Both amazing

Amazing roads converge upon one amazing house

Story and photos by David Moore

It’s a toss-up as to which is more amazing – Jody and Kenyala Hicks’ house in Cherokee Ridge, or the roads they traveled getting there.

Built of brick and flagstone, graciously windowed and topped by two understated cupolas, the Hicks’ two-story house perches on a hill, draped in privacy amidst 3.5 acres of wooded grounds. Double steel doors inlaid with frosted filigreed glass open to a foyer with a 20-foot ceiling accented by exposed timbers, overlooked by a Juliet balcony.

A different ambiance enfolds nearly every room. Big spaces manage to capture a cozy feeling compliments of both architecture and Kenyala’s tasteful decorating. Original art, some of it hers, accentuates the ambiance. Arched doorways lead to unexpectedly towering, chapellike rooms or surprising alcoves just large enough to tuck away a garden bath.

Floors reflect the rich look of walnut. Some of the six fireplaces have bold stone hearths hooded by heavy timber mantles. One fireplace anchors the screened living area off the back of the house. Also out back, a flagstone patio beckons like a ballroom dance floor.

The basement is the Mammoth Cave of man caves where Jody keeps not only his ping pong table and a few vintage computer games but a stage, replete with lighting, for his electronic drum kit. He and Kenyala are slowly stocking the wine cellar.

The house is grand, but life wasn’t always that way.

“I grew up with nothing,” Kenyala says.

She was raised in the Ryan community west of Arab. Her mom taught school there and worked other jobs, too; her dad was not always home. An Air Force brat, Jody grew up on bases across the U.S. and later flew Black Hawks in Afghanistan.

Both on second marriages, Jody and Kenyala have been a couple only since 2010. They didn’t intend to become “flippers,” but in 12 years they’ve bought, moved into and remodeled 12 houses. (Quick, do the math.) When not busy buying, selling, moving and holding down jobs, they were busy appearing on “The Newlywed Game,” “Family Feud” and – aptly enough – “House Hunters.” Really.

So, yes, it’s a toss-up between which is more amazing – their house or the roads they traveled getting there.

First things first … Kenyala? It’s pronounced like the African country with a “la” on the end. “When I met her,” Jody laughs, sitting at a table in the kitchen alcove, “I thought her parents were maybe missionaries and she grew up in Kenya.”

“It’s nothing special,” Kenyala says, “just a six-year old concocting names.”

Her older sister, Kristi Garrison, named her by combining their father’s

A Juliet balcony overlooks the foyer, upper left. The arched doorway to the left leads to a formal dinning room, lower left, which has a shiplap ceiling accented with rustic beams. Jody’s office is accessed through arched doors to the right of the foyer. They love the walnut, judge paneling. Over the fireplace, appropriately enough, is commissioned painting of helicopters. The living room, top, viewed from the step to the second story, offers evidence of Kenyala’s decorating skills. The Hickses bought most of the furniture.

name, Kenneth, with Angela, their mother’s favorite student.

Kenneth Ellenburg worked for Morgan County, “when he worked,” Kenyala says.

“He was the life of the party, always smiling and wanting to have a good time,” she adds. “My dad loved me. I was his pride and joy. He just wasn’t present.”

Her mother, Faye taught at Ryan and worked other jobs. She divorced Kenneth in 1997 when Kenyala was 18.

“She worked very hard for us and always provided the best she could,” Kenyala says.

Henry Mooney, Kenyala’s grandfather, was a father figure. He preached at Hilltop Church of God in Hulaco.

“Mom was the pianist,” she says. “I used to sing there as a kid, and Grandpa Henry played the fiddle.”

After attending Ryan, Kenyala attended Brewer High School two years, during which the family house burned. It was rebuilt in the same place, but she transferred to Arab High School because of friends, cousins and a boyfriend there. She graduated in 1997, by which time Jody’s road had led him to marriage, a family and parachute jumps at Airborne school.

Jody was born in California, while his dad, a Vietnam vet, was stationed there.

