The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: The Northern Rim of the Gulf Coast since World War II

Raines, a Birmingham boy who one day would become executive editor of the Times and a popular author in the bargain, could turn a phrase with the best of them, and there are those who think he coined it.1 The "stretch of beach" to which Raines was referring, the stretch he defined as the Redneck Riviera, began just west of Gulf Shores, Alabama, and continued east to the Flora-Bama, a bar that still sits mostly in Florida to take advantage of more liberal liquor laws, but where enough hangs over into Alabama that the slogan "Doing it at the line" was and still is taken as a challenge by many. [...] the visitors fit nicely with the local population, whose racial composition, experiences, and values were not unlike their own.