Monday, November 20, 2017

The Alabama Years

In 1986 I went on the road to Alabama, near Birmingham, to ply my trade as a cartoon cartographer. I did several city maps, Bessemer, Homewood, Wylam, and Columbiana. In Columbiana, the newspaper there found out I could set type on the new-fangled Apple Macintosh and so I got a job as a typesetter.

That led to a job with the Western-Star newspaper in Bessemer, in which I worked free-lance as a court reporter on a two-week grisly murder trial that was the talk of the town. Not my favorite career move, but it paid the bills. 

I put in for a job at the Cullman Times up in Cullman, AL, and became a reporter once again, this time on a daily newspaper. I enjoyed the daily deadlines and the out and about taking pictures. 


For a couple of months, I lived at the Hurricane Creek Park, a nature trail featuring rocky ledges and a swinging bridge over a rushing creek. 


But after several months, the publisher offered me the editor's job for a weekly newspaper he owned in Pell City, AL.  It was called the St. Clair (County) News-Aegis.

So I made the move to Pell City,  a nice place on the interstate just east of Birmingham. The work was back to a weekly schedule and that was fine. There I wrote many interesting stores of wrecks, fires, a couple of tornadoes, and feature articles about a variety of fascinating folks. 


After two years, I became homesick for Covington, LA, so I moved back to southeast Louisiana and started re-drawing updated maps  that I had already done of local cities. Then the editor's position at the St. Tammany Farmer opened up and I once again joined the staff there.