UlysAnnie album, page 20

June Barnett, Wathada Burford, Velma Lee Barnett

Evalee, Elvin

Evalee, Beverly, Buck, Charles

Bernice Hicks and Bill Rogers

(Bernice and Jay Bridges divorced some time after 1952. She married Bill Rogers in 1970 and they were married for 33 years until he died in 2003.)

Bald Knob Picnic 1954 - at Riverview Park in St. Joseph, Michigan

There were so many people who migrated from the South to Michigan during the 1930s and 1940s, looking for jobs, that the area of southwestern Michigan where I grew up was heavily populated with transplants from the same area of the country where my relatives came from in Arkansas. I have a little story to tell about Bald Knob --

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In 1988 I was in California visiting my parents. (They had moved to California in 1979 when my father got a job there, and they lived there for 20 years until they retired and moved back to Michigan.) During that visit we went to Sea World in San Diego. There was a 'needle' elevator ride there where you could get a bird's-eye view of the park. Painted on the ground surrounding the needle was a map of the United States. I took pictures. 

After we got back on the ground I noticed something peculiar about that map...

There were only a few cities and towns marked in each state. For Arkansas, of the three or four towns pinpointed on the map, one of them was BALD KNOB!! The population of Bald Knob at that time was probably less than 2000 people.

But wait, there's more!

The map of Alabama also had just a few towns marked, and one of them was the town I now live in -- my (ex)husband's hometown -- Fairhope. At the time, Fairhope's population was about 9000.

I've always wondered why those particular little towns -- which were landmarks in MY life -- happened to be the ones that appeared on that map in San Diego, California. The main reason I took pictures was because I knew if I didn't have the pictures to prove it, I would come to doubt whether my memory of that map was really true or not.