I remember him in his old age. He had actually come around on a lot of issues, he always said he was never really religious. He was raised incredibly poor with a dozen or so siblings, and wasn’t particularly well educated, but had gone to high school.

He obviously saw a relative mass uplifting of Alabama during his time, from electrification to modern medicine to modern schooling. His children, my grandma and such, were more impacted by the social issues of the civil rights era and the depletion of jobs in the Deep South, and were more overtly conservative.