The aura of glory has returned to Tuscaloosa, where the Bryant-Denny fortress looms over a lovely campus brimming with pride in the Crimson Tide. Alabama is once more the possessor of the national college football championship, and in the Heart of Dixie the return of that trophy to its rightful owners is comparable to the return of the Ark of the Covenant to the territory of Israel after its capture by the Philestines.

And here I am falling into the sloppy thinking typical of those snooty outsiders who think Alabama is a one-dimensional state and that the one dimension is football.

It’s an easy attitude to acquire. Alabama is a small Southern state still cherishing its ante-bellum traditions, still gleaming with redneck brass, only recently awakening to the heroism its black citizens displayed during the civil-rights struggle..

It has no world-class cities (Birmingham has long since retreated into the shadow of Atlanta. Muscle Shoals has never rivaled Nashville as the fountainhead of twangy music). Mobile still asserts its claim to being the birthplace of Mardi Gras in North America, but New Orleans gets all the respect. It has produced no presidents and its most famous political figure was the man who drew the nation’s attention by making a farcical stand in a doorway to bar black students from the University of Alabama. When people think of famous Alabamians they think of Bear Bryant and George Wallace, usually in that order.

Alabama has no major-league sports teams, though its NASCAR track at Talladega is a magnet for the major leaguers of stock car racing. And it has produced many major-leaguers, including Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Satchel Paige in baseball, Joe Louis in boxing and Jesse Owens in track. Vince Dooley, the Hall-of-Fame coach at Georgia, was born in Mobile (Bear Bryant was a native of Arkansas).

In college football, Alabama regularly produces national powers at the University of Alabama and its sister (and fierce rival), Auburn University. The leftovers from their recruiting make for spunky teams at Troy State University. It’s ironic that the Texas Longhorns, representing a state several times the size and population of Alabama and with a history enriched by cattle, oil, the Alamo and giant-sized exaggerations, went into the national championship game as the underdog against ‘Bama; and that the Crimson Tide, on its way to Pasadena, crushed the upstart Florida Gators, product of a state that has eclipsed the Heart of Dixie in size and national clout over the last half-century.

I spent the better part of a decade roaming the backroads of Alabama and the streets of her cities, and I can tell you that the state is more than the Crimson Tide — awesome as that athletic behemoth may be.

A few miles up I-59 from Bryant-Denny Stadium, they make Mercedes-Benzes. Just off I-20 to the east of Birmingham they make Hondas. On the outskirts of Montgomery is a big Hyundai plant. Alabama is producing the cars that threw Detroit for a huge loss.

Up in Huntsville, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center developed the rockets that propelled America into outer space. Nor is technology a recent arrival in Alabama. During the War Between the States, Mobile was a center of submarine and mine development. It was there that the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel was built. And when Adm. David Farragut yelled, “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead,” those “torpedoes” were floating mines of the type built in Alabama.

Neither Auburn nor Alabama has reached the elite status of state universities such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Florida and the University of Texas, and Alabama has no private equivalent of Vanderbilt or Duke. But both are far cries from diploma mills, as the six astronauts who graduated from Auburn can attest. Regina Benjamin, just sworn in as surgeon-general of the United States, is an Alabama native and a graduate of the highly regarded medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, one of the most influential jurists of the 20th century, was a product of the University of Alabama law school.

There’s nothing second-string about Alabama’s intellectual status either. Helen Keller, author, lecturer and heroine of the play and movie, “The Miracle Worker,” was born in Tuscumbia. Harper Lee, Pulitzer-winning author of “To Kill and Mockingbird,” grew up in the small town of Monroeville as a neighbor and friend of Truman Capote, author of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “In Cold Blood” and other acclaimed works. Alabamians Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and Sara Haardt Mencken were noted short-story writers before they married famous writers (F. Scott and H.L., respectively) who overshadowed them. William March of Mobile wrote “The Bad Seed,” which was made into a successful movie.

In the world of entertainment, Tallulah Bankhead and Nat King Cole both sprang from Alabama soil. Johnny Mack Brown was a star of the Crimson Tide’s Rose Bowl-winning team before he became a cowboy hero to a generation of small boys. Jimmy Buffett, born just over the line in Pascagoula, Miss., sank his roots into Mobile and its neighboring towns, and I’ve patronized at least one Alabama bistro that claimed to have inspired “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Alabama has lent its name to a popular band, and “Sweet Home Alabama” has become the state’s trademark song, though people of my generation probably prefer “Stars Fell on Alabama.” One of my all-time favorites is Julius LaRosa’s “Mobile,” about the “honey suckle heaven” built around a robin’s nest.

But perhaps the most famous ‘Bama-born entertainer of them all was Hank Williams, who took country music by storm before his death at the age of 29. He left behind Hank Jr., of course, who made his own mark and produced Hank III.

For scholars, try Dr. Edward Osborne Wilson, a native of Birmingham who took his undergraduate and master’s degree from the University of Alabama and his doctorate from Harvard. In 1995, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential men in America, and in 1996 an international poll named him one of the 100 most influential scientists of all time. He is one of only two persons to win both the Pulitzer Prize for literature (twice) and the National Medal of Science. The Royal Swedish Academy of Science couldn’t award him a Nobel prize, because the Nobels don’t cover the areas of his expertise; so it awarded him the Crafoord Prize for his work in ecology.

It ain’t the Heisman, but then the state has produced three Heisman winners — Mark Ingram, Bo Jackson and Pat Sullivan — and John Heisman, for whom the trophy was named, coached five years at Auburn.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.