Ah...my home town

It happened in my birthplace, my old home town, and I might say “sweet home Alabama,” except that Fort Payne is home to the country music group Alabama and not Lynnyrd Skynnyrd. (I went to high school with Randy, Jeff & Teddy, if that means anything to anyone.)

Teenager steals airplane.

Nothing that exciting ever happened when I lived there, unless perhaps it was another semi hitting “Joe’s Truck Stop” (a 6-foot wide reinforced cement wall at the bottom of the long mountain grade, designed to keep trucks out of Joe’s living room).

Occasionally (it being a dry county) the newspaper would cover the Sheriff’s capture of cars full of beer that individuals attempted to bring in. The practice was to “pop and pour” to destroy it. (Gosh, glad I never got stopped for facilitating my dad’s desire for malt liquor.)

Fort Payne recently voted to go wet, to my great surprise. But that’s just the city, not the county.

M

It’s amazing that the kid with no flying lessons managed to get the plane in the air, fly around for twenty minutes, attempt to land it, took off again for another thirty minutes or so and walked away from a crash landing.

MarkB

On Wednesday, police say that the teenager climbed a fence at the airport or walked through an open gate and found a plane with the keys left inside. …in light of the theft, the mayor of Fort Payne said additional security measures are now being considered.

Keyed gate? Or maybe “unkeyed” plane?