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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page iii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Beverly S. Curry retired from the University of Alabama (UA) in Tuscaloosa in 2005. She was employed by the UA Office of Archaeological Research as a Staff Archaeologist; however, for the last nine years of her employment, she was contracted from the University to the Army, serving as the Staff Archaeologist at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. The author earned a Bachelor's Degree (1981) and a Master's Degree (1987) in Anthropology from UA. She also has a Master's Degree in Education (Teaching English as a Second Language) from UA. In addition to her work at the UA, she taught an English class to professors at the University of Lima in Peru in 1994 and also taught a course in Maritime Archaeology at that university. The author has extensive interviewing experience, which began with interviewing delinquent boys (incarcerated by the Illinois Youth Commission) for a research project on informal social control. In addition, she interviewed inmates in all levels of federal prisons across the U.S., including the federal maximum-security prison in Atlanta. She was the first female allowed to interview inmates in that prison. She interviewed residents on three islands in the Bahamas, resulting in the development of a model and a quantitative and qualitative study of Bahamian foodways. She also interviewed residents in the Bahamas for a project to discern what effects the drug trade that passed through had on the island of Bimini and its inhabitants. The author's interviewing experience in Alabama includes conducting the interviews with female faculty and staff at the University for a psychology professor who had a grant to study stress in working women and also conducting interviews with Black parents in rural areas of Alabama for the College of Community Health Science. In addition, she interviewed a random sample of Tuscaloosa residents after a hostage-taking incident at a local school in order to learn their perceptions of the amount of force used in the takedown of the perpetrator that was shown in the media. The interviewing conducted with the former residents of the land that is now Redstone Arsenal provided the author the opportunity to meet many good people. This book was written to preserve their history; the author's personal gain was in learning how the people lived and what they thought, giving her an understanding of “how it was.” Beverly S. Curry P.O. Box 420959 Summerland Key, Florida 33042 E-mail address: BevSCurry@aoi.com iii - (4024)