The Homewood Star StopBloodCancer.com
May 2014 • A1
Volume 4 | Issue 2 | May 2014
Time to read
neighborly news & entertainment for Homewood
A faster trip down Oxmoor Road
The Homewood Public Library is making final preparations to kick off its summer reading program. Learn how to sign up inside.
Community page A17
To market, to market Study recommends significant change to keep corridor traffic out of neighborhoods By JEFF THOMPSON
Fresh produce will return to a farmers market near you later this month. Find details about the markets’ dates and times inside this issue.
Oxmoor Road traffic is expected to change in 2014, and it could be coming as soon as this month. With the opening of the new Homewood Community Center, the corridor could see increased congestion around Central Avenue.
In addition, the Homewood City Council has approved the first step in an expansion of The Exceptional Foundation and for months has been looking at calming traffic around Edgewood Elementary. Anticipating a need for improvement — specifically to keep traffic from further spilling into
neighborhoods — the Homewood City Council commissioned a study of the corridor. It received the results in April and is moving forward with its recommendations. The Oxmoor Road Corridor Study, prepared by Skipper Consulting Inc. and funded by the Regional Planning Commission
of Greater Birmingham, focused on the stretch of Oxmoor Road between U.S. 31 and Palisades Drive. It concluded that the area between Broadway Street and Central Avenue is the most congested portion of the corridor.
See SIGNALS | page A23
Prehistoric treasures
Community page A16
INSIDE
Homewood residents discover 300 million-year-old fossils
Sponsors ................. A2 City ........................... A4 Business .................. A6 Food ......................... A8 Community ............. A15 School House ......... B1 Sports ...................... B10 Calendar ................. B12 Opinion .................... B15
By SYDNEY CROMWELL
StopBloodCancer.com
Pre-Sort Standard U.S. Postage PAID Birmingham, AL Permit #656
Edgewood Elementary students cross College Avenue in front of the school. As the school population increases, the Homewood City Council is seeking to protect pedestrians by reducing the amount of traffic detouring through Homewood neighborhoods. Photo by Madoline Markham.
Brent McCormick, right, and his son, Thomas, found fossils while working on a landscape project in their front yard. So far, the McCormicks have found about 15 fossilized imprints of a scale tree, which lived 300 million years ago. Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Normal rocks don’t come with scales. That’s what Brent McCormick and his son, Thomas, thought when they were laying riverbed rocks for landscaping at their house. The strange scale-like pattern on some of the rocks was similar to fish or snake scales. Thinking the rocks might be fossils, McCormick and his son began collecting and researching them. “For about 12 hours, I was on the computer,” McCormick said. “I had nailed it down to the Paleozoic period; it was a lumpfish.” With curiosity growing, McCormick decided to follow up his home research with a professional’s opinion. He consulted Scott Brande, a UAB chemistry
IT’S TIME TO TAKE A vacation FROM CLEANING.
professor specializing in paleontology. Brande recognized that the fossils were not, in fact, from a lumpfish; they were imprints from the trunk of a scale tree that lived approximately 300 million years ago. So far, the McCormicks have collected about 15 fossils from a few different kinds of scale trees. Some of these were found by neighborhood children, whom McCormick paid a quarter for each fossil they discovered. Thomas also took some of the fossils to show to his second-grade classmates at Edgewood Elementary. Scale trees flourished in prehistoric Alabama, but the McCormicks’ particular fossils came from a riverbed near the Kentucky-Tennessee border.
See FOSSILS | page A23 Proudly keeping homes cleaner and healthier since 1987
871-9338 www.MAIDS.com
Give yourself a break, call the cleaning service most recommended to family and friends.
Referred for a reason.