My Story

This is my first experience building a website for blogging. I don't know much about blogs, but my idea is to have a place where I can share things about me and the things I do without it being public, like Facebook or Instagram.

I started writing my story and I have several parts started, but not necessarily finished. I may post parts and finish them later and re-post.

First Part:

Me

As a small child, I could go under the house and play with whatever toys I might have had. I remember playing cars, but I didn’t have any cars, so I pretended a 6 oz coke bottle was a car and I could drive it around in the soft dry dirt.

I also remember that there were doodlebugs that made their home in an upside down cone and they buried themselves in the bottom and covered themselves with the very dry sand. The idea was that if something like an ant or some other insect  found itself on the side of the cone, it would slide down to the bottom and the doodlebug would grab it and have a snack. We could poke a small straw down in there and wiggle it around in the bottom and call out to them “Doodlebug, doodlebug your house is on fire” and if we were lucky, they would bite the straw, and we catch them that way. I guess I was never lucky, I don’t remember ever catching one. It wasn’t really about catching them; it was about the entertainment factor for a small child.

When I was about 6 or so, I was outside watching Jimmy cut grass in the back yard with a push more. I suddenly felt a pain in my left arm above my elbow. I ran inside to let momma look at it. There was a small hole in my arm about the size of a ball point pen. Momma took care of it, but a few days later it got infected. She took me to see a Doctor. He checked it out, cleaned it up and prescribed some medicine and sent us away. He said there was nothing in my arm. A few days later I was about to go to school, but my arm wasn’t getting better. Momma started mashing around on it to get some puss out of it when something shot out about an inch. She pulled it out of my arm and wrapped it in a handkerchief and said that she was going to take it to the Doctor and show him. I don’t know if she ever took it to the Doctor but my arm soon got well. What she pulled out of my arm was part of a metal clothes hanger, the twisted part about 2” long.

As I mentioned earlier, I went to 11 different schools: Sycamore, AL (1st ,2nd and started 3rd), Anniston (went a few weeks in 3rd), Thomaston, GA (finished 3rd) I have a memory of kid having a seizure in class, but that’s about all I remember about Thomaston, and  Manchester is where we lived when my mother’s mother died in 1958. I should have been in 4th grade. My memory is not clear which school was next, but I think it was Barnesville. I don’t remember the school, but I remember living in a housing project there and my brother, Jimmy lived in Barnesville with his wife Dianne, after he was married., Griffin, Swainsboro, Ila, (Madison County GA) Villa Rica 9th and most of the 10th, Kingsland, GA Camden County High School the rest of the 10th and 11th, Hollandale, MS senior year, where I graduated.

I just recently figured out that going to so many schools may be part of the reason that I am who I am. Basically a loner, slow to make friends, and I have very few friends now. I guess, because of all the moving, I can move on to new things and not look back with regrets.

There are several memories from Barnesville.

One day daddy and I were outside. I don’t remember exactly what time of year it was, but the weather was nice, the sun was shining and there was a wind blowing. My dad looked up at the sky and around and said” Cyclone winds”. That is all he said. I didn’t really know what a cyclone wind was, but I had heard tornadoes referred to as cyclones and it put a long-lasting fear of the wind in me.

Another memory while we lived there was that daddy took a pickup truck with high side boards on it and went south to where the peach orchards were abundant and brought back a pickup truck full of peaches. My mother used and canned peaches for a long time. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them. I guess he sold as many as he could.

Another thing that I remember is that I had a BB gun while we lived there and one day when it was cold outside, I went out with my BB gun “hunting”. I managed to shoot a little bird, a sparrow, I think and when I went over and picked it up it had a seed in its mouth, and I started to cry. I couldn’t believe I had killed a little bird with food in its mouth. He was just trying to survive.

As I mentioned daddy was a preacher and from the time he started preaching, I don’t think we ever missed a church service. If the church doors were open, we were there. On this particular Sunday, he wasn’t pastoring at the time, but he was getting ready for church, anyway either by accident or on purpose, he cut a skin tag off and couldn’t get the bleeding stopped. It bled and bled and bled. We didn’t go to church that day, and to my knowledge, that was the first time we ever missed church.

We moved from Swainsboro to Freedom Church of God in Madison County, GA. There was a family that were members of the church and lived within walking distance and sometimes we would walk to their house and hang out with the boys. I don’t remember how many boys there were, but I think there were 2. Anyway, the oldest one was about my age. In the course of our visits we were introduced to “Sunday School words” , cuss words. Having led a sheltered life as a PK (Preacher’s Kid) we didn’t know many cuss words, if any at all. The Escoe boys introduced us to them.

