“A man is the living sum of his past." -- William Faulkner
Georgia Witness, a contemporary oral history of the state, includes interviews with notable figures, such as Griffin Bell and Mack Mattingly, as well as ordinary people like Oscar Cruz, a second generation migrant worker who, like the more illustrious citizens profiled, helps make Georgia a locus of opportunity and contributes to its history going forward. The following is a list of contributors to this oral history and random excerpts from their narratives.
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Griffin Bell: Former Attorney General. Possibly the last interview of his published. He died of pancreatic cancer shortly after providing this narrative.
"I never really thought about segregation until I got home from the war [World War II], and I passed a country school one day while I was in law school. It was just a poor building, and all the children were outside at recess, I guess. I was riding with another law student, and I said, 'You know, this won’t go on. Look at that building, and think about the building the whites have in this county.' It was over near Thomaston, Georgia. That’s the first time I started thinking about the segregated schools. You can’t keep people down forever, and I think the war probably gave me that inspiration."
Ruby Crawford: Advocated advancement of women in professional jobs. Recalls days of passenger train travel. Appeared on What’s My Line and Oprah.
"At the time I became a lawyer, women could not serve on juries. After years and years of struggling, in 1954 we finally got a bill passed in the state of Georgia to get women first-class citizenship. We felt like we were treated like second-class people since we couldn’t serve on juries. Back then, even women who were lawyers couldn’t be members of the Atlanta Lawyers Club – only men. We had all the discrimination you could imagine. Ultimately I was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court."
Willie Mae Robinson: Civil Rights activist born on Sapelo Island. Descendent of Bilali Muhammad, a Muslim slave who once oversaw operations on Thomas Spalding’s Sapelo plantation. His writings are housed at the University of Georgia Hargrett Rare Book Collections Library.
"If you were going to say hip, like your hipbone, we would say kimbo. That’s a West African name for hip. My mom used to tell me, 'Take your hand off your kimbo. You’re too grown.' Some of the research by Rena Green, who worked for the state of Georgia in Atlanta, has us coming from West Africa. She came here to my house when Daddy was alive. We have some of the family tree that she researched. They [researchers] had found a book that they thought was African language, and it turned out to be Arabic. The little book is in Athens in a library. It was writing from memory of our ancestor, Bilali, who was the overseer for [Thomas] Spalding’s plantation on Sapelo. I descend from Bilali through my mother."
Bill Brown: Descendent of a Continental Army soldier. Family once owned lumber mills after the Civil War. His great-uncle befriended poet Sidney Lanier.
"One of my grandfather’s brothers, Jacob, was a friend of Sidney Lanier.... One night he was walking down Newcastle Street and passed Friedlander’s Emporium, a beer hall, where he heard the melodious notes of a flute coming from within. Jake went in and Lanier was in there playing his flute. They chatted and then walked from Newcastle down Gloucester Street and sat on the edge of the creek on a moonlit night with a spring tide, and Lanier got his inspiration to pen his poem, 'The Marshes of Glynn.' My mother said he got his inspiration out of Friedlander’s beer barrel."
Irene Cordell: Margaret Mitchell was a neighbor and childhood friend of Irene’s mother. Margaret was there for Irene’s birth, and Irene was present when Margaret was struck by the car that killed her. Irene descends from Major William Horton, James Oglethorpe’s second-in-command.
"The day I was born was the worst snowstorm in the history of Atlanta. My dad had to get Mama to the hospital. He went out to the car to get something and slipped and temporarily passed out underneath it. Dr. Upshaw lived in Marietta, and he was having trouble getting to the hospital. Finally we get there, and Mother was having a bad time; she was forty years old, but there was an intern on duty, and Margaret Mitchell came in and kept bringing my mother coffee, which is a horrible thing to give a pregnant woman, but she was trying to help. Finally, Dr. Upshaw got there. I don’t know what happened, but I had a pint of Dr. Upshaw’s blood, and mother had a pint of the intern’s. Mother told me later they did it direct, from arm-to-arm."
Sam Massell, Jr.: The only person of Jewish faith elected mayor of Atlanta (1970-1974). Recalls cross burning in his yard, the Atlanta synagogue bombing, and his time as mayor.
"During a period when a group of major mayors in the country were lobbying for different issues, we decided the issue in Atlanta was going to be transportation and to make the point that we needed money to help with traffic problems. One day, I had some of the most prominent mayors in the country – Lindsay from New York, Daley from Chicago, Alioto from San Francisco – out on the 10th Street Bridge early in the morning for a news conference, looking down over the expressway to see the bumper-to-bumper traffic. What I didn't know until later is that George Berry had arranged to have a police car with the blue light blinking parked about three blocks south of there so the cars had to back up. He wasn't taking a chance that I wouldn't have bumper-to-bumper traffic. He made sure I would."
Patrick Demere: Descendent of Raymond Demere who served under General Oglethorpe at decisive battle that repelled the Spanish from Georgia and North America.
"The Highlanders loved to fight, but the British Redcoats were the dregs of the earth. Most of them had been emptied out of prisons or cast-off of other regiments. Whenever a new regiment was formed, they used the opportunity to get rid of their troublemakers. The only way to train them was to beat them. Rain started to fall during the battle, and some of the Redcoat platoons 'retired' – retreated in disorder. They panicked and ran. You got sixty guys standing there with the Spanish in front of you. Because of the rain, their weapons were useless. Two or three start to run; then fifty start to run. Oglethorpe rode up on them and made them regroup, which Demeré did. Another officer, who was never named and never court-martialed, refused. There’s no record of who that officer was."
