Great book and a great story. My father who was a poor farm kid from south Alabama went to Ole Miss on a basket scholarship so I'm intimately familiar with, and a huge fan of, Ole Miss. His name is engraved at the Ole Miss Letterwinners Walk outside of Vaught Hemingway stadium. And since it's Father's Day weekend, I'm going to brag about him some more...he was no dumb jock, he rose to the level of executive Vice President managing 5 divisions of an international Fortune 100 company headquarter in NYC. His life story should be a book.Bubba wrote: ↑Jun 14th, '24, 21:24 Thought I’d resurrect an old thread for the summer at least.
For those who’ve seen and enjoyed the movie “The Blind Side”, you ought to read the book. I just finished it and learned a lot more about the story and about the real life of Michael Oher, the Touhey family, and the background info that was either omitted from or modified quite a bit for the movie. I usually read the book before seeing a movie based on the book so I’m often disappointed by the film but it’s interesting to reverse the process for a movie I enjoyed.
Ole Miss and the town of Oxford are absolutely beautiful...and so are the women. You will never see so many beautiful women in one place in your life. It's known for that and lives up to it. So do football weekends there, tailgates in the Grove are legendary and a sight to behold, if you've never been, it's a bucket list thing to do. Friday night on the Square is like a Mardi gras.
I grew up in NJ, my best friend's parents were from MS. His father was a Mississippi State University and MIT educated Electrical Engineer phd who worked for Bell Labs in NJ. He was a pioneer in the field of digital speech processing. He was awarded the National Medal of Science presented to him at the white house by Bill Clinton. My best friend has lots of cousins that went to Ole Miss. One of them is a surgeon that has a football weekend house in Oxford which is where we stay. Many of his other cousins are also medical doctors or have a phd in something else. All of this flies in the face of the ignorant southerner stereotype. Stereotypes are just that, stereotypes.
A few years ago, we were down for an Ole Miss football weekend and then went down to his parent's hometown of Greenwood, MS on the delta. It was my first time to Greenwood. We were about 10 minutes from his aunts house and he said to me "have you ever seen the movie The Help?" I said no but coincidentally i'm about three quarters of the way through the book, why do you ask? He said i haven't either but a lot of it was filmed at my aunts house. His aunts house is a classic old plantation house on over a thousand acres. His uncle was a lawyer and a united states senator. His aunt also rescued about a dozen old sharecropper shacks, preserved them in a cluster, and added plumbing and electricity which are now open to the public to stay in. Great place to stay when checking out the Blues Trail which is another bucket list thing to do.