UPSON COUNTY, GA - HISTORY "I Remember" 2002 columns ***************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm *********************** This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: Hartford Pryor These "I Remember" columns appear each month in the Upson Historical Society Newsletter. Reprinted here with permission. Year 2002 JANUARY 2002 I remember when, in the 40's, 50's and 60's, there was a group of hard-working men employed by Thomaston Mills who were also preachers. They were: James F. Kelly, carpenter; John Presley, cloth inspector; Doc Corley, cloth inspector; B. T. Gill, weaver; Clarence Bruce, weaver; Ed Harvel, card room machinist; Johnny Shelley, machinist; Joel Montgomery, weave room; and Walter Wade, loom fixer. James F. Kelly organized the dark's Chapel Baptist Church in 1946 and preached until 1951; Walter Wade followed Kelly from 1952 to 1962; followed by John Presley from 1963 to 1971. One day Marvin Sanford was witnessing to John and talking with him about his drinking. John told Marvin, "I am going to drink until my toes turn up." Little did he know that the Lord had other plans for him. Look what was accomplished after he was saved and totally surrendered his life. Doc Corley served as pastor at Faith Baptist near Butler for seven years. Before he was saved, Doc had a bad drinking problem, too. He and John Presley were close friends and the two of them would get together on weekends and do their thing. B. T. Gill was pastor of a church in Maulk for several years. Clarence Bruce was an Assembly of God lay preacher who did a lot of preaching at the Upson Public Works Camp. Ed Harvel was a Church of God lay preacher and later served a church in Warner Robins. Johnny Shelley served at Elkins Creek, Pleasant Valley, New Harmony, New Hope in Zebulon and Hammond Drive in Griffin. Joel Montgomery preached at Mt. View and Elkin's Creek and then formed Emory's Chapel in 1937 in an old one-room school building. FEBRUARY 2002 I remember when boys used to like to pay a hunting trick on one of their friends who didn't know anything about hunting. They called it "snipe hunting." This was a bird that lived chiefly in the marshes. They would give the inexperienced boy a large bag and tell him to stand in a certain place and they would go out into the woods and beat the bushes so that the snipe would run into the bag. What they would really do is go off and leave the poor boy stranded for several hours. Eventually, he would figure out that it was a joke. I remember back in the 1930's when people would come to Thomaston from out-of-state and try to organize unions in the textile mills. Union was a "dirty word" and it got very scary. There was an incident where a man on the old mill village tried to work up support for unions. Word got out and' several men went down to discourage him. They beat him up. After several weeks, there was a court trial and a twister-room overseer was called as a witness. The union lawyer asked him why he had been there. His reply was, "I heard that there was going to be a fight and since I am not required to stay in the mill at all times; I went to see it, because I love a good fight. During that time, the Martha Mills installed a large spot light on top of the mill. After dark, every car that went down 6th Avenue would have this light following them. One night, they put the light on a car and someone inside the car shot the light out. I remember once when the Upson County Commission created a special county police force, one of the men they employed was an ex-moonshiner. MARCH 2002 In the year 1947 in the Roland Road Community there was a family named Mr. & Mrs. Nathan Pollard. They had 9 children: Mondell, Mordeze, Roscoe, Paul, David, Bill, Joe, William and Mattie Lou. They all attended a 1 room schoolhouse named Sunnyside where Mrs. G. H. (Ethel) Phillips taught all 8 grades with a total of 24 students. Mattie Lou was a good speller and Mrs. Phillips, who lived near the Pollard family gave her special lessons at night. The Atlanta Journal sponsored the Spelling Bee in Georgia and Mattie Lou won in Upson County. Mrs. Ella (Cloud) Joiner of 296 Easy Street said Mattie Lou beat her on the word "COUNCIL." Next, Mattie Lou won in Georgia, and Upson County came alive to help her go to Washington DC. Everyone began to raise money for Mattie- Lou, Mrs. Pollard, and Mrs. Phillips, to buy them clothes and to pay for the trip. On the day they left, they almost missed their train in Atlanta. Mr. Holstun, who was to take them, got stuck in Upson's red mud. After sight seeing, it was time for the Spelling Bee. In the sixth round, Mattie Lou almost lost out on PEDIGRED. Accustomed to Southern drawls, she misunderstood the word. The judge ruled in her favor. Finally, she won by spelling CHLORPHYLL. She became a celebrity. Gordon Holstun and Mayor Frank Binford met her in Atlanta and presented her with a bouquet of roses. A motorcade brought the party into town for a big celebration at the Courthouse that was led by Gov. M. E. Thompson. Mattie Lou is now Mrs. Mattie Lou Cato and lives in Stockbridge. She is 69 years old and has 2 children and 3 grandchildren. APRIL 2002 I remember when, on Saturday evenings on the east side of the courthouse, Mr. Olin Miller (he worked in the Peerless Division of the Thomaston Mills) would preach. The attendance would