>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Evan King on Sunday, November 6th,
2016 at his home in Adairsville,
Georgia, which is 112 King Street.
And Mr. King, do you agree to this interview?
>> I do.
>> Thank you very much.
So we'll go ahead and start at the beginning.
Can you tell me when and where you were born?
>> I was actually born in Florid Hospital
in Rome Georgia and at January 28th, 1957.
I actually still have a copy of one of
the hospital bills that saved from that day.
>> Do you remember how much it was?
>> I do not. That I have to
pull it out to get that figure,
but I can tell you it's not as much as it is today.
>> So what were your parents' names?
My father was Edward Walter King Sr. and my mother was
Anna Macolin Tig and she
was called Anna Mac in
her younger years short for the Macolin.
Her father was Mac Tig and I'm sure
the Macolin came as a derivative of Mac.
She was an only child.
>> Can you tell me about your father's work?
>> My father in his younger years,
he had a sawmill like his father,
and then he started a building contractor, house mover,
a jack of all trades, but mostly,
a builder, he built homes and moved
homes and did some remodeling work, that type of stay.
>> And would you be willing to tell me about your mother?
>> My mother was diagnosed with a mental illness in
the '60s and she spent most
of my life in a mental institution at Millersville.
That was difficult at that time for people to talk about.
It's difficult today for people to talk about.
And it's something that needs to
be talked about because the only way
you want to reduce that stigma is to get it out and open.
What a lot of people don't
realize there's about 20% of the population,
about 1 in 5 have some mental illness,
whether that be bipolar,
whether that be depression, whether
that be schizophrenia,
mood disorders and that's
something that we as a society need to deal with.
And in those days, it wasn't dealt with in
the manner that we deal with it because we didn't know.
She had an aunt who had some mental disability.
This is a story my father told.
My father and she had been married two or three years.
And they had dated prior to them getting married,
but my dad said that they'd been married
two or three years before he even
knew that this aunt existed,
she was kept in a back room in
a house and she was fed meals.
Essentially, like a prisoner is the way I envisioned it.
I'm not saying that's the way it was,
that's the way I envisioned it.
Because if you didn't get out and
you were fed meals in your room,
that's essentially what you are.
But again, she had a mental disability
and through shame or whatever reason,
that's the way it was dealt with it.
And I don't think that she would have been
isolated in that situation.
I mean, that's the way not just
that family dealt with it or my family dealt with it.
That's the way a lot of families dealt with it.
But hopefully, we're working
in involving in reducing that type of stigma,
so people can get help because
they're part of our society.
There was a movie a beautiful
mind about the gentleman that had
schizophrenia and he won
a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in mathematics.
So these are intelligent people,
these are people that can contribute to society
if they have the tools to do
so and the support system to do so.
My family is just one family
out of many who's had to deal with that issue.
>> And did your father both work and care for you?
>> Essentially, yes, as best he could.
My father also had a problem with alcohol.
He was an alcoholic and
I lived for a while with my grandparents,
his parents because my mother's parents
had passed away and
my grandmother had a great influence
on my life and I said as did my grandfather.
And I'm not wanting
to get political here in this interview,
but is it in a very real sense
the community racing in many ways.
I can remember coming home from school,
but this houses across the street,
Dr. Payne's house and I got in the fight.
And my grandmother's house was on
North Main Street at the time I
was living in my grandmother's house.
And by the time I had finished the fight
and walked home and I lost the fight,
by the way, she knew about it.
And so what I'm saying is people looked out
the window and saw what was taking
place and they picked up the phone and they called.
And so there were consequences to
my actions and the church raised me,
my local church, the Davis Baptist Church.
That was a part of a huge part of
my life, my teenage years.
Earlier years, I can remember Jack Carlo
the pastor on RA trips, Paul Baker,
a deacon in the church on RA taking us on RA trips
and those were great influences on my life.
I guess what I'm trying to say,
as difficult as it was in those circumstances,
I could not have done anything of what I'm
today without those influences on my life.
>> So where was your childhood home?
>> One hundred Oak Street.
That was my mother's father's house,
my grandfather's house, which I still own.
I have it as rental house now,
that's as a general rule,
that was our base because my dad would move around
to various places to work in various situations,
but that's generally where I was raised.
And then my grandmother's home,
his mother's home at 301 North Main Street,
which my sister lives in now.
She inherited that house.
I had a thought that came through
my head, but it went away.
That house was I guess I've still got the paper.
I know what it was about to say.
My grandfather was a veteran of World War I,
Mac Tig and he was in
the trenches in France and was exposed to mustard gas.
