http://weldbham.com/blog/2014/09/09/birminghams-white-knight-willie-perry/



The city of Birmingham had little to cheer for in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Years of well-earned bad press and the loss of the steel industry sent the Magic City spiraling into decline, suffering by comparison to the ascendant star of Atlanta, the “City Too Busy to Hate.” But in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Birmingham had something no other city in America could claim: it had a real-life superhero.

By day, Willie Perry was the general manager of J.F. Day & Co., a window-making shop in Lakeview. By night, he was Batman, cruising the highways and byways of Birmingham in a souped-up 1971 Ford Thunderbird he called the Rescue Ship, complete with a sign reading, “Will help anyone in distress.”

For years, Perry helped people of all ages, races and creeds in all parts of Birmingham, only stopping when he tragically died of carbon monoxide poisoning – in a cruel irony, Perry accidentally inhaled fumes from the Rescue Ship itself, left running on a cold night in the garage he called the Batcave – in early 1985. After his death, Perry’s legacy lived on in the Rescue Ship, but the car has suffered from years of mistreatment, neglect and, for an uncertain amount of time, misplacement.

I remember him, and his car, well from my youth (I grew up in B'ham, didn't move south until I was 28).