Quick-Fire Quips is a questionnaire where we get to know people who stand out in the State of Alabama! Today, Alabama Public Radio host Baillee Majors talks with Joy Sorensen, President of Majestic Caverns in Childersburg.
Baillee: Hey, Joy, how are you?
Joy: I'm doing great. So happy to be talking with you.
Baillee: Same, very excited! I grew up going to Majestic Caverns. I think most people took a field trip when they were a kid in Alabama, so very excited to learn more. But for those who are unfamiliar, what is Majestic Caverns?
Joy: Majestic Caverns is America's most historic cave, located right here in Alabama, and it's been a part of our family for over 100 years.
What makes it special is it's more than just a cave; it's an experience. You can walk through a beautiful, living cavern that stays 60 degrees year-round very nice for those hot Alabama summers.
Baillee: So great!
Joy: Above ground, we have a full family adventure park experience with over 20 attractions, water fun, and then also just a lot of hands-on experiences.
Baillee: How did you come into this role?
Joy: So, I have been passionate about caves. This cave has been in my family for over 100 years.
My great-great-grandmother purchased it in 1912, and she was Ida Mathis. She's in the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. She was amazing. Giant footsteps there.
She loved our agriculture, and she was credited as doing more than any other person stateside for helping us win World War I. She did a lot of stuff with agriculture, but she loved land, and she purchased it, and I'm so grateful she did.
My father was the first in the family to turn it into an attraction, and he did so over 50 years ago. He's still working there, and I get to work with my dad, which I love. And so it's been in our family under Kymulga, De Soto and now Majestic.
Baillee: Awesome! Well, now the introductions are done, let's get you warmed up to answer the questionnaire, and to do that, I want you to say "Quick-Fire Quips" three times fast.
Joy: You got it! Quick-Fire Quips, Quick-Fire Quips, Quick-Fire Quips.
Baillee: Here is the first question: What comes to mind when you hear "Alabama"?
Joy: Oh my goodness, I think of deep roots, strong values, and natural beauty. I mean, we have an incredibly diverse system in our state, and it's just an incredible place. I've gotten to live in our state, and Alabama brought me back for a good reason.
Baillee: Yeah, Alabama is gorgeous, especially the trees. What is your favorite thing about living in Alabama?
Joy: Goodness, where do I start? I would say... I love that we sometimes get snow, but that I'm not shoveling it five months of the year like I have in other places I've lived.
I would say that people are warm and friendly, and although some people may think Southern people can be friendly when they don't have the same intent underneath, let me tell you, living in cultures where that friendliness isn't the first experience with people, it's so great to be around warmth and people having a general intent of kindness.
It's just a wonderfully warm place to grow up, as far as people.
Baillee: What is your favorite getaway spot in Alabama?
Joy: Oh, the beach, I mean, I feel like that's a classic for a good reason... The calm and just that sugar sand.
Baillee: I agree with that. Is there anything that you don't like about living in Alabama?
Joy: I mean, summer is bad everywhere. Yeah, I mean, if I could make a request of God and say, "Could you dial it down a little bit?" I would be glad to. The humidity is a little rough, yeah, but I haven't really lived in many places where the summers weren't hot.
Baillee: What is a bad stereotype, or something that people get wrong about Alabama?
Joy: So, I know this one from personal experience. When I was in New Jersey, I was checking out at Subway, and there was a lady that was beside me.
She asked where I was from, and I said, "I'm from Alabama," and she looked at me with total shock and said, "You have all your teeth?" And I said, "Yes, they come standard everywhere!" In retrospect, I could have said, "And my manners."
Then she asked me, "Do you have dirt roads back there, or what? What's it like driving there?" I said, "Well, it is America, and thanks to the Roman Empire, we have roads and we have water that comes around," so this has been kind of important for a long time in history.
Baillee: You handled it gracefully, because I don't know that I would have had the manners to say what you did.
What is a hidden gem in Childersburg that more people should know about?
Joy: Well, Majestic Caverns, certainly. So, we have it's a historic place, but there's also so many fun things to do on top, and it's really unlike a lot of other places. Some people describe it as being almost like a Peter Pan experience, because it's just got a lot of hands-on attractions that you don't see other places.
Baillee: The caverns have a lot of historical significance and just a lot of history to them— there's indigenous heritage, federal documentation from all the way back to 1796 the family stewardship of 100 years.
Joy: We had a Mastodon bone found in it. Prehistoric history. We also had Native Americans who utilized the cave for living in, and then also for burying individuals as well. We had some bones that were found that were dated back 2000 years ago to the Woodland Indian Period.
It used to be that the bones were on display before my father came to work at the caverns, and he felt that it was important to have something that was sacred and historical like that reburied, so we do not have them on display at all.
