Roy Wood Jr.

He eventually became a mayor of Birmingham, a gentleman named Larry Langford.

And Larry Langford at the time was trying to build an amusement park in Birmingham proper and,

to cut off traffic from Mississippi.

People from Mississippi were coming through Birmingham to go to Atlanta, to go to Six Flags.

So Lankford's idea was let's build our own little thing here and maybe we can siphon some of that traffic, boost the tourism, blah, blah, blah.

But Birmingham has like, I don't know, I'm just spitballing.

Let's just say there's 10 suburbs.

Each suburb has its own mayor, but they're all part of the county commission within Jefferson County.

So Birmingham proper is,

is not liked by the other outlying suburbs.

If it's good for Birmingham, the other suburb, and Larry Langford came in that barbershop every day for about two years and just gave the play-by-play of where he was on trying to get the other suburbs to play ball.

And eventually he got the deal done and Visionland was built, Alabama Adventure, now it's still there, wonderful park, go there, all wooden rollercoaster, beautiful wave pool.

But just as a high school student listening to this man

Talk about just trying to get all of the suburbs to agree to put in a little money to build a fucking park to bring in money so we can split the money amongst all of the municipalities and we all grow.

Complete another bullshit.

The type of stuff he like just cutting deals and having to meet and go and talk to them.

You know, it was it was like that was like my first lesson in local politics from a dirty level where, OK, for this guy to approve it, you've got to go do these two things.

And this guy, he'll like stupid shit.

I need Alabama tickets.

I want to meet Gene Stallings at the next.