Twenty-five years later, Wayne County still is and will be home

For several years, our corporate office was in downtown Athens, 

across the street and diagonal to City Hall where another 

Jesup native, Alan Reddish, is Athens-Clarke County’s manager. 

The historic Civil War double-barrel cannon, on the corner of 

College Ave. and Hancock Ave. pointed at my desk.  I’d look out my office window 

and think: “If that thing ever fires, again, I’ll be blown 

all the way back to South Georgia.” 

     Sitting in Jerry Mosley’s barber chair, you get more than a haircut.  The squat, concrete-block building, in the alley behind Cherry Street, is the 50-yard line of chatter and miscellaneous information.  But when I told my high school classmate that I was moving from Jesup, he gasped, dropping his hands to his side.  Before he lifted the comb and scissors again, he said, “Man, I thought Manuel Noriega (the infamous Panamanian dictator) would have moved here before you ever left.”

     That was 25 years ago.

     Life-changing decisions are rarely simple, and uprooting my family wasn’t easy.  So, why did we move to Athens?  As much as I loved Wayne County, I hated the idea of missing any of our children’s growing-up years.  Our company had expanded over several states.  Staying in Jesup would have meant leaving on Monday—most weeks—and returning on Friday.  I couldn’t imagine missing Little League games, dance recitals and suppertime banter around the kitchen table.

     You get one chance with your children—before they leave home—and I didn’t want to miss that chance.  That meant our family needed to move to the geographic center of our newspapers, so I could make mostly day trips and be home in the late afternoons.  Around our oval oak kitchen table—on the corner of Ninth and Newcastle—suppertime became the forum for us to talk about where we’d go. 

     My first suggestion was Rabun County.  I painted a picture of living on a mountain lake, something entirely different from our customary piney flat woods.  My excitement was not universal, so I pitched living on Lake Lanier, with the mountains on the horizon.  Again, I was trying to create an adventure, giving them a totally different environment.  Alan’s, Emily’s and Eric’s faces cast their votes of rejection without ever opening their mouths.

     That’s when I asked, “Well, where would you like to live?”

     I’m not sure which one said it first, but it was clear that Athens was their choice.  Since their toddler days, they’d been packed into Oldsmobile station wagons and ferried up and down Highway 15 from Jesup to Athens—430 miles round-trip. They knew all the pit stops, including Holcomb’s Barbecue in White Plains.  It wasn’t a Bulldog football Saturday unless they shuffled their feet in sawdust on Holcomb’s floor while chomping on a bun filled with hickory-smoked pork.

     I think it was 14-year-old Emily who painted the picture for me.  With wide, expressive blue eyes, she said, “Dad, you know we love Jesup.  This is home, the only place we’ve ever known.  But we know we need to move, if we are going to be the kind of family we want to be.  Going to Athens will be like moving across town.  We know so many people there.  It’ll be the best of both worlds.  We’ll have all our old friends here, and we’ll have all our friends there.”

“Besides, Dad,” Alan said, “if we are going to move, now is the time.  Emily’s going into high school next year, and Eric will be in middle school.”  He insisted that he could spend his senior year in North Georgia.  Pam and I questioned him, but the soon-to-be-17-year-old stood firm.  He was ready to do what was best for all five of us.  A few years after the move, my dad said, “We see more of you now than when you lived across the street from us.”

     Looking back to 1990, our children were right.  Athens is the perfect location for our company’s headquarters. Emily was spot-on in her predictions. Our Athens friends—old and new—have made us feel welcome—very welcome.   And Jesup will always be home.  A D-8 Caterpillar couldn’t bulldoze our souls out of South Georgia or pull us away from our hometown friends.  In fact, it’s about time to roll down Highway 15 and turn left in Baxley on Highway 341, so I can climb into Jerry’s chair and hear what’s happening.

We must be reflective and grateful, for it could be worse

     Like smoke blown through a keyhole, a cloud of gloom can drift in and settle its funk onto your

shoulders.  And all of a sudden, your smile droops.  That’s what happened to me, as I read the news from random parts of the globe.  I got progressively dejected, wondering where the world is headed.

