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This article is not to try and place blame on anyone, any group, or any area. It deals with my home area, simply because we live here. I wasn't born here in Calhoun County, Alabama but I was raised in an adjoining county. My wife and I, with our children, moved about as I followed my business career. We lived, at least briefly, and some places for years, beside Alabama... Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, South Carolina and North Carolina. We enjoyed living in each one of those places and met wonderful people in each location. We have friends who still correspond with us, on occasion. But of all the locations, we still chose to return to this area for retirement. Mainly because of the people. Things are certainly not as they were when we first began our ramblings, but as far as hospitable people, morality, ethics, etc., I believe this to be one of the very best in the entire world.
I read an awful lot of statistics in my daily research for article materials. So, I am used to it,to a certain degree, but I picked up this mornings paper, the Anniston Star, from Anniston, Alabama.
Anniston is the county seat here in Calhoun County. The population for Calhoun is estimated (for 2008) at 113,419 and the county seat has approximately 25,000 within the city proper. It is adjacent to Oxford, Alabama (you can't discern the line as you move from one city to the other) and that adds another 14,500 to the metropolitan area. This entire setting is a normal southern area where hospitality still exists although not as avidly as it was sixty years ago. Now I have explained all of this to set you for the stats I read. One would expect very little crime and mischief from such an area, and actually it is much less than you will find in the larger concentrations of people. But, each Monday, the Star has a section called the record, listing the public records of occurrences for the preceding week. And some of them are quite startling to me, although possibly not to most people. Let me list a few of them to see what you think. The names are listed with these stats, but I am not going to include them here:
Number of marriages: Eleven
Number of divorces: Twenty-five
Ch. 7 Bankruptcies: Five
Ch. 13 Bankruptcies: Six
Burglaries (City): Six
Burglaries (County): Five
Thefts (City): Ten
Thefts (County): Two
Auto related thefts: (City) Four
Auto related thefts: (Co.) Three
Arrests (City): Seven
Arrests (County): Nine
These numbers may look small to some, but for this area, it is rather surprising to me. Especially surprising to me was the dreadful number of divorces vs. Marriages. Good grief: At a rate like that the county will soon be all singles. Of course, this isn't June, so maybe we'll make that back up next June. Come to think of it, this is four months after June, it is probably those who got starry-eyed for a June wedding. I don't think I would have been so surprised at these, had they been for a full month, but for one week...that's a right smart (old southern exclamation).
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