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15 Lake Country Estates “There I was in California and we had this big hunk of property back in Alabama . The other family members wanted to realize their money from this land we held. Until Jane got married later in 1980, I had to keep things going from California City. So, I got this big real estate firm to help me decide what to do with it. But when it came to a decision, I had to use my own judgment . I didn’t do anything until I left California City and came back here to Alabama in 1981.” For Nancy, the move meant starting over. She was sixty-one years old and had been gone from home—from the South—for thirty-two years. Nothing was the same. Family members and old family friends had passed on. The remaining kin were the next generation. The Alabama that she returned to was nothing like the Alabama she had left in 1950. Nancy began to rebuild her life. Because she planned to live in it, Nancy drove the RV—crammed with the possessions she wanted to keep—from California to Alabama. At that point, the Rocky Ridge Farm—where Nancy and Paul had lived as newlyweds in the late 1940s—was rented out, but the house was still there, and unoccupied. Nancy planned to use the farmhouse for storage and to live in the RV, which she parked next to the house. She had sold one Super Cub and Radford flew the remaining one back to Alabama when he came for his cousin Luther’s wedding. Nancy also owned a 1949 Mooney Mite that she had been restoring while living in California City. “Mite” aptly describes this pint-sized, single-seater wooden aircraft, built when the aviation world still thought that someday there would be a small airplane in every garage parked next to the family car. A man she knew from the Birmingham Aero Club offered her hangar space for it at the Talladega Airport. She flew it cross-country, east, to Talladega. “So there I was in the country, living in the RV and trying to decide what 122 • Chapter 15 to do with all this land. I got a job with a local firm in order to get my real estate license and I started making contacts with people.” Nancy set out to learn the real estate and building businesses literally from the ground up. The farm at Rocky Ridge was a favorite of Paul Jr. and remains a place he will not forget. Not only did he live there the first years of his life, he returned often as a young child and walked the pastures with his grandfather when Radford Sr. checked on the beef cattle he was raising. “I remember, after my grandfather died, going to a cattle auction with my grandmother and my mom,” Paul said. “Some of their cattle were being auctioned. I was in junior high by then and, living in suburban California, that was a unique experience for me. This farm was in St. Clair County, quite near where my grandmother grew up. Both my Batson grandparents came from an Alabama country background. “In fact, my grandmother kept bees. It wasn’t a big thing, but she would go out to the farm every day and harvest honey. She kept a jar with a honeycomb in it and when we visited their house, we would eat the raw honey.” Before he died, Rad Sr. had turned Rocky Ridge into a chicken farm. Paul remembered the chicken coops. “They were long red brick houses. Our grandfather had a contract with the Purina Feed Company. They brought little chicks out to be raised to a certain age. Then the Purina people came and got them and paid first my grandfather and, after he died, my grandmother so much per chicken. That’s where some of the money my grandmother lived on came from. After my grandfather died and until she became too ill, Muddy drove out every day to check on the bees, the chickens, and the farm. Tenant farmers lived there and took care of the farm—local folks. When Muddy became ill, they stopped the chicken operation and the farm lay fallow for a while.” When Nancy went back to Alabama in the fall of 1981, she needed to feel safe. Her roots were deep in that St. Clair County soil and she felt comfortable there. Before her father died, when...

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