always be good. Also, Mr. Herman Powell, who was a radio announcer on WSFT (We Speak For Thomaston), had a country music band and would perform. From time to time, Mr. Gene Lewis (he worked for Sears) would also sing. I remember when country homes had a large fireplace and a hearth which they took pride in keeping clean and very white. The way they did this was with some kind of white mud they got out of the streams of.water. Some people would let this clay dry and eat it. They claimed it was good for your health. I remember when Thomaston Mills had their own musical band under the direction of Joe Medcalf, Virgil Medcalfs uncle. The band would perform under a pavilion at the East Thomaston swimming pool. After the concerts, Thomaston Mills would serve tubs of lemonade. I was reminded by Mrs. Hilda (Noell) Moulton about fertilizer coming in cloth bags from which the ladies made shirts, sheets, curtains, and pillow cases. Mrs. Moulton's mother, Mrs. Gladys (Abb) Noell, had a collection of cloth calendars. Mrs. Moulton has a collection of enough handkerchief to make a quilt top. The handkerchiefs came out of Duz Washing Powders. Each box of powder had one handkerchief in it. In those days handkerchiefs sold a lot of Duz. MAY 2002 I remember how hard we used to work in the mills. We were required to be accurate in our work and to follow a number of work rules. Still sometimes there would be some "horseplay." I remember one playful incident that went awry. This incident occurred in the # 2 weave room. This particular loom fixer had a large hammer in his hand when a certain young lady walked up and leaned on his workbench. The fixer pretended he was going to hit her hand and she jerked it back. This became a game with them. After a few minutes she became tired and want to quit and she did. But the fixer did not know that she had quit and he hit her hand again breaking all four lingers. This was on the 12-8 shift. The shift foreman and everyone else really got upset. When the department manager came in at 8:00 o'clock the next morning things really got stirred up. He, the shift foreman, the fixer, and the young girl went into his office. The department manager told them, "we have got to fill out an accident report.. If we tell them the truth you both will loose your jobs, so this is what we'll say, "The fixer was working on a loom part and needed someone to hold the part for him while he hit it with the hammer and the young girl was going to hold it for him and while she was holding it for them, the hammer slipped and he hit her hand." All went well and very few people ever knew what really happened. I talked to this lady a few days ago (year 2000) and we had a big laugh about it. Needless to say everyone learned an important lesson about not playing risky games in the workplace. There were so many ways a person could be injured, there was no need to invent others. MAY 2002 I remember how hard we used to work in the mills. We were required to be accurate in our work and to follow a number of work rules. Still sometimes there would be some "horseplay." I remember one playful incident that went awry. This incident occurred in the # 2 weave room. This particular loom fixer had a large hammer in his hand when a certain young lady walked up and leaned on his workbench. The fixer pretended he was going to hit her hand and she jerked it back. This became a game with them. After a few minutes she became tired and want to quit and she did. But the fixer did not know that she had quit and he hit Her hand again breaking all four fingers. This was on the 12-8 shift. The shift foreman and everyone else Teally got upset. When the department manager came in at 8:00 o'clock the next morning things really got stirred up. He, the shift foreman, the fixer, and the young girl went into his office. The department manager told them, "we have got to fill out an accident report.. If we tell them the truth you both will loose your jobs, so this is what we'll say, "The fixer was working on a loom part and needed someone to hold the part for him while he hit it with the hammer and the young girl was going to hold it for him and while she was holding it for them, the hammer slipped and he hit her hand." All went well and very few people ever knew what really happened. I talked to this lady a few days ago (year 2000) and we had a big laugh about it. Needless to say everyone learned an important lesson about not playing risky games in the workplace. There were so many ways a person could be injured, there was no need to invent others. JUNE 2002 I remember when, in the early 1930's, Thomaston Mills built a swimming pool on Park Lane; and for several years there was no fence around the pool. People would come from everywhere and go swimming. I have seen cars drive up Park Lane loaded down with children who already had on their bathing suits. They would get out, run across the grass and into the pool. Finally, Thomaston Mills put up a fence around the pool and built a bathhouse. Then they issued silver coins to all the employees with a five cent stamped in the center of it. After that we would have to pay five or ten cents to go into the swimming pool. The pool had a main entrance and .there was a man collecting the coins. The only names I remember were Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Leslie, and Mr. Wesle.y