By Will Bacon
Growing up in Wayne County, Georgia, meant growing up among people whose names and
personalities became part of the landscape itself.
Jesup and the Oglethorpe community were the center of my world, but Wayne County stretched into
Gardi, Screven, Odum, the Altamaha River, pine forests, farms and dirt roads. What I remember most
now, though, are the people who gave those places life.
As a boy, I worked for Ralph Smith at Jesup Pharmacy as a “soda jerk.” Later, I topped, suckered
and helped string tobacco near Beck’s Dairy. I loaded and hauled watermelons for my Uncle Tyler
Surrency. As I got older, I worked at S&R Men’s Shop with Mr. Jimmy Sullivan and Don Miller,
helping sell Gant shirts, Hart Schaffner & Marx suits, and Bass Weejuns.
At the time, I thought I was simply working.
Looking back, I realize I was being introduced to Wayne County through its people.
Each of those people had their own way of doing things, his own expectations, his own personality,
and his own place in the community. They taught me lessons without announcing them as lessons. You
learned by watching. You learned to show up, to work, to speak to people, to treat customers well, and
to understand that your name and your word mattered.
My own family was part of that same fabric. Early in their careers, both of my parents taught at
Piney Grove School, where Dad also served as principal. Dad was also a minister, and I often tagged
along when he stopped by the funeral home to visit the family of a church member or friend who had
died. Dink’s father was the undertaker and funeral director, so the connection between our families
goes back many years.
I did not understand it then, but funeral homes were places where stories were told. People gathered
to remember what someone had done, something funny they had said, how they had helped another
person, or simply what it had meant to know them.
Years later, after college, I returned to Wayne County, married a wonderful Cherokee Lake
sweetheart, and went to work at Rayonier alongside Bob McCrary and Gerald DeWitt. Angie worked
for Glenna Parker, who had taken over the insurance business where she herself had worked for
“Snooky” Littlefield. Once again, our lives were intertwined with familiar Wayne County names and
stories. Eventually, education and opportunity carried our family elsewhere.
But the people of Wayne County traveled with me.
In my own work as a minister and marriage and family therapist, I have heard thousands of stories.
Over time, I have come to understand that our stories are one of the ways we keep one another alive.
Ralph Smith and Uncle Tyler, Jimmy Sullivan and Don Miller, Bob McCrary and Gerald DeWitt,
Glenna Parker and Snooky Littlefield—these names and so many others belong to the Wayne County I
remember. Some are gone now, but when I speak their names and remember the lessons, laughter, work
and ordinary days we shared, they are present again.
In People Die Twice, Dink helps us understand why those stories matter. We die once when life
leaves us, but there is another kind of death that comes when our names are no long spoken and our
stories are no longer told.
So we tell them.