William Ladson: His family owned sawmill operations in south Georgia. Served in Korea where he worked with future North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
"When times got hard, the price of cotton went down to ten cents a pound, and the price of a number one hog went down to two or three cents a pound. There was no way a farmer could raise a hog or grow cotton at those prices. They had to diversify, and my father was one of the leaders, and that’s when they brought in tobacco and later what they called the “Spanish peanut” used in candy and peanut butter. Before that, the only peanuts grown were what they called 'runners.' As soon as they developed, you turned your hogs on them to fatten them. This was during the ‘20s and the first couple of years of the ‘30s."
Floyd Faust: Record setting minor league baseball player who recalls a time when professional baseball teams in small towns were common.
"Our ’53 season coach was Jack Papke. In ’54 it was Frank Ozeak. Jack was still a playing coach. He was a catcher. There wasn’t a lot of teaching going on. I had mastered base stealing and hitting from my time in the service. Stealing bases came naturally. I had no problem keeping them busy throwing to second. The Georgia-Florida League started, I believe, in 1935. Brunswick didn’t get into the league until 1950. The old record was 69 stolen bases. I stole 76. Practically all those 76 bases I stole were second base. My coach, Ozeak, didn’t believe in stealing third. He said, 'If you’re on second, you’ll score anyway if there’s a hit.' But I could have stole third so easy so many times there’s no telling how many bases I might have stole."
Lucian Sneed: Member of the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee. Discusses ancestors and treatment of Indians in Georgia.
"My great-grandmother is a descendent of Nancy Ward. If you look at a Georgia map, northwest of where I live now in Cumming is a little town in Cherokee County called Ball Ground. Ball Ground got its name from a battle between the Cherokees and the Creeks in the late 1700s, right around 1800, over disputed land to the west, near Carrollton. They both claimed they owned the land and had a battle. Back then, many women went with their husbands to battle. They already had rifles at the time. Nancy went with her husband, and he was killed in the Battle of Taliwa. She picked up his rifle, and they said she fought like a piga, a man. As a result, she was rewarded by being named the first 'beloved woman' of the Cherokee nation. She’s buried on the Georgia-Tennessee line just east of Chattanooga."
Claryce Strother: Her family’s hardware store is one of the oldest family-run businesses in the state.
"...during the summer we’d go to the Casino and dance there at night. They had a jukebox, too. The thing that impressed me so much was that there were all ages of people – granddaddies dancing with grandchildren. That was such a wonderful neighborly thing going on. They had a big skating rink down around the pier. People used to skate to music, and you sort of danced on skates. In that same area, the Cofer family had a bar with a jukebox and dance floor that extended out over the water. At that time the Navy boys hung out over there, and one of my friends married one. I remember being anxious to see a Yankee. I had never seen a one before..."
Vic Waters: A musician who toured with James Brown and Dick Clark’s Caravan of stars.
"The first time I met James Brown was backstage at Soul City. It was me and all of my band, part of his band, and Marva. I said, 'Hey James, if Marva wants to do any of the songs I’m doing in my show, I’ll just drop them out and let her do them.' Because I was doing a lot of cover tunes – R&B, Wilson Pickett stuff. He was only about five-foot-five, a little short guy. He pointed up at me and said, 'Hey! You don’t call me James. You call me Mister Brown.’ He started snapping his fingers. 'And I’ll call you… What’s your name?' I said, 'Vic Waters.' He said, 'I’ll call you Mister Waters.' I mean, he called me down in front of my band. Embarrassed me to death. So, we went out and did our show.... One night I was coming off the stage and he says, 'Vic, we got off on a bad foot. We need to get on the good foot. Just call me James. I’ll call you Vic.'"
Chuck Leavell: Rolling Stones keyboardist, former Allman Brothers Band keyboardist, and renowned land conservationist.
"I eventually found myself working with a group called The Jades. I was in high school at the time....The Jades were very much a Temptations-type band. They had the harmonies and the dance steps and did cover songs by the Temptations, the Four Tops, and so forth. They were excellent, really great musicians. They had a keyboard player named Freddy, and Freddy found himself confined to being behind the keyboards. The other four guys were up front dancing and singing, and Freddy wanted to be up there. I was hanging around a show somewhere, and we met. Somehow, Freddy heard me play, and he said, 'Look man, I think I can show you some stuff that will help you out as a musician. Then I can go up here and dance with my pals.' I said, 'Okay,' and found myself in the rather unique position of playing with an all black group and being a very young keyboard player on stage with them."
Pat McDonald: Drummer for the Charlie Daniels Band.
"When I got to high school, one of the courses you had to take was Health and Safety. The class was taught by Theresa Adams, the girls’ basketball coach. In the beginning of class she made us fill out a form – What’s your name? Where are you from? What are your hobbies? She went through each person’s survey. When she got to me and read that my hobby was drums she asked, 'Are you in band?' I said, 'No.' She said, 'Why not?' I didn’t realize that I could have even been in the band. I didn’t do the Middle School band thing and thought that’s what you had to do that to be in high school band. She said, 'I’ll go talk to the band director. I’ll get you in band.'....I would have probably never joined the band if Ms. Adams hadn’t taken the initiative to get me involved. I’ve always wanted to get a chance to tell her how huge of a fork in my life’s road her interest in me turned out to be."
Ron Edenfield: Recounts life growing up at Reidsville State Penitentiary.
