Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – One of these days I’m going to find my way out of this concentric circle maze that seems to be my life. There has to be a secret door somewhere in the universe. What I need is a worm hole.

Let’s just hope it’s not death’s door. I’d really like to make it out to California to see Redwood and Sequoia trees before my exit, and commune with the spirit of John Muir in his woods and Yosemite Valley. Now may not be the best time for that, since the Alt National Park Service is flying a giant American flag upside down in a sign of national distress as the park service comes under attack from the new crowd taking over in Washington.

An image shared by the Alt National Park Service on Facebook, a recognized international distress signal: NAJ screen shot

For now, I find myself circling back on myself once again, back in the land of Dreamland BBQ and Crimson Tide football. It’s not clear how or why this happened, but here I am, listening to Violin Concerto in E Minor on public radio, WUAL. They don’t do news talk all day long like many other stations around the state and country. They deliver the news in the morning, on the hour and in the afternoon, then take a break with classical music all day and night long. At night on the weekends, they play some jazz and bluegrass too.

When I discovered this as an undergrad in 1981, thanks to the recommendation of Political Science Professor Barbara Chotiner, it became a calming and centering feature of my life for many years. I did not have the luxury of growing up in a household where anyone read the New York Times daily or on Sunday, or listened to NPR. We only got the conservative Birmingham News and commercial radio and television. It was the early days of childrens’ educational programming on public television, so there was a little of that.

I only discovered NPR when Dr. Chotiner said, as I still recall, “It’s a wonderful way to keep up with the news without all those distracting pictures,” meaning television news, and this was well before the crazy 24-hour news talk began on commercial radio and cable.

On Monday, before an appointment on Tuesday at the new Digital Media Center in Bryant-Denny Stadium, I was looking for a place to get a haircut. Both the salons I’ve used in the past when blowing into town for a story or something were busy, so a friend recommended Harry’s Barbershop. There I met Randy Kimbrell, son of the barbershop founder, Harry Kimbrell, who used to sometimes cut the hair and shave the great Paul “Bear” Bryant. His regular barber was Joel Williams, but sometimes Kimbrell had to step in to give the old man a trim and shave that famous wrinkled face (see video on Facebook).

We had planned to visit the original Dreamland BBQ, but someone recommended Archibald’s instead, so that’s where we ended up, before heading over to the Druid City Brewing company for a beer. They say the Moon Room is a great local music venue, decorated with lots of memorabilia from the old Egan’s bar on the strip and the Chukker bar downtown.

On Tuesday morning, I got the gate code to the parking lot right by Saban Field behind Reese-Phifer Hall, the old Union Building, where Dean Ed Mullins brought all the communications departments together under one roof back in the 1980s. Mullins was my faculty adviser as an undergrad from 1981 to 1983, Bear Bryant’s last two years as the coach. Mullins was instrumental in helping me get my first newspaper staff writing job at The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette in January, 1984.

Saban Field at Bryant-Denny Stadium, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Glynn Wilson

He was also my Thesis Committee Chair in grad school from 1993 to 1995, and was instrumental in getting me my first full time teaching gig at Georgia College in ’95-96, the year the Summer Olympics came to Atlanta. What a great year. My first column ever published on the web in those days is still up. Check it out here. There’s more to the story, but that’s for another day.

Charles Barkley Smokes Big, Fat Cigars

The college was in the old Georgia state capital of Milledgeville, the Southern writer Flannery O’Conner’s home town, a few miles east of Macon. There was a BBQ joint in between where I saw Derek Trucks play slide guitar when he was only 15. I also visited the graves of Duane Allman and Barry Oakley of the Allman Brothers, and rescued an old Lido drum set from a barn in Macon.

After a meeting with Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio’s news director and former NPR correspondent covering space and NASA, and a tour of the relatively new media center, I wandered around in the communications building and managed to get a quick appointment to meet the new dean, Brian Butler, thanks to his secretary Ginger.

Ironically, Butler just got here recently from Maryland, where I just left back in September. He holds degrees in computer science, information systems and business from Carnegie Mellon University, and has studied online communities, social media and “organizational resilience.”

Prior to moving to Tuscaloosa and joining UA, Butler was a professor and leader at the University of Maryland where he served as the founding co-director of the interdisciplinary Social Data Science Center, director of the master of information management program, interim dean and senior associate dean. We talked a little about College Park and Greenbelt, Maryland, and a bit about what’s going on in Washington these days. He seemed to share my idea that in these wild times, the further you can get from D.C. the better.

After that I noticed it was developing into a beautiful spring-like day on campus, so I wandered over to the Quad, or Quadrangle Park by Gorges Library, and took a couple of snaps of Denny Chimes.

As I walked by it rang out on the hour still, as if nothing else had changed in the world since 1981. But of course the world has changed a lot since then, and some of it not for the better.

One of the problems with going around in circles is the never ending nostalgia trip that comes and goes along with it. This really gets old after awhile. But I figure you might as well lean into it, eat the barbecue and drink the beer, and try to find a way to have a good time. That’s been my MO since 1981 anyway.

You can ask Rick Bragg.

“You have more fun than anybody I’ve ever known in this business,” he told me once when we were working together in New Orleans.

He also said, and I’m not making this up: “You are the only poor man I’ve ever known who could make a living as a free-lance writer.”

In those days being a “writer” was mostly reserved for rich guys from Mountain Brook and such. Of course Bragg was not from Mountain Brook, and grew up poor himself, living for a time in a little cabin with a dirt floor in Possum Trot, Alabama.

We’re heading down to Montgomery for a few days, chasing a couple of stories for APR and NPR. See you down the dusty trail.

The symbol of concentric rings embodies at once a view of the triadic structure of the cosmos and the reality of the blood-water exchange that maintains a balance between creative and destructive forces: NAJ screen shot

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