And so he bought that house at 100 Oak Street on
what we would call
today the GI bill that was came after World War II.
They had some program after
World War I. I'm not familiar with the name of it,
but he borrowed the money
on that program to buy that house for $750.
I've got the paper that he signed for that.
I've got the days that Mr. Whitworth
was one of the owners of the house at one time.
And there was actually when when
my granddad Tig bought it.
It was about three different people that had it.
And I have heard and I have not documented this,
but I've heard it at one time.
Mr. Whitworth also had a store in town and he was,
for the time of established businessman
and he had a furniture store and he also had
a funeral home business and I have heard that he had used
that house at one time as a place to in bomb bodies,
but now, I don't know that,
I'd like say, I have not documented that.
But he was one of the owners that I have on
the deed did when my grand did purchased that house.
Like I say, I've still got the paper
where he and my grandmother
borrowed the money for that house.
I'm particular about that stuff.
>> What do you mean in particular?
>> I like to keep all records.
The camera can't go in there,
but I've got a newspaper ad when my grandfather,
my daddy's father, ran for County Commissioner in 1940,
and there's a story behind that.
But let me tell you about how I came
about this, the newspaper article.
My grandfather passed away in '87,
I believe and he had two sisters.
One of those sisters lived in
Linette Alabama and she had passed away and her son,
Bill Owens sent me
Mel block one day and I opened
it up and it had this article,
full page newspaper article.
And so I called him I said, Bill, I said,
I like money as well as the next guy.
And I said, but you couldn't have sent me
$1,000 bill and made me any prouder.
I said, where did you find this?
And he said, well, mama had this put back,
said this was in one of her bibles that she'd
put back when Cliff friend for County Commissioner.
And he said, I knew that you would appreciate it
probably as much or more than
anybody and he said, I want you to have it.
I said, well, I sure do appreciate it.
Another story about that time in those days,
the elections took place in February
and my dad was on the North end of the county
and there's a lot of talk about we were
the redhead were and some people say
still are the redheaded stepchild
of the county, that thing.
But my granddad ran
against a group of guys that were out of Carter,
which had a bigger population base
and the bigger voter pool,
those things. And he lost the election.
I'm saying all that say, he lost election.
My granddad had a plainer meal and sawmill out
here where the [inaudible] Chanel building is now,
which actually, it's an antique mall now.
But all that was a big lumber
yard that my grandfather had.
And Mr. Cobb Green was
my granddad's right hand man for lack of better word.
And Cobb told this story a lot
and Cobb said the day after election said,
Cliff lost and said there were several
of us getting ready to
go before we started work that morning,
we'd build to fire out of the strips and
slabs from the sawmill to get warmed up,
warm our hands up and stuff and say, Cliff,
Cliff drove up in his old black car,
and he said, all cars were black in those days.
You didn't have cars
colors the way you did now and he said,
you got out of that car and he said,
he had a six gun strapped on
his hip just like John Wayne.
He said, I knew that he was mad because
he lost the election and
said he walked up there and he said, what's wrong, Cliff?
So why are you wearing that gun?
Mr. King looked at me just as straight
faced and just as serious because I said he was serious.
He said, well, he said a feel
hadn't got any more friends than
I got needs to wear a gun.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's been a story that's gone
around many times in this community.
>> So you've talked a little bit about your growing up
years and living both at your father's house,
but also your grandparents.
So can you just tell me generally,
what are some of your earliest memories
growing up here in Adairsville?
>> I can remember one of
my favorite memories is the drug store downtown.
Albert Mitchell worked for
first Mr. Bradley and then Doc Walk Mason.
Doc Mason's daughter and I
graduated the same time together at 75.
Just as a youngster,
you would go in there and there were
the old style table and chairs,
table wasn't very big.
And then they had
a soda fountain and
getting Albert Mitchell to make cherry cooks.
That was one.
You died a heaven get one of those cherry cokes.
But there was also a comic book graph.
And comic books were what?
$1.15 at the most.
And you'd go in there and you
would get a cherry coke after school or on
Saturday and go pull
a comic book and read
a comic book and inst a comic book back in the rack.
And thinking today,
I'm sitting there thinking now if we did that today,
they want to pay for that comic book.
But those guys, they never mentioned anything.
They knew what we would do. I was just,
there would be several of us.
I'd say several but one or two guys
would go with me or sometimes they go by myself,
it might be me, my brother,
and we'd sit there and read the comic books
as we was drinking our cherry cook.
I guess the comic books were
the lost leaders for the cherry cook I don't know.