Whitten. Mr. Whitten. always liked to work with electricity. He kept a radio sitting on his desk that he played all of the time. He loved to tease' the children. He ran a wire from the radio and laid it on his desk. Then as the kids would come to his desk, he would lay one hand on the wire and then touch us. Being wet from the pool, what a shock we would get. After a while Thomaston Mills issued a card to all their employees and their children with their names on it. We would have to show it to the man at the desk as we went in. I was reminded by my wife, who grew up on the farm where they used an old fashioned wood burning fireplace, that when the ashes would build up, they would place sweet potatoes in the ashes and cover them completely and bake them. I remember when in 1936, we had a real dry spell and people had gardens in the Potato Creek bed. JULY 2002 In the late 1920's and early 1930's men loved to gather at different places and just sit and talk. There was one elderly gentleman. Dad Milner, that lived with his son Clyde on Edgewood Avenue at the Peerless Mill Village. He would leave home every morning and make his rounds to these places. His first stop was my house, 303 South Main Street, to talk to my dad and to chew Beechnut Chewing Tobacco. He would leave our house and go down North Main to Five Points, now North Bethel Street, and visit three barber shops, one at a time. They were Marion Page's Shop, Rex Barber's Shop, and one belonging to a Mr. Swells. After several hours in the barber shops, he would leave Five Points and go to the Courthouse Square where he would take a seat in Sheriff Grady Meeks' office. After having dinner on the Square, he would go down to Bamesville Street to two more favorite hang-cuts, one of which was Slim Watson's Service Station. After a few hours on Bamesville Street he would go home to supper and then to bed. He did this day after day. I remember hearing people tell about when Thomaston Mills built its first houses for the Thomaston Division. They installed a water spigot about every six or seven houses. People drew their water from these faucets in buckets which they carried to and from their houses. There was no indoor plumbing in the those days. every home had an out-house. People who did not like to go out to the outhouse at night in cold weather, used chamber pots which they emptied every morning. A black man driving a mule and wagon would come by and put the waste into barrels. He then threw lime under the outhouses. We kids called his wagon the "hunky wagon." AUGUST 2002 I remember in the 1930's and 1940's that it was a very common thing for someone to preach on the courthouse steps on Saturday afternoon. My Dad would not miss it for anything. I would always go with him. One day a big truck came to town before Saturday and did a lot of advertising about a preaching on that afternoon. This wandering pulpiteer called himself the "Cowboy Preacher." When the time came, he got all dressed up in a cowboy suit and a ten-gallon hat. He always had a lasso. In his preaching, he would condemn ball games, picture shows, smoking, chewing tobacco, and then he would reach down and pick up his lasso and start preaching about men running around on their wives. At this time, he started twirling his lasso over his head and shouted, "There is a man here today that is with another man's wife and I am going to lasso him!" At that very moment a man in the crowd started running. No one ever saw him again. Everyone thought it was a setup and he was one of the preacher's workers. I remember when I was a child on the Peerless Village, one of the favorite things the people liked to do was to make homemade ice cream. If you were not fortunate enough to own one of those hand cranked, ice-cream freezers, you could borrow one from your neighbors. We did not own one so we would borrow the one belonging to the Stevens family. The moment you borrowed it, the word went around and that meant having plenty of company. Homemade ice cream always went at full speed during the peach season because during those days peaches were so plentiful in Upson County. SEPTEMBER 2002 I remember in the 1920's and 1930's when most writing was done in schools and offices with a lead [actually the lead was solid graphite] pencil. They were all numbered 2, 3, and 4. Number 2 was a soft lead, easy to write with, # 3 was a hard lead, and #4 was a very hard lead. On special occasions, if ink was required there was a wood stick or staff to which, you could attach a writing point, dip it into an ink bottle, and then write with it. You could write as long as the ink on the point lasted and then you would have to dip it again. There were many times that you would put too much ink on the point and ruin the paper. If you were writing -an essay this could be a serious problem. Later on the Schaffer Company came out with a fountain pen which had a small rubber tube inside the pen. There was a lever on the outside which you could pull down making the lower part depress the rubber tube. This would create a suction that filled the rubber tube with ink, drawing it out of the bottle. On some models, you had to unscrew the body of the pen and squeeze the tube with your fingers. Every school kid that had to use ink in school oftentimes had to carry a bottle of ink with them. Sometimes the top would come off