“I always wanted to fly,” Jody says.

At Kenyala’s insistence, he recounts an incident in Texas when he was 12. He’d just finished soccer practice on base and, while awaiting a ride a home, watched a fighter land on the adjacent field. He always thrilled to see the planes.

“The pilot came over and for, whatever reason, started talking to me,” Jody says. “I said I wanted to be a pilot, and he said study hard, stay focused and hold on to my dream.”

Then, to his amazement, the pilot gave him his flight gloves. Jody proudly wore them 12 years later on his first solo flight as a pilot.

Jody was 15 when his dad retired from the Air Force and moved the family to his parents’ home in Cullman. Jody played sports in school but had no real plans after graduation in 1982. His dad did, however, and signed him up for Marion Military Institute, a two-year school.

In 1983 Jody was one of 68 cadets nationally selected to attend Ranger School at Fort Benning. That gave him a taste of Army life and a coveted Ranger uniform tab. He wanted more.

Through an early commissioning program, he spent three years in the National Guard while finishing the last two years of a banking degree at The University of Alabama. Graduating in 1986, Jody was bound for the infantry, but his dad urged him to apply for the Army Aviation Branch, despite some eye issues.

“I felt like the Army was where I needed to be,” Jody says. “My eyes came out perfect

Kenyala and Jody stand in their keeping room. With a soaring, 18-foot, beamed ceiling, the long room has the feel of a chapel, but despite its size, and in “keeping” with its name, it manages to feel cozy. They have two daughters from Jody’s previous marriage “doing good things on this earth” – Dr. Caroline Densmore of Iowa, a pediatrician, and Emma Hicks, a chemical engineer in Huntsville. Kenyala’s sons Drew and Sam Gullion, a freshman and senior at Brewer High School, live with them.

on my physical. Dad said not to tell them about my asthma.”

Jody attended flight school and wore those gloves – now long lost – to make his first helicopter solo in June 1987. After graduating he went active Army then married later that year.

Flying Hueys and mostly Black Hawks, he served in Virginia, Korea and Germany. In 1996 he joined the 160th SOAR (A) and undertook a rigorous year of flight and other training, including Airborne school, after which his dad proudly pinned on Jody’s Airborne wings.

He was a company commander and XO at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. By the end of 2001, he was leading his company’s first of multiple three-month rotations to Afghanistan.

“I feel very fortunate – very happy – to have survived it all,” Jody allows without elaborating on that period of his life.

Still in the Army, he earned an online MA in aeronautical science from EmbryRiddle in 2003.

Wanting his family to experience life overseas, he transferred with them to Germany as a lieutenant colonel in 2004 and served as an aviation battalion commander. Life was soon jolted by a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Beating the cancer, he came to Fort Rucker and retired in 2007, having logged some 2,800 hours flying helicopters.

The family moved to Cullman, and Jody’s road led him to work as a defense contractor on Redstone Arsenal. He was divorced in April 2010.

Graduating from Arab High in 1997, Kenyala attended Wallace State Community College, thinking her road lead to nursing.

“But my first day of clinicals,” she says, “I came home crying, ‘This is not for me!’ It takes a special person to be a nurse. I’m special but not that special.”

“You’re very special,” Jody says from his seat by her at the table in the kitchen alcove.

What it is, she grins, is a preference for money green over blood red. So she switched to business. Married in 1998, Kenyala went on to earn a business degree from Athens State University and later, from the University of North Alabama with a master’s in business and community development.

She embarked upon a 20-year career in banking-related sales and marketing while raising two sons. On the heels of a divorce in 2007, she was laid off during the financial crisis in 2008 and went to work as

a contract analyst at Redstone Arsenal – the point of convergence for their roads through life.

They worked in the same area – and noticed each other.

“I saw her and started chatting with her,” Jody says of those shortlived early days. “I could tell she was younger than me and thought, ‘She’s going to blow me off.’”