But I know today that that couldn't happen.
Number 1, we don't have a drug store like that.
Today, comic books in a bookstore are folks read
those things online and are on
their taster, that kind of thing.
But that's a great memory of mine.
Another great memory is
when the great locomotive chase festival started.
You've probably heard this
in some of the interviews that you've been.
We would have what we call
Halloween carnivals in the old gymnasium.
And they made some rule at some level,
I think it was at the state level that we couldn't
have those type of functions on school grounds anymore.
And so the principal at the time, Mr. Lacy,
decided one one ways to
circumvent that road would
be just move the whole thing downtown.
So that's how it started
instead of having a Halloween carnival,
we had a festival downtown
because it was a fundraiser
for various school activities.
The Halloween carnival was.
And so that's how this festival started.
I can remember the first time we would have
a old fashioned stuff like apple bobbing
or hitting the thing where
the bell slip the hammer
where you ring the bell at the top.
Lots of different and people would dress up.
I've got photos that all had taken
some scans of of how people we dress.
They were dressed back in the 1800s
with the big hook dresses and
guys would have overalls on or
the string ties and things of that nature.
And that was a great to me,
it was a great community.
I don't know what the word I'm looking for is.
It created a community within the community.
My father was not much of one
to participate in those type of activities.
But I can remember one year,
he grew a mustache
because they had asked everybody to grow mustaches.
And so he grew a mustache.
That left an impression on me.
But what I'm saying is that that was
a great way and it's still
a great thing for our community.
I don't know if you experienced well, I forgot.
One of the interviews we did was during the festival.
You saw the activities that went on down there.
And a lot of people that's just like a homecoming.
You can measure your era of
time of when you graduated a lot of times just going to
the festival because a lot of folks now they'll
plan their class reunions and things around
the festival because they know people are
coming back to town for the festival.
We've planned several for my class and my wife's class,
around the festival because we know people are
coming back to town to visit,
with the festival we'll
visit family and things of that nature.
So it's a great community
Increase this community within the community.
And wherever you go within the country.
A lot of people have grown up and went to
school and moved on and they did other things in life,
but they'll remember the
great locomotive fest and come back
and come for a day or two.
That's a great thing.
>> Do you have a general idea
of how many people attend on average?
>> I've heard some numbers,
but I don't know exactly how you
can pinpoint that number.
And I'm saying that I know that they
have they have ticket sales and things of that nature.
But over a three day period,
it fluctuates, so I don't know.
Just as a guestimate,
I would say somewhere in
the neighborhood 30,000 people range.
I said 30,000 but about 30,000 people.
Now, that's a ballpark
and I would want you to go to
a big ballpark because I don't know
if I'm anywhere close.
I have heard people say 50,000,
but I don't know how you can
actually pinpoint that number.
But I know it's a lot of people.
Because sometimes you can't walk through
town because there's so many people.
There's Wilder wild people.
>> You mentioned the drug store just now.
Can you tell me about the barber shop?
>> Which one?
There was a barber shop downtown,
Andy's barber shop that I remember.
>> Tell me about that?
>> I can't remember his last name.
I remember it was Andy and he had
a barber shop in near where Coston store
is because my biggest memory
was there was a bench that was on the outside of it.
And an old gentleman named Norm McCallister,
always sit on that bench.
And Mr. McCallister, like a lot of folks in those days,
like the dip snuff and a lot of it ran down his chin.
And he always had on overalls and a denim coat.
And I can remember Mr. McCallister sitting on that bench.
I don't remember going into Andy's us to get
a haircut because I always went to Domo's barber shop.
He his barber shop was on
the south end of the town where Sue's barbershop is now.
And Domo cut my hair.
I guess until I graduated from high school.
He's, of course, was passed away now,
but that's the barber shop that we frequented.
Now, there was another barber shop on
the north end of the town called Slims barbershop.
Slim Collins ran a barbershop up there.
And I would go in there every so often,
mainly because my grandfather on the building and Mr.
Slim rented a spot from him.
And what I remember about that barbershop,
he had mirrors on both walls.
So when you were sitting in the barber chair,
you looked at 1,000 faces or
1,000 back of the head because you were
looking at the back you head from the other mirror.
As a kid, that was
always funny to me that you were able to do that.
But Slim Collins run
a barbershop on the north end of time.
>> So what are your memories of the train depot as a kid?
>> Playing around there. The depot,
I don't remember it being what I would call active,
commerce going in and out of the depot.
I can remember playing around the train depot as a kid.
