By Madoline Markham Koonce
History texts can take many forms – including ones as small as matchbooks. That’s what Corey Williams, 28, found when she recently discovered her mom’s collection of matchbooks from Birmingham restaurants and bars from the 1970s and 1980s.
“They are tangible and you can hold them in your hand, unlike a lot of things that are vintage items that you can only see in pictures,” Corey said. “It was also a cool way of advertising.”
Just a few months after finding the collection, Corey has started sharing the matchbooks’ history on Instagram @birminghammatchbooks and selling art prints of them – offering a walk down memory lane for people who remember Birmingham’s hot spots of that era and a quirky local history lesson for a younger generation that doesn’t.
The matchbook collection started in the late 1970s with Corey’s mom, Shelly Williams, and Shelly’s older brother Glenn Stephenson, a 1977 Shades Valley High School graduate who would pick up matchbooks when he went out to bars and restaurants. When he moved out, he left behind a fishbowl of the matchbooks, and Shelly, who graduated from Shades Valley in 1980, kept adding to the collection through the mid-1980s.
Fast forward to 2023: Corey had been noticing that matchbooks in shadowboxes were getting popular on TikTok and knew her mom had a collection from years ago but thought her dad had gotten rid of it. At Thanksgiving that year, though, they found the collection in a drawer at Shelly’s parents’ house, and Corey was immediately intrigued.
Over the holiday, they set out all the matchbooks on the floor, and Glen, Shelly, and a friend of Shelly’s started to look through them with Corey and recount the memories tied to each place.
Brothers Music Hall, Dugan’s, Louie Louie…
For Shelly, going through the matchbooks brought to mind bands that played at Brothers Birmingham Music Hall across from Brookwood Mall and the nickel draft served in plastic mugs at Flanigan’s by Century Plaza. The Ox Restaurant by Brookwood Mall was known for its prime rib, Dugan’s for its hamburgers and onion rings, and Spats for its nachos. Speaking of Brookwood Mall, the matchbooks reminded Shelly of the years after it first opened, when it was alive with restaurants such as Penrod’s Restaurant & Saloon and The Cabana Café.
One of the most memorable spots for Shelly was Louie Louie, where she met Corey’s dad, who was playing in a band called Pegasus.
Jim’s Down Under was a favorite, too. “We thought we were elegant going in there because I didn’t just get a draft beer,” she said. “I would get the fancy drinks like amaretto sours.”
Shelly’s only matchbook regret is that she never got one from Clyde Houston’s in Five Points, another one of her favorite spots.
History Into Art
After discovering the matchbooks over Thanksgiving, Corey started to think about what she might do with the collection. She liked how matchbooks looked in shadowboxes, but she didn’t want to sell the matchbooks themselves. Instead, she arranged sets of them into grids, set them on poster board, and took photos from overhead. Then she had art prints of them made at Art Editions & Gallery in Homewood. Today she sells the prints – two 8-by-10-inch sets and one 16-by-20-inch set – at Alabama Goods in downtown Homewood and on Etsy online.
But Corey wasn’t just interested in how the matchbooks looked. As a journalist and writer, she was also curious about the history of the places behind them. She’s had a subscription to the archives on newspapers.com since her days as the editor of The Auburn Plainsman in college and set to work searching for news articles and ads from the past, primarily that ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald.
Corey would often go to her mom and ask if she knew about the historical tidbits she was learning – like that a dance floor at The Club was the inspiration for the disco set in the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” and the director of that film grew up in Birmingham, and his sister played Scout in the 1962 film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Isn’t that crazy?” Corey told her mom upon that particular discovery.
As she was doing that research, Corey brainstormed ways to show more people the matchbooks and thought an Instagram account would be a good avenue to share them, so she started posting images of the matchbooks, along with newspaper clippings and historical information, on @birminghammatchbooks in January. She also shared some images of the matchbooks in the “You know you grew up in Birmingham, Alabama if” group on Facebook.
So far, she’s posted about Jacque’s, a steak and seafood restaurant founded by the restaurateur behind Jack’s Hamburgers and Hamburger Heaven; Taco Casa’s founding by University of Alabama football player Rod Wilkin; the likely namesake of a bar called Birmingham Cold Storage being an innovative ice manufacturing business that started in 1881; French bistro La Vieille Taverne’s status as a “a fine place to have lunch” on Cobb Lane, a one-block cobblestone street in Southside; and the outlaw-themed decor at Rube Burrows Food and Spirits, which was named for an infamous 19th century train robber.
Going forward, Corey is considering making small 4-by-4-inch prints of individual matchbooks, since Piggly Wiggly and Taco Casa have been the most popular. She’s also started her own collection of matchbooks from restaurants and bars in Birmingham that have them today, including The Garage and The Essential, as well as collecting more local vintage matchbooks as she finds them. She doesn’t plan to stop her research any time soon.
