During our final group meeting at the Labs this past Thursday, June 25, 2009 Tyger Williams told a few of us that Michael Jackson had died. At the time it just sounded like a bad joke, no one believed him. We’d been in this bubble all week… it was just strange and honestly I still don’t really know how I feel about it.

My earliest memories of MJ are really my mom’s earliest memories of him. She confessed how she’d had a really really big crush on him when he was in the Jackson 5. She told me that once while we were watching him perform on TV.

I was just a kid but I never forgot it.

Last night I was speaking to my mom about MJ’s death and she relayed the following story which I didn’t know:

My grandfather (my mother’s father) was from the same small town in Alabama that MJ’s grandparents lived in, Hurtsboro, Alabama.

When my mother was growing up she remembered visiting Hurtsboro with my grandparents and hearing stories about “the Jackson Boys” who would come to town every now and then. It’s a small place and they would cause a big stir and would have to leave or hide out until the crowds left.

Also years later, my mom was visiting her sister who still lived near the small town and owned a tiny club there. They’d traveled there because Rebbie Jackson (the oldest of the Jackson children) was performing in the town at my Aunt’s club. My mom and her sisters had a chance to meet her and they got to talking and realized my grandfather was related to the family in a distant way.

My mom told me (and honestly, I can’t remember) in the TV movie about the Jackson family you can actually see a woman walking down the streets in one of the early shots and a title fades up which reads: “Hurtsboro, Alabama”.

So… I’m related to the Jackson’s… I guess it’s a small world you know, and a true story (i think).

On the map below, Hurtsboro is the “B” and my home town, Ozark (where my grandparents eventually moved to) is the “A”.



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I saw the video below somewhere on TV today, maybe CNN… these are inmates from a maximum security prison in the Philippines. Amazing how far MJ’s reach was.

The video was made on 071707

The other video below is a tribute they released 062709.