The Lady in Red
Images by Terrell ManascoIt’s 3:00 pm on a Friday afternoon and the air is saturated with electricity. You can smell the weekend approaching like a mammoth wave rumbling ashore. Outside the offices of Blackwell Body Shop on Highway 69, the sound of gravel crunching heralds an approaching vehicle. Within seconds a vintage black 1955 Thunderbird convertible with whitewall tires appears like a desert mirage at the crest of the hill in front of the building. The driver parks the T-Bird underneath the overhanging roof and shuts off the engine. The driver’s side door swings open and Kathy Blackwell emerges like a 1950s Hollywood starlet in a sleeveless red dress, her face beaming like a child on Christmas morning.Moments later that smile returns as Kathy, now seated at a table in a quiet rear office, begins the interview with an amusing story told to her by her mother. “My mom will be ninety-two in December, and she has a little dementia,” she begins. “One of the things she remembers is when the whole family had this Asiatic flu. She said, ‘Nobody would come in the house, and we needed groceries. They brought them and put them on the front porch. Everybody was so sick.’ She said I was two years old, and I got up in a chair and I washed dishes. She always says, ‘And you did a good job of it, too! Those dishes were clean!’”Kathy Abbott Blackwell was born in July, 1953, the oldest of three sisters. “The biggest, baddest and meanest,” she giggles. “My mother says, ‘You’re bossy, just like [Kathy’s aunt] Rosie.’”
The smile fades a little as Kathy remembers the hard times her family endured when she was growing up. “My daddy was a coal miner. We were very poor,” she says. Her father was a strict disciplinarian who would not tolerate misbehavior. “I was a good girl. My daddy used the hickory stick regularly,” she laughs. “I always said if I went to church, I might as well plan on getting a whipping before I got home. We lived next door [to the church] and he’d say, ‘Break yourself a hickory on the way home.’”Kathy was forbidden to wear sleeveless dresses or cut her hair, and there was no TV watching allowed for the children while her father was at work. “In the summer months he would disconnect something inside the TV so it wouldn’t work, so we could not watch TV until he got home.” she says. “He listened to country music, and if we ever had that radio dial set on a rock and roll station, we were in trouble.”But there are pleasant memories as well: camping under a bluff on Blackwater, shelling peas into a #3 washtub, and playing outdoors after dark. “There were times he’d come home and we’d go out and play Hide and Seek in the dark, because we didn’t have outdoor lighting,” she recalls. “You’d catch a jar full of lightning bugs and put them in your room so you’d have light at night. We had chickens and a cow. I never really did learn how to milk that cow. I didn’t want to cut off my fingernails.”
Despite his strict nature, Kathy says her father was a skilled guitarist. “My daddy’s family was talented,” she says. “He played the guitar, another brother played the mandolin and banjo, and his daddy played the fiddle, and when they’d get together they’d play bluegrass music.”But as Kathy reached her early teens, the tectonic plates in the Abbott family foundation shifted violently when a division in their church split the congregation. The ripples from that event were so cataclysmic that her father was affected by it the rest of his life. “The sad part of my life is at [when I was] thirteen years old, my daddy became an alcoholic. Because of that, our relationship...we really suffered. It was a miracle that he lived to be seventy-nine years old.”After graduating from Curry High School in 1971, Kathy wanted to work in the field of computers. “That was the infancy of the computer age,” she says. “I really wanted to go into computer technology.” When her decision left her father apoplectic, Kathy enrolled at Smalley’s Beauty School in Jasper and got her cosmetology license.Months later, Kathy realized being a hairstylist was not for her so she left cosmetology. For a while she worked at a Pelham hardware store, then at an Arley sewing plant.That was about the time she met Monroe Blackwell. “He was driving his 1959 Corvette, cruising around Reese’s Drive-In,” Kathy recalls, laughing. “He said, ‘Hey, you wanna go touring next weekend?’”Within a few weeks, they had gone from touring to fishing. “He loved to bass fish, so I became his fishing partner,” Kathy says. “I didn’t know anything about bass fishing. I must have driven him crazy.”Monroe had been employed as a loader for a logging company since high school. Weary of working for long hours in cold weather, he opened Blackwell Body Shop in 1975, then located in a small building across the road from its current location. “His daddy made him a heater out of an old drum,” Kathy says. “He said, ‘I can stay warm in there.’”They were married April 22nd, 1977. For the down payment on a mobile home, Monroe sold his 1971 Chevy Malibu. “You remember those?” Kathy says. “White with the black racing stripes down the hood?” Three years later they bought a house in the Mill Creek area. “We took 10,500 bricks off that house, and my mom chipped all the concrete off of them during the day. Aren’t mamas sweet?” she says. “We’d come home and load them up on the truck and move them to where we were moving the house.”
As Monroe continued to build the business, Kathy worked as a secretary at Burton Manufacturing. In 1989, Monroe made her an offer. “He said, ‘Kathy, life is too short for us to be apart. You come work with me, and if we can’t make it together, I’ll close the doors and we’ll both go get a job,’” she remembers. “I had always wanted my college degree, so we decided I would come help him, and I would go to college,” she says.Kathy got her associate’s degree in business at Walker College, and began taking evening classes at UAB, but by then, business was booming. “I couldn’t finish,” she says. “Business had grown so much. I was helping him and I couldn’t stay awake. I couldn’t drive back and forth,” she laughs.In 1995, they built and moved into the larger building across the road from the original site. Although Kathy works in the office, she is certainly not afraid to get her hands dirty. “Even as a teenager, my motto was, ‘I can do anything I want to do.’ I was always helping my daddy change out an engine, build an engine, swap transmissions, build brakes. I’ve taken cars apart, put them back together, painted, etc. People have always been amazed that I can do all these things.” There is only one thing Kathy refuses to do. “I will not weld,” she giggles.Much of the credit for their success belongs to the people working behind the scenes. “We have a wonderful crew, and they do wonderful work,” she says. “They’re really meticulous and they try to do the best repair possible. Monroe says it’s not all about the production. It’s about doing a good job, and that the customer comes back.”Without a doubt, there is much truth in that philosophy. They’ve been coming back for over forty years now. 78