On this date in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell used a phone for the first time. He called his assistant, Thomas Watson, who answered the call from his boss because he didn’t have caller ID.
The answers to Friday’s quiz is near the bottom.
Thanks for reading,
Ike
Cash flow, interrupted
President Trump’s interruption in aid to Ukraine also appears to be an interruption to a significant flow of money to defense contractors in Alabama, reports AL.com’s John R. Roby.
Alabama officials previously have touted the state’s impact on Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2022 invasion. Former President Biden visited the Lockheed-Martin plant near Troy, where thousands of Javelin anti-tank missiles were built and sent to Ukraine.
In Huntsville, Aerojet Rocketdyne has built rocket motors and Boeing has built “seekers” that are used against aerial attacks.
Add it all up, and $3.7 billion, according to Pentagon data, has flowed into defense-industry facilities in Alabama. That puts us second to only Arkansas for having companies land Ukraine-related defense contracts.
Early in the war, Gov. Kay Ivey even fired off the tweet: “We want the last thing Putin ever reads to be ‘Made in Alabama.’”
Ah, but that was so much politics ago.
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville voted for the first Ukraine spending package but his resistance rose sharply along with the cost of aid to Ukraine and eventually led to his calling Ukraine “the most corrupt country on the face of the planet” and warned that “we are on the cusp of a nuclear war.”
Skepticism has grown among many other Republicans, and a very contentious White House meeting involving President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was followed by Trump’s order to pause aid to the country.
An ambassador again?
President Trump announced that he’s nominated Montgomery businesswoman Lindy Blanchard as U.S. ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The organization leads efforts to fight hunger and has offices in more than 130 countries.
You may recall that Blanchard ran for governor in 2022 after briefly testing the water for U.S. Senate in that same election cycle. She finished second to Gov. Kay Ivey, pulling in 19% of Republican primary voters against a popular incumbent in a pretty crowded field.
She joined plaintiffs who sued Alabama officials over the state’s electronic vote-counting machines after that election but withdrew from the lawsuit before it was eventually dismissed.
Before that, Blanchard served as U.S. ambassador to Slovenia during Trump’s first term. She and her husband made much of their wealth through real estate.
What’s in a Name?
Tombigbee River
This week’s Alabama place name is the Tombigbee River.
When I was a young boy, I could’ve sworn the Tombigbee River was named after Tom, the surly cashier at Big B Drugs.
Remember Big B Drugs? It was last headquartered in Bessemer. While we’re throwing it back … Big B was sold in the late ’90s to … Revco. I remember in my hometown the Big B and Revco shared the local market with … Eckerd.
Back to Tombigbee, whose name had nothing to do with drugs as far as we know.
The Tombigbee starts in Mississippi and eventually joins the Alabama River to form the Mobile River.
William A. Read’s “Indian Place Names in Alabama” tells us that Tombigbee comes from Choctaw words meaning “box makers” or “coffin makers.” He follows the “coffin makers” line of thinking and reports that there was a class of old men who cleaned dead people’s bones and put them in boxes.
Yikes.
Read wrote that “Evidently some members of this class must have lived along the Tombigbee,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a sure bet, although this version of history is often cited.
Mississippi historian Rufus Ward takes us down the “box makers” interpretation. In The Commercial Dispatch, he sites a territorial judge’s writing in 1805 that it was named for a box maker who once lived on the Tombigbee’s headwaters. He also sites other accounts that put the source of the name in Alabama where the French Fort Tombecbe once stood.
Also pointing in that same direction: According to Ward, a land draughtsman wrote way back in 1848 that, more than 100 years before, the Choctaws named the river after wooden boxes that were made by people along the river for shipping furs.
Which would make sense. We know that the French Americans were prolific fur traders. The Canadian Museum of History calls fur “the real economic driver of New France.”
It could be that it is memorialized in the name of an Alabama river.
More Alabama News
Alabama News Quiz answers/results
Overall:
This nationally known Alabama politician has been hinting at a run for governor in 2026.
This Alabama-connected author has a book of short stories publishing (posthumously) this year.
The Iron Hills Country Music Festival — a new event — will take place at this site in October.
A bill in the Legislature would require unemployment recipients to …
Troy University’s Board of Trustees has voted to close the school’s location in this city.
The podcast
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Ukraine money, Tombigbee origin: Down in Alabama – AL.com
