Kathryn Tucker Windham died on June 12, 2011 at the age of 93.

For me, and most native Alabamians of my generation, Kathryn Tucker Windham was always there. I read her collections of ghost stories when I was a child. I heard her speak on various occasions and I saw her on TV many times through the years. Her stories made me smile as I listened to her each Friday morning on Alabama Public Radio.

It was comforting to know that she was at home in Selma writing something new to share with the world. But now she’s gone.

Mrs. Windham was widely known for her collections of Southern ghost stories. She was the inspiration for my 1998 documentary titled, “The Ghosts of Selma.” The documentary featured several Selma, Alabama ghost stories and I interviewed people who told me they had seen ghosts at locations around the city. It ended with Mrs. Windham, who many in Selma lovingly called “the ghost lady.”

The closing credits appear over an image of Live Oak Cemetery in Selma where Mrs. Windham liked to go for picnics. Some people thought she was a bit strange. She loved life and approached everything with childlike curiosity and enthusiasm.

Her weekly commentaries on Alabama Public Radio ran for 26 years. Mrs. Windham told stories about growing up in Thomasville, Alabama or shared her observations about things that “made her wonder.” She collected folklore and traditions from around the world and wove them into tales of south Alabama life in the early 20th century.

Those stories were recorded in her dining room by various people through the years. When Brett Tannehill left Alabama Public Radio in late 2010 to become program director at WLRH in Huntsville, I was asked to carry on this tradition. Mrs. Windham was 92.

In early 2011, her health declined and she was unable to record new material, so I searched though the library of past recordings for something to air each week until she was able to record again. I called her every few weeks and she would say, “I need just a little more time to get over this illness. Check back with me in a couple of weeks.”

For the last six months of her life, the public radio programs were all reruns but I didn’t hear complaints. Several people said something like, “I think I’ve heard her tell that story before, but it was good to hear it again.” Mrs. Windham provided a link to life before the advent of air-conditioning and television, when people sat on their front porches and told stories to pass the time. Her stories were amazing and all were true.

She recalled her grandfather talking about being taken prisoner during the Civil War. Her father, a banker, told her that the change she brought back from a class field trip was all the money the family had at the advent of the Great Depression.

Her best friend started driving at eight years of age. Her brother had a pet possum that escaped and was missing for weeks until it was found hanging by its tail from the living room curtain rod. When the boy she really admired showed up to take her to the school prom, he smelled like a skunk.

My favorites were the account of the circus monkey escaping and the story of the Easter pageant that went awry. Her sister ran terrorized from the circus tent when the monkey escaped only to find it waiting for her on their front lawn. After the stage manager and the Jesus character had a fistfight during scene changes, Jesus, dressed in loincloth and fake blood, ran out of the auditorium shouting, “They’re trying to kill me!” The actor who had played Judas, dressed in gym shorts, ended up on the cross in the final scene.

Mrs. Windham lived a remarkable life and shared bits of it with us in ways that kept us tuning in for more. In her final commentary, which aired two days before her death, she urged us all to record our family members telling their stories before they are gone forever.

Max Shores.

I recently discovered that the trailer for the 2003 documentary “A Taste of Hog Heaven” had been placed online by my colleague Rob Briscoe. (Thanks Rob!) It brought back some good memories. Here’s the story behind the documentary which I wrote in 2003:

For the past twenty years, I’ve traveled over Alabama collecting stories to tell through public TV documentaries. Everywhere I go I prefer to eat at local restaurants rather than national chains. If there’s a barbecue restaurant handy, that’ll be my first choice.

I like barbecue and so do most of my co-workers. In fact, some of my co-workers through the years have been barbecue fanatics. There was one cameraman who just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to stop at Jim’s Bar-B-Q on Highway 82. Every time we traveled from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery, he’d stop there for a late breakfast or early lunch. Then on our return drive to Tuscaloosa, he’d stop again to pick up takeout for his family.

