The story of how two women, Clifton and Byrd Lewis—are fighting to save one of Frank Lloyd Wright's creations, Spring House. Wright never saw the house, but the son of the architect who worked on it says, "There's a spirit to this house, a sense of timelessness, permanence, truth, and beauty." The house, though still standing, needs at least $250,000 worth of repairs to keep it from crumbling.
I was twenty-three and had been working at WDIA for one year, as long as the station had been on the air. Unexpectedly, Bert asked me to move a little closer to him on the seat. I edged over and waited but he didn’t speak. After a long moment he whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “What do you think of programming for Negro people?”
Bill Best, who founded the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, saves seeds—not in the way that people save stamps or coins, but in the way that people save endangered species, or possessions from a fire. He grows and stores about 700 varieties of beans on his farm in Berea, Kentucky, where he lives with Irmgard, his wife of fifty-one years, in a midcentury ranch house she designed, with stone chimneys he built. Some of his seeds are more than 150 years old—one goes back to the American Revolution.
Watching Bussard listen to records is a spiritually rousing experience. He often appears incapable of physically restraining himself, as if the melody were a call to arms, an incitement it would be immoral if not impossible to ignore: he has to move.
On April 28, Dust-to-Digital released No More Good Time In The World For Me, a two-CD set of Bruce Jackson’s recordings of J.B. Smith. Revisit producer Nathan Salsburg’s article about Smith and his work songs, from our Texas music issue.
The first time I admitted that yes, I was related to Francis Scott Key, it came as a shock, even to me, because, of course, I was lying. While my other college friends experimented with drugs and God, I experimented with genealogy.
One hot day in June 2002, a young man named Chris Gladden was fishing with his father when he discovered the complete fossilized remains of an ancient marine reptile called Clidastes. The fossil has the potential to be the most important of its kind known to science. More than a decade later, hardly anyone outside the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa knows that it exists.
Once you could sit in a boat right over the spring source, hemisphere of sky above, hemisphere of water below, and it would be as if you hung suspended between the elements inside a perfect globe of morning-glory blue. Once, but not now, not anymore.
Today, October 25, 2012, we wait for what the cab drivers are calling a “motorcade,” their rolling protest against new regulations proposed by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and approved by the City Council in April.
Micro-memoirs from our Spring 2017 issue.
My mother seined the waters of our childhoods. She gathered everything into the nets of her fingers: schoolwork, artwork, mementos. My mother did not recycle. Nor did she dispose. She was indisposed to it. Gathered now, it seems a kind of evidence, but of what?
