Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Subject:Hello Again

Judy Hubbard

Class of '65

I just wanted to drop in and update you and the group with my address, etc. I am renovating an older home built actually about the time we graduated on a really special wooded lot interior to Lake Hartwell here in Anderson, SC. Barbara and Ed Donnelley will know what that means, hot , humid, but no privileges. Actually, I live fairly close to them I believe. Anyway, it's 401 Little John Trail, zip 29621-3422, phone 864 224-2487.

I need to share some news with any of our classmates who may have had younger siblings who were close to my baby sister, Marjie, who was only born 5/10/1960. She married Barry Lee Stewart and has two beautiful sons, Steven age 15 on Friday and Brian age 10. She is a consulting dietician and finished school in Charlotte, NC prior to college.

At the present time, she is fighting recurrent breast cancer that is aggressive and dealing new blows every single day. She has shown remarkable courage and stamina and has continued with her usual routine until last week when brain lesions were found and fluid in her chest made it difficult for her to breathe. I am asking all who knew her to keep her in your prayers and send her cards of support to our parents home at 113 Seven Oaks, Pendleton, SC, 29670 and we will get them to her. Thank you and God Bless. I'll be in touch soon. Love to all, Judy

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Subject:Rison School

Dianna May Stephenson

Class of '64

I was just reading Ron Brand's article on Rison School and noticed he didn't know the year it was built. I just thought I would let him know that it was built in 1922 and not in the 1930's. I'm sure it doesn't make alot of difference, but maybe he would like to know the actual year.

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Subject:Barbara's Article

Linda Ragland Dykes

Class of '64

Barbara, thanks for the wonderful memories!

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Subject:What we ate

Paula Spencer Kephart

Class of '65

I have read on the website that most of you ate Spam, bologna, potted meat, hot dogs, and other assorted goodies. Somehow, I never did develop a taste for those foods. I believe I heard my mother talking to the neighbor about what they were made of.

Barbara talked about the Ritz Cafe on Washington St. I ate there many times--from sandwiches to yes, veal cutlets. My Dad had the Twickenham Barber Shop across diagonally on Clinton Ave, so I was there in the vicinity often. Whenever I was in downtown, I always went by the barbershop and got money, so I could eat. Sometimes, it was the Ritz, and sometimes, Krystal.

On Saturday I got a dollar and went to see double feature, then went to Krystal--had one or two krystals and an order of fries. When I got a little older and got a little more money, I would go with my friend to W. T. Grant's and have a cheeseburger. It was a fancy sandwich because it had lettuce and tomato. Boy, was I easily impressed!

On weekends, we would go to Bon-Aire on Meridian St. or Holiday House on the Parkway. I remember Bon-Aire for the home cooked food, and the other one was an after church place. One Sunday our neighbors were eating there with us, and we ordered fried veal cutlets. The neighbor's name was Lena and Ernie. Ernie was a very quiet man who was not a complainer. His food came and I was studying it very carefully. Before he began to eat, I saw a VERY LARGE horsefly fried to his veal cutlet. I pointed it out to him and he just had the most awful look on his face. He sent the food back and would not eat anything else. No doubt, that was probably our last time there. I don't seem to remember it after that.

Barbara mentioned the vegetables and cornbread. Sounded familiar, but we used to always have fried corn. My mother would cut it off the cob and fry it in an iron skillet. She added water and salt, and a little bit of butter. Seems we usually had Silver Queen corn a lot--some of which came from my grandmother in Tn. I remember her killing a chicken fresh, it running around and falling over, and then eating it for Sunday dinner. After lunch, I'd go and swing on the front porch where the wisteria was lush. Sometimes it would be nice to live that way again.

On Monday, we ate cubed (minute) steak, Tuesday, we had meatloaf or liver and onions, Wednesday, we had fried chicken(my Dad was off that afternoon.), Thursday was whatever, and Friday, we usually ate soup or whatever was available, Saturday was eat out or cook steaks, yes, steaks we bought once a week at Campbell's Meat Market on Oakwood Avenue. Sunday was usually pot roast.

