Voices from Alabama: A Twentieth-Century Mosaic

J. Mack Lofton Jr.
University of Alabama Press
352pp., ISBN 0-8173-0684-6
$24.95

Lofton did indeed finish out a long career with Sears a decade ago, and yes, he has spent a lot of time chewing the fat with old-timers in small-town cafes and elsewhere. But that marks the end of any similarities between retirement and what Mack has been up to.

After "working for a living" for 30 years, he took early retirement -- following heart surgery -- and embarked on a second career as a writer.

"I began writing full time, primarily for regional magazines, developing articles around interesting people and story tellers around the South," he says. "I've had about eight stories in Mississippi Magazine, for instance."

He also has written two fiction and four nonfiction books.

Lofton's first published book, Voices from Alabama: A Twentieth-Century Mosaic, is a collection of 145 stories told by 60 Alabamians, whom Lofton interviewed by crisscrossing the Camellia State with a tape recorder. Their words illuminate the history of that state and its people far better than any historical narrative ever could.

Published last July by the University of Alabama Press, Voices from Alabama is a treasure trove of vignettes—humorous, colorful, and poignant—about rural and urban life, the Great Depression, World War II, cornbread, old-time religion, horse trading, coal mining, farming, and myriad other topics. It's about how our parents and grandparents "got along."

In reading these stories, you get a sense that the tellers are eager to share the snapshots that made up their lives in the early days of the century. Happily, there are no overtones of instruction to the young 'uns, no lecturing or preaching, no excuses. These are people who are holding their lives out in front of them in broad daylight and saying, "Here we were."

Lofton, by the way, shows no sign of slacking up. He has just finished a book on the personal experiences of medical people in Alabama.