The Alabama Experience; Triptik: Traveling Alabama's Highway 90

You You Traveling west from Florida, highway 90 crosses into Alabama over the Perdido River, once the boundary between French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. This is a German country in these parts.

Everything from cattle to the pecan trees brought in years ago after the bull weevil scare and still a profitable business. And on any given afternoon, you're likely to find some of the locals gathered at a favorite roadside store. These fellas told us that for a really good story, we should visit the home of a locally renowned horse trainer who lives just down the road, provided, of course, that we could find him. The stop sign takes another left and goes past the dead end. The word for a dead end is just keep going. When the highway quenches, just keep driving about another four-of-a-mile, he's on the left. It ain't a quarter, it ain't a quarter, isn't it? Sorry, miss, I like both. Well, it's across the 40. They can't fall down by a sliver of light. It's across the 20. It's a half of a quarter, that's right. That ain't no 40, it's a 20. I've been never where man, I've been never where man, across the desert fair man, we have no where man. I've not had my share man, I've been everywhere. Horses are strange animals, but a lot like people.

Each horse has its own personality. You have to read that personality, after you train horses a while, you learn how to read that personality. You can tell if they're going to buck what they're going to do next. And that makes the difference between a trainer that stays in the business and one that gets broke up. You've got to learn how to read the animal. By doing that, you learn to trust me. You learn not to be scared of me. And that's normally what gets you in trouble. It's not that the horse is mean, he's just scared. Don't have any confidence in what you're doing there. And then they get flirty. And you get hurt. Or the horse has hurt as well. I like to teach all my horses patience. You can't train a horse if you don't have patience. You've got to learn to wait on them. You've got to learn to wait.

Just like a child. You can't train a child unless he has a little bit of patience. And their attention spans only about 20 minutes. You can keep a horse's attention about a good 20 minutes or anything over that. Pretty much wasted. Just like a kid. Big man. Steve Foley is well known around here for the way he seems to just understand horses. And for his particular brand of wisdom in training them. Sometimes though, it's hard to tell just who he's talking about. The horses or the people who ride them. Another thing, and a lot of people may disagree with me, is me personally, I don't want a real smart horse. I don't want a smart horse. I want a smart horse who will try to figure a way out of work. Have you seen very many real highly intelligent people that works real hard? You've got to be smart enough to learn, but dumb enough to do.

That's my philosophy. You can change a bad habit. Any bad habit on a horse, pretty much any in 30 days. You can't do that on human beings. And you can change in 30 days, this horse will be a completely. His personality will have changed as far as the human eye. Because I don't want him to thank run all the time. If I want him to walk, I want to host a walk. If I want to run, I want him to run. It's that unique way Steve seems to just know how to communicate with a horse that earns him the animal's trust and the owner's loyalty. My personal opinion is nobody else trained. Some of your trainers snatch and pull on them and spur the heck out of them, trying to get them to work right and Steve doesn't think that he's real low-key, laid-back, nice and easy with your horses.

That's the reason I use it. Here you go. I think it's good to give horses time off if you can. It's just like people, you know, they go to school so many months and they need that spring break and then they need your time off through the summer. Horses need the same thing. You can't just keep on drilling them, but they'll quit on them. You kind of get the feeling that no horse would want to quit on Steve Foley, kind of like a child who doesn't want to disappoint his parent. Come on, baby. Well, that wasn't much to that one. Yeah, he's a good baby. It's a lot of hard work. It's like anything else. It's a lot of hard work. You saddle 12 to 14 horses a day and ride them and do them a good job. You have done a day's work.

I don't want to have to be a baby because those people are not going to be a baby when they get it. But I enjoy what I'm doing. I love it and I like working with folks, especially young people with their horses. They had an opportunity that I really didn't have when I was real little. And I'm glad that they can do that. And the ones that appreciate it, my children, they run when they were little, but they got where, you know, it was handed to them on a silver platter and they don't really appreciate it, but there's a lot of young folks out there that I can just sit in their eyes that they love it and they want to do this. And those are the folks that I really tried here. I was born and raised on this property right here. When I was a little kid, I used to run these woods and hopefully I'll run them until I drop over dead. I love this property and I'll never leave any place else. This is my roots. When I got out of the military, when I got to Alabama line, I got out of the car and kissed the ground. I said, I'll never leave you again. And I've been here ever since and don't intend on leaving. Follow the highway west through Baldwin County

and it's easy to spot the evidence of the growing tourism industry. Businesses booming along the route to the beach, one place in particular, caught our attention. Just who is Norm the Tireman? Meet Norm the Tireman. Only in business a little more than a year, Norm the Tireman is already getting an inflated reputation. People tell me that I've got the most used tires in Baldwin County and this is part of my long hair, but I hope they're right. I have over a thousand used tires and four to five hundred new tires that I try to keep in stock all the time. I tried to retire for a year, I didn't do that. We had some friends down here in Baldwin County and we came down here with this fellow in love with the area.

