Construction Maison

SYLACAUGA, Alabama – Harold Franklin never set out to attend Auburn University . The school with its agricultural heritage had little appeal for the bookish Franklin. “I used to hate when daddy grew a garden and I had to go out and help with it,” Franklin said. "That was the last place I wanted to go.” He had dreamed of being an attorney, inspired by his childhood idol Thurgood Marshall , the prominent counsel for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and first black Supreme Court justice . “I wanted to be a lawyer,” Franklin said, sitting on the couch in his two-bedroom apartment in Sylacauga below a framed photo of Samford Hall. “That was the most important thing to me.” Franklin graduated from Alabama State University , then named Alabama State College , in 1962 with a degree in government and psychology. Franklin was seeking character references for a law school application when an encounter with civil rights attorney Fred Gray put him on the track to b...

"You walk without a sense of purpose," a Berkeley bar manager once told James "Peaches" Lucas before firing him. A dedicated climber who spent 15 years living out of caves, tents, and then a Saturn station wagon to pursue the sport, Lucas stumbles through life but marches to the boulders, crags, and walls. Peaches Preaches is his monthly column. Photos from the author's dirtbag days, circa 2004.  "You ain't no dirtbag, home boi," a Seattle climber wrote me in a direct message on Instagram. "You talk as though you are because you have been doing it since 2001. You are not a dirtbag; you have Instagram, for crying out loud!" The unsolicited slander caused me to reflect on the dirtbag experience and my role in promoting it. In the past decade, the climbing community has grasped onto the idea that being a dirtbag—that being deliberately impoverished in order to scrap and save every last penny to go climbing—is “cool.” The Seattle climbe...