"There’s a little store that sits right across the road from the prison, and we used to walk across prison property, within twenty feet of the fence, taking a short cut to that store. Now, you’re not even allowed to drive in that area. We used to play baseball in the field right next to the prison. I actually played pitch with prisoners inside the fence. I’d throw my baseball to them over in the prison yard, and they’d throw it back. On the weekends, if you had some work that needed to be done around your house, you could go up to the prison, if you worked there, and check a prisoner out. There was a water boy named Carlos who carried water to field workers during the week. On weekends, my dad would go up to the prison dormitory and get the officer running the dormitory to check Carlos out for four or five hours and bring him to the house to help do work around the house. When he was through, he took Carlos back to the dormitory. Carlos was a trustee. He had a sweet tooth. My mom would bake cakes, and he’d eat all the cake he could before he left because they wouldn’t let him carry cake back into prison with him. He’d just about eat the whole thing."
Harriet Gilbert: Recalls Macon in the 1930s and ‘40s. Descendent of Sylvanus Landrum, who preached to Confederate and Union soldiers during the Civil War.
"We’d take a streetcar to the Saturday matinee and stay all afternoon. Every Saturday they’d show a continuation of a wild-west show. The first movie I ever saw as a child was Sonny Boy at the Rialto Theatre. It was the first Vitaphone talking movie. I just bawled because the little boy gets run over, and Al Jolson sings to him. I just boo-hood, and my sister was very embarrassed. She was twenty months older than me. My mother had an aunt named Harriett who was married to a man who wrote The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansmen [Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.]. They made Birth of a Nation out of both of them. That is a sad thing for me to know, because I had seen Birth of a Nation. It was awful. It was about how a black man had raped a white woman. Horrible. In my grandpa’s diary, it says Woodrow Wilson liked it. [Dixon and future President Wilson were classmates at Johns Hopkins University.] The way we thought about black people and Jewish people is awful to me. We were mad about a lot of things like that in Georgia."
Bob Woodward: Remembers Augusta during the days of segregation. Took a road trip to see aging blues singer Lizzie Miles.
"Black ladies would walk through neighborhoods with large bundles of someone’s laundry tied up in a sheet and balanced on their heads, with another bundle under each arm. They would come and pick up the laundry and take it home. They would wash it out in the yard in a big black pot, stir it with a boat paddle, hang it out to dry, and bring it back to the family. But I was amazed that these ladies could walk those distances with that large bundle on their heads and more bundles under their arms. One day I commented on it in front an adult. I said, 'How does that black lady balance that bundle on her head?' The adult was a male, and he looked at me and said, 'That’s not a lady. That’s a woman.' I wanted to know what’s the difference, and he said, 'White females are ladies. A black female cannot be a lady. She’s a woman.' At the time I didn’t know much about race relations or what prejudice was based on, but that did not make sense to me, and things have always had to make sense at some level for me to accept it. I decided right on the spot that henceforth anytime I referred to any grown female, it would be as a lady. That was my way of saying, 'To hell with you. I’ll decide that sort of thing for myself.' To this day I refer to any adult female as lady.”
Ted Dennard: Began with one beehive as a teen, served as Peace Corps beekeeper instructor, and now owns the Savannah Bee Company.
"I got interested in beekeeping early on. An old man, Roy Hightower, put his beehives on our family’s land around 1979 – ’80. I was fourteen years old. We put on all kinds of raincoats, rain pants, boots, bee gloves, and bee veils and marched to the beehives. In that 100-degree Georgia summer heat, we literally were soaking wet before too long. It was as if we had jumped into a swimming pool. Roy lifted the top of one beehive and puffed some smoke in there. From the few dozens of bees outside the hive, all of a sudden there are thousands of bees flying around and roaring with their wings. It was terrifying. They’re everywhere around you. Fairly quickly you learn that they’re not trying to sting you, and you calm down a bit. We started pulling frames out of the hive and looking at the honey. I held up this one frame, which had different colors of honey in each section of the frame – a reddish honey, an amber or gold honey, a greenish honey. You could put your finger in each part of the frame and taste, and each one was distinctive. That was the first time I realized that honey taste could vary, and I was just blown away by that, and I still am.
Lewey Cato: Master mechanic for the Georgia & Florida Railroad.
"While I was working at the grocery store, the news went around that you might could get on with the railroad. So, Mom went with me to the superintendent of Motor Power, George Crowder, of the Georgia & Florida (G&F) Railroad. The Georgia & Florida ran through a more-or-less agricultural part of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. The general offices were in Augusta. It ran from Madison, Florida to Greenwood, South Carolina. He gave me an opening in the tool room, and I worked there a month-and-a-half and worried him every time he came out about putting me on my apprenticeship, which eventually he did on September 15, 1936. There I learned anything about operating any of the machines – the lathes, shaper, planer – in the shop. There were many different types of lathes in the shop. Eighty-to-ninety craftsmen working in it. There was the coach shop, paint and lettering workers, a blacksmith, welders, boilermakers, machinists, electricians, and all the crafts had apprenticeships. They made me a mechanic on February 1, 1940. My job was to tear down and repair and rebuild any steam engine on the line. It included welding and running all type machines and assembling the steam engines. If one came in with something broken, I made the part and put it on."
Bootie Wood: Descendent of Colonial Era settler in Georgia. Describes life on the campaign trail when her father ran for governor of Georgia.
