Why Birmingham’s Rickwood Field is a national Treasure
In 1991, Chicago’s Comiskey Park became a parking lot, passing the title of America’s Oldest Baseball Park to Birmingham’s 10,800-seat Rickwood Field. Built in 1910, the spearmint-green, mission-style gem had long been home to Birmingham’s minor-league Barons and Negro Leagues Black Barons as well as, from 1912 to 1927, Crimson Tide football. Even Lynyrd Skynyrd played there—a 1974 concert included the band’s new single “Sweet Home Alabama.” Since the Barons left in 1987, though, Rickwood had served as little more than a restroom for birds, and it appeared an errant feather away from collapse. [more]
Five Best: Books on Expeditions
Selected by Keith Thomson, the author of ‘Paradise of the Damned: The True Story of an Obsessive Quest for El Dorado, the Legendary City of Gold.’
Endurance
By Alfred Lansing (1959)
1. “Endurance” chronicles Ernest Shackleton’s failed imperial trans-Antarctic expedition… [more]
Imagining the Future of Military Gadgetry
June 19, 2011 Truth isn’t just stranger than fiction — it’s faster. In an espionage novel I wrote in 2007, I created what was then a futuristic million-volt stun gun disguised as an iPhone. Today, you can buy an even more potent stun gun online, albeit tricked out as a BlackBerry. [more]
How Gamblers—History’s Most Accurate Election Forecasters—are Betting on 2012
10/24/2012 I don't like uncertainty. The current presidential polls -- Gallup with Romney leading by three percent, CBS with Obama up by two percent, aggregators split on whose nose is ahead -- are a hotbed of uncertainty. Fortunately there are veritable election oracles I can turn to instead: gamblers. [more]
Dick Scruggs is shown at Birmingham's Rickwood Field. (Brian Williams | For AL.com)
July 25, 2018 True or false: In 1945, did Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers open the doors of Major League Baseball to black players.
False, argues Birmingham resident Ernest Fann, and he cites his abbreviated career as evidence. [more]
ONE SUNNY DAY LAST FEBRUARY, JOE MURPHY, THE GREATER BIRMINGHAM HUMANE SOCIETY'S ANIMAL CRUELTY INVESTIGATOR, WAS CALLED TO WINFIELD, A TOWN 80 MILES NORTHWEST OF BIRMINGHAM, WHOSE 4,700 RESIDENTS LIVE IN RELATIVELY CLOSE PROXIMITY. IN THE BACKYARD OF A TWO-ACRE PROPERTY THERE, HE FOUND A 500-POUND TIGER AND A SLIGHTLY LARGER LION. BOTH LAY IN CRAMPED CAGES SURROUNDED BY MOUNDS OF EXCREMENT AND OLD DEER CARCASSES.
THE SCENE WAS NOTHING UNUSUAL. [more]