They had ramps all around it,
and we would go down there and play tag or chase,
or whatever, and get in, I'm sure,
all mischief around the railroad.
Throwing rocks, I'm sure we broke some windows.
Just being kids.
I might need to be taking the fifth on that one.
But I just remember playing.
We weren't able to go in it.
And then when Mr. Penfield was the mayor,
I think he's the one
that entered into a lease with a railroad,
and he and his wife had antiques in there.
I remember Mayor Lycee had
an office on the South end of the depot.
Now this was after I was an adult,
and he had an insurance business,
and mayor named Reed Hopson built houses there.
That was an office that they used.
But as far as as a kid, I never did go in it.
We just played around. It was
just a place to play for us as a kid.
>> And you mentioned that the passenger train
was not coming through regularly?
>> No, not during my lifetime.
Now I do have an interesting story,
I'm not saying that I remember this.
What I'm saying is,
we have a VHS tape that
I'm wanting my wife to get converted
to the whatever they are now.
That Joe Penn did from Kennesaw about
the last gentleman that engineered the general.
Happens to be Angie's uncle, Jeff Moss.
And they stopped there in 1964.
And again, that's according to the tape.
But I don't remember that.
There are some people there that I can
recall that were there,
but I was not there on the day that that happened.
Actually, they were bringing the general
from Chattanooga back to
Atlanta for it to where it's located now.
I think, Kennesaw, but
Jeff Moss was the last one that engineered that train.
And I asked him one day before he passed away.
I said, "Jeff," I said, "How did you get that honor?"
And he said, "Well, it goes by seniority."
He said, "I was a senior engineer
on the railroad at that time," and he said,
"I bid to get that job."
And I think that's a pretty new story.
>> So it was still being used very late than the general?
>> No. It was actually had been in Chattanooga.
They had claimed it, but they had
some legal thing that went on.
I don't know the details of that.
And they agreed to have
some settlement that it was coming back to Georgia,
and of course, they
had to have an engineer to drive the train.
And it was a big deal because
the governor was on that train.
That's a lot of dignitaries on the train, for the time.
>> I see. So what were the main drivers of
the economy in Adairsville when you were growing up?
>> Well, Mr. Cooveman had chenille
mill out on the highway, like I mentioned earlier,
where my grandfather had a lumber yard
before that in the late '40s
and early '50s after World War II.
Right here at the end of King Street,
it was a little shirt
manufacturing location called Tri-State,
and later was called Kenmore.
Some other people bought it and called Kenmore.
Those employed a lot of folks.
Other things was agriculture was big in those days,
a lot bigger than it is now.
But we were mostly a bedroom community, as I remember.
I mentioned my father,
a lot of things that he might
have to go to Rome or Calhoun, or Carhartt,,
or Atlanta, or even over into Alabama,
depending on where the job was located
as far as a contractor was concerned.
Tourism some, we had the motels that used to
be out on the 41 before the tornado took them out.
So that was just small business of that nature.
As far as a major industry like we have today,
that was really non existent in that sense.
Several people that lived here
worked at Lockheed, that type of thing.
But we were mostly a bedroom community,
as I would describe it,
and people would go out of
the community for their livelihood.
>> When you said earlier,
redheaded stepchild of the county,
could you unpack that a little bit?
>> Well, my grandfather,
who was a pretty large businessman for the time,
always said that the county line
should be down on Cartersville.
And because he said as a trading partner,
we actually traded more with
Calhoun than we did with Cartersville.
And of course, a lot of this you
have to remember is slanted because,
from his election viewpoint back in the '40s,
that was still his mindset.
And a lot of folks think that Cartersville gets
more than Adairsville does in many ways,
as far as resources are concerned.
But what a lot of people don't realize,
Cartersville got a bigger population base.
But there has always been
a mindset that it's an us verse them.
I don't necessarily buy into that mindset now.
I think over the last several years,
we worked together more cooperatively,
which is very good.
But there has been a time when it has been very strained,
and I think anybody that would say
otherwise is not dealing with the truth, exactly.
Now, were there strains justified on either side?
I wasn't there.
I can't really say that.
I can just say what I've heard through the years.
But I do remember my grandfather,
one of his strongest saying was that
the county line needs to be down on Cartersville mine,
and that always got a big laugh,
and sometimes got a big argument.
>> So where did you attend school?
>> Right across the street at Adairsville High School.
I graduated in 1975.
I went in there. I can
remember when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Mrs. Farmer was my first grade teacher
and we had to lay our heads on the desk.
That was just a calming effect.
I think we did that more because
the teachers were more concerned than we were.