I know everyone did not eat that well, but my parents only had one child, me. Makes a big difference in what families could do and eat. I also remember eating in the LHS lunchroom. Mrs. Owens was the manager and she let me get water to drink because I was not a milk drinker. After she left, Mrs. Kephart became manager and she let me get my water, too. I am very thankful for that. Kids now do not have any idea what it is all about.

LHS was an interesting place. I started there in tenth grade. I came from a private school and was over whelmed at the place. I soon got into the routine and enjoyed school so much. I, especially would like to thank the teachers I had so much. I had one for English that was SO HARD. At least I was prepared for college when I got there. She is on the State Board of Education now. If you see a sign or bumper sticker that says, "Thank a teacher if you can read this!", please do so. They work hard and don't get much positive feedback. I know very well, because I was a teacher for almost twenty years. Dwight used to tell me that I communicated well on the eighth grade level. He was so dry and could just blow you away with what he said. He also taught while in graduate school, substituted, and taught junior college. So I guess he knew, too.

Your articles have brought back many memories that I have enjoyed. Keep up the good work!

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Subject:Pinto Beans

Eddie Burton

Class of '66

You know Tommy, in Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly's and Ron Brand's stories they both mentioned the beloved pinto bean. I came to Huntsville from Montgomery via Decatur and had never laid eyes on a pinto bean until I saw my first one at lunch in the eighth grade an Lee.

Don't ask me why but in south Alabama where I had lived most of my life in Montgomery or Mobile or several other smaller towns the main dried bean staple was the dried lima or butter bean as we called it down there and black-eyed peas which I later learned is more of a bean than a pea. Well sir, when I saw those little reddish brown things on my school lunch tray I had no idea what they were but I tried them and I thought I had discovered a new religion. I fell so much in love with the pinto beans that on days at Lee when we had them, I would go table to table offering anything on my tray for pintos. Some kids looked at me like I was some kind of nut which I guess you could say was right but I was on a mission for those beautiful little morsels. Some days I'd have my whole tray running over with nothing but pintos. I'd trade my desert or meat or anything I had to get them. One of my mother's friends who lived up the street from us found out how much I loved them and every time she would make a pot she'd bring me a big bowl. It was heaven but I couldn't get my mother to make them so I had to count on the kindness of neighbors and schoolmates.

So if any of you guys out there are having trouble remembering me from Lee, I was the geek with glasses who begged your pinto beans at lunch. The only thing I regret about this whole love affair with the pinto is, I sure felt sorry for the kid who sat behind me in 5th period.

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Subject:Food Stories

Chip Smoak

Class of '66

Barbara asked for them so I will contribute one.

I was not present but heard this from my first cousin who was and who lived with us at the time. He and my father were in a Krystal Hamburger store on Memorial Parkway one night when two men entered. He said that they were obviously very hungry and ordered a large number of hamburgers for each of them.

According to my cousin the man behind the counter was quite heavy and walked around with his mouth open. While he was grilling the hamburgers he drooled on the grill. One of the men asked the other if he had seen that. The second said that he had and suggested that they leave and go somewhere else. They did.

I have always approached Krystals with some trepidation ever since and must admit to watching the cook carefully while my food is being prepared.

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Subject:Summer School

Chip Smoak

Class of '66

I went to summer school at Butler for extra credit one year. Summer school was not available at Lee, at least not that year. A fellow Lee General whose first name was Earl (I do not remember his last name). Earl brought a pack of miniature playing cards to school every day. We got together at every break to play High Card Draw for a nickel a hand.

I can still hear Earl saying, "I'm going to take your shirt, Smoak."

I did not say anything to that. I kept taking Earl's nickels or least running a tab for them. Earl never did pay his gambling debt to me.

This may not seem like much of a memory to most of you but it reminds me of those good ol' days at Lee.

Save your Confederate money, Generals, the South is going to rise again some day.

