Kierstin Woods gets it, she says. She wants no one to get sick and die. But she had senior-year dreams. She had senior pranks to play. She had a senior skip day to enjoy.
It's Memorial Day weekend, and I’ve always wondered about these two Alabamians buried in the American Legion section of Anniston’s Edgemont Cemetery.
McKenzee Webster gave us hope. She didn’t walk out of Regional Medical Center last Friday, she didn’t tell us what is possible. She showed us.
Evie Waddell got hit by a falling tree. A huge tree, probably an oak, that sideswiped her head and struck her back and left the Anniston EMS paramedic dazed in a mobile home park, along with Anniston firefighter Walker Kent.
Long before Anniston died, the little girl from Louisiana checked off items on her list. She starred in a talent show and rode a motorcycle and picked flowers and went swimming, more than 100 achievements in all. And she came here, to Anniston.
Emily Keys treks across the East River at the end of her 24-hour shifts from Brooklyn to her Manhattan apartment. Rooftop melodies played on a trumpet greet her.
No one called her Baby Doll during the war. That didn’t happen until she met Chester Price, an American soldier from Blue Mountain who wanted her to be his bride.
Tahj Jones is only 17. He’s finishing his final Anniston High School classes at home. He could be miffed. He should be miffed. But just listen to him.
Ethan Suttle is a 30-year-old nurse in the surgical intensive care unit at Gadsden Regional Medical Center, heroic work in the era of COVID-19. “I have a unique skill set,” he says.
None of us have endured anything like the global pandemic of COVID-19, but our predecessors did in October 1918, when the Spanish flu outbreak brought the world to its knees. Calhoun County didn’t escape the pain. And no one had Netflix.
One of the byproducts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Alabama’s statewide state-at-home order is an apparent rebirth of a simple tradition: family dinners. (Or suppers, depending on your linguistic preference.)
While Anniston's older public school students are using school-owned laptops, a significant number of elementary students aren’t learning online because they lack access to either a computer, the internet or WiFi. Or all three.
Edward R. Murrow was a broadcast journalist who gained prominence during World War II. He’s credited with saying: “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
Golden Springs Baptist Church's Rev. Roland Brown is sure that his congregation is stressed because of the pandemic. And he doesn’t plan to give COVID-19 a starring role in his Easter sermon. “It makes the message I have to say more important than at any time in my life,” he said.
Tanner Medical Center of East Alabama, in Wedowee, isn’t that far away from hard-hit Chambers County. There is no surge there, no apocalyptic outbreak. For now.
And those face masks? “Anything is on the table in respect to protecting our community and in respect to not overloading our health care system,” Anniston Mayor Jack Draper said. “That’s what this is really about.”
The victims. They’re always on Susan Shipman’s mind. The victims of sexual assault, of domestic violence. Those who often are voiceless, whose options are few.
Jim Wilson talks with the slow, pastoral comfort you’d expect from a hospital chaplain. As RMC’s longtime chaplain, he's adamant that COVID-19 won't change halt his work: “I’m here every day,” he said.
Camaron Harry of Durban, South Africa, is one of dozens of JSU international students waiting out the global COVID-19 pandemic in Jacksonville, thousands of miles from home.
Down in Alpine, Debbie Wade read the news, and it was ruthlessly bleak. The darkness was unabated: the spread of the novel coronavirus, the sickness, the deaths, the fear, the unknown. But there was one thing she could do. So she started sewing.
The cruelty of this global pandemic is so profound, so inhumanely sinister, that its touch isn’t limited to those it kills. It’s even cruel to the families of those who die from something other than COVID-19.
As the community grapples with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, local businesses have been hit hard by the decrease in human activity.
Each weeknight for the next two weeks, Sgt. Michael Webb will post a video on the Anniston Police Department’s Facebook page featuring an officer or City Hall volunteer reading a book. Webb hopes parents will join their children for a community-wide bedtime story that’s as much public service as it is educational.
Today’s high school seniors are seeing their final year upended in an abrupt swirl of postponements and cancelations that won’t be forgotten. That includes proms, many of which were set to happen right about now.
Before the novel coronavirus became a global pandemic, and before the worldwide outbreaks of Spanish flu, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, H1N1, SARS and MERS, there was yellow fever. And, have mercy, does Anniston have a story to tell about it.