They were more in shock than we were because we didn't
really know at six-year-olds what was taking place,
but I can remember Mrs. Farmer having
everyone lay their heads on
the desk, that kind of thing.
And I went all through school at Adairsville,
and had some great teachers,
had some great influence.
As I said earlier that the whole town raised me,
and that as much as I revelled in a lot of years,
those folks had a great positive influence on me.
The class of '75 was
the last class that graduated from the old gymnasium.
My wife's class, the class of '76,
graduated from the new auditorium,
that has just been torn down to make
way for when they built
the school South of town
and they're about to build a new elementary school now.
But I graduated from
the auditorium that my father
and my mother graduated from.
They were beginning to tear the school down in
the spring of '75 and to make way for
the new things that they were about to build.
We're in election season.
This is November of 2016.
Our high school civics teacher,
Miss Clare Sutton, those that had turned 18,
she made sure that we were registered to vote.
She's passed away now.
I never go vote that I don't think of Clare Sutton,
and the responsibility of
civic duty of voting that she instilled in me.
I hope that she instilled it in all of us,
but I know she instilled it in me.
>> How many students were there in the school
about, approximate number?
>> I can't tell you that, but I can tell
you they weren't many in that graduating class.
There were 40.
And again, I'm going to go with my wife's class.
She was a class of 1976,
and there were 76 that graduated in her class.
That's how I remember that.
So from one class to another, almost doubled.
But as far as knowing the number of students,
I don't really recall that,
and I don't know that I ever really paid
attention to that, just to be frank with you.
When I mentioned the increase of my wife's class,
through redistrict and things
of that nature that school boards do,
I'm sure that had a lot to do with
the increase in the number of
students who graduated from her class.
>> And when you were in high school,
what percentage of students assumed
or knew or planned to go to college?
>> Very good question.
If you'll give me just a minute
on camera to think of me.
Well, I wasn't one of the smarter ones to say the least.
I aspired to go to college.
Mainly because the group that
I ran around with several
of those wanted to go to college.
I'm going to say out of those 40,
probably 25%, 10,
maybe 15 as far to go to college.
Someone in the military,
I can think of one who made a career in
military and actually in military intelligence.
There were actually more than one,
but he made a career.
I'm thinking of another one who was in the military,
and then he made a career in law enforcement.
It's a lot of military folks do.
He was in military police when he was in the military.
Now, I don't know.
As we're younger, we don't think much about the future.
We don't think about retirement account.
There's a lot of things we don't think about.
Young and dumb is what I'd like to say.
But I've often wondered how
many when they got in the workforce,
then took that extra initiative to go to
school to increase their knowledge of their job,
their employment, that kind, I don't know that.
And then I've wondered also this question sparked one,
how many from my original first grade class
made it to a senior?
I don't know answer to that question.
I'm thinking out loud. I don't know.
>> Well, can you tell me about
your teacher, Julia Wellington?
>> Great inspiration. Miss Wellington was a short lady.
She had gone to school at Maria College in Kentucky.
She was a high school senior English teacher.
I'm not going to say it's a prerequisite there's a lot of
things I can't say about it in that regard.
What I'm trying to say is, you
had aspirations to go to college if you took her class.
And you knew that because of
the reputation she had as a teacher,
she was a very strict teacher.
And her class was the closest class.
And that's no reflection on anything.
It's just the way that it was of what you
might experience when you went to
the next level when you went to college.
Because she was extremely strict in
her expectation because she
wanted you to do your very best.
And of course, I had known
Miss Wellington through my high school years
and I took her class and I
actually was an aide to her in the library.
She was also a librarian.
She taught high school senior English,
and she was a librarian for the school.
And she was firm.
Firm might be a better word than strict.
When you interacted with Wellington in
school, she liked to travel.
Her husband had passed away about 15 or 16 years earlier.
And miss Wellington traveled in the summertime and so she
had lots of experiences
that she was able to share with us.
Most of us hadn't got out of the state,
most we probably got to was
Florida or the Smoking Mountains in Tennessee,
if we took a weekend trip, that kind of thing.
For the majority of us.
That's what I'm saying.
There are several that were able that had
the finances to travel further with their family,
but most of us didn't.
I specifically, I hung on her every word.
When she talked about going to Russia,
she traveled to Russia and traveled.
English is what she taught and
she loved England and she would
tell us about visiting various places in England,
the Thames River and
the Abbey and all those type of places.
And I remember one day in class we
were talking and I said something the fact just offhand.
Well, I'll never get to go to those places.