Imagine this scene… Three or four (and sometimes more) public TV people eating lunch at a barbecue restaurant. We’ve been up since long before sunrise, driven for an hour or three, worked all morning with cameras and lights and we’re already pretty tired. We’ve got a lot more work to do after lunch and we know that we won’t be back home until late. This lunch is our only time to relax, and we’ve found a great place to eat. The meat is tender and smoked to perfection and the sauce adds just the right bite.

It doesn’t take long before someone says, “We should do a documentary about barbecue.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard those words. I’ve even said them myself.

Being public TV storytellers, naturally we researched the topic. We read about the history of pit cooking and how it originated in the Caribbean, was brought to North Carolina, and spread across the US. We read how different sauces were developed in various locales. We talked about it over lunches in barbecue restaurants across Alabama for years, but we never got anything done on it. After lunch we’d go back to the job at hand. We were always busy with something else.

Then one day Dwight Cammeron walked into my office and said, “We’ve been talking about this for years. Let’s do something!”

The history of barbecue cooking is a fascinating subject, but we decided not to focus on that. We decided instead to focus on barbecue restaurants around the state. After all, barbecue restaurants had been our inspiration from the very beginning.

As you might expect, we had lots of favorite places and it didn’t take long for us to realize that we couldn’t include all of them. We decided to feature ten restaurants spread out across the state. Dwight had a highway map hanging on the wall in his office and he drew ten big circles on it to divide up the state. He started looking for restaurants in five of the circles and I took the other five.

We phoned all over the state asking folks we know and folks we didn’t know until then about their favorite barbecue restaurants. When we came up with a list of good places to eat, we started calling restaurants. Some of the restaurant owners thought we were practical jokers. Some didn’t have time to talk to us. Some got real excited. All of them probably thought we were crazy.

In the end, we came up with nine restaurants scattered over the state. Passionate barbecue enthusiasts may question why we included one restaurant and not another. Well, we only had an hour of TV time to work with. We were looking for interesting stories and colorful people. We were also trying to include places ranging from extreme north Alabama to extreme south Alabama and all points in between.

We decided to let the restaurant folks tell their own stories without a lot of commentary from us. We hope the end result will let the viewer get to know the people and see behind the scenes. The folks at all of the restaurants were great to work with and were glad to share their life’s work with interested people.

We spent a couple of days at each of the featured restaurants dragging cameras and lights into tight corners, standing on chairs or lying on the floor to get just the right picture. We choked on smoke and worked up a sweat. Then we had lunch and celebrated the fact that we were finally doing something we’d talked about doing for years.

But the subject of conversation over lunch has changed. Now we talk about plans for the next barbecue documentary.

For more about “A Taste of Hog Heaven” and the featured restaurants, click here.

The next barbecue documentary was “Holy Smoke Over Birmingham” in 2006.

Max Shores.

Sunset over Kudzu

I was searching for a documentary topic when I called a friend to pick his brain. “You could do a documentary on kudzu,” he said and I was drawn into a field of tangled vines that hold me to this day. That conversation was in 1994 and in it I learned that my friend’s mother made baskets by weaving kudzu vines.

With the help of a student research assistant, I found fascinating people making things from kudzu, determined people trying to kill kudzu, and I unraveled the almost too strange to be true history of the kudzu plant in the US.

“The Amazing Story of Kudzu” was broadcast in Alabama in 1995 and distributed to PBS stations nationwide in 1996. I was interviewed by BBC Radio just before the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. They wanted to prepare visitors to Atlanta for the large areas of green vines they would witness. I have joked ever since about being one of the world’s leading scholars on kudzu.

The image of sunset over kudzu above was captured by cinematographer Greg McNair. I found what I thought would be the perfect spot to shoot it not knowing that Greg would have to stand in an ant bed. We used three thousand watts of light to illuminate the leaves in the foreground. The image has been used in textbooks and in brochures. It was also used as the backdrop for a conference on invasive plant species in China.

The simple web presence I created to promote this documentary remains popular today and I continue to get email questions about “the vine that ate the South.”

For more about kudzu, visit The Amazing Story of Kudzu.

Max Shores.