D. O. Whilldin: Alabama Architect (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 299 Army Air Forces terminated the job that Nancy called “the greatest in the world.” Nine months later World War II was also over and the question Nancy faced was: “what next?” Coming home to Alabama, she knew the options beyond marriage and motherhood would be limited. In February 1946, Nancy Batson married Lt. Col. Paul Crews. Paul was recalled into active duty when the United States Air Force was created in 1947, thus beginning Nancy’s life as a military wife. Three children—two sons and a daughter—were born beginning in 1948. The military moved them around several times but ultimately they ended up in southern California in 1958. Nancy loved her family but by 1960, when she turned forty, she was bored. Paul encouraged her to get back into flying. Following his premature death in 1977, Nancy relocated to California City, where she was now flying fulltime for a living. A short, unhappy stint in local politics led her to return to Birmingham to make a fresh start. Until her death from cancer in 2001, Nancy lived in Alabama, doing some flying but mostly active as a real estate developer, transforming her family’s former farm property into Lake Country Estates. Inspired by a 1937 tract, Think and Grow Rich, Nancy Crews achieved her goal of dying a millionaire. Rickman’s approach to this affectionate biography has been to allow Nancy and her closest friends to tell the story. Though the book is written for general readers, the absence of any engagement with the rich body of works about the history of women in twentieth-century Alabama or even books such as Wayne Flynt’s magisterial Alabama in the Twentieth Century is noticeable. Further, while Rickman does not flinch from more difficult topics such as Nancy’s attitudes towards race, she is gentler than some readers might like. Still, this reader is glad for the book’s publication for it is a welcome addition to the small literature about the individual women flyers of World War II, whose collective contributions subsequently did prove transformative to the life of the nation. DEBORAH G. DOUGLAS MIT Museum D. O. Whilldin: Alabama Architect. By Thomas Mark Shelby. Birmingham: Birmingham Historical Society, 2009. vii, 223 pp.$29.95. ISBN 978-0943994 -33-8. David O. Whilldin was a Philadelphia-born architect who lived and worked in Birmingham from 1902 until his death in 1970. During his T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 300 fifty-eight years in practice he designed more than 400 projects, including the Phillips High School, the Sims-Florentine Building, the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, the Dr. Pepper plant, and Legion Field in Birmingham; the Merchants Bank and Trust (today RBC) Building, the Tuscaloosa High School, and the City Hall and Bama Theater complex in Tuscaloosa; and the Reich Hotel, the American National Bank, and the first country club in Gadsden. In this book, Thomas Mark Shelby thoughtfully and thoroughly inventories Whilldin’s extensive body of work. He first places the reader in context by addressing Whilldin’s architectural training within the Beaux Arts tradition and outlining the possible influence on his work by turnof -the-century Philadelphia architects, including his professors at Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania. He then goes on to present the body of Whilldin’s work, project by project, in chronological order. The chronology is divided into three chapters: “Professional Prominence in the 1920s,” “The Thirties: Great Estates, Public Housing and New Styles,” and “The War, the Post-War Building Boom and the Modern Era.” Each building or project is described clearly and in considerable detail and illustrated using a compelling combination of photographs by the author and archival material (the latter includes a wealth of original plans and drawings from Whilldin’s office as well as historical photographs). Shelby also provides detailed information on the clients, partners, and colleagues in the design and construction of each project, and on the current condition of each building. The buildings themselves are carefully examined and analyzed according to architectural principles, functional and...