"In 1954, the year I graduated from Glynn Academy, my father ran for governor of Georgia. He had been Glynn County’s representative to the state legislature for almost 20 years, had made good friends locally and all over the state, and had been encouraged by many of them to enter the race. Nine candidates were in the running, and my father and his supporters felt that a run-off election was a possibility and that he stood a good chance of being in it. So our family embarked on a family-style summer campaign during which we drove all over the state meeting people and giving speeches from the back of a truck. After the speech, my sister and I walked into the crowd with iron skillets in case there was anyone who wanted to contribute money to the campaign. The idea behind the skillets was psychological. We thought anyone who gave money would be more likely to remember 'Gowen' on Election Day. I was always surprised at the people who responded to us. We actually raised enough money to pay for the gasoline in the old black Plymouth car our family drove that summer. I had had my driver’s license for two years and was trusted to be the driver of the car, a responsibility I took very seriously. My sister, Anne, sat in the back seat with her portable typewriter in her lap, pounding out stories about our campaign for Georgia newspapers as we drove along the highways."
Charles Gowen: Recalls a 1920s trial in which he represented an African-American entrepreneur. The trial took place on the local pier.
"At the conclusion of the evidence, arguments to the jury began. Mr. Nathan had the opening and conclusion. When my turn came and I began my argument, the [intoxicated] witness we hadn’t used realized he had been overlooked, stood up and called to me and pointed to himself and tried to take the witness chair. I got him quiet and was just getting into my argument when all the jurors suddenly jumped up, ran to the other side of the pier, and some of them jumped into the ocean. It was to save a summer resident who had gotten beyond his depth and was crying for help. After he was rescued and the jurors returned to their seats we finished the arguments, and the Justices has us all retire a short distance away while the jury deliberated."
Sonny Gibson: Speaks candidly about the current status of race in Georgia.
"I entered what was then the Lanier Junior High School, which was an all boys’ school at that time. Education was segregated not only by race; it was segregated by sex. It was an ROTC military high school. Having been at a military school, I accepted the military discipline a lot better than a lot of people did. I grew up at the time a lot of area musicians were beginning their careers. One of the first people who really made it was Little Richard. When I was in high school, Little Richard used to be a carhop at one of the drive-ins [movie theatres] frequented by the teenagers. He would do the hambone and put on a show for people. Carhops would take your order and put the tray on your car window."
Dot White: Governor Thompson’s secretary during the infamous “three governors controversy” of 1946-47. Friend of Minnie Pearl and Pearl impersonator.
"Daddy worked hard. He was an entrepreneur in those days of the Depression, trying to make a living in this and that. He started a coal business. He had coal shipped in and provided that for the town. He grew up on a farm and loved horseback riding. Once he and a friend raced their horses down Broad Street. So he was interested in training horses, and he started harness racing in Hawkinsville and trained his own horses. In fact, it’s become a big thing. It’s central as a training place for harness racing. The federal government put money into building four hundred stalls and built two new tracks. People come down from Michigan and other place to train their horses, and then they move on when it’s time to race. They go to Pompano Park, Florida or go back to Michigan. We don’t have pari-mutuel betting in Georgia, so they have to move on."
Billy Winn: A Columbus native, journalist and historian whose great-great-grandfather drew up the original plans for Columbus and served as a physician to both whites and Creek Indians. As a news reporter, Winn covered much of the civil rights movement, including press conferences with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders as well as Dr. King’s funeral.
"I didn’t take Ralph McGill’s advice not to return to my hometown. As much as anything, I moved back to Columbus because of something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said not long before he was killed. Dr. King had a tremendous influence over my life. We weren’t friends or anything. I just knew him from covering him. I’m sure if he were alive today he wouldn’t know me from Adam. I don't mean he took me aside and said go to Columbus. He sometimes would say to all of us reporters who covered him in Atlanta that we should go and work for the movement among our own people because they were the ones that really needed it. This stuck in my mind. I never thought I’d actually get a chance to do it though. I liked him very much although he was always late for meetings and press conferences, a real pain to reporters on deadlines. He’d always come into meetings smiling, tell a joke or something on himself. You couldn’t stay mad at him."
Oscar Cruz: Second generation migrant worker who has worked Georgia’s onion and cotton crops for decades.
"In 1980, my Dad’s brother-in-law invited him to work in Georgia doing onions. So we started coming to Georgia every year and just decided to stay permanently. We stayed in Lyons where there were trailers we could rent. I came here in 1980 and stayed permanently in 1994 and never had any problems with anyone. I’m a Georgia citizen! I like picking onions. The soil in Toombs County makes Vidalia onions special. We work almost seven days when we can. On Sundays we just work half a day. My family goes to church in the morning. We got to go wash clothes, get groceries – all that. The other days we go until the body tells us it’s time to quit the work. We start at seven o’clock in the morning and knock off at six o’clock or 6:30. I’ve been doing it for so many years. Some people work faster than others. It all depends on the person. We get paid by the bucket – $.38 a bucket. Some people can do about 350 buckets a day. If the onions are big, it takes about 40 or 45 onions to fill a bucket. If they are medium-size or small, it takes more onions."
Mack Mattingly: Former United State Senator and Ambassador. Reflects on the opportunities that make Georgia a place that still attracts people.
"I found a job with IBM Corporation in Savannah as a sales representative, and that was a true defining moment in my life. I was a northern born guy in a southern state with a large sales district, and in order to survive I had to develop and use every bit of those sales and character instincts I’d learned from my dad and my own brief experience. IBM was a wonderful company to work for, and through that job I not only learned customer skills and how to turn sheer determination into success, I also learned Georgia. I was on the road driving from town to town four and five days a week. I learned every road and every town, every good restaurant and where the best coffee could be found – and I met people. Wonderful, wonderful people. I learned what mattered to them and what they were worried about in their towns, in their state, and in their country. I learned from them. And they made me a Georgian."
