Thirty-five years ago, the southside branch of the Bank of Atmore put an automatic teller into use. It was quickly nicknamed “Freddy.”

In 1982, I guess we were just beginning the age of electronics. We all take automatic tellers for granted these days. For a long time, I tried to keep up with it, but I have finally given up. New things happen every day, and it is just too much to know it all. I am sure that it is not because of my age.

Two people were injured when an oil well rig collapsed at Robinsonville.

I know that the people that work on those rigs are trained as well as can be for these jobs. Working on oil rigs is a little like people working on sky-scrapers. I have seen people balanced or walking the beams of those buildings where you just had to know that each step might be your last. I personally want to keep at least one foot on the ground.

K-Mart was selling a crockpot for $9; a blanket for $2.99; and double knit pants for $3.99. Greer’s had whole fryers for 39 cents a pound. I wish they still did have bargains like this. Atmore was hit by an ice storm and one life was lost on the interstate when the victim of one vehicle hit a patch of ice.

This sounded so familiar. We recently had a pretty good ice storm here in our area. Thank goodness we had no serious problems this time around.

The disease known as Newcastle disease was found in our area. This is a disease affecting chickens. In addition, there were reports of cattle tuberculosis found in some livestock in our area.

There is always something lurking around to give our ranchers and farmers more problems.

There was a photograph in The Atmore Advance showing the results of the work done by students enrolled in the home economics class at Escambia County High School.

Once upon a time only young ladies took home economics, but included in this photograph was a young man. They were all sporting the clothing they made in class.

I say hooray for them. When I was in school, back in the dark ages, girls took home economics and boys took shop. I think it is a good idea to swap it around a bit. Let them boys learn to cook and clean and turn the girls loose in the shop. I’ll bet they would enjoy it.

Even if they didn’t enjoy it, they would learn some good skills.

Lastly, 250 people gathered to watch the old water tower, built in 1959, come down on Lindberg Ave. It took a lot of skill to make it fall, just where they wanted it to go missing a small building and not touching the new tower already erected.