And she looked at me straight in the eye,
she says, don't say that,
Dave and said there's no telling
the things that you'll go.
And when I see that book,
All The Places You'll Go, I think of miss Wellington.
But just the fact of her
traveling and her sharing those experiences,
inspired me more than
the subject that she taught
in English because it opened us up.
And just like books do when we read,
we're able to visit a lot of
places just by going to the library.
You're able to go back in time,
you're able to go ahead in time.
You're able to go to other countries just by reading.
But she she put the actual legs to
those readings because she'd been there,
she was able to rely
personal experiences of what she had seen and
she would share photographs and things of that nature,
but she was a great lady.
Like I said, strict is a word a lot of folks used.
Firm might be a more fair word to use.
And the funny thing is we went to church together.
And after I graduated,
we became great friends.
And she was a different person because she had
a different responsibility as
opposed to being a high school teacher.
When you're a high school teacher, if you're not firm,
you lose control sometimes.
But as a friend, she was a dear friend.
I would go to her house and and help her do things.
She was a very private person.
But she was a great inspiration to me.
And I'm sure to others. I'm just
speaking to me personally.
How she affected me and what I looked up to her in.
>> So you were in school at the time
of integration in local schools.
What did you notice about that?
How did that affect you?
>> Well, I was probably in about the third,
fourth or fifth grade when I noticed with
black students in our school and we hadn't had any.
And It was the south in the 1960s,
which was much different in the south of
the 1950s or the '40s or the '30s.
And it was a great social change.
So to say that it went smoothly would not be fair,
it would not be the truth
and it would not be fair to the black students to camp.
And what I remember
now and what I regret.
Now, some of the comments that I
made because they are
just people, we're all just people.
We want things better for
our children but it had to be difficult for those folks.
And no one has ever said that to me.
No one has ever mentioned that to me.
Folks that I know now that I went to school with.
So my Black friends, they've never mentioned me.
I'm not going to go so far to
say that they took it in stride.
I think that's unfair because I know that
there was some hurtful things that had to be going on.
Because we're products of
our environment in our environment again,
it was the 1940s, '50s and '60s South.
You crossed the state line and you have
the governor trying to keep
Black folks from going to the university.
You had the Little Rock situation in
'57 where the National Guard had to come in and
allow citizens of this country
of color to be able to enter a public university.
So there was that resistance in that regard.
But kids being kids, they reflect a lot of times
what they hear around the dinner table.
And it was difficult.
Looking back and you can't rewrite history.
History is what it is.
In the sense that those were the thoughts of the time.
Thankfully, that's changed for the better I hope.
I'm not in school today, so I can't speak to
that from first hand knowledge.
But I'll give you a story.
When my grandmother was ill,
my dad's mother was ill, she was 93.
And we were sitting with her.
We would rotate Sundays,
we'd had somebody to help stay
during the week, those things.
And I would listen to the stories that she would
tell because they were reported.
One story she told was
her father was the foreman
for Mr. Boyd up on Boyd Mountain.
It was the Boyd family and the Hayes family.
My grandmother was a Hayes.
And she talked about
they were the only White family on the mountain.
Everybody else was Black.
And because they did the labor and
my great grandfather was the foreman of those folks.
But the story that she told that stuck to me was she can
remember it now because we didn't have
TV. They didn't have TV.
So their entertainment was when they were playing.
I'm going back to the story that she told me that stuck
to me was she remembered hearing the Black children
play wherever they were located, she could hear.
And thinking, me I'd love to go
play with those children because they're having fun.
And when you're a kid,
that's what you want to do, is have fun.
Your kid.
And I thought to myself after she told me that story,
how radical that thought was because that's not 1940s,
'50s or '60s sound.
That's 1910, '15, '20s.
So if we thought the lines were drawn in
the '40s '50s and '60s
or if we think the lines are drawn now,
what were they in 1915, '20, '25?
And for her to have to
realize as a young girl before that influence,
the negative influence of racism can come into play.
She just want to play with kids.
That's what she wanted to do.
And I can remember Mr. JD McConnell,
a Black gentleman before he passed away.
He passed away after
my grandfather and I was a mailman in town,
and so I talked to a lot of
different people and Mr. JD was one of them.
And he was one of the people that lived
on the mountain where my grandmother was a girl.
And he was one of the ones that she could play with.
So we come a long way.
We'll got a long way to go.
I hope I'm answering your questions.
>> Yeah, that was that was great.
Can you tell me what you did
after graduation from high school?
>> Well, I went to Shorter College for
a short time for about a year and a half and
talked that I knew more than shorter did.
