Ben Windham

I'm very sorry to hear that long-time Tuscaloosa News columnist Ben Windham has passed away at age 68.  Ben was a real treasure for this southern university town.  I thought from the moment I first get to know him, which I guess was around 2002, that he was the classic southern journalist.    I've met over the years in Tuscaloosa and Chapel Hill a few people who seem like they've stepped out of a movie about small southern university towns.  Ben is one of them.  (My beloved colleague Tom Jones was another.)  If you called central casting and asked for a southern, sort of muck-racking journalist with some common sense, Ben is the man who'd arrive.  His mother, Kathryn Tucker Windham, was a famous Alabama story-teller and author.  She passed away in 2011.