Issue 57, Summer 2000
On the cover: A Chinese cloisonné bowl from the Berman Museum, Anniston. [Photograph by David Walters]
Features
Eugene Walter
By Mindy Wilson
Once, when he was asked to disclose his favorite hors d’ oeuvres, Mobile’s multifarious son, Eugene Walter, responded in typical mischievous fashion, “Bayou La Batre oysters while someone’s rubbing my feet.” But Walter was more than an epicure; he was an accomplished gardener, artist, chef, and writer, having published several novels, book of poetry, and cookbooks. Indeed, he was considered by many Mobilians to be the port city’s one-and-only Renaissance man. In the Summer 2000 issue of Alabama Heritage, Mindy Wilson charts Walter’s life from his 1920s childhood in the heart of Mobile’s old-world-style downtown, to his adventures abroad, and finally to his return, late in life, to the city that never left his heart or his imagination.
Alabama Collections: Cloisonné at Anniston’s Berman Museum
By Karen Henricks
Representing a colorful, mythic world of dragons and masks, the cloisonné of China is one of the least understood and least studied forms of Chinese decorative art. In Anniston, the Berman Museum is doing its share to rectify that problem. Karen Henricks, an art history professor at Jacksonville State, details the Berman collection of this brilliant, colorful porcelain, describing the intricate process of cloisonné production, its storied and sometimes mysterious history, and its significance as a cultural artifact.
Harriett Engelhardt: A Job Worth Having
By Karon S. Bailey
At 5’1″, 110 pounds, Harriett Engelhardt did not, at first glance, appear to be a prime candidate for service at the front in one of the most catastrophic conflicts of the twentieth century–but she was. A closer examination of her brief life shows she would not have been anywhere else. Karon Bailey documents the extraordinary experiences of this Montgomery native, focusing largely on Engelhardt’s fateful time as a “Clubmobile Girl” in the Red Cross in Europe during World War II, where she would meet her untimely end. Quoting extensively from Engelhardt’s eighty-six letters home to relatives and friends during this period, Bailey paints a vivid picture of the breadth of spirit behind this diminutive woman.
Nancy O’Neal and the Koger House
By Milly Wright
The William Koger House – Its Architecture
By Robert Gamble
In 1991, not even the collapse of an entire endwall just days before she was to close on her purchase of the historic William Koger house outside of Florence could dampen Nancy O’Neal’s spirits. O’Neal had recently moved back to north Alabama–an area her family has been in since well before the Civil War. After spending most of her adult life as the art director for a major New York advertising firm, everything was a challenge and an adventure–from acquiring a cattle operation with almost no relevant experience to buying a dilapidated house in the middle of a wide expanse of cotton fields. Milly Wright tells the story of O’Neal’s restoration of the c.1830 plantation house, along with her return to the roots her family set down in 1819. Robert Gamble, Senior Architectural Historian for the Alabama Historical Commission, tells the story behind the Koger’s “story-and-a-half double-pile” architecture.
Departments
Recollections
Coming Home
By Albert F. Killian
Karl-Heinz Bösche, prisoner #4 WG 33980, was incarcerated in Camp Opelika, Alabama, from 1943 to 1944. Fifty years later, he returned to the campsite where he had spent much of World War II.
Nature Journal
Nevius and Neviusia
In 1857, two friends from Tuscaloosa discovered a sprawling shrub, part of a previously unknown genus of plants whose closest relative was in Japan. The drama surrounding the naming of the plant was as remarkable as its discovery, and forms the basis for L.J. Davenport’s report on the shrub.
