Alabama - Day 10 - Tuscaloosa

Tannehill Ironworks State Historical Park
Tuesday, 10 December 2019

It started raining during the night, and kept on intermittently all during the day, coming down heavily at times.  I thought about staying in the campground again, but Tuscaloosa is less than 30 miles from here.  That's where the main campus of the University of Alabama is so I decided to hop on down for a quick trip.  And I anyway needed groceries.

today's route

Heavy rain continued for much of my drive over.  A nuisance because I couldn't see as much.

I passed a sign about the Mercedes-Benz plant near here, which has a Visitor Center I'd thought about going to see and then forgotten about.  Maybe on the way back.

Coming into Tuscaloosa along University Drive, I passed a historical marker for Partlow State School and Hospital.  It was first opened in 1923 as the Alabama Home for Mental Deficients and started with 100 patients ages 6-18.  That seems like an awful lot of kids with mental problems.  And it stayed open until 2011. 

I don't know what happened to adults that might qualify for such a place, or even what qualified as mental deficiency.  Attitudes in the US about mental health are better now than they used to be but still not far from the Dark Ages, in my opinion.

Farther down the street was the University of Alabama.  Established 1820, now with an enrollment of 38,000. 

My overriding impression was square-cornered brick buildings.  All of them - or at least, all the ones I saw.  Lots of the fraternities and sororities have houses along this street, and all are brick and all look like brick antebellum Southern mansions.

You can tell from the green trees this isn't my photo - I didn't stop because there was too much rain to get a decent picture.  But this is one of the many Greek houses and they all look something like this, though most have many more pillars across the front.  Very imposing and permanent looking, but not looking friendly enough for me to have wanted to join their groups when I was a freshman. 

Denny Chimes

Another brick example.  The Denny Chimes are a school landmark - 115' tall housing a 25-bell carillon.

Crimson Tide football stadium

Even the football stadium has square brick corners.

University of Alabama logo

This is the logo of the Crimson Tide, as the school is known.  I had to look it up because I was getting it confused with the logo for Auburn which, to me, looks like it stands for U of A (Univ. of AL).

Different colors, but I hadn't noticed that when I just saw these logos on people's cars.

Auburn University logo

Nearby is Gene Stallings Ave., head coach at Texas A&M (his alma mater) 1965-1971, later head coach here at U of AL 1990-1996, with several national championships to his credit.

Not far away is Paul W. Bryant Dr., legendary head coach here for 25 years.  When he retired he was the winningest coach in collegiate history with 323 wins.  He was 6'1" and 180 pounds at age 13 and became known as "Bear" Bryant when he wrestled a bear from a traveling circus.  His attitude: "Winning isn't everything, but it beats anything that comes in second."

I went to both a Publix and a Piggly Wiggly, and both were surprisingly deficient in things I wanted - ordinary things like cayenne pepper.  All I wanted was a small McCormick's tin of it, which doesn't seem unreasonable.  But not in Tuscaloosa, apparently.

And I had trouble finding any place to walk the dogs.  No parking in the university area and no sidewalks in the nearby neighborhoods.  And it was continuing to rain.

Not really as pleasant a visit as I'd hoped.

I read online a Business Weekly (I think) article about some serious problems in the trucking industry.  One of the major companies, Celadon, is filing for bankruptcy and throwing 3,000 truckers out of work.  I'm really stunned.  I've been spending much of my life these last couple of years driving the country's highways, and the one business I thought was secure was the trucking business.  Everywhere I've gone I see signs saying someone's hiring truckers.  And sometimes trucks are the majority of the vehicles I see on the roads.  Not sure what to make of this.

I also saw the news about University of North Carolina making a deal with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to take the Silent Sam statue, toppled last year by protesters, and giving them $2.5 million to display it.  Many of the comments spoke of this deal being university support for white supremacy, with the SCV folks saying oh, no, they aren't white supremacists.  So I looked them up.  Their homepage settles that question for me.  Here's the link, if you want to see for yourself.   https://scv.org   Motivated by a desire to preserve liberty and freedom, my hind foot.

I decided not to stop at the Mercedes place.  It was later than I'd expected and I was tired of dealing with the rain.  But I can say that Mercedes makes cars here in Alabama.