I don’t remember exactly when I got a learner permit to drive or if I really ever got one, but I started driving when I was 15 years old on dirt roads in Madison County GA. It was a lot of fun to drive fast and drift or slide around the curves on the dirt roads.

 We moved to Villa Rica early in 1963 and I was allowed to pick up church members and haul them back and forth to church before I got a legal license.

We arrived in VR in 1963. At that time the Villa Rica Church of God (VRCOG) was a small concrete block building on “the hill”. The membership was very small, probably only 25 to 30 people. I assume they were ready to build another church and it didn’t take daddy long to get the ball rolling.

I don’t know the story of how the property was obtained for the new church, but everything was arranged and put in motion within about 6 months. That project was my first exposure to construction. I was 15 at the time and I was one of the main helpers.

November 22, 1963 several things happened that was memorable. The first one was that President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

The next thing was that my grandmother  died that day.

The other thing was that it started raining and continued to rain for about 3 days. The church was framed up but it was not dried in. The building has a basement that is about half as big as the upstairs. The basement walls were made of concrete blocks and had not been back-filled. When the rains came, the water came in and carried a lot of dirt to the long wall and the wall had not been re-enforced, so, the water and mud crashed the wall. We didn’t see the church for several days because of my grandmother’s funeral.

When we walked in there, we got the surprise of our lives. All that mud and concrete blocks laying on the ground. I don’t remember but I assume that the same person that laid the blocks originally came back and did the work again.

I remember being with daddy in Anniston, AL and we were talking to a preacher friend, Howard Shell, who was also a General Contractor. I didn’t really know what a General Contractor was. I was about 15 at the time and he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a General Contractor. It was kinda prophetic. Most of my career was spent working for a large General Contractor as a Superintendent.

With that introduction to building, I had summer jobs with a couple of framing crews, and that helped me in the future. One summer I was working with Hobert Wallace framing a house. One day I was walking across a garage ceiling on the ceiling joists. I didn’t notice that one of the joists had a big knot in it and when I stepped on it, it gave away and I went down. Fortunately the ones next to it didn’t break and I was able to catch myself on one of them and didn’t fall all the way down to the concrete, but I did have bruised ribs for a few days.

Another time I was working with a guy whose nickname was “Big’Un”. He was probably twice as big as me and we were on home-made scaffolds on the outside of a building when suddenly the scaffold broke and he and I went down to the ground. We landed in relatively clean soft dirt. I wasn’t hurt and I don’t think Big’Un was either.

I don’t know the exact date we moved away from Villa Rica to Kingsland  GA, way down in the southeast corner of the state, Camden County. I think it was about the end of summer in 1965.

As a part of the high school experience in VR, I was a member of the Vocational Industrial Clubs of America (VICA). As the name implies, it was dedicated to guiding students to a suitable career after high school. Because of my association with VICA, I was placed with a local upholstery shop during my Junior year in Woodbine. The upholstery guy had a part-time business in his house. That was my first exposure to upholstery.

As it the word spread in school, the home economics class had an old sofa bed that needed new fabric. So, I took the project on and re-covered the sofa with the help of my mentor. The Home Economics teacher was pleased and the old sofa got a new lease on life. The class couldn’t believe that I could sew to make the new cover.

Also during my Junior year at Camden County High School, I ran for student council president. There were two other contestants, Jim Shoemaker and Laquita Wilder. We each had to give a speech before the entire student body. It was a political speech outlining what would happen during our leadership.

I don’t remember anything that was in Jim’s speech or any points from my speech, but I remember very well to this day something what Laquita said. She had 3 glasses of water on the lectern. As she spoke and criticized Jim, she dropped a tablet of some sort in the water and said “This is what happens when Jim is elected” and she dropped some kind of tablet into the water and it just sunk to the bottom of the glass and nothing happened.

She did the same thing with me with the same results. She then said “And this is what happens if you elect me, Laquita Wilder as class president.” She dropped the Alka Seltzer into the glass and she started describing the bubbling and all the things that Alka Seltzers normally do, except when she looked at the glass of water, nothing was happening. The Alka Seltzer just sank to the bottom of the glass. Nothing. It was classic. I think Jim Shoemaker won the election.

Theresa and I had a long distance relationship for about 4 years after we moved from Villa Rica in 1964 until we were married in 1968.

