By Shannon Fagan, WEIS Sports Director
CENTRE – Six influential community members will be honored Thursday by the Cherokee County Historical Society at the annual Baker-Dean Awards ceremony. The event is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Cherokee County Historical Museum.
This year’s recipients are James Clayton and Laure Clemons (Media), Florence Major and James Rowe (Sports), and Gerald Covington and Randy Jones (Community).
The Baker-Dean Awards are a collaborative project of the Cherokee County Historical Museum and the Cherokee County Historical Preservation Society. They were established in 2017 to honor longtime Cherokee County media representatives Jerry Baker (WEIS Radio) and Terry Dean (Cherokee County Post-Herald). The awards have expanded to include Cherokee County citizens for their community service and appreciation of sports.
The following is a synopsis of this year’s recipients’ careers and achievements.
James Clayton
James Edward Clayton was born to Andison C. Clayton and Bell Anderson Armstrong Clayton on Nov. 24, 1921, Thanksgiving Day in Gadsden. He learned most of his photography skills while working with P.C. and Elma Smith, who owned P.C. Smith Studios in Alabama City while he was still in high school.
Clayton graduated from Emma Samson High School in 1939. He continued to work with Smith Studio until Jan. 1942, when he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He married a neighborhood girl that he’d known all his life, Mary Elizabeth Boyd, on Jan. 17, 1942.
After joining the Air Corps, Clayton was stationed at McDill Field in Tampa, Fla. His wife, Mary joined him there, and their first child, James Norwood Clayton (Jim) was born there in 1944. He was fortunate to serve in an MP unit and was able to stay at McDill the entirety of World War II.
After being honorably discharged in 1945, Clayton and his family moved back to Gadsden, where he resumed his work at P.C. Smith Studio.
In Nov. 1947, the couple had their second child, a daughter named Nancy.
In Jan. 1948, they moved their young family to Centre and established Clayton Studio, which he continued for 40 years. He always enjoyed his work and was very creative. He even pulled some very creative, skilled photography “tricks”, long before Photoshop or AI image enhancers.
For many years, Clayton did all the photos for the high school yearbooks for all five schools in the county, as well as photography as school sporting events. He loved going to the school and enjoyed working with the young people.
In Dec. 1954, the Claytons had another addition to their family, a son, Stephen David Clayton.
Clayton chronicled much of the history of Cherokee County in his photography. He made many pictures in the early 1960s when Weiss Dam was being built to show the changes it brought to our county.
Clayton joined the Centre police force in the early 1970s as a radio dispatcher. Affectionately known as “Mr. C”, he worked there for almost 20 years.
Laure Clemons
Clemons, a Cherokee County resident since 1997, began her media career in 1998 in Rome, Ga., as Darlington School’s Director of Creative Design. In 2008, she utilized her design skills closer to home by becoming the Cherokee County Herald’s layout editor under the direction of Dean.
In addition to laying out the Herald’s weekly newspaper, Clemons designed an annual 72-page magazine called PastTimes, which highlighted Cherokee County history. She reported on major local events, including the April 27, 2011 tornadoes which affected Cherokee County and the surrounding areas. Clemons also wrote a popular monthly column, sharing insights on the lessons we learn by living life well.
In 2014, Clemons left the Herald to work full time for the community-based, non-profit Extended Family – a support system for families of prisoners in which she founded in 2003 after her husband was sent to prison. Through Extended Family, Clemons found healing through teaching other families how to navigate the challenges of having an incarcerated loved one.
Clemons used her media skills to introduce Extended Family to Cherokee County and the state and created Extended Family for Kids – an interactive and educational curriculum for children with an incarcerated family member. The Extended Family for Kids Curriculum Guide has since been distributed in 18 states and offered to students in every school in Cherokee County since 2014.
Through her work with Extended Family, Clemons appears regularly as a guest on radio and television, and as the featured speaker at state and national conferences. She includes her graphic design skills in her work as the Executive Director of Extended Family in developing new curriculum for programs and creating awareness materials, including brochures, signs, t-shirts, and more.
Clemons has built a team of nine employees at Extended Family who combine their talents to achieve her dream of continuing to serve individuals coping with family incarceration in Cherokee County and across the nation.