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Bide-A-Wee Drive, Polk Drive, Van Buren Drive, Peck Road, and Titus Road—that’s all there was to Darwin Downs in the beginning—just that rudimentary network of presidential roads and very modest houses curving into the big cove at the foot of Monte Sano.

As far as I know, my family was the first one to move into Darwin Downs, early in 1953, claiming the first house right there at the foot of the hill, 15 Bide-A-Wee Drive (it didn’t become 1924 until several years later). We had lived in an apartment and a rented house since our arrival in the city in 1950. By 1952, as a response to the city’s promising economy and rising population, numerous housing developments were sprouting at Huntsville’s fringes. The city was having to stretch past its small-town borders. Colonial Hills, which lay out Meridian Street near Alabama A&M, was one of the new subdivisions, Monte Sano was being actively colonized, and housing tracts were changing the appearance of West Huntsville, too, out on West Holmes and near Jordan Lane.

There is a story among the Germans of a “floating” bank account in those days. A sizable number of families kicked in what cash they could to put together a housing fund. Shortly before a family was ready to begin proceedings to buy a house, this fund would be made available to them. Whatever nest egg they had accumulated on their own would be respectably (but only temporarily) enhanced. Once the loan officers saw the healthy savings account, they happily granted mortgage approval. After a discrete period, the money moved on to the next family ready to put down roots. It’s possible that the purchase of our house was leveraged in this creative manner.

I don’t think I ever asked my parents why we settled in Darwin Downs and not elsewhere in the city. My father mentions the move in a short autobiography he wrote in the early 70s, but he doesn’t elaborate. He was a big-city boy from Berlin and my mother grew up in a small village in East Prussia (now part of Poland). Perhaps the somewhat rural setting reminded her of home. My father was an independent sort; he liked to do for himself (and that’s evident in how he re-shaped our house.) In any case, the surroundings of this neighborhood, with mountains, pastures, and greenery all around (just wait until spring and summer), must have appealed to them, too. Right there at the edge of the city was a promising place to start new lives.

The new subdivision naturally had a raw look in those winter days. Nobody had trees, bushes, or lawns. The driveways, which were always on the right side of the house, were gravel, and there weren’t any garages or carports. If you lived in one of the rectangular houses, the entrance was on the right (no need to pour walkways, see?). If you lived in one of the smaller, square designs, your front door was in the middle. In the first couple of years we lived there, my father and older brother, Dieter, in order to correct the house’s insufficiencies, built a garage, created an extra bedroom and breakfast nook by enclosing the two porches, moved the entrances to the house away from the corners, and re-arranged some interior walls to make a dining room appear.

Darwin Downs was named for the family who owned the land the subdivision was built on. Jeff Darwin and his family were the last private owners of Oak Place, the elegant ante-bellum mansion built as a country residence about 1840 by George Steele, one of Huntsville’s leading citizens before the Civil War.

A Virginian, Steele came to Huntsville in 1818. He apparently learned about architecture and construction as an apprentice with experienced master builders—whether in Huntsville or Virginia is unclear. Buffeted by the ups and downs of Huntsville’s frontier economy, he struggled financially during most of the 1820’s. By the 1830’s, however, he achieved financial and professional stability. As he prospered, his reputation and influence grew. One historian of the period ranks Steele highly: “More than any other individual, he helped shape the physical appearance of Huntsville through his numerous public and private commissions.” Steele was the architect of the famous building we all know as the First National Bank Building; he also designed the second Madison County Courthouse (built in 1840, demolished in 1913). The Cabaniss House and the Pope House were two of his private designs.

Steele purchased the land for Oak Place, which consisted of 320 acres, from the heirs of Moses Vincent, who had acquired it in 1809, just a few years after the founding of Huntsville in 1805. Steele designed Oak Place in the Greek Revival style, an architectural movement which dominated the early part of the 19th century in America and came to symbolize (and advertise) the emerging greatness and potential of the nation by calling to mind the monumental structures and ideals of classical civilization. Compare the front of the six-columned First National Bank with the Parthenon — in Tennessee or Greece—and you’ll see the similarity. The second Courthouse, which had a copper dome, followed a modified temple design, too.