So I talked that wanted to make a living.
So I worked with my father son,
then I went to trip McCall Cleveland for a little bit,
and I went to Dalton Junior for a little bit.
Decided I knew more than all of those places.
And I was very wrong about that,
by the way, but I went to work with my father.
He was, like I said, a contractor and
we were in business together.
And got married in '78 to my wife,
who you met earlier and started living a life.
And my father got ill about,
I don't know, eight or 10 years after that.
And he passed away and then
an opportunity came for me
to go work for the post office.
I took a job with the postal service here in town.
I was fortunate to do that.
Most folks get a job with the post office,
they might have to go to Marietta Smyrna,
Canton place like that.
I was fortunate enough to get
one in the town that I lived in.
I'm working on my 32nd year.
>> Well, with your father's lumber business,
who were your customers?
>> Well, we did what
we call custom sawing, farmers ran.
We were custom sawing with him.
Most of what I did cut cross ties
to Southern Wood who sold cross ties to the railroad.
That was a big part of what we did.
And that was pretty hard work
because we didn't have
the modern equipment that a lot of folks had.
I did it the way my grandfather did.
I remember, he said one day before he died,
well, he said, if we'd had a forklift,
we could have done a lot more than what we did.
But as far as the actual mill itself,
I just had what was called peperwood sawmill,
but we did a lot of hard work.
>> Where was the sawmill located?
>> It was right here
where they're building a new highway,
4 lane highway on the North end of Adair.
You crossed 140 where North Main Street.
You crosses 140 and becomes over Dixie Highway.
It was sitting there on the left.
And then before I had that four put it there,
I had it on my wife's family farm
out on Iron Mountain Road.
We saw there for a long time.
>> So let's talk about this transition to
the working for the post office.
You said that became available.
Can you go into more detail?
>> Well, of course, you
have to take a test to work for the post office.
My father passed away and so
those shared responsibilities became my responsibilities.
And as much as I thought that I knew when
I knew more than shorter and
Truett McConnell and Dalton College.
I realized that there's a whole lot that I didn't know.
And my thoughts were
I might need to be looking for just a regular job.
And so I had a friend. Don't let me back up.
I can't remember how I became
aware of the testing process,
but somehow I came aware.
And I went to Rome to take a test for the post office.
And then at the time,
I didn't know that there was
that there would be a job in a Adsal.
But I had a friend that worked at Adsal and they gave me
a call and said my name and come up on a register.
And again, it's a little bit of a fluke or
a coincidence or some people
would say it's more than that.
But my name on the register had expired,
but there was some technicality.
So they came up and they renewed
those names for another two years.
So my name was actually on the register for
four years instead of the two years.
After two years, they laps and
you have to go through the whole process again.
But anyway, I got to call that
there was going to be a slot
open in Adsal and was interested.
Of course I was interested because I had taken the test.
I was still working for myself then, still self employed.
And so I went and talked with the postmaster at time,
Mr. Roger Finley and he hired me.
And at that time,
it was we were called part time flexibles.
It was not a full time job, a 40 hour a week job.
You might just work Saturdays or you might
just work in the mornings or things of that nature.
But it worked out for me because at the time,
my wife and I were thinking about building a house.
And so when I wasn't working at the post office,
I was working on my house.
I sold my other interest, sold equipment,
things of that nature and decided,
well, this will either work or it won't,
but I'm going down the show mainly
because he was going to get her house built.
They said I went to work post office in May of '85.
And my father passed away
actually and then we
started working on the house, built in my house.
And in August of '86,
if I remember correctly,
Mr. Finley had gotten
a city route approved for [inaudible].
Before that time, everybody
had to come to the post office,
which is located near
the Methodist Church here in town to pick up their mail.
There were four rural routes for the outlines.
The post office covers portion of three counties Bartow,
Gordon and Florida County.
But there was no city delivery within the city here.
But Mr. Finley had applied
and gotten approved for a city route.
And he talked to me
and asked if I would be interested in that and.
Of course, I was because
that meant more hours, which meant more pay.
And so he started
the city route like say in August of '86.
And it was still a part time job because
not everybody transitioned to
get their mail on the street at that time.
The a lot of people still had their mail and field box.
But as time went on,
more and more people got their mail on the
on the street and it became a full time job.
And then somewhere along about, let's see.
Let me think, 2008.
I developed a little heart situation and had to have
an aortic valve replaced
and had surgery on April Fools' Day,
April 1st of 2008.
When I came back to go to work in
June or July of '08 after rehab and recuperation,
the heat was very difficult for
somebody with a heart condition.
