On Sunday, people from all over drove to Selma to celebrate Kathryn Tucker Windham‘s 90th birthday. We really wanted to go, but after spending so much time in the car on Saturday, I wanted Shug to have all day to just play around the house.
Our friend Al Benn wrote about the party for the Montgomery Advertiser. Here are small portions:
Windham arrived in a golf cart and took her seat high above the huge crowd just as a Dixieland band strutted down the middle of the street to the library, playing “When The Saints Go Marching In.”
The guest of honor even got a parade permit and, when the library portion of the celebration ended, the crowd marched across a busy, but blocked-off intersection to the Selma-Dallas County Performing Arts Center. That’s where her birthday cake waited to be cut.
Mayor James Perkins Jr. held up a proclamation naming Sunday “Kathryn Tucker Windham Day” in Selma and then took his place in the crowd, holding a little plastic comb with wax paper around it — soon to serve as a makeshift musical instrument. That’s the way Windham wanted to celebrate her special birthday — a fun time for all on a day in which she became an official nonagenarian.
Comb playing may be a lost art, but her friends quickly took to it and joined her in their own renditions of “Amazing Grace,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “You Are My Sunshine” and many other selections.
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Inside, her friends were treated to Moon Pies, grape soda and water as they pushed toward the table to get a piece of her birthday cake. Among those celebrating was author and political observer Wayne Flynt, who is familiar with the glare of spotlights. He described Windham as a woman who is unique in Alabama.
“Some people are important to intellectuals, journalists or politicians, but Kathryn Tucker Windham is probably the only person I know in Alabama who is important to everybody,” he said.