Alfie Crosslin the Dragon Dog is a fixture in Florence, and rightly so. His Facebook status this morning inspired us, and we hope it will you too. In Alfie's own words:
In order to love me as a friend you must understand that I am an animal lover... My heart is BROKEN REGULARLY and filled with sadness for those animals that are not loved. That are not treated with kindness and respect. That do not know kind words and gentle hands... EVERY animal is worthy of a stable environment, food, water, affection, and humane care... If you feel the same way post this on your wall. Sit. Stay. Eat. Live...... ♥ ♥ ♥
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Yesterday we blogged concerning the 95 rail car order National Alabama ostensibly produced in the past few months, to use Mike Goens' words. According to our sources at the Barton facility, the cars were actually completed in late 2010.
An initial run of 50 cars was begun in 2009 in order to ascertain how well the assembly line process worked. A second 50 car run was completed in 2010 in order to streamline the various production processes. Therefore, many of these 95 cars have been sitting around the mile-long plant gathering dust for almost two years.
We were unable to obtain the name of the buyer for the rail cars, but one source has speculated it's Norfolk Southern. If so, we sincerely hope the 95 cars are of such a quality that this rail giant will be inclined to purchase more. We also have to wonder why the buyer took only 95 of the 100 available cars; was it a budget decision, or were five of the finished rail cars unusable? We're not waiting on a press release to answer that question.
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Happy birthday to Ben Tate. His wonderful photography of Florence will live on long after us all.
Today the TimesDaily published an extremely well done piece on Remembering Florence, the Facebook page run by Florence native Larry Fisher. Thanks to Tom Smith for an excellent article on an endeavor that adds to our city and the entire Shoals area.
We've done blogs on Larry's contributions to our area before, but today we're going to add Ben Tate to the list of those who are selflessly attempting to improve our town's image. Ben is an excellent photographer. If you haven't yet seen his many original photographs, you are in for a treat. Ben has spent countless hours documenting Florence as it is today; those who come after us will undoubtedly learn more about our town in the early 21st Century from his work than from any other source.
However, if you haven't yet visited the site, don't expect it to be all new photos. Old images are appearing every day. We're going to compare it to YouTube's cache of old Hank Williams videos--images no one knew existed.
We've called Larry a hero before for standing up to those from Sweetwater who were verbally abusing anyone who asked questions about its owner and its finances. Now, we're calling him a hero twice over for his time-consuming work of love.
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