"It wasn't long ago that Atmore's most memorable feature was Alabama's death row.

I saw a few people die there, in that electric chair they called the "Yella Mama."

That's hard to forget.

But Big Yella Mama was pushed aside some years back, largely forgotten when inmates were given choice of a less dramatic way to die. And a big orange blimp has become a symbol of Atmore's evolution.

It flies over the region -- over Birmingham some days -- hawking a 17-story Indian casino rising above Atmore's nothingness.

That blimp casts a fat shadow. It hovers up there like temptation, justification even, for something that ought not exist.

Gambling, you might recall, is still illegal in this state. Except, as the governor says, in "a few narrow exceptions."

Which, in the shadow of the blimp, is like telling folks in the Middle Ages the bubonic plague was not contagious, with a few narrow exceptions."

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John Archibald: Blimp casts dark shadow over Alabama (The Birmingham News 7/12)