support the show Support the Podcast The podcast is free but it’s not cheap. If...

Hi, my name is Shawn Wright, the host, and creator of Alabama Short Stories. The podcast that was created to celebrate those stories about Alabama that you don’t hear about often, if ever. They are the stories that were not shared in your fourth-grade civics class. In the first season, we share two different stories of Alabama high school sports teams that had to overcome obstacles on their way to...