June/July 2009 | 

Below the Line, June and July 2009

Goings on in the South and beyond

Alabama
Fish On!
The waters surrounding Dauphin Island hold just about every saltwater fish you’d ever want to catch, and come July 17, about 3,000 eager anglers will converge on this little strip of barrier island for the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, the largest and oldest multi-species saltwater fishing tournament in the country. The three-day tourney includes thirty categories, everything from speckled trout to tuna. If you’d rather just enjoy the show from dry land, as some 100,000 people usually do, don’t miss Sunday afternoon, when the offshore boats come in to weigh the big boys. adsfr.com

Arkansas
Killer Tillers
Take a wildly popular regional food, add in one of the world’s most bizarre races, and you’ve got the PurpleHull Pea Festival & World Championship Rotary Tiller Race (June 26–27) in Emerson. The purple-hull pea, a local backyard-garden staple, is closely related to the more familiar black-eyed pea, except it’s, um, purple (and in Emerson they’ll tell you tastier). There’s a pea cook-off, a pea dinner, a pea-shelling contest—you get the idea. But the main event is the racing. It started with regular rotary tillers (yes, the engine-powered gardening implements used to turn soil), but nowadays folks soup them up until they can blaze across the earth like turbocharged hot rods. Watch your toes. purplehull.com

Florida
Storm Story
Before the devastation wrought by Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina, there was the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, the first recorded Category 5 storm to hit the continental United States. As it made landfall along the Florida Keys, more than four hundred people were killed, a total that no doubt would have been even higher had the Keys not still been a relatively remote outpost. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, the book Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane (University Press of Florida) re-creates the events leading up to, during, and after the storm. It’s a fascinating account not just for the drama of the hurricane itself but as a look at the then fledgling National Weather Service and Depression-era life in the Keys.

Georgia
Southern Portraits
It’s hard to imagine Atlanta as anything other than a megalopolis (with a traffic problem). But back before the Fortune 500 companies and five professional sports teams came to town, cotton was the big deal in the Big Peach. Starting July 20, you can see images of the city’s, and the South’s, rural past at the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum exhibition The South in Black and White: The Works of James E. Routh, Jr., 1939–1946. Born in New Orleans and Georgia-bred, Routh studied at the Art Student League in New York before turning back south in 1940. Traveling through Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, he sketched scenes of daily life, capturing dilapidated churches, farmers working depleted soil, and a region struggling through economic hardship. ipst.gatech.edu/amp

Kentucky
Back in the Saddle
Sure, the Derby’s long gone, but there’s still plenty of equine excitement to be had in the Bluegrass State. The folks at Lexington’s Kentucky Horse Park are already gearing up for the 2010 World Equestrian Games, which leave Europe for the first time since their 1990 debut. This July, the park opens its new 6,000-seat arena for some preliminary events, offering World Games competitors a little practice, and spectators a preview. Check out the vaulting action (imagine acrobats on horseback—really) during the national championship (July 9–12), or catch some agility-styled competition at the reigning test event (July 20–23). kyhorsepark.com

Louisiana
Celebrating Satchmo
“There is two kinds of music,” Louis Armstrong once said, “the good and bad. I play the good kind.” For four days (July 30–August 2), the good kind will roll in New Orleans’ French Quarter as Armstrong fans from across the country gather for Satchmo Summerfest, a celebration of the hometown legend’s birthday. The event features multiple stages devoted to jazz, both contemporary and traditional, along with speaker seminars on Armstrong’s life and legacy. Find yourself a plate of red beans and rice, and get loose. Pops wouldn’t have had it any other way. fqfi.org/satchmosummerfest