Since nobody but my family and maybe 8 others from the past century has come from Weokahatchee (though Emmylou Harris had two aunts who were our closest neighbors) I’ll go with Montgomery, the city where I was born.
Nat King Cole
Brett Butler
Bart Starr
Zelda Sayre (later Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Famous residents who weren’t born there but lived there during formative or very important periods of their lives:
Hank Williams (whose daughter Jett was born there)
George Wallace
Jefferson Davis*
[poet]Sidney Lanier**
Rosa Parks
Harper Lee
Martin Luther & Coretta Scott King (who had two children born here)
Deforest Kelley***
Orville & Wilbur Wright****
Steve Rubell & Ian Schrager*****
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Helen Keller******
*Davis is the namesake of the biggest public high school in town, known simply as JD. (The second biggest is Robert E. Lee [who to the best of my knowledge never came to Montgomery].)
**Namesake of the third biggest public high school and, occupationally, of their football team, “The Poets”- wimpiest mascot any school ever had unless there’s a “Wounded Chipmunks” somewhere- “It’s the Panthers versus the Poets” gives great images of feral wildcats chasing a frantically hobbling Byron or desperately fumbling Milton or an agoraphobic Emily Dickinson all over a field.
***He was stationed at Maxwell AFB during the late 1940s. I’ll call it significant because he claimed to have seen a UFO while on duty one night. (He’s the only member of the original cast to have claimed a UFO sighting.)
****They started the first pilot’s school at what is now Maxwell AFB. According to completely unsubstantiated local rumor one of the two lifelong bachelors (I can’t remember which and it probably varies depending on which local old gossip you’re talking to) was arrested for “importuning” (or ‘soliciting’) from one of the students, though charges were dropped and expunged.
*****Co-owners/co-founders of STUDIO 54, they spent 2 years at the prison on Maxwell AFB (a prison that really and truly is bordered by a golf course- when I was a bellman we fell over ourselves to be the drivers and gofers to prisoners who stayed at our hotel when on weekend pass as many were hugely rich drug dealers or junkbond traders who tipped like crazy.
******Her sister lived here and their mother moved in with her, so Helen was a frequent visitor. Montgomery is where she was “stood up” by the lover who was supposed to elope with her, so she waited all night on a porch for a man who would never arrive. (Biographers believe that it was not her family, as Helen suspected, who changed his mind but more likely Annie Sullivan, who not only understood how demanding it was to be Helen’s “voice & eyes & ears” but blamed Helen’s dependence on the demise of her own marriage.)
While she wasn’t famous in her own right, H.L. Mencken’s wife was from here. I mention her only because
–it’s odd such a total cynic was not only married but a completely devoted husband who nursed her through a long illness (she died young) and was devastated when she died
–other Montgomery Dopers (I know of at least 3) may be interested to know that the house she grew up in was Mgy’s most famous “haunted house”, the former 666 South Perry St.. The mansion is now beautifully restored but Montgomerians can remember the 20 years or so it spent as a stupendously wonderful abandoned mansion with outbuildings and sides covered in ivy and weeds, totally an Addamsesque South “we broke down on the road and wondered if we could spend our final night on Earth here” type of place. It’s antebellum, has stained glass ceiling and a hand carved staircase and magnificent woodwork and was on the market for $75,000 at one point, but didn’t sell until the address was officially changed to 668 South Perry St…