The main entrance to Oak Place, a columned portico on the north side facing Chapman Mountain, is the most obvious Greek Revival element. Steele broke from conventional design in the interior of such a grand house by utilizing a split-level design, eschewing showy staircases, creating a large banquet-hall in the English basement, and deploying unique architectural touches throughout the house, such as the pocket doors at the front entrance. Surrounding the house when construction was complete in 1840 were stables, a carriage house, hen house, well house, ice house, and several cottages for the hired hands, masons, and carpenters that were associated with Steele and his business. The sources I consulted made no mention of slave quarters.

George Steele died in 1855 at the age of 57. His son, Matt, took over the business and did well until the Civil War. In 1862, Mrs. Steele and one of her daughters were evicted from Oak Place by Union officers, who made it their quarters. Because of the harsh economic conditions in the South after the war, Matt Steele was unable to keep the business solvent. Although the Southern economy was beginning to recover somewhat in the 1880s, the Steele family was finally forced to sell the entire property in 1883.

I’ve tried to discover who was responsible for the early development and construction of Darwin Downs, but I haven’t been able to turn up any solid information. One source remembered the group-name Cummings-Ivy as being associated with the enterprise. I surmise that half of that team would have been Milton Cummings, the president of Brown Engineering and one of Huntsville’s most farsighted and influential businessmen. Mr. Ivy, I suppose, managed the real state branch of the business. In a further attempt to get at the truth, I recently placed a call to the Jeff Darwin that’s listed in the Huntsville phone book, but that led to a dead end; he would admit to no connection to Oak Place. Maybe somebody out there can shed some more light on the origins of Darwin Downs.

Well, whoever bankrolled or built it, this is clear and still very real to me: Darwin Downs was a kids’ paradise.

As you turned onto Bide-A-Wee from Maysville or O’Shaughnessy in the early days, you were suddenly in farm country. A fenced-in feedlot lay on the right (the southern-most portion of the Darwin estate at the extremity of McCullough right below Bankhead Parkway). Look, cows! I seem to remember chutes and pens for bovine management in that general area, too. Up ahead, at the crest of the hill and just off the road to the right stood a weathered barn, headquarters to Jumboloin, the resident bull, two mules, a couple of horses, a German Shepherd, and a small herd of cattle. Several feral pigs scavenged on the property, too.

Just a few feet from our property was a barbed wire fence that ran east toward Monte Sano for about ¼ mile and then angled up into the woods, marking one perimeter of the Darwin’s diminished estate. A terraced hillside strewn with brambles, long grass, stones, occasional mud puddles, broken farm implements, stunted trees, cowpies and their producers, rose up beyond the fence towards the woods below Bankhead Parkway. While the Darwins still managed a working farm, we explored and roamed the hill with caution. Once the animals were gone, it became a favored playground, a place poised between wildness and cultivation. The tumbling terrain and small copse of woods became

the badlands of the West and we were cowboy heroes, riding hell for leather. I had a broken Daisy pump-action air rifle and when I pulled back the slide it looked sort of like a Thompson machine gun. I crouched behind the ridges, on the lookout for the North Koreans or Red Chinese that were trying to sneak up on my squad. The hill was a good place to fly a kite, too. I can also remember lying on the grass up there one afternoon and seeing a rare natural phenomenon I never witnessed again: thousands of birds flying high overhead from north to south for many minutes. Darwin Downs lay under a migratory bird path that day (or Jimson weed was causing me to hallucinate). Airline traffic coming in from the north followed the same route.

Across Bide-A-Wee and slightly uphill from my house (about where Alice Gullion’s house came to be) sat an abandoned, collapsing shack. It fascinated me because it smelled of decay, contained some of the broken furniture of its former inhabitants, and was wallpapered with old newspapers. There would have been an outhouse close-by, too, of course, but it had been razed. I would have remembered such an interesting structure, new to my experience. A garbage pit, full of burned cans, broken bottles, and other debris had been left behind, though.

