In the beginning.....

I was born in a small rural town in Georgia. My Father worked in a sawmill and Mama, at the time of my birth, didn't work at all. Meager would be a more than fair statement about how they lived. In fact, for several years they actually shared a house with my aunt and uncle. Things were tough. My Daddy and his brother eventually owned a log cutting business together. That was sometime in the sixties and things did begin to turn around for them. Mama and Daddy actually built a house in the mid to late sixties. It was a nice ranch style house built by Ross Reese, a local builder of the time in the small rural town. It had a modern kitchen, a den, living room, dining room, three bedrooms and two baths. Nice by the standards of the day in rural Georgia. I remember Daddy buying a very nice and new Oldsmobile 98. It was green and had all the latest bells and whistles….electric windows and seats, stero, everything! We were finally doing more than getting by.

Our little town was and still is wrapped all around the local high school football team. We’ve often laughed and said that any house in the whole county could be robbed on Friday night as everyone, including the local police and sheriff deputies were all at the ballgames. The town was (I can’t speak for now as I’ve been gone so long) so very much divided into the haves and the have-nots. Even though we had technically risen a little above the have-not crowd, we were still not considered among the haves. You had to be born into that crowd. I even remember a school mate coming home with me one day and stating that her Mama said that we were poor and that she had never known anyone poor before. Listen, I had been to their house and ours was newer and better furnished than theirs!

My Daddy was one of seven or eight children. His father had been in the sawmill business and needed all of his sons to help him as soon as they could. Most of them didn’t get very far in school. It seemed that his whole family had a love hate relationship with one another. They fought, and I mean literally, all the time. One was always mad with the other one about something. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, they would gang up on someone outside the family and fight too. I know that at least one of the brothers served some time for such. Well, all that, continued to lead to a bad reputation for the whole family around town.

Then it all started…