“I spotted him, too,” she grins. One day she took her son Drew to work with her, and her boss, reading between the lines, suggested she take him to the back of the building where there was a helicopter.

“I was trying to find Jody,” Kenyala confesses. “I knew he was pilot and knew he was cute. He was on my radar. I think I was on his. He would show up in my office with ‘work questions.’”

After two weeks, Jody invited her to join him on a trip to visit a friend at Fort Benning and the infantry museum there – not a date just anyone can pull off. At the museum they tried their hands at a rifle range simulator.

“She is wearing high heels and has this M4 carbine,” Jody recalls.

“He asked if I needed help holding my weapon,” she laughs. “I said, ‘I’ve got this.’”

“I looked up at the screen and was, ‘Wow! She’s really good.’”

“That’s why he liked me,” Kenyala laughs. “I was pretty impressive.”

That was spring 2010. They married in October. Bullseye.

They went to Las Vegas for the wedding, a private ceremony at the scenic Valley of Fire State Park attended by only a photographer and a preacher, who was not, Kenyala laughs, an Elvis impersonator. In fact, he was so touched by their service that he cried.

They moved to her garden home in Park Place in Arab and soon bought a house in Decatur. It was there they did something not many newlyweds do – they appeared on “The Newlywed Game.”

They were sitting on the couch, surfing channels and happened to stop on the show. They’d never watched it but found themselves playing along – and doing quite well. What the heck? Kenyala applied for them to be contestants, which required her to make a video of the two of them.

A few months later they got a phone invitation to be flown to New York and be on the show. Jody just couldn’t believe it.

“I have been in sales and marketing for 20 years,” she reminded him. “Of course they are going to pick us!”

Not only that – they won. An eight-day trip to St. Croix. The bad news – Kenyala was homesick after four days. More bad news – they had to pay taxes on what they considered a very over-valued $11,000 trip.

That first house in Decatur proved too small with four kids, so they decided to sell it. On a whim, they decided on something else, too.

“We applied for “House Hunters” on HGTV,” Kenyala says.

“Impulsivity is a trend with us,” Jody notes. At any rate, the show producer called them asking for a video. Kenyala readily complied. “I guess they thought we were funny,” she says. “They called back and wanted us on the show.” A lot of the show, they learned, is staged. For instance, the Hickses were required to have a house under contract before any shooting was done. The other two houses in their episode were “decoys.” “They are trying to capture the home buying During Jody’s years in Army Aviation, he probably faced helicopter landing zones process – the smaller than Kenyala’s kitchen island. Besides lots of storage space, it has several emotions and heating drawers. Her home office is through the doorway to the right. stress – and do that pretty well,” Kenyala says. “It was, actually, stressful because the filming took five days.” “We had to do every scene three times,” Jody says. “But it was still fun.” Meanwhile, the real-life house-hunting Hickses bought a second, bigger home in Decatur, and deeds started toppling like dominoes. Starting with Park Place in 2010, they bought and moved into four Decatur houses, then moved to 10th Street in Arab for about a year before returning to Decatur, first to a house in the historic district then moving into two others before buying house number 10, this time in Hartselle. They weren’t in the market to buy again, but in 2020 Kenyala saw the former home of Jimmy and Tara Helms in Arab (featured in the 2019 spring issue of GLM) and was smitten. She and Jody looked at it, bought it and returned to Arab.

Whenever the Hickses bought a house, they’d always make improvements, painting and decorating to their tastes, doing most of the work themselves.

The house has 8,654 square feet, including the screened porch, above to the right. Next to it, the kitchen alcove extends from the back wall of the house. The Hicks’ master bedroom overlooks the flagstone patio and has a Juliet balcony.

“What we noticed,” Jody says, “is that people [shoppers and buyers] were always commenting on our improvements. We had something going on we had not intended.”

“The way I decorated was ahead of the trends,” Kenyala says. “I was using grays and whites before they were popular.”

The couple could not help but notice something else – they always made money when they sold. By definition, one who regularly buys, quickly remodels then resells at a profit is a “flipper.”