Beyond the shack lay the main grounds of Oak Place. They were defined by an arcade of tall trees—cedars, tulip poplars, Osage Orange (with their strange fruit, the softball-sized hedge apples, bright green, furrowed like brains, and perfect for throwing) and others—that marked the eastern bounds of the property and cedars and some kind of ornamental bushes that had gone wild on the northern boundary (where Stevens was cut through a few years later). True to its name, the main grounds featured many tall, impressive oaks. On the northern down slope of the lawn (which eventually became the neighborhood football field) stood towering holly trees, several pairs of males and females; their thick trunks and branches and dark green leaves made one think of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest or the wonderful tree house of the Swiss Family Robinson. Of the many outbuildings that were part of the original mansion only a stable and a low cottage building remained.

Behind the houses down Bide-A-Wee towards the Maysville side of the subdivision was a patch of woods full of climbable trees, low brush, and plenty of vines to swing on. The terrain plunged and tilted down to the creek, which snaked through the woods, pooling deeply where it turned, a mini-Amazon. The landscape was cut with twisting gullies and trails. It was easy to imagine it as a jungle and we played out new adventures of Tarzan, Jungle Jim, Bomba the Jungle Boy, or Ramar of the Jungle (but not George). Periodically, we had to sweep the area of Japs. During the scorching summer days we hauled quilts and supplies into the shady greenness for picnics, card-games, or comic-book swaps.

Just upstream from that magical jungle realm the banks of the creek were about five feet high, composed of yellow clay, and tree-less. It was another fascinating change of terrain and environment. The creek bottom along there was devoid of rocks, and when the water was running clear and shallow it was a blast to scamper through there on the slick, cool clay chasing minnows or treat it as a wading pool. This was a thrilling place to be, too, when we had experienced several days of rain and the creek was swollen and wild.

On the other side of the creek was the triangle of land formed by the creek and the intersection of Maysville and Oakwood (later to be presidential territory when Truman and McKinley were cut in). In the early days the property was fenced-in and cow-ridden. Next to the woods and close to Maysville Road, the land was swampy and a great place to find tadpoles.

Just a little further upstream from the clay banks, the creek meandered over rocks and a mud-bottom. Trees lined the banks of the pasture, their roots exposed by the lapping water. Older kids once hung a rope from a high branch of one of the trees, and we found out how exhilarating that kind of a swing could be. From that point the creek made a lazy turn to where it flowed under Oakwood. Beyond that—still going upstream, of course-- the creek keeps on rolling (are you singing along, Collins?) through the pastures, up into the woods and its source above Buzzard’s Roost.

So, who joined me in the fun and discoveries of those first exciting years? In the beginning, my younger brother, Gunter, was a little too young to venture very far, but he was soon solid company. Half of the kids I played with in the early days were Germans who all moved to Montdale after several years (Hartwig Schulze, Jurgen Kampmeier, Georg von Tiesenhausen) and few of the rest of the other kids from my part of the neighborhood (Bill Wooten, the Karrh brothers-- Charles, Lewis, and Robert-- and Buddy Curry) stayed around long enough to go to Rison with me, much less Lee. (Ricky Weaver and Venita Boyd did). Some of those friendships were fleeting, but I hope they have equally fond memories of our days in paradise. The strong friendships that I developed later with Mike Zeanah, Jim Storm, Butch Adcock, Ben Still, Rick and Jonathon Edmonds came about as Darwin Downs grew out into the cove beyond its original core.

I have used three sources for this article: the Sesquicentennial Edition of the Huntsville Times, September 11-17, 1955; a collection of letters by members of the Steele family with historical commentary, Cease Not To Think of Me, edited by Patricia Ryan; and the historical marker that’s posted on Oak Place. Travel grants and research funding arranged through the Towery Fund.

A Bonus: Can you name the type of car in the photos above? Send in your guess.

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