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Griffin Bell: Former Attorney General. Possibly the last interview of his published. He died of pancreatic cancer shortly after providing this narrative.
"I never really thought about segregation until I got home from the war [World War II], and I passed a country school one day while I was in law school. It was just a poor building, and all the children were outside at recess, I guess. I was riding with another law student, and I said, 'You know, this won’t go on. Look at that building, and think about the building the whites have in this county.' It was over near Thomaston, Georgia. That’s the first time I started thinking about the segregated schools. You can’t keep people down forever, and I think the war probably gave me that inspiration."
Ruby Crawford: Advocated advancement of women in professional jobs. Recalls days of passenger train travel. Appeared on What’s My Line and Oprah.
"At the time I became a lawyer, women could not serve on juries. After years and years of struggling, in 1954 we finally got a bill passed in the state of Georgia to get women first-class citizenship. We felt like we were treated like second-class people since we couldn’t serve on juries. Back then, even women who were lawyers couldn’t be members of the Atlanta Lawyers Club – only men. We had all the discrimination you could imagine. Ultimately I was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court."
Willie Mae Robinson: Civil Rights activist born on Sapelo Island. Descendent of Bilali Muhammad, a Muslim slave who once oversaw operations on Thomas Spalding’s Sapelo plantation. His writings are housed at the University of Georgia Hargrett Rare Book Collections Library.
"If you were going to say hip, like your hipbone, we would say kimbo. That’s a West African name for hip. My mom used to tell me, 'Take your hand off your kimbo. You’re too grown.' Some of the research by Rena Green, who worked for the state of Georgia in Atlanta, has us coming from West Africa. She came here to my house when Daddy was alive. We have some of the family tree that she researched. They [researchers] had found a book that they thought was African language, and it turned out to be Arabic. The little book is in Athens in a library. It was writing from memory of our ancestor, Bilali, who was the overseer for [Thomas] Spalding’s plantation on Sapelo. I descend from Bilali through my mother."
Bill Brown: Descendent of a Continental Army soldier. Family once owned lumber mills after the Civil War. His great-uncle befriended poet Sidney Lanier.
"One of my grandfather’s brothers, Jacob, was a friend of Sidney Lanier.... One night he was walking down Newcastle Street and passed Friedlander’s Emporium, a beer hall, where he heard the melodious notes of a flute coming from within. Jake went in and Lanier was in there playing his flute. They chatted and then walked from Newcastle down Gloucester Street and sat on the edge of the creek on a moonlit night with a spring tide, and Lanier got his inspiration to pen his poem, 'The Marshes of Glynn.' My mother said he got his inspiration out of Friedlander’s beer barrel."
Irene Cordell: Margaret Mitchell was a neighbor and childhood friend of Irene’s mother. Margaret was there for Irene’s birth, and Irene was present when Margaret was struck by the car that killed her. Irene descends from Major William Horton, James Oglethorpe’s second-in-command.
"The day I was born was the worst snowstorm in the history of Atlanta. My dad had to get Mama to the hospital. He went out to the car to get something and slipped and temporarily passed out underneath it. Dr. Upshaw lived in Marietta, and he was having trouble getting to the hospital. Finally we get there, and Mother was having a bad time; she was forty years old, but there was an intern on duty, and Margaret Mitchell came in and kept bringing my mother coffee, which is a horrible thing to give a pregnant woman, but she was trying to help. Finally, Dr. Upshaw got there. I don’t know what happened, but I had a pint of Dr. Upshaw’s blood, and mother had a pint of the intern’s. Mother told me later they did it direct, from arm-to-arm."
Sam Massell, Jr.: The only person of Jewish faith elected mayor of Atlanta (1970-1974). Recalls cross burning in his yard, the Atlanta synagogue bombing, and his time as mayor.
"During a period when a group of major mayors in the country were lobbying for different issues, we decided the issue in Atlanta was going to be transportation and to make the point that we needed money to help with traffic problems. One day, I had some of the most prominent mayors in the country – Lindsay from New York, Daley from Chicago, Alioto from San Francisco – out on the 10th Street Bridge early in the morning for a news conference, looking down over the expressway to see the bumper-to-bumper traffic. What I didn't know until later is that George Berry had arranged to have a police car with the blue light blinking parked about three blocks south of there so the cars had to back up. He wasn't taking a chance that I wouldn't have bumper-to-bumper traffic. He made sure I would."
Patrick Demere: Descendent of Raymond Demere who served under General Oglethorpe at decisive battle that repelled the Spanish from Georgia and North America.
"The Highlanders loved to fight, but the British Redcoats were the dregs of the earth. Most of them had been emptied out of prisons or cast-off of other regiments. Whenever a new regiment was formed, they used the opportunity to get rid of their troublemakers. The only way to train them was to beat them. Rain started to fall during the battle, and some of the Redcoat platoons 'retired' – retreated in disorder. They panicked and ran. You got sixty guys standing there with the Spanish in front of you. Because of the rain, their weapons were useless. Two or three start to run; then fifty start to run. Oglethorpe rode up on them and made them regroup, which Demeré did. Another officer, who was never named and never court-martialed, refused. There’s no record of who that officer was."
