At our last meeting of the Alger Sullivan Historical Society we had a guest speaker who is originally from our area, he now lives in West Virginia but has spent a great deal of his life working all over the world and gave a very interesting talk about it. I'm talking about Howard Green and his wife Becky, hopefully we will be able to have him as a guest speaker again in the future as he has said, he could talk all day on each country he has worked in.
With September here this brings to mind two things of interest to me, football and camping. Though football is more or less a fall and winter event and camping can be done anytime of the year in this area, I prefer to camp during the cooler months of the year. Having been a student of Century High School I was a big fan of the Blackcats. If I wasn't working on a Friday night I was at a Blackcat football game during the season, I guess if they had played a game on the moon I would have found a way to be there along with several hundred other fans. There are a few games that really stick in my mind, mostly the Jay and Flomaton games. One game between Flomaton and Century led to the winner of the game for a couple of years having bumper stickers made with the score on them.
A game at Jay was a good one, probably the best game between the two teams, I believe that the difference in the score was only one point, and it was a high scoring game, I'm not really sure who won so I won't say. I do remember just returning to my spot along the fence when the Blackcats made a long touchdown run of almost a hundred yards. I had a hotdog in my hand and when the play ended my hotdog had some how disappeared, I ask the man next to me if he saw what happen to my hotdog and he said, “yea, you ate it.”
As I mentioned, I like to do my camping during cool weather and on one trip it was a Friday night and Jay and Flomaton were playing a football game that night. We were camping along the river and the weather wasn't bad, about forty five degrees and just a slight breeze. Some of us decided to go to the game in Jay, since it didn't seem that cold at the camp most of us didn't wear a jacket. When we got out of the river bottom and on the hill in Jay, there seemed like along with the forty five degree temperature there was also a north wind blowing about forty five MPH, making some of us wonder if we were going to freeze to death before the game was over.
One of the most memorable camping trips that I've been on in recent years was in 2010, when a company was laying a pipeline just a hundred yards or so above our campground. They had started work on the pipeline a few months earlier and it was now fall and more and more people were in and out of the hunting club getting ready for the fast approaching hunting season.
The job was a day only job with a night watchman, naturally people would stop and talk to him since he was there by himself. I had stopped a couple of times and one day he told me, a few of the people have told me they have seen bears over here. I didn't think nothing of it at the time and told him, there are bears in most of these woods in this area. I hadn't given it much thought since I had did the night watchman job on oil rigs before and kind of enjoyed being in the woods by myself.
I was at the camp a week or so before I intended to spend a couple of nights there and go duck hunting before deer season came in. While there at the camp a couple of other hunters came up and we were talking when one of them told me that the watchman was from Mobile and had never been in the woods and was more than a little nervous. I told him, “oh, I wish you hadn't told me that.”
I just happen to be back over there a couple of days later when I stopped to talk to the watchman, some how the subject of bears came up. I told him I was surprised that there were still bears over there, that by now the bigfoot creatures would have taken care of them, with that I handed him a copy of BFRO report #5801, I just happen to have with me.
The report actually describes a bigfoot sighting in that area made back in 1994. A couple of days later I was back at the camp to go duck hunting, just after dark I was eating when I heard a siren, I thought something may have happen at the plant in Jay since it wasn't that far away. A few minutes later I heard the siren again, this time I was able to step outside and heard the siren was to the north, not the south in the direction of the plant. During the night I woke up several times and each time I heard the siren, I heard it several times during the time I was cooking breakfast the next morning. I got ready and went on hunting that morning and since the watchman was still on duty and nobody else was around I stopped to talk to him. While talking to him, he told me, come around here I want to show you something, I got me some protection against all these creatures over here.
I was thinking he was going to show me a gun, he pulled a blanket back in his back seat to show me a very large hand crank siren. I guess in the end the joke was on me since he woke me up several times during the night.
The Alger Sullivan Historical Society meets at 6 PM on the third Tuesday of the month at the Leach House Museum at Fourth and Jefferson, please join us.
