What a Tornado Taught Me That College Didn’t
Forbes. Com – Aug. 10
(Last month, I offered one young male journalist $100 to write a guest post on this blog. Today, Alan Blinder, 21, shares his story of the tornado that changed everything.) My college career did not end when I turned in a final exam. It ended as I stood in the seventh-floor waiting room of a hospital, viewing the destruction an EF-4 tornado had wrought on Tuscaloosa less than 24 hours earlier. My BlackBerry vibrated with an email from the University of Alabama, one of the few times my cell phone worked that day. Officials had canceled final exams and postponed commencement. The academic year was over, and so was my college career…Within a few minutes of the tornado’s touchdown, I was on my way to cover the aftermath for the Associated Press. For the next 10 days, I did little else…For a while, I debated if I’d return for commencement. My friends and family inundated me with advice, warning me that I’d regret not walking across the stage. Finally, I relented…That evening, I attended a vigil at the university to memorialize the six students the storm took as it flattened Tuscaloosa and struck entire neighborhoods from the map. I didn’t know any of them: Scott Atterton, Danielle Downs, Ashley Harrison, Melanie Nicole Mixon, Morgan Sigler and Marcus Smith…As I watched the vigil, I thought about how I would graduate the next day. Members of family would be at the ceremony, but they would not collect my degree for me, unlike the parents and siblings of the six students who died…During commencement the next morning, the University of Alabama awarded posthumous degrees to the six deceased students. As I watched the families of the dead slowly walk across the platform, I looked for my family in the crowd. I wanted to see them. I had to see them. I needed to know that they were there…
Al.com – Aug. 10
Birmingham metro area income gains trail those elsewhere in Alabama
Birmingham News – Aug. 10
… Ahmad Ijaz, director of economic forecasting at the University of Alabama’s Center for Business and Economic Research, said Birmingham’s anemic income growth is a hangover from losses suffered earlier in the economic downturn. “Birmingham has lost more jobs than any other MSA” in Alabama, he said. Jobs that are being added to the metro area’s economy today are mostly lower-paying jobs, not the sort of industrial and manufacturing jobs with higher wages. Birmingham is adding jobs in food services, restaurants, leisure and hospitality, he said…
Sam Hodges, former DMN religion writer, has a new book
Dallas Morning-News – Aug. 10
…Sam Hodges (…left the paper a while back to become managing editor of The United Methodist Reporter, a Dallas-based publication of the United Methodist Church.) Sam has just finished a project he’s been working on for years, a “labor of love,” as he calls it, which has nothing to do with Dallas or religion. He’s compiled and edited For the Love of Alabama, a collection of the writings of two of Alabama’s most notable reform-minded journalists, Ron Casey and Bailey Thomson…Thomson, who died in 2003, was associate editor of the Mobile Press-Register and, later, a professor of journalism at the University of Alabama. The University of Alabama Press…published For the Love of Alabama…