Christmas Tales of Alabama (5 page)

Wyona Griffith (right) meets with Alabama governor John Patterson, who helped find a job for her father so he could remain at home. Wyona was suffering from bouts of blindness at the time and was told she would lose her eyesight completely.
Photograph courtesy of Wyona Griffith Murray
.

Patterson called workers at the employment office in Gadsden, a few miles from Attalla, who were able to secure a job at a steel company for James Griffith. The family was relieved and grateful, but Patterson had another surprise in store. He contacted Dr. Stanley Graham, a specialist in Birmingham, to evaluate Wyona's condition. With the help of funds raised by friends, Wyona would visit the doctor for several years. Wyona's mother shielded her from the grim diagnosis that she wouldn't learn until many years later: Dr. Graham told Mrs. Griffith that Wyona would likely be fully blind by age sixteen and dead by age twenty.

Mrs. Griffith wrote again to Patterson and asked if she could bring Wyona to meet the much-admired governor. Patterson readily agreed. On Tuesday, December 20, 1960, four days after Wyona's fourteenth birthday, the Griffith family arrived at Patterson's office in Montgomery, where Wyona personally thanked him for keeping her family together and presented him with a Christmas gift: a pair of cufflinks.

While Wyona was overwhelmed with excitement by the meeting, Patterson, too, was emotional. The meeting was reported in an Associated Press story in newspapers across the state under headlines such as: “Girl, Soon to Be Blind, Meets Governor, Had Wish Fulfilled” (
Ocala Star-Banner
, Florida) and “Wish Fulfilled: Girl Going Blind Sees Alabama's Governor” (
Los Angeles Times
).

When Patterson thanked Wyona for her gift, her response had double meaning: “I think it is a privilege that I can see you,” she said.

Soon, young Wyona was receiving cards and letters from across the country, some with well wishes and some containing money to help with her treatment. One letter in particular touched her. An elderly man named Cecil Reed of Atlanta wrote and offered to donate his eyes to Wyona. “I'm an old man and I've seen everything I need to see,” he wrote.

After a couple of years, Dr. Graham told the family he could no longer treat Wyona. Wyona's vision was not worsening, and in any case, there were no medicines or surgery that would help.

Then an odd thing happened. Wyona's vision improved. The incidents of blindness grew farther apart until they stopped altogether. Not only did she live, but she also retained her eyesight. By 1972, Wyona Griffith Murray was the single parent of an infant daughter, who was doted on by Wyona's beloved father until his death in 1974.

In 2011, Wyona was living in Georgia, where her family moved in the 1960s when her father transferred there. She said she hoped to move soon to Anniston, Alabama, where her brother and other family members still live. To this day, Wyona keeps a scrapbook filled with letters, clippings and photos from the governor who helped keep her family together.

F
ANNIE
F
LAGG
'
S
M
AGICAL
B
IRMINGHAM

When little Patricia Neal was nine years old, the best places for Christmas shopping were the majestic department stores in downtown Birmingham. Shopping was a luxury experience, with glistening counters and marbled staircases leading to mezzanine tearooms. Escalators were like futuristic ships, transporting shoppers to new lands of toys, perfumes, clothing, house wares and gifts.

In a few years, malls would blossom across the South, and the stores—Loveman's, Pizitz, Parisian—would go with them.

But through the 1950s, downtown was a wonderland unlike any other. Though the temperatures rarely dipped below freezing in this major southern hub, children would shiver when they got a look at the blankets of faux snow in display windows and the lighted snowflakes adorning lampposts along the street.

Patsy, an only child with little extended family, found the magic of Christmas on the bustling streets of a city that grew around the iron industry. Her father, William Neal, who was employed as a projectionist at theaters such as the Ritz, the Lyric, the Melba and the architectural jewel the Alabama Theatre—the first building in the state to have air conditioning—would work during Christmas, showing films such as
Miracle on 34
^th
Street
with Maureen O'Hara and Natalie Wood and
White Christmas
with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.

After Patsy had her fill of the imaginary world onscreen—a world filled with families and love and happy endings—she would don her coat and mittens and walk down the block to peer into the storybook windows at Loveman's Department Store.

Toy trains would chug through an array of moving Santas and skaters performing figure eights on “ice” made of glass. “It was like a fairyland,” she recalls.

Surrounded by a city that glistened like new-fallen snow and a throng of starry-eyed children with noses pressed to the glass, Patsy felt a thrill. “At night, seeing all those lights set me wild,” she says now.

She always attended the Christmas parade, filled with floats and marching bands and then went to dinner at Britling Cafeteria with her mother, Marion Leona Neal. Within another year or so, Patsy would write, direct and star in her fifth grade play,
The Whoopee Girls
. She loved writing, but struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, she decided on an acting career. To accomplish this goal, she would repeatedly enter the Miss Alabama Pageant until she won a scholarship to acting school.

Fannie Flagg, born Patricia Neal, recalls Christmases in the 1950s in downtown Birmingham.
Photograph courtesy of Fannie Flagg
.

When she applied for her Actors' Equity card at the age of eighteen, she would learn that the name “Patricia Neal” was already registered. She chose the stage name Fannie Flagg; Fannie was suggested by her grandfather, also a film projectionist, because it had been popular in vaudeville with comediennes.