They've been tested in the past, but my father actually invited the Native Americans, who were descendants—he had them come down and rebury the bones in the cave, a private ceremony. I think that was very respectful for him to do, and the right thing.
In 1796, Benjamin Hawkins, who was the US Superintendent of Indian Affairs for President George Washington, he actually came through the area.
Native Americans brought him into the cave and talked to him about the history, and he wrote about it, sent the letter to Washington, and it was recorded as the first cave in the United States.
Baillee: That's so cool! Oh my gosh!
Joy: And they also had the oldest cave graffiti in the cave. It has a lot of history. It was used as a honky-tonk back in the day. So it had some really fun history; on every tour, we share about our history.
And Hernando de Soto came through the area during the era of exploration and left behind two people, Freyata and Robles, and those two individuals stayed.
One of them married a Native American, and they created the longest continuous settlement in America, and so that took place back, you know, in the 1500s. So we've got some incredible history in our state that's reflected in our area.
What I love about that story, with De Soto coming through, by the way—just a quick thing—is that it's really a Romeo and Juliet story. And when you look into the history and what took place back then, it's beautiful, you see.
This man stayed behind, fell in love with this woman. He's on a pursuit of fame, glory, and gold, and he leaves the people behind that he's supposed to go with.
Even Hernando de Soto has these letters written where he's so mad that this guy stayed behind, because one of the guys got hurt, and the other guy was like, "I'll stay behind." And he knew this young lady he liked, and they ended up marrying her, and just learning the language, and there's some written history around that that's really remarkable to look into.
So, anyway, but it's a neat story, where you're like, "Wow, you left what you knew, you never went back to your homeland, and you stayed, and you wanted to get to know someone that didn't speak your language," and all that.
So it's like all these little barriers of, like, right, you don't speak the same way, and all that, but I don't know, love wins in that, so I just think it's a special story.
Baillee: So, the caverns were once called De Soto Caverns, and now they're Majestic?
Joy: It just serves our guests so much more. It's really important to us is that people know who we are and that we are a unique brand.
People got us confused with De Soto State Park consistently enough that we would have people buy tickets to our events, and I'd be getting messages and all sorts of emails from our guests saying, "Hey, we're here, where are you guys?"
But our out-of-state guests dealt with the disappointment of buying tickets for an event, showing up at a location and being two hours away.
When you have years of history... a lot of memories with it—and with the name De Soto—to me it was nostalgic, it was hard to make a change, especially when you're well known.
It was the right thing to do for our guests, and so I do think it really communicates the cave so well, because the cave is majestic, and that's something that the Native American people believed about it.
To me it really honors the cave and its description very well, while at the same time making people not get lost.
Baillee: The cave has been in your family for a very long time. What was that like growing up?
Joy: Growing up, we were always a part of the National Caverns Association, so I've gotten to know other cave owners and operators across the country.
What I would say is that my earliest memory was actually related to our old Native American festivals. So, we used to have these Native American festivals, and I remember one festival my dad was talking to my mom after dinner. He mentioned we didn't have enough booths at the festival, or not as many as we'd want to.
I remember him being frustrated, sad, just wanting to make sure we're giving our guests the best. And I just remember the night before being like, "Oh, I'll have a booth."
And my dad—the night before a big festival, where he's just working for weeks straight, like morning and night—I told him I got all these seashells when I visited my grandparents in Florida, and I said, "Let's roll these in. I'll make necklaces and bracelets."
I remember the next day being so proud, sitting in my little Mary Jane shoes at my own little table, where I'd made necklaces for like 25 cents.
I loved helping my dad out, and I started working at the cave regularly. I had a regular job when I was seven years old. After school, I'd come back and do a lot of mailing envelopes and doing things for marketing.
Then I was tall enough to look like I could be someone who could work appropriately. I worked with the attractions, and when I was young, part of my chores were like weeding the maze or doing stuff.
Baillee: America 250 is coming up, which is the 250th celebration of America as a country. How are you celebrating the caverns during that time?
Joy: A laser light show that shares about America 250 and just the history of the caves. That's going to be on every cave tour; people are going to experience that.
We are already a historic destination, so we are a great place to come to experience Alabama history and to enjoy walking where people have walked for thousands of years. And so, we're not just a site that represents something; we're a site that's been encountered through years.
Baillee: What are some other attractions that visitors can enjoy when they come to the caverns?
Joy: We have bumper cars that we got this year, which are really fun, great for ages.
Then we also got a brand new Vertical Extreme; it is an obstacle course. It's crazy fun.
We have cannon wars, which are like these cannons that you shoot at each other. They are Nerf-kind of style balls. We do have archery. We have an inflatable ax-throwing area.
We have a cave crawl box—that's my children's favorite... The first time they were scared, and now it's their top choice. We have a squirt gun maze. We have a regular maze people go through; it's three-quarters of an acre—it's massive.