We moved from Kingsland, Ga to Hollandale, MS in 1966. That summer I stayed in Stockbridge, Ga with my brother Wayne and worked that summer at Sears Roebuck. That was the start of a short career. I ended up working for Sears for 11 years. After a civil rights strike in the early 70’s things changed at Sears and I couldn’t see a future for me anymore, so I quit and decided to chicken farming, but I couldn’t convince the government to loan me $250,000 to buy a farm and get started. So, I tried starting my own business as a handy man around Villa Rica, but I didn’t have any money saved to get me over the hump. Almost everybody was optimistic that I could succeed and so a good job. They said it will take a little time. I thought a little time was a couple of months. I think that if I could have lasted about 2 years I could have made it. But a series of false starts and struggles followed until I started with Brasfield & Gorrie.

But I digress.

I graduated from Hollandale High School in 1967 and then went to Lee College in Cleveland, TN. After the Army we bought a small house in Villa Rica(VR) and lived there for about 3 years and then built a bigger house on Lake Paradise Rd in VR.

I decided to be the General Contractor and do some of the work myself. I had the grading, foundations, framing, and Sheetrock contracted. After the basement walls were laid, I decided to put gravel in there in preparation to pour concrete. I rented a Bobcat (skid steer) for the job. There was a gap between the ground and the basement wall, so I put some boards down to span the gap to the wall so that I could drive up and dump the gravel over the wall into the basement. Bobcat controls are different from other skid steer machines and since this was the first time I had ever been on one I wasn’t that familiar how everything worked. One time I was going up to the wall to dump the gravel and as I got almost to the wall I got confused and hit the control to go forward instead of dumping the bucket. The thing lurched forward and I hit the wall and knocked about 3 blocks loose on the wall and almost tumbled into the basement. But by the grace of god, I got stopped in time!

Another thing about that construction project was hanging drywall. I decided that I could hang all the drywall with a little help. With the various helpers, we managed t get it all hung except about 50 pieces. I called the finishers and when they arrived, we still lacked the 50 boards. So, I asked the finishers if he could hang them. He agreed and had them hung in what seemed like just a few minutes. It had taken me and my helpers weeks to hang most of it. When I realized how quick it could be done by professionals, I said “I’ll never hang another piece of drywall as long as I live!” I was wrong. In about 2 years I was doing it for a living.

Because I quit Sears after we had been in the house for about 4 years, we thought we couldn’t afford to live there, so we sold it. We rented a house for about 4 years and managed to buy 8 acres in Douglas county.

We started the second house, but instead of contracting almost everything, I decided to do it all myself and I did with some help from family and friends. It took almost a year to build it. The only 2 items that I had contractors do was heat and air and the roofing. We have lived in that house for 42 years and it has evolved through various face lifts and minor renovations and additions.

I made a decision to move in March 1, 1984. We were not finished. We didn’t have a toilet or cabinets in the kitchen. We had water and a septic tank, but we used a portable toilet and I built some rustic cabinets for the kitchen with just a circular saw and painted them royal blue.

One of our neighbors was riding down the road one night saw the cabinets through the window and stopped and said that she just had to see our house, so we showed her around. Later we were able to upgrade the kitchen and get rid of the horrible blue cabinets.

After a few years Melissa was married and her husband, Tim and I were working together. One day we were in the house and I spotted a turkey walking down the road. It just so happened that I could see his head above the bank in the yard. I grabbed my little 22 rifle and shot him. We were planning to go somewhere, so we just brought him in and laid him on the kitchen counter and went to the supply store for materials. We came back about 3 hours later. When we opened the door to the kitchen the turkey had recovered for death and was flying around the kitchen and pooping as he went. When we entered the kitchen he took and tried to fly through a window that was not open and managed to rip the curtains off the windows. We finally caught him and I had to kill him again. Apparently when I shot him the first time, I almost missed. I guess he was only stunned.

There have been many times in my adult life that I wanted to move out West to Colorado, Montana, or anywhere in the Rocky Mountains. Theresa always had a reason that we couldn’t do it, kids, school, job, grandkids or some other reason.

One day she came home and was fed up with things and said that she was ready. Ready to move away and start over. I said, “Wait just a minute, I’m not ready right now.”  I guess since we have been married for 56 years, and lived in the same house for 40 years, I had become attached the old home-place and when I had an opportunity to move away, I didn’t want to go. So, here we are.