Born on September 21, 1944, Flagg had grown up an only child in cramped apartments in the big industrial city. Though she fondly recalls the giant metal sign flashing “Birmingham: The Magic City” in thousands of electric lights at Terminal Station, she also remembers feeling small and insubstantial within its glow. With the exceptions of time spent with her Aunt Bess Fortenberry in Irondale and the wondrous downtown Christmases, her memories were often lonely ones.

Still, her love for Birmingham and Alabama would mold her second career as a best-selling author of classic novels such as
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
and
A Redbird Christmas
. While many of Flagg's Alabama memories are etched into these novels—the titular
Whistle Stop Café
is based on Aunt Bess's Irondale Café, and
Redbird
is set in a fictionalized version of Magnolia Springs, where Flagg owns a home—the love of her hometown is most prominently displayed in her 2010 novel
I Still Dream About You
.

Set in modern-day Birmingham,
Dream
features a fading Alabama real estate agent who grieves the loss of her mentor, Hazel, who was three feet, four inches tall. Hazel was based on Adele “Del” Chambordon, a well-known Birmingham figure of about four feet, three inches tall who worked for decades as a bookkeeper at Loveman's Department Store and became Twinkles the Elf each Christmas.

Each day during the Christmas season, Del would descend the marble staircase in the center of the store, playing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” on her accordion. Then a costumed Del would assist at Breakfast with Santa, where local radio personality Dave Campbell played Santa and “Cousin Cliff” Holman performed a magic-and-comedy act for the children in Loveman's mezzanine tearoom.

As were many Alabamians, Flagg was frustrated by the dichotomy of her hometown in its golden era. In the 1950s and '60s, Birmingham was filled with genteel people, women who wore gloves and hats and never left home without lipstick and men who dressed in suits and ties. It was also a place where many of its citizens, those who were black, were treated as subhuman.

Reaching a horrific culmination in the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement in Birmingham has given Flagg's hometown a terrible legacy. It's been called “Bombingham” and was the site of marches in which authorities turned fire hoses on children. When Flagg moved to California to continue her career, she wished people understood that not everyone in Birmingham was racist and cruel. Through her character Maggie, Flagg describes how many white people in Birmingham were as appalled by the violence as the black population.

Through her writing, Flagg hopes people will understand that there was good and bad in Birmingham.

Flagg's path to becoming an author was a roundabout one. She became a comedy skit writer, Broadway and film actress, game show regular and author. She had worked on
Candid Camera
as a writer and actor, starred in
The New Dick Van Dyke Show
and had parts in films such as
Grease
and
Crazy in Alabama
. Then a tragedy led her to focus on her unfulfilled dream of writing.

After both parents died in 1980 when Flagg was thirty-six, she hit a turning point and decided to write full time. She wrote
Coming Attractions
, later released as
Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man
, but it was her second novel that put her on the best-sellers' list.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
also became a blockbuster film, and more books followed. Then, in 2003, after writing other best-sellers, Flagg told her agent she would no longer write. “I'm tired,” she said.

Undeterred, her agent called a few weeks later and asked if Flagg would consider writing a Christmas novel. Because she had once considered writing a children's book about Christmas, she agreed. The book is set in the fictional town of Lost River, Alabama, which is based on the picturesque south Alabama town of Magnolia Springs, where mail is still delivered by boat.

From the beginning, Flagg knew cardinals would figure in the plot. “I've always loved red birds,” she said. “I've always thought they were such beautiful things.”
A Redbird Christmas
has been optioned for a feature film, which is in planning stages.

Flagg never did stop writing, coming out with
Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
in 2006 and, later,
I Still Dream About You
, in which she harkens back to a magical time in the Magic City. “I loved growing up where I did and when I did,” she said.

Flagg has been quoted as saying, “To have gone from being a girl who could not spell her name to an author with her own books on a library shelf is the most rewarding thing that has ever happened to me.” Some of the attitude that led to her success was instilled by her mother. In Fannie Flagg's
Original Whistle Stop Café Cookbook
, Flagg writes that her mom advised her, “Honey, I tried all my life to please everybody and I just couldn't do it. So just do the things that please you and you will know that at least one person will be pleased.”

Mrs. Neal was right: Flagg's works have pleased millions of fans.

The Story of Twinkles and Cousin Cliff

Del Chambordon and Cousin Cliff were well-known Birmingham characters in the 1950s and '60s.

Del's career at Loveman's spanned thirty-eight years, until its closure in 1980. Her bosses once sent her to Hollywood to a Little People of America convention, where she learned for the first time that there were other small people in the world. Because of her stature and bubbly personality, she went on to appear on the
Lawrence Welk Show
and the
Art Linkletter Show
, and on her seventy-fifth and eightieth birthdays, she was honored on the
Maury Povich Show
. Until her eyesight failed, Del was an important member of Birmingham society, serving on dozens of boards and fundraising committees.

In 1995, she was inducted into the Woodlawn Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed by her alma mater, Woodlawn High School, where she was a cheerleader and graduated in 1939.