Since I've been to the Tire Brothers for the last 20-some years, I've been here a lot more than a tire stone. The weirdest thing I ever found in a tire was a baby bottle brush, but we found chisels, spark plugs. This was in a forklift tire, screwdrivers, all kinds of pieces of steel, body screws, pieces of wire or whatever, spikes, port of a valve stem from a truck tire. I don't know what kind of a dude that that is. Pieces of steel, this looks like a bone or some type. I don't know, I've got a whole jar of things in there that we've collected since April the 7th, just at this store here. You can go down any stretch of highway, any mile you'd find four or five things that would ruin a tire. Well, I could do the air pressure gauge and check your pressure. The part of Highway 90 that crosses Mobile Bay is known to locals as the Causeway. It's preceded by the stretch of road called the Old Spanish Trail.

Early explorers blaze the trail through tropical jungles to the edge of the bay. Now, the old highway connects the eastern shore to the city of Mobile. And though it runs in the shadow of Interstate 10, the Causeway was first to offer easy access to Mobile and even easier access to a favorite local pastime. I was down and out here on the highway. There's a sign out there, there's no wind on the roadway. So we said over the poverty. No, that's a pyramid. No, thanks. We persuaded Mr. Lewis to let us join him, although we may not have helped his luck much. He showed us his catch before we showed up. That's my luck catch for the business. Afterward, all we managed to hook was some algae at the bottom of Mobile Bay. But then that's okay too.

Swaping stories about the one that got away is sometimes more fun anyhow. Although fish stories aren't the only ones you'll hear on the Causeway. Jack Kerawak and his crew, Dean Moriarty and the novel on the road, among others, came through Mobile and Kerawak talked about approaching Mobile across the long, tidal highway, which of course was the Causeway. And he described the soaring golf clouds. And they stopped at a gas station and while two of his friends played chase around the elevated gas tanks, he and his other comrade managed to steal as he put it with no problem, three packs of cigarettes. Once inside the city, highway 90 changes her name to government street. Arguably one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the entire country.

Airline pilots often comment on the giant oak trees, which from the air seemed to obscure part of the city. On the ground, they create a natural awning for some of the oldest, most beautiful historic homes in the south. Not only do these houses provide a lovely community for the folks who live here, they're an economic benefit for the city too. They tell us who we are and where we came from, they tell us what kind of city this was and is. And if you want to put it on the lowest ground, they're economically useful because of tourism obviously. Mobile is an aging port city without the bright prospects of a Seattle or even a Birmingham, which has made the transition from a blue collar to a white collar economy. Shipping is in decline worldwide and that's an important part of our economy. So we've had to sort of struggle to find ourselves in the 20th century. And historic preservation has been part of the answer. People will come here for historic homes tours or to visit historic sites, heritage tourism cells. Once such home offers a unique story of economic adaptation,

being brought back from its commercial use as a retirement center to its original status as a family home. That's one of the big pushes in this neighborhood. We've been doing so much trying to take buildings that have been commercial for so long and bring them back to residential zoning. And this was one, you look around and it's almost hard to envision how it was once a nursing home now that some of the renovation to bring it back to residential has been done. If you look at the buildings on government, many of them are a turn of the century or a little bit later, colonial revival, classical revival. But the ones before that were these grand of Victorian Queen Anne mansions, as we call them, with lots of turrets and towers. The popular term is gingerbread. They were very busy. They were very asymmetrical and they were painted a lot of different colors. The Tissington House is one of the later examples of that. It was built in 1901. And it personifies all that fussy exuberance that those kinds of houses. Some people call them painted ladies. A number of the other houses like it have been torn down on government,

replaced by newer styles of vengeance. But the Tissington still stands as an example of what high Victorian mobile value in architecture. The house was built in 1901 for Mr. Takon, who was the president of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. My husband's grandparents bought it in 1905. And that was Dr. Robert C. Gordon. A number of the furnishings in the house have been in here since 1905. In fact, this sofa that I'm sitting on is a carved rosewood. And it was in my grandfather's dental office downtown. And the wallpaper in this room, the front pile and the second pile, is original to the house. A number of pieces of furniture and pictures that have been here all along. The stained glass that you see on the landing is so pretty. And that's the eastern exposure and early in the morning.

And the sun comes through and it's perfectly beautiful. I do think the downtown area of Mobile is coming back and a lot of interesting, exciting things are happening. And in this particular part of town, which is really called Midtown, is a very nice neighborhood and a nice place to live. A lot of young families are moving in, and a lot of the homes are being restored. So I'm very much pleased with the progress that's taking place in Mobile. Also off-government street, another historic site associated with Mobile's oldest families, church street cemetery. Buried here are revolutionary war veterans, 18th century immigrants, even Mobile's most famous native son, Joe Cain, who brought the rowdy Marty Gross celebration to Mobile after the Civil War. But it's a lesser known grave site that is perhaps even more intriguing.

