Honoring Bobby Harris

EVERYONE WAS IN ON THE PLAN TO SURPRISE

BOBBY HARRIS, A BEDROCK OF ALABASTER,

WITH AN HONOR FEW HAVE: HAVING A STREET

NAMED AFTER HIM.

BOBBY, HOWEVER, HAD NO CLUE.

The surprise took place during a recent City Council meeting. “I did not know. Everyone kept it from me since February. The city administrator called me a week before the council meeting to come to the meeting because they were going to recognize the council that built the mall. I was excited to be there. So, when I walked into the council meeting and I saw my fellow former council member, I knew it was good. They even gave me a dummy agenda. Everybody else had the agenda with my name on it. But the copy they gave me...my name was not on it. I took the dummy agenda and I took my seat,” he recalled with a smile.

It slowly dawned on him that maybe there was more to the meeting than what he was told. “And then when councilwoman Rakestraw opened the meeting with a prayer, she prayed for me. I couldn’t understand why she called my name in the prayer.” He continued, “Well it really hit me, after I heard that prayer, and then Councilwoman Sophie Martin started reading the resolution. ‘on my god they got me, they pulled one on me’,” Harris said with shock.

The resolution called for renaming Progress Boulevard, located between Walmart and Books-A-Million which connects Colonial Promenade Parkway with Alabaster Boulevard, to Bobby Harris Boulevard. The same resolution recalled some of the history of Bobby Harris. “Bobby Harris was born and raised in Alabaster, Alabama, and has been a long time Member of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, and, he served as Assistant Principal at Thompson High School from 1986-1996 and in 1996 was named Principal of the School of Technology at Shelby County High School in Columbiana and retired in 2000, and Mr. Harris served three terms on Alabaster City Council for Ward 1 from 1992-2004 playing a key role in the development of the Promenade, the development and construction of Veteran’s Park, the development of the Publix Shopping Center (off 119), major expansion to the sewer plant and renovations to Buck Creek, Warrior and Municipal Parks, and he served as a Board member of the Shelby County Regional Library from 1989-2016 and a past member of the Shelby/Jefferson Literacy Council Board of Directors, and, in 2011 Mr. Harris was appointed to the Alabaster Water Board and he has served as Chairman since 2016.”

“My kids, grandchildren and great grandchildren will drive on that road named after me. I feel proud. I think the legacy is the fact that first of all, personally, you have to have principle. You have to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything. I stood for what I believed in. The legacy is obvious. You have the City Hall: new. The Thompson High School: new. The Senior Center: new. Basically, all of 119, all of that was part of this development. Veteran’s Park. There was no Veteran’s Park. All of this came from the financial overflow from the mall. That is my legacy,” he said proudly.

Harris wanted to thank so many people. “I want to thank the people in Ward 1 who believed in me. They may not have always understood where I was leading them, but they trusted me.

I would also like to thank my family; they could have walked off and left me in the pain and the misery of it all,” he said. AC