It's a lot of hands-on activities that people get to enjoy that just—you don't see at other parks.
Baillee: Okay, what is your favorite part of the caverns?
Joy: I love the waterfall in the back. I love just that sound of rushing water against stone; it's so calming. And the Native Americans actually thought the back of the cave was like this beautiful, sacred thing.
And it feels special. It's just a neat passageway at the back of the cave. The main cathedral room is this—taller than a 10-story building, longer than a football field.
Baillee: Okay, so we have some miscellaneous questions here. Do you have any superstitions or rational fears?
Joy: Rational fear, yes. Crabs. Anything... Well, really, any crustacean with pinchers, really.
Baillee: Did you just have, like, a bad experience on the beach one time with a crab?
Joy: First time snorkeling ever. The year before, I'd been pinched by a crawfish pretty badly, and had a blood vessel burst in my hand. As a four-year-old, you know, when you're little, you can be dramatic about those things, and I lived up to that.
And the following year I was learning to snorkel, so I was young, and my brothers were with me—they're all older, three older brothers—and I saw a crawfish in the water, and I got spooked, because I had a little bit of water in my goggles that magnified the look of it, anyway.
My brother said, "Just flip your fin at it, it won't bother you." So I flipped my fin at them, and some terrible orchestration of moments all worked together to make it so that the crawfish somehow swam backwards, and the way I flipped the fin, it went backwards up into my fin underneath my foot, and got stuck in my snorkel fin. It got crushed into my foot.
Then a follow-up time, my dad and I were going to caves, it was one caving where we went to wild caves, and there is this one area you could kind of shimmy into vertically and get into this cave, and it opened up onto the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Incredible experience.
High tide starts to come up, but we're above where high tide is... All of a sudden these crabs start pouring into the side of the cave, a wild cave, there's no like walk passageway out. We have to shimmy our way out of a wild cave while it's filling with these crabs.
Baillee: So I don't think that's an irrational fear. I feel like those were some pretty bad experiences... So, tell me something on your bucket list.
Joy: On my bucket list next—I've been checking them off. This has been a year for it. I did publish a book this year, and it's going to be available at the cave.
It's called In the Depths of His Majesty: God in Majestic Caverns. I was a biblical literature major back in college, and always was fascinated with caves through scripture. And so I wrote a book that basically goes through a lot of the encounters that people had in scripture with God in caves, so that was one of my goals.
Not going off the list, I have loved traveling. I've been to over 40 countries, so I've bungee jumped, I've skydived, I've swam with sharks, cage dived, so I did all the crazy things, I deep sea fished, and then also snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef while backpacking, and I do mean I only had a backpack. So I am adventuresome.
But what I would say, this one's going to take a little while, but I've always wanted to see the pyramids of Egypt, and I think it would be really cool to go there. I've also thought Cappadocia is a really neat place in Turkey.
Baillee: Did you have a childhood hero?
Joy: I looked up to my father. I've always thought his work ethic was impressive. He had such care and compassion.... He's CEO, but boy, he always wears a button-down. My whole family has a joke that we never seen my dad in sweats, and we have now. I bought him a pair of sweats for his birthday.
My mom was an incredible educator, and she homeschooled me for three years of my life. I've been to a lot of great schools, thankfully, but her education was dynamic, so everything was hands-on, everything was learned and lived. If I had vocabulary, I was not to write a story that included every word.
Every single thing that I had to do with school turned into a learning experience: I had to act it out, so if we were learning about history, I read books about the history we were going through from different perspectives, and then I had to put on a play... It made everything I learned so concrete, because I had to relive it in a different way.
My mentor is Jack Herschend. We named our son after him, and he owns Silver Dollar City. He worked with Dolly Parton and Dollywood... He's a remarkable, loving businessman who has really created some great places for people to work that are historic, but also are just a part of the Americana experience.
Baillee: Here's our last question: What does Alabama need?
Joy: So to me I think of it two different ways, and one is what Alabamians need is I think that—especially me being in a rural area, I think I wish there were some more job opportunities, I do believe that it would be very advantageous.
I would also say that Alabama needs other states to know that we are a pretty great state... How people have stigmas or ideas about Alabama, I think it's because a lot of people don't leave as much, and it's because it's just so great.
Other places people are more well-traveled. I'm like, "Well, it's probably because they don't like their homes." when I've traveled, I would say that I consistWntly am grateful for the state we live in, and I think Alabama needs other people to know that we're living here not because we were forced to. Is it a great place to live.
Baillee: Alright, that's it for today's Quick-Fire Quips, a questionnaire where we get to know people who stand out in the state of Alabama! That was Joy Sorensen. I'm your host, Baillee Majors. Find us at APR.org for more Quick-Fire Quips!