It sits just outside the cemetery walls in what was once a potter's field. Charles Boyington was arrested in 1835 for the murder of his friend Nathaniel Frost, whose body had been found mangled near the church street graveyard. Boyington went to the gallows for claiming his innocence. He made their dramatic statement that if he were executed, let an oak tree grow from his grave as a symbol of his innocence. He was hanged, and now a giant oak stands over the place where he was said to be buried. Three years after his death, someone else confessed to the crime. Fortunately for the nostalgic traveler, old businesses along Highway 90 haven't suffered as much as in some places where state highways have been replaced by interstates. Tourist traffic still keeps many old roadside motels in business, and some other historic establishments are as popular as ever too.

No other establishment on Highway 90 represents a bygone era any better than the Wattaburger restaurant. Its orange and white A-frame is a well-known landmark and was the last of its kind built by the restaurant chain in 1973. But as numerous wall photographs depict, the history of Wattaburger goes back much farther, back to Texas in the 1950s, where Harmon Dobson opened his first restaurant in the mom-and-pop chain. In fact, mom still owns the company, and they've tried not to change anything else too much in all those years. Prices on the menu may have gone up just a little, but the most requested item is still the same. Management says the secret to success is a reputation for the highest quality service a long history of committed civic involvement, and well, a really good burger. Long time customers seem to agree.

And it looks like a new generation of patrons will too. After that kind of endorsement, we couldn't resist either. We're going to drive on the track at five o'clock for hot laps, and we're going to qualify at six o'clock tonight, despite the forecast, we're going to get this rate in. And if it's anything like last week, it's going to be some of the best races you've ever seen. Highway 90 west, the Nervings and Underworld, regular admission prices tonight. Down south, on the Gulf Coast, it's big down here.

I started my racing in Houston, Alabama when I got out of high school. And I moved down here 10 years, 12 years ago. Now I've been racing down here ever since. And I think it's just the people. They like it. You know, it's down home racing is what it is. Some place go on Saturday night, and the man you say up in Birmingham is clean as family fun around. There are a number of different race tracks along the Highway 90 route. Ask around here in Irvington, and most anybody will tell you that, frankly, there's just not much else to do on a Saturday night, but go to the races. That's one reason this speedway is such a popular family attraction. The plain sweeper word is for any driver that can be the best qualifier with a heat and with a feature. It piles up every week, 25 or week for the pier stops for the modified spiff urine for the late models. It's up to $75 this week for the modified LMS air conditioning for riding that running.

Most small time racing teams can't afford the big time sponsors that their NASCAR counterparts enjoy. These drivers have to count on family support. In fact, there's usually a place on the pit crew for everybody. Well, my daddy, he's been racing for several years, and going with him has grown up. You know, and my uncle Roy over there, he races, and going with him as, you know, and I was younger. And just I enjoyed it, started powder puffing, and after that, you know, after you went to powder puff, then you want to do better, you know. But just been, yeah, yeah, I always been with my family. You know, weekends, going with them, just always wanted to do it. Love it, love the thrill of it. We was first woman to ever win a feature race out here in 32 years. So after that, you know, then we moved up. I told them I'm ready to move up again now. So it was like after you win, you're ready to move on, you know. And if we do a conference for the ASI and up, we're going to do a conference for the ASI and up.

The old cell has been here. It was a farming country doesn't town what it was. It's old farming. We had there a deeper way I had a uncle that would catch the male. The train would go through. We'd hang it up on the rack and the train would catch it. And then the train would throw off my own and he cared over the post office. So it was deeper. A little about five, six years old, but I remember it. The old train going through. And it was made where the snag got bad, pulling it in that train.

They never stopped. The reason I retired over here was because it's the best of both worlds. 15 minutes to pass. 15 minutes to mobile in one traffic light. And I told my wife when we came out here in 74, if they ever put in another traffic light, we're gone. We love a small town. It is like the garden of Eden in Gran Bay. By the time Highway 90 reaches Gran Bay, it begins to take a back seat to the more popular interstate. It may move a little faster on the super highway, but maybe that's not always the best measure of a good way to travel. We're getting a lot more tourists going through here. They can stop anywhere up down the road and take a look at what they want to look at and talk to people over there. You don't see many people on interstate. There's a lot of people coming through here and talk to us.

Ask your questions and then they're stopping next little town. They just feel interested. You need to stretch. There areout 4 house座. Eight. Two days with the crew. 22 days, the remaining are at chapters 3. Um, hopefully around 5. Yeah? Too much to walk on. He says it's too slow to walk on the west, so wait for the��도 to start pass. crap really hard. I'm a dynamical off the Charleston lady. And of course, they play with the line. I have one of those, and I'm in touch with Dave. You're on the front line. It's gotta give him credit. It's not as fun. All right, fairies. I'm a baby. I'm a little sick. No crack, no crack, no spook. Let's go. Finn asleep. Let's do it, let's do it. Let's go. Let's go, please. I've been everywhere. I've been everywhere. Cross it. There's a tear man. Reveit my man. Tell them I've had my share man. I've been everywhere.

Reveit my man. Thank you very much. Thank you.