“But we never intended to flip houses in the beginning,” she says.

“When we first started moving so much, we were almost apologetic about it,” Jody says. “After five years or so, we decided to own it. Now we treat it like an art project.”

“People look at you like you’re crazy,” Kenyala says. “But we don’t have to explain anything we enjoy. We love the search. We love different types of architecture, the different, cool ‘bones’ that need life breathed back into them. It’s fun. It is our hobby.”

Logically, in 2017 she got a real estate licenses and joined the former ERA Ben Porter agency in Decatur and Huntsville. She got her broker’s license about the time Redstone Family Realty in Huntsville bought out Ben Porter.

Kenyala helped rationalize their purchase of the Helms’ home in Arab because it was close to the Guntersville office of Redstone Family Realty, which she opened in 2020.

Two things of note occurred in 2015 that had nothing to do with the Hicks’ real estate feeding frenzy. First, Jody was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And since fate often favors irony, two weeks later he appeared on “Family Feud,” part of a team comprised of Kenyala, her mom, sister and brother-in-law, Faye, Kristi and Derrick Garrison.

“We were the Hicks from Alabama,” Jody grins now, though at the time being happy on stage, as they were instructed to be, wasn’t easy in the shadow cast by cancer.

In the 1970s, Faye had tried unsuccessfully to get on the “Family Feud,” and she got her hopes up again when she learned auditions would be held in Birmingham.

“She called me because she knew I could get them on the show,” laughs Kenyala, who today is still batting 1,000 as a game show applicant.

So the Hicks team showed up in Atlanta where Host Steve Harvey and crew were recording. The team struck out on day one. But, due to a technicality they still don’t understand, they were called back for day two. They smashed that one out of the park – well, at least until Jody and Kristi advanced to the fast money round and a chance to win $20,000 and a car.

“It was the worst TV performance ever,” Jody says of the round. “We did not win anything. On day three, we were a well-oiled machine, then got hung up

at the end. Out of three days, we had a chance to win $60,000 and three cars. We walked away with $145 each, and priceless memories.”

In a much better outcome, Jody beat his cancer and got to “fire” his urologist as he did with his oncologist after beating lymphoma. And it’s a good thing he beat it, too, because Kenyala had more flipping to exorcise from her system.

Those flips led them in 2021 to Cherokee Ridge and the grand house for sale on Pinnacle Road.

“I have always loved Cherokee Ridge,” says the woman who grew up with nothing. “I would drive through and think, ‘Wow! It must be amazing to live in Cherokee Ridge.’ It was always a dreamy place for me.”

Kenyala first saw the house online and begged Jody to simply drive by and look at it with her. Both found it stunning – but how could they afford it? The house gnawed at their minds for two months. Finally, Kenyala implored Jody to look closely at their finances and see if there was some way they could swing it.

“I think we can,” he reported. And that’s a good thing, too, because going inside and touring the house, really getting to see it, tipped the balance beyond the point of any return.

“We were blown away,” Jody says. “The pictures online did not do it justice at all.”

“What is not to love about it? It’s amazing,” Kenyala adds. “Selling real estate, I see tons and tons of really nice houses, but I have never seen one like this. The people who built it put so much detail and thought into it.”

Hmmm … so no more flipping?

“Our kids do take bets on how long we are going to stay somewhere,” Kenyala confesses. “If we ever sell, it would be to downsize or maybe move to the lake. But I think we could search high and low and never find a house we could love as much as this house.”

“Me either,” Jody adds. “It’s beautiful.”

Well then, anyone up for another game show? “House Hunters Redux?”

“Naw ... we’re done,” Jody laughs. “But the “Pyramid” game show sends up emails and wants us to apply.”

They’ll have to see where their converged road leads them.

Good Life Magazine

The six bedrooms and six bathrooms, include the master bath, top right, and master bedroom center. A sitting room with a fireplace connects the two. The extensive basement includes a theater room and, background right, wine cellar.