You want to talk about sleazy?

[WiregrassTiger]

That's what it takes to move in next door to one of Alabama's most treasured writers, befriend them and then write a book about them. Ms. Mills is the epitome of low-class and sleazy.
http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/07/is_harper_lee_an_alabama_fan_o.html#incart_m-rpt-2

Is Harper Lee an Alabama or Auburn fan? Here's a clue from the book 'The Mockingbird Next Door'

Nelle Harper Lee attended the University of Alabama, but her brother, Edwin Lee, went to Auburn. So hers was a house divided


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Bob Carlton | bcarlton@al.com By  Bob Carlton | bcarlton@al.com   
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on July 18, 2014 at 8:45 AM, updated July 18, 2014 at 9:33 AM

Most folks probably know that, in the late 1940s, Harper Lee studied law at the University of Alabama, where she wrote for and eventually became editor of The Rammer Jammer, back in the day when it was a campus humor magazine and not a victory cheer with which Tide fans taunted their vanquished opponents.

And many also have heard the story about that time, seven or so years ago, that former Auburn coach Pat Dye, having recently reread "To Kill a Mockingbird," arranged to meet the intensely private Lee on her home turf in Monroeville and charmed her so that he got her to autograph a copy of her book for a charity auction. Dye has said he even turned her into an Auburn fan.

All of which raises the big question: On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when practically the whole state is divided into two opposing camps and one has to choose between the crimson-and-white and the orange-and-blue, for whom does Harper Lee cheer in the Iron Bowl?


Mockingbird Tribute poster.jpg

Author Marja Mills will attend "A Mockingbird Tribute" at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 23, at the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham.

Chicago writer Marja Mills, author of the new book, "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee," lived next door to Nelle Harper Lee and her older sister, Alice, for a year and a half, and she says got to know the sisters very well, even spending a little time watching football with them.


Harper Lee, we might add at this point, is apparently quite peeved – "Hurt, angry and saddened," are her exact words – that Mills used that friendship to write "another book about Harper Lee."

And Mills, we might also add, has responded that both of the Lee sisters "were aware I was writing this book and my friendship with both of them continued during and after my time in Monroeville."

But that's a disagreement for another day.

Back to our question: Is Harper Lee a Bammer or a Barner?

Mills provides an answer on Pages 87 and 88 of her book. She writes:

For years, Nelle and Alice had their own tradition for watching football games. They loved watching the Crimson Tide in particular. They had no television in the house, Alice told me, until Julia (their housekeeper) was hired in 1997 and insisted. Nelle suggested the same more than once, but it took Julia to get a small set across the threshold. She was not about to miss her game shows. After that, during football season, Alice would join Nelle in the back bedroom to watch the games. Before the dawn of the television age in the Lee home, the two sisters would make the seven-block drive to the Monroe County Bank building, below Alice's law office, and watch the weekend's best games in a conference room.

Sometimes Nelle watched University of Alabama games at the home of her high school English teacher, Gladys Burkett. This was in an old house on North Mount Pleasant Avenue, a few blocks off the town square. It was there that Nelle got to know Dale Welch. They met over football but bonded over books. "I think she appreciated that I was a teacher and a librarian. We had a lot to talk about," Dale told me. A friendship quickly blossomed and soon they were meeting for coffee or lunch at Radley's.

Like many in their circle of friends, the Lees were a mixed family when it came to football in Alabama. Their brother had attended Auburn. That gave it special status. But Nelle had attended the University of Alabama, and she and Alice gravitated to the Crimson Tide. If you ever want to drive down an empty thoroughfare in Monroeville, do so when Alabama is playing Auburn.

So that settles it, right?

Well, not quite.

Mills lived next door to the Lee sisters from the fall of 2004 until the spring of 2006, which Alabama football historians will note was during the Mike Shula years and before the arrival of Nick Saban. The Dark Ages, in other words.

It was a year or so later, sometime around 2007, that Dye met Harper Lee and, over the course of their three-hour chat, supposedly persuaded her to switch her allegiance to Auburn. Then again, maybe she was just humoring Dye.

So, like a lot of other things we don't know about Harper Lee, whether she bleeds crimson and white or orange and blue could remain a closely guarded secret.