All In the Timing

AuthorHouse

Contents

Foreword...........................................................................ixAcknowledgements: Indispensable Support............................................xiIntroduction: Rooted in the South..................................................xixSection One: Couture and Culture: Growing a Man....................................1Section Two: Athens, Marriage, and Major Decisions.................................39Section Three: From Baltimore to Boston; to The Dunes and Back.....................63Section Four: Halsted Finally!.....................................................99Section Five: Back Home to Georgia and My Early Years at Emory.....................127Section Six: Leadership, Recruitment, and the Next Right Thing.....................177Section Seven: No Scepters, Only Hard Work.........................................245Section Eight: A Happily Ever After Ending.........................................311

Chapter One

A Personal Word

I was a young boy during the Great Depression. Talk about timing, I was conceived the month the stock market crashed and was born amidst the country's epic slide into the Great Depression. As a boy I worked on a local tobacco plantation and quickly realized how little money my fellow workers earned. I didn't want to grow up to be a tobacco farmer. My parents emphasized a strong work ethic, consideration and respect for other people, black or white, honesty and integrity, and performance consistent with my abilities. Though my first ten years were marked by the Great Depression and the next five by World War II, my memories are happy ones.

The Conception and The Crash

About 400 people live in Attapulgus now, and about 400 people lived there in 1930, the year I was born. Back then, forty or fifty shade tobacco plantations encircled the little town, and they defined the culture of the community. The only other business in town was a Fuller's earth mine. Fuller's earth is clay similar to kaolin. The clay mined in Attapulgus is called Attapulgite, after the town. The clay is used in the refining of petroleum, in face powder and other cosmetics, and up until recently, it was the active ingredient in Kaopectate. The mine is still active today. The tobacco fields of the plantations have long since grown over.

Shade tobacco was a lucrative crop prior to World War II, but then cigarettes replaced cigars as the smoke of choice for most Americans. Shade tobacco was used to wrap hand-rolled cigars, and up until World War II it was one of the most profitable agricultural products in the country. Another reason that shade tobacco fell out of favor is that production of the crop is very labor intensive. On a typical tobacco plantation there was a white owner or an overseer (on the larger corporate plantations) and a couple hundred black workers, a demographic fact that would have profound political implications in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The shade tobacco industry withered after the war, and by the late-1950s the crop was no longer grown in southwest Georgia.

The mine on the other hand is still quite active. When I was a child, Standard Oil owned the site. Today BASF owns the mine and the company is the largest employer and taxpayer in Decatur County. I was a young boy during the great depression, and from beginning to end the mine remained open, albeit with limited production. The workers were not laid off; instead they were asked to accept shortened work weeks. Families in Attapulgus survived the Great Depression this way. Folks were able to supplant their incomes by working on the shade tobacco plantations come harvest time.

* * *

My father was born in Wilkinson County, Georgia, and upon graduating from High School he went to work for the Johnson Brothers Mercantile Company in Irwinton. He worked in a country store patronized by the men and women who worked the kaolin mines in Gordon and McIntyre, two nearby towns. News spread that a Fuller's Earth mine was going to open in southwest Georgia and the Johnson Brothers decided to expand. My father came to Attapulgus to establish and operate the new store. He quickly realized that the store was going to be successful and that it would make for a good investment. He saved up as much money as he could and then he bought out the Johnson Brothers. Around this time he was courting my mother, who was from a large, local family. He knew that she wouldn't want to leave Attapulgus, so he purchased a small frame house near the store. Earning an income and in possession of a home, he considered himself in a position to propose, which he did. My mother accepted and they were married in 1928. My father was 24-years-old and my mother was a year younger.

I was conceived in October, 1929, the month the stock market crashed on Wall Street. I was born on June 28, 1930, amidst the country's epic slide into the Great Depression. The pregnancy was my mother's first, and it proved uneventful until the onset of delivery. My mother went into labor early on a Friday afternoon and my father drove her to the Riverside Hospital in Bainbridge, to be delivered by Dr. R. F. Wheat. Dr. Wheat was not an obstetrician, rather a family practitioner who was well regarded in our community. Labor persisted through that afternoon and evening, and into the early hours of the morning. There was an abnormal presentation. A cesarean section was an extremely uncommon procedure then, and I doubt anyone in the rural hospital was an expert with forceps, so the labor went on. The protracted experience weakened my mother. The hours ticked by and she grew very fatigued. Dr. Wheat whispered to my father that she might not survive the delivery. In the prayers that followed, my father promised God that he wouldn't attempt another pregnancy if he spared my mother from this delivery.

I was ultimately delivered late Saturday afternoon, healthy in every way. Unfortunately my mother experienced significant pelvic damage. An adequate episiotomy had not been performed and she sustained a pelvic laceration, which produced urinary difficulties. Those difficulties would persist for many years until they were finally corrected by surgery.

* * *

My father's store in Attapulgus sold everything from tuxedos to wagon-wheels. It was an old-fashioned general store and it was an integral part of the local tobacco culture; the place served as a commissary for the farm workers. This was partly because of the depression, which kept wages low, even on the more prosperous tobacco plantations.

I went to work on a local tobacco plantation when I was five. We arrived at dawn, worked under the hot sun, left at dusk, ate dinner, bathed, and collapsed into bed. In the morning, when it was still dark, we started all over again. Times were hard, and I knew that life was not easy for anyone, my parents included. The full-time workers on these plantations were usually black, but come harvest time white children would augment the labor force. I was only five but I can still remember those long, hard days. I also remember the camaraderie. I felt proud to produce something during the depression, even if all I took home was a...