Florence Major
Major was born and raised in Cherokee County. She graduated from Cherokee County High School and went to Gadsden State Community College for two years. She has one daughter, three brothers, and three sisters. Major is currently a Production Control Clerk at Prince Metal Stamping in Gadsden.
Major is also an assistant coach for the Cherokee County High School Lady Warrior basketball team and is a member of Providence Baptist Church in Leesburg.
Her passions include watching sports and spending time with her family. She hopes her life makes an impact on someone else.
James Rowe
A proud 1965 graduate of Cherokee County High School, Rowe was awarded a basketball scholarship from Southern Union Community College. His academic journey continued at Auburn University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education, and culminated at Jacksonville State University, where he obtained his master’s degree.
Rowe took up a coaching career which spanned 37 years across schools in Alabama and Georgia. He started his career at Sand Rock in 1970 as an assistant coach for boys basketball and football. He spent two years at Centre Middle School before returning to Sand Rock in 1977, where he began a 19-year stretch as the head boys basketball coach. His impact was profound and he remains the school’s longest-tenured boys basketball coach.
Also during that time, Sand Rock’s football program won the 1985 state championship and made the playoffs for 11 consecutive seasons.
Following 25 years in Alabama, Rowe embarked on the next stage of his career in Georgia. For 12 years, he shared his expertise at Dade County High School, Trion High School, and Coosa High School. He retired from Coosa in 2009. All totaled, Rowe spent 21 years as a head varsity boys basketball coach, 20 years as a football defensive coordinator, 12 years as an assistant football coach, eight years as an assistant boys basketball coach, and six years as an assistant girls basketball coach.
But retirement didn’t mean the end of his coaching journey.
Rowe continued to inspire the next generation, dedicating his time to coaching his granddaughters in your league basketball and AAU basketball. He also assisted three years with Sand Rock girls basketball.
Gerald Covington
Born Dec. 17, 1937 to Caldwell and Pearl Covington, Gerald Covington has been instrumental through the years in discovering talent and coaching it in the game of the baseball. He has always taken an interest educating young men around the community about baseball and to help further their careers in the game he loves so much.
Covington is well known for coaching and playing in his younger years for the semi-pro Centre Blue Sox, which was started in the late 1950s Negro league. The team was later affiliated National Baseball Congress.
Covington has nine children, 18 grandchildren, and nine great grandchildren.
Randy Jones
Jones was born at Vansant Clinic in Piedmont in 1956. He was raised in Cherokee County and attended Spring Garden High School. His parents were James and Nellie Jones. He has five brothers and one sister.
While at Spring Garden, Jones was the Alabama State 4H record book winner in Fish and Wildlife and won an all-expense paid trip to Chicago for a week. I was also the reporter in his senior class at Spring Garden, and took welding classes under instructor Harlan Cochran in the first classes at the Cherokee County Vocational School, which later became the Career and Tech Center.
In 1976, Jones was hired at Anniston Army Depot as a welder, where we worked on various military pieces of equipment. He moved from welder to welding inspector to quality assurance specialist while spending 35 years at the depot before retiring.
In 1979, Jones felt the call into the ministry and has since been licensed and ordained. He has been the pastor at Nazareth Baptist Church for six years and Fair Haven Baptist Church for seven years.
In 1981, Jones married Phyllis Jennings. The couple has three children: Andrew, Moriah, and Isaac, and one grandchild, Lincoln.
Jones has been a part-time farmer most of his life but got more involved since he married Phyllis, who at the time was a dairy farmer. They now raise beef cattle on their farm in Key near the old Hardin School.
Jones attended Covington Theological Seminary, where he earned a Doctor of Ministry in Pastoral Studies in 1979. He has been writing for the Cherokee County Post-Herald for many years, starting with a devotional piece for several years, and occasional history and military articles. His favorite military articles are a story about the four Gowens brothers from Pleasant Gap Community in Cherokee County that served during World War II and all made it back home safe. Jones also did an article on Mike Tyree who served in Vietnam and how he was wounded.
Jones has felt the need to write articles that promote farmers and farming, and so for several years now, he has been writing farm-related articles.
Jones is also serving in his third term as a Cherokee County Commissioner in District 1. He attends First Baptist Church in Centre, where he sings in the choir, works with the Carpenters for Christ, and teaches Sunday school.