William Ladson: His family owned sawmill operations in south Georgia. Served in Korea where he worked with future North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
"When times got hard, the price of cotton went down to ten cents a pound, and the price of a number one hog went down to two or three cents a pound. There was no way a farmer could raise a hog or grow cotton at those prices. They had to diversify, and my father was one of the leaders, and that’s when they brought in tobacco and later what they called the “Spanish peanut” used in candy and peanut butter. Before that, the only peanuts grown were what they called 'runners.' As soon as they developed, you turned your hogs on them to fatten them. This was during the ‘20s and the first couple of years of the ‘30s."
Floyd Faust: Record setting minor league baseball player who recalls a time when professional baseball teams in small towns were common.
"Our ’53 season coach was Jack Papke. In ’54 it was Frank Ozeak. Jack was still a playing coach. He was a catcher. There wasn’t a lot of teaching going on. I had mastered base stealing and hitting from my time in the service. Stealing bases came naturally. I had no problem keeping them busy throwing to second. The Georgia-Florida League started, I believe, in 1935. Brunswick didn’t get into the league until 1950. The old record was 69 stolen bases. I stole 76. Practically all those 76 bases I stole were second base. My coach, Ozeak, didn’t believe in stealing third. He said, 'If you’re on second, you’ll score anyway if there’s a hit.' But I could have stole third so easy so many times there’s no telling how many bases I might have stole."
Lucian Sneed: Member of the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee. Discusses ancestors and treatment of Indians in Georgia.
"My great-grandmother is a descendent of Nancy Ward. If you look at a Georgia map, northwest of where I live now in Cumming is a little town in Cherokee County called Ball Ground. Ball Ground got its name from a battle between the Cherokees and the Creeks in the late 1700s, right around 1800, over disputed land to the west, near Carrollton. They both claimed they owned the land and had a battle. Back then, many women went with their husbands to battle. They already had rifles at the time. Nancy went with her husband, and he was killed in the Battle of Taliwa. She picked up his rifle, and they said she fought like a piga, a man. As a result, she was rewarded by being named the first 'beloved woman' of the Cherokee nation. She’s buried on the Georgia-Tennessee line just east of Chattanooga."
Claryce Strother: Her family’s hardware store is one of the oldest family-run businesses in the state.
"...during the summer we’d go to the Casino and dance there at night. They had a jukebox, too. The thing that impressed me so much was that there were all ages of people – granddaddies dancing with grandchildren. That was such a wonderful neighborly thing going on. They had a big skating rink down around the pier. People used to skate to music, and you sort of danced on skates. In that same area, the Cofer family had a bar with a jukebox and dance floor that extended out over the water. At that time the Navy boys hung out over there, and one of my friends married one. I remember being anxious to see a Yankee. I had never seen a one before..."
Vic Waters: A musician who toured with James Brown and Dick Clark’s Caravan of stars.
"The first time I met James Brown was backstage at Soul City. It was me and all of my band, part of his band, and Marva. I said, 'Hey James, if Marva wants to do any of the songs I’m doing in my show, I’ll just drop them out and let her do them.' Because I was doing a lot of cover tunes – R&B, Wilson Pickett stuff. He was only about five-foot-five, a little short guy. He pointed up at me and said, 'Hey! You don’t call me James. You call me Mister Brown.’ He started snapping his fingers. 'And I’ll call you… What’s your name?' I said, 'Vic Waters.' He said, 'I’ll call you Mister Waters.' I mean, he called me down in front of my band. Embarrassed me to death. So, we went out and did our show.... One night I was coming off the stage and he says, 'Vic, we got off on a bad foot. We need to get on the good foot. Just call me James. I’ll call you Vic.'"
Chuck Leavell: Rolling Stones keyboardist, former Allman Brothers Band keyboardist, and renowned land conservationist.
"I eventually found myself working with a group called The Jades. I was in high school at the time....The Jades were very much a Temptations-type band. They had the harmonies and the dance steps and did cover songs by the Temptations, the Four Tops, and so forth. They were excellent, really great musicians. They had a keyboard player named Freddy, and Freddy found himself confined to being behind the keyboards. The other four guys were up front dancing and singing, and Freddy wanted to be up there. I was hanging around a show somewhere, and we met. Somehow, Freddy heard me play, and he said, 'Look man, I think I can show you some stuff that will help you out as a musician. Then I can go up here and dance with my pals.' I said, 'Okay,' and found myself in the rather unique position of playing with an all black group and being a very young keyboard player on stage with them."
Pat McDonald: Drummer for the Charlie Daniels Band.
"When I got to high school, one of the courses you had to take was Health and Safety. The class was taught by Theresa Adams, the girls’ basketball coach. In the beginning of class she made us fill out a form – What’s your name? Where are you from? What are your hobbies? She went through each person’s survey. When she got to me and read that my hobby was drums she asked, 'Are you in band?' I said, 'No.' She said, 'Why not?' I didn’t realize that I could have even been in the band. I didn’t do the Middle School band thing and thought that’s what you had to do that to be in high school band. She said, 'I’ll go talk to the band director. I’ll get you in band.'....I would have probably never joined the band if Ms. Adams hadn’t taken the initiative to get me involved. I’ve always wanted to get a chance to tell her how huge of a fork in my life’s road her interest in me turned out to be."
Ron Edenfield: Recounts life growing up at Reidsville State Penitentiary.