     Go with me:

     Longmont, Colo.

     Police allege a woman used a Craigslist ad to lure a pregnant woman to her home to buy baby clothes.  When the expectant mother showed up, the accused woman—a former nurse’s aide—knifed the victim and stole her 7-month-old fetus.

     What?

     New York City

     A hot plate sparked a Sabbath fire in Brooklyn.  The 45-year-old mother of eight “valiantly tried” to save her children, but seven died.  The mother and a 15-year-old daughter eventually escaped by jumping out a second-story window.  Hospitalized for their serious burns, the mother and her teenager are too injured to know the horrific news.

     Why?

     Mount Everest

     The 29,029-foot geographic icon attracts hundreds of ambitious climbers each year.  The tab for the adventure isn’t cheap, reportedly as much as $100,000 per person.  The price to the mountain isn’t a bargain either, earning Everest the moniker of “World’s Highest Garbage Dump.”  Grinnell College, in a report, estimates 12 tons of human feces are strewn along the trails each year.

     What? 

     Middle East

     Unrest should be the middle name of the Middle East.  Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and now Yemen boil with turmoil and terror. Blame Bush.  Blame Obama.  Blame anyone you choose.  The United States or any other country doesn’t have a good track record of defusing that multi-nation time bomb.  America continues to pour blood and billions onto that conundrum.

     Why?

The real Superman lives in Athens

               

     The Superman I know doesn’t wear red briefs, blue leotards and fly around with a cape flapping in the wind.

     No, no.

     That’s in the comic books and in Hollywood.

     I know the real Superman.

     Really.

     He was once my next-door neighbor.

     Like Clark Kent, he’s a reporter and a good one.  When he drops by my office, he’s usually wearing a sports coat, sans tie.  In our 40 years of friendship, I’ve never seen him in a skin-tight red and blue getup.  And if he has x-ray vision, he disguises that super power by propping bifocals on his nose.

     How do I know he’s Superman?

     Trust me.

     He’s the man.

     Here’s the proof.

     As editor of his college newspaper, The Red & Black, he crafted his writing skills.  With a crisp University of Georgia diploma, he went home to begin his career.  He joined the feisty staff of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, the one that won a Pulitzer Prize by beaming sunshine into the shady side of Phenix City, Ala., also known back then as “the most corrupt city in America.” (I recommend you read The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama by Margaret Anne Barnes.)

     If he or any of the other reporters could fly, they didn’t know it.  Instead, they treaded across the Chattahoochee River Bridge in their Hush Puppies, toting note pads and cameras.   The late Claude McBride was among those award-winning journalists.

     During that 1950s era, a crime-busting prosecutor was assassinated, as the gambling, prostitution and whiskey toughs fought back.  Once, I asked Claude, then the chaplain of the Georgia Bulldog football team, why he became a minister.  “One night,” he said, “I stepped out the back door of the newspaper, and I felt a gun in my back. The thug said I better never write another word about Phenix City.  Right then, I heard the Lord calling.”

     In a daring plunge, my friend, Superman, quit his assistant editor’s job on the big city daily for another reason.  He launched a weekly newspaper, The Phenix Citizen, inside the enemy lines.  He survived, physically and financially, but that’s not the heroics that proved my once-upon-a-time neighbor is Superman.

Bill Simpson still has that voice and that laugh

     The sun was hellishly hot for an autumn afternoon.  My rump was roasting on the aluminum bleacher, but I wasn’t complaining on Oct. 8, 1966.  

     As a UGA freshman, that was my first Sanford Stadium experience. The Bulldogs beat Ole Miss,

9-3, before 45,200 fans. And I was one of them. When the final whistle blew, my red-striped necktie was loosened and my starched, white oxford-cloth shirt was stuck to my back. As I walked out of the stadium, both hands were busy.  One was guiding a pretty brunette through the barking mob, and the other held a sweat-soaked navy wool blazer, slung across my shoulder.