the ink bottle and spill on your books. The same thing happened to those who traveled. Ink ruined many men's shirts and women's purses. In school every kid had a desk, all in a row, with a hole in the corner holding an ink well. If a mean kid was sitting behind a girl with long hair and the temptation was too great, he might dip her hair into the ink well. Now look at the modern writing tools and throw-away pens that we have. OCTOBER 2002 Before Thomaston Mills sold all of the houses in their villages in approximately 1968, they had their own maintenance crew under the watchful eye of Mr. R. W. "Red" Yawn. There were two certain men that were painters that' everyone loved to watch. One of them was Albert "Mutt" Fallin, who was very tall; and the other man was "Abe" Kent, who was very short. Everyone called them Mutt and Jeff, after the comic strip characters. The story was told on them that they were supposed to be painting the outside of a house, but they went inside and made a fire in a pot-bellied stove. They were just loafing ar.ound when one of them saw Mr. Yawn drive up. They grabbed their paint buckets and out the back door they went, out of the sight of Mr. Yawn. After Mr. Yawn came in the front door, they ran around to the front of the house sad came in behind him. As they did they were complaining on how cold it was outside, just as if they had been painting. Another story on some painters involved Mr. Carl Reeves, who was overseer of the warehouse and lived on Park Lane just across from the Mill. One day, he received a phone call from his wife. She was very upset and complained to Mr. Reeves about a painter whom the company had sent to paint the inside of her house. After questioning her, Carl found out that the only complaint she had was that the man had long hair. Mr. Reeves always called his wife "Mama." He told her, "Mama, the long hair has nothing to do with how he will paint the house." After he said this, she settled down and the painter finished the job. I can remember when long hair always aroused a lot of suspicions. NOVEMBER 2002 I remember in the 1920's and 1930's that country people would often build a house with the kitchen about 15 feet from the living quarters. It would have an open walkway joining the two parts. The purpose of this was to keep the living quarters from getting so hot in the summer time because most everyone cooked with a wood burning stove. I remember in the 1930's when most everyone had to be careful how they spent their money and tried to save any way they could. When we wore a hole in the bottom of our shoe, we cut a piece of cardboard and inserted it inside the shoe. The cardboard didn't last very long though, especially when it rained. One company came out with a rubber half sole. We bought these at Maxwell's Dime Store for 50 cents. It came with a tub of cement glue. Before applying this ' rubber sole, we scratched the old sole with a little piece of tin that resembled a potato grater to make it rough. This would help the glue to get a better grip on the shoe and keep the new half-sole in place. I remember in 1943, before Thomaston had a radio station, Reverend Johnny Shelley (who worked in the shop at the Peerless Division) had a Sunday radio program on station WKEU in Griffin. His program was at 7:00 a.m. A quartet went with him which was comprised of Tommie Self, Carlton Blount, Edna (Pryor) Dickens, and Doris Salter. (Doris, after the deaths of her first two husbands married the Reverend Lynn Wood. Rev. Wood was then the Director of Missions for the Centennial Baptist Association.) Brother Johnny Shelley had a large following in Thomaston and served as pastor of a number of area churches. DECMEBER 2002 I remember when Dr. B. C. Adams, known by everyone, made house calls in the 1930's. Sometimes Dr. Adams would get my Dad to go with him. There was place off the Pleasant Valley Road called "Over the Top" where people made moonshine liquor. It was dangerous to go there, but they knew Dr. Adams' car and would let him come. My Dad told me that as they rode by the houses, men would be sitting outside with shotguns. If a strange car came by, someone would fire one shotgun blast to signal a stranger was coming in. A second shotgun blast was fired to signal that the stranger was still coming. The third shotgun blast was to warn the. stranger not to get "too nosey." There was one man who made liquor and told me that when the state revenue agent was going to have a raid that the sheriff would call ahead and warn' them. I remember how in 1949 my wife graduated from nursing school in Macon and came to Thomaston and went to work at the seven bed clinic for Dr. R. L. Carter and Dr. B. C. Adams. While working there, the Upson County Hospital was being built. On April 16, 1951, it was finished. My wife and other employees liad to make up the 80 beds and stock all of the rooms. The hospital was officially opened on April 23. In those days the Thomaston Times printed the names of all the patients who were in the hospital. Bill Hundley and Jeff Davis, radio announcers of Radio Station WSFT, announced the names on a program that came on every day at 12:30 called "Town Topics." How things have changed. Now you can go to the hospital and ask to see the patient list and you are told that you are not allowed to see it for you are violating the patient's rights.