"There’s a little store that sits right across the road from the prison, and we used to walk across prison property, within twenty feet of the fence, taking a short cut to that store. Now, you’re not even allowed to drive in that area. We used to play baseball in the field right next to the prison. I actually played pitch with prisoners inside the fence. I’d throw my baseball to them over in the prison yard, and they’d throw it back. On the weekends, if you had some work that needed to be done around your house, you could go up to the prison, if you worked there, and check a prisoner out. There was a water boy named Carlos who carried water to field workers during the week. On weekends, my dad would go up to the prison dormitory and get the officer running the dormitory to check Carlos out for four or five hours and bring him to the house to help do work around the house. When he was through, he took Carlos back to the dormitory. Carlos was a trustee. He had a sweet tooth. My mom would bake cakes, and he’d eat all the cake he could before he left because they wouldn’t let him carry cake back into prison with him. He’d just about eat the whole thing."
Harriet Gilbert: Recalls Macon in the 1930s and ‘40s. Descendent of Sylvanus Landrum, who preached to Confederate and Union soldiers during the Civil War.
"We’d take a streetcar to the Saturday matinee and stay all afternoon. Every Saturday they’d show a continuation of a wild-west show. The first movie I ever saw as a child was Sonny Boy at the Rialto Theatre. It was the first Vitaphone talking movie. I just bawled because the little boy gets run over, and Al Jolson sings to him. I just boo-hood, and my sister was very embarrassed. She was twenty months older than me. My mother had an aunt named Harriett who was married to a man who wrote The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansmen [Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.]. They made Birth of a Nation out of both of them. That is a sad thing for me to know, because I had seen Birth of a Nation. It was awful. It was about how a black man had raped a white woman. Horrible. In my grandpa’s diary, it says Woodrow Wilson liked it. [Dixon and future President Wilson were classmates at Johns Hopkins University.] The way we thought about black people and Jewish people is awful to me. We were mad about a lot of things like that in Georgia."
Bob Woodward: Remembers Augusta during the days of segregation. Took a road trip to see aging blues singer Lizzie Miles.
"Black ladies would walk through neighborhoods with large bundles of someone’s laundry tied up in a sheet and balanced on their heads, with another bundle under each arm. They would come and pick up the laundry and take it home. They would wash it out in the yard in a big black pot, stir it with a boat paddle, hang it out to dry, and bring it back to the family. But I was amazed that these ladies could walk those distances with that large bundle on their heads and more bundles under their arms. One day I commented on it in front an adult. I said, 'How does that black lady balance that bundle on her head?' The adult was a male, and he looked at me and said, 'That’s not a lady. That’s a woman.' I wanted to know what’s the difference, and he said, 'White females are ladies. A black female cannot be a lady. She’s a woman.' At the time I didn’t know much about race relations or what prejudice was based on, but that did not make sense to me, and things have always had to make sense at some level for me to accept it. I decided right on the spot that henceforth anytime I referred to any grown female, it would be as a lady. That was my way of saying, 'To hell with you. I’ll decide that sort of thing for myself.' To this day I refer to any adult female as lady.”
Ted Dennard: Began with one beehive as a teen, served as Peace Corps beekeeper instructor, and now owns the Savannah Bee Company.
"I got interested in beekeeping early on. An old man, Roy Hightower, put his beehives on our family’s land around 1979 – ’80. I was fourteen years old. We put on all kinds of raincoats, rain pants, boots, bee gloves, and bee veils and marched to the beehives. In that 100-degree Georgia summer heat, we literally were soaking wet before too long. It was as if we had jumped into a swimming pool. Roy lifted the top of one beehive and puffed some smoke in there. From the few dozens of bees outside the hive, all of a sudden there are thousands of bees flying around and roaring with their wings. It was terrifying. They’re everywhere around you. Fairly quickly you learn that they’re not trying to sting you, and you calm down a bit. We started pulling frames out of the hive and looking at the honey. I held up this one frame, which had different colors of honey in each section of the frame – a reddish honey, an amber or gold honey, a greenish honey. You could put your finger in each part of the frame and taste, and each one was distinctive. That was the first time I realized that honey taste could vary, and I was just blown away by that, and I still am.
Lewey Cato: Master mechanic for the Georgia & Florida Railroad.
"While I was working at the grocery store, the news went around that you might could get on with the railroad. So, Mom went with me to the superintendent of Motor Power, George Crowder, of the Georgia & Florida (G&F) Railroad. The Georgia & Florida ran through a more-or-less agricultural part of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. The general offices were in Augusta. It ran from Madison, Florida to Greenwood, South Carolina. He gave me an opening in the tool room, and I worked there a month-and-a-half and worried him every time he came out about putting me on my apprenticeship, which eventually he did on September 15, 1936. There I learned anything about operating any of the machines – the lathes, shaper, planer – in the shop. There were many different types of lathes in the shop. Eighty-to-ninety craftsmen working in it. There was the coach shop, paint and lettering workers, a blacksmith, welders, boilermakers, machinists, electricians, and all the crafts had apprenticeships. They made me a mechanic on February 1, 1940. My job was to tear down and repair and rebuild any steam engine on the line. It included welding and running all type machines and assembling the steam engines. If one came in with something broken, I made the part and put it on."
Bootie Wood: Descendent of Colonial Era settler in Georgia. Describes life on the campaign trail when her father ran for governor of Georgia.