     When you are 17, you think you are going to live forever.  But on that Saturday, it was as if I had died and gone to Heaven.  And this heaven even had a rich, god-like voice booming from the stadium’s loudspeakers. I vowed to do my homework.  Who was the man behind the Bulldogs’ microphone?  When I found out, I wrote his name down and saved it for another day.

     Four years later, I startled Bill Simpson.  He was in his spartan office on Clayton Street, sorting cardboard boxes.  I knew he had just left the university to launch his public relations and advertising firm.  Well, I had just earned a UGA public relations degree. The best way to find a job is to go look for one and ask.  And that’s what I did a few days after my 1970 spring graduation.

     I can still hear Bill laughing.  He wasn’t being rude, just honest.  Waving his hand around the tiny office, he said, in his Sanford Stadium voice, “I don’t even know how I’m going to pay myself.”  Since he didn’t have a chair to offer, we stood and chatted.  As I learned, a conversation with Bill is punctuated with laughter.

     As the years rocked by, I discovered how the dots between our lives connected.  Bill’s stepsons, Ed and David Allen, are my friends.  One of Bill’s best friends is Hubert Howard.  As Sigma Chis at Georgia, the pair bonded, and they have stayed in touch for 65 years. Until he retired, Hubert was my Jesup attorney. Bill calls his buddy “Bear,” and Hubert calls his fraternity brother “The Mouth of the South.”

     Hubert and Bill still get tickled about the 1950-era “Ugliest Man on Campus Contest.”  Bill was determined to nominate his fraternity brother, but Hubert flipped the trick and got Bill on the ballot.  Time has faded memories of who won, but both men still laugh about that stunt.

     One thing Hubert hasn’t forgotten is Bill’s gifts in comedy, songwriting and music.  Bill was a celebrity on sorority row. Genius-like, he could craft lyrics, almost on the spot.  He would play the piano and belt out his originals—like “Peachtree Street”—and young ladies would swoon.  Starting in 1956, he put that voice into action in Sanford Stadium’s press box for about two decades. And just the other day, the 85-year-old had a crowd rollicking to jokes like this:

Nothing compares to friendly hometown service

     UGA freshmen didn’t have cars back in 1966, so my best transportation was wearing out the leather on the bottoms of my oxblood Weejuns.  One of my favorite destinations was Clayton Street, after a brief stop at the Varsity on the corner of College Avenue and Broad Street.

     There were other men’s stores, but the big three were: Dick Ferguson’s, Gunn’s, along with West

and Dean.  Gunn’s is gone.  Dick Ferguson’s, celebrating its 80th year, moved to Beechwood 20 years ago.  And now, George Dean’s Men’s Store is turning out its lights on Christmas Eve.

     Wayne Dean, who took over from his father, George, wasn’t quite ready to retire, but Zaxby’s really wanted his location in the middle of downtown.  With 45 years of retailing, he’s pushing in the clutch and shifting to another gear of selling.  He’ll keep his lines of merchandise and sell on an individual basis to his loyal customers.

    Since moving back to Athens in 1990, I’ve depended on Dick, Wayne and Gene Lewis at Lamar Lewis Shoes to keep me attired.  I like going into their stores.  You know them, and they know you.   They don’t have to ask what size, and they know my personal tastes.  And they’ll send me a bill at the end of the month.  

     One of my favorite services they offer is modern-day Pony Express.  With a call, Dick, Wayne, Gene or one of their associates will be standing outside with my merchandise.  All I have to do is stick my left hand out as I drive by.   There’s absolutely nothing to compare to hometown service.

     I joke with Dick that I do my initial shopping with him, through his windows, on the way to Beechwood Cinemas.  Wednesday, our son Eric and I visited George Dean’s one more time.  First, we stood on the Clayton Street sidewalk, perusing what was in the window, just as I did in 1966.  Eric still calls Wayne “Coach,” from Little League days.  

    Once inside 227 East Clayton Street, I paused and took it all in.  The high ceiling, the smell of new clothes and that nostalgic feel that took me back, way back.  It was old-home week, visiting, laughing, backslapping and reminiscing.  And, of course, we had to buy a few things.  I repeat: there’s absolutely nothing to compare to hometown service.