"In 1954, the year I graduated from Glynn Academy, my father ran for governor of Georgia. He had been Glynn County’s representative to the state legislature for almost 20 years, had made good friends locally and all over the state, and had been encouraged by many of them to enter the race. Nine candidates were in the running, and my father and his supporters felt that a run-off election was a possibility and that he stood a good chance of being in it. So our family embarked on a family-style summer campaign during which we drove all over the state meeting people and giving speeches from the back of a truck. After the speech, my sister and I walked into the crowd with iron skillets in case there was anyone who wanted to contribute money to the campaign. The idea behind the skillets was psychological. We thought anyone who gave money would be more likely to remember 'Gowen' on Election Day. I was always surprised at the people who responded to us. We actually raised enough money to pay for the gasoline in the old black Plymouth car our family drove that summer. I had had my driver’s license for two years and was trusted to be the driver of the car, a responsibility I took very seriously. My sister, Anne, sat in the back seat with her portable typewriter in her lap, pounding out stories about our campaign for Georgia newspapers as we drove along the highways."
Charles Gowen: Recalls a 1920s trial in which he represented an African-American entrepreneur. The trial took place on the local pier.
"At the conclusion of the evidence, arguments to the jury began. Mr. Nathan had the opening and conclusion. When my turn came and I began my argument, the [intoxicated] witness we hadn’t used realized he had been overlooked, stood up and called to me and pointed to himself and tried to take the witness chair. I got him quiet and was just getting into my argument when all the jurors suddenly jumped up, ran to the other side of the pier, and some of them jumped into the ocean. It was to save a summer resident who had gotten beyond his depth and was crying for help. After he was rescued and the jurors returned to their seats we finished the arguments, and the Justices has us all retire a short distance away while the jury deliberated."
Sonny Gibson: Speaks candidly about the current status of race in Georgia.
"I entered what was then the Lanier Junior High School, which was an all boys’ school at that time. Education was segregated not only by race; it was segregated by sex. It was an ROTC military high school. Having been at a military school, I accepted the military discipline a lot better than a lot of people did. I grew up at the time a lot of area musicians were beginning their careers. One of the first people who really made it was Little Richard. When I was in high school, Little Richard used to be a carhop at one of the drive-ins [movie theatres] frequented by the teenagers. He would do the hambone and put on a show for people. Carhops would take your order and put the tray on your car window."
Dot White: Governor Thompson’s secretary during the infamous “three governors controversy” of 1946-47. Friend of Minnie Pearl and Pearl impersonator.
"Daddy worked hard. He was an entrepreneur in those days of the Depression, trying to make a living in this and that. He started a coal business. He had coal shipped in and provided that for the town. He grew up on a farm and loved horseback riding. Once he and a friend raced their horses down Broad Street. So he was interested in training horses, and he started harness racing in Hawkinsville and trained his own horses. In fact, it’s become a big thing. It’s central as a training place for harness racing. The federal government put money into building four hundred stalls and built two new tracks. People come down from Michigan and other place to train their horses, and then they move on when it’s time to race. They go to Pompano Park, Florida or go back to Michigan. We don’t have pari-mutuel betting in Georgia, so they have to move on."
Billy Winn: A Columbus native, journalist and historian whose great-great-grandfather drew up the original plans for Columbus and served as a physician to both whites and Creek Indians. As a news reporter, Winn covered much of the civil rights movement, including press conferences with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders as well as Dr. King’s funeral.
"I didn’t take Ralph McGill’s advice not to return to my hometown. As much as anything, I moved back to Columbus because of something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said not long before he was killed. Dr. King had a tremendous influence over my life. We weren’t friends or anything. I just knew him from covering him. I’m sure if he were alive today he wouldn’t know me from Adam. I don't mean he took me aside and said go to Columbus. He sometimes would say to all of us reporters who covered him in Atlanta that we should go and work for the movement among our own people because they were the ones that really needed it. This stuck in my mind. I never thought I’d actually get a chance to do it though. I liked him very much although he was always late for meetings and press conferences, a real pain to reporters on deadlines. He’d always come into meetings smiling, tell a joke or something on himself. You couldn’t stay mad at him."
Oscar Cruz: Second generation migrant worker who has worked Georgia’s onion and cotton crops for decades.
"In 1980, my Dad’s brother-in-law invited him to work in Georgia doing onions. So we started coming to Georgia every year and just decided to stay permanently. We stayed in Lyons where there were trailers we could rent. I came here in 1980 and stayed permanently in 1994 and never had any problems with anyone. I’m a Georgia citizen! I like picking onions. The soil in Toombs County makes Vidalia onions special. We work almost seven days when we can. On Sundays we just work half a day. My family goes to church in the morning. We got to go wash clothes, get groceries – all that. The other days we go until the body tells us it’s time to quit the work. We start at seven o’clock in the morning and knock off at six o’clock or 6:30. I’ve been doing it for so many years. Some people work faster than others. It all depends on the person. We get paid by the bucket – $.38 a bucket. Some people can do about 350 buckets a day. If the onions are big, it takes about 40 or 45 onions to fill a bucket. If they are medium-size or small, it takes more onions."
Mack Mattingly: Former United State Senator and Ambassador. Reflects on the opportunities that make Georgia a place that still attracts people.
"I found a job with IBM Corporation in Savannah as a sales representative, and that was a true defining moment in my life. I was a northern born guy in a southern state with a large sales district, and in order to survive I had to develop and use every bit of those sales and character instincts I’d learned from my dad and my own brief experience. IBM was a wonderful company to work for, and through that job I not only learned customer skills and how to turn sheer determination into success, I also learned Georgia. I was on the road driving from town to town four and five days a week. I learned every road and every town, every good restaurant and where the best coffee could be found – and I met people. Wonderful, wonderful people. I learned what mattered to them and what they were worried about in their towns, in their state, and in their country. I learned from them. And they made me a Georgian."