And a supervisor job came
open at Adairsville again locally,
and I was encouraged to apply for it and I did,
and I got the job through
some gracious decisions by my boss.
And then not long,
about a year or so after that,
I got the job, but then
district management abolished the job.
So they had abolished
that job and I had some choices of where to go.
And one of the choices,
there was a postmaster job open
in a little post office west of Rome in Coosa.
So I took that job,
and then another opening came in Armuchee
and I was able to laterally
transfer to that location, which is where I'm at now.
And like I said, I'm working on my 32nd year.
>> So how did the city route change the city?
Was there an impact?
>> Well, it was very convenient.
When you think about older individuals having to
get up in order to
get what we think is routine going to get your mail,
instead of having to get in a vehicle
or walk or whatever their mode of
transportation of going to
the post office now, it was in front of their house.
So convenience factor, I think, was very big.
But as far as if there was a dynamic change,
I really can't say that that took place.
Convenience, I think,
would be the biggest thing that you would
see as far as the community's concerned.
>> And what had been the impetus for it?
Why did the postmaster decide to create a city route?
>> Well, of course, it looks good in his job reviews.
The more routes you
have is the bigger level
of your office in the postal service.
So that was, I'm sure,
a part of that decision.
But, I don't know exactly how to put this,
as Mr. Finley's personality
was perceived in the community,
he inherited a situation that he had to take care of,
community-wise, from a postal service standpoint,
and a lot of times that's difficult.
And so his perception by those within the community,
in many ways, was not positive.
I always had a very positive view of him
because I was able to see what he
was trying to implement,
and one of the things he tried to
implement was a city route.
So I'm saying that to say,
even though he might not have had
a very positive perception by the community,
what he was trying to do was to help
the community to create that convenience.
And so that's my perspective of it.
As far as anything else,
I really can't speak to because I'm just trying to think.
Well, there's what I would call the positive perception.
For instance, when the tornado hit in
'13 or when you have
a snowstorm and things come to a standstill,
whether you're in the city of Adairsville or you're in
the city of Atlanta or if you're in wherever you're at,
you can even say 9/11 in New York City,
the disaster that that was for a whole country.
But one of the first things that you see that brings you
back to normal is
seeing a mailman going up and down the road.
So in that vein of thinking,
you've got a good PR thing going
on when you've got the postal
truck going up and down the road.
That's a visual that no
matter what your thoughts are towards your government,
there's a government representative stopping
in front of your house every day,
and the postal services is the only one that does that.
You can talk about the military as great as they are,
you can talk about the FBI or you can
talk about Department of Agriculture.
You can talk about a lot of different entities
that are under the umbrella of the federal government,
but the US Postal Service is the only one
that stops in front of your house every day.
And that's a sense of normalcy when you have tornadoes,
snowstorms where everything come to a standstill,
any type of natural disaster.
When that post office truck
is stopping in front of your house,
things are getting back to normal.
>> In the lead up to talking about you running for mayor,
I wanted to just get some quick thoughts on
major changes in Adairsville economically,
socially, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s.
>> Prior to my becoming mayor,
Mr. Doyle Penson was mayor.
I'm sure that you had
some interviews where his name's come up.
And probably, during Doyle's tenure was
the most dramatic change
as far as growth in the community that I remember.
But I want to back up even before Doyle.
There was a gentleman that actually lived in this house,
who was Preacher Williams, DF Williams,
who was a mayor at that time, who was very progressive in
his business pursuits and when he became mayor in
his growth for the community.
And then following Preacher Williams, Mr. Alan Towe,
current city councilman, his father was the mayor.
And he continued that process and,
in fact, was city councilman when Mr. Williams was mayor.
But they created and put into
place various entities to help growth.
And when I say that, things like
the Development Authority where you could create
tools to get financing
and grants and things from the state and/or
the federal government, in order to build things.
Like when Mr. Towe was the mayor,
we had an investor that had come
in with the Georgia North Park,
out near the Industrial Park.
And the Development Authority,
through a lot of his leadership,
I'm sure, got a grant
in building an industrial spec building.
And those type of tools were instrumental in
having a lot of growth that we saw during
those years and then through Mr. Penson's years.
In either Mr. Towe's or Mr. Penson's years,
140 was four lane between 41 and 75,
which opened up all that commercial area,
and the industrial area because that
Industrial Park's on the north side.
I'd like to say that Mr.
Penson saw the growth that Mr. Towe helped create.
There was more chain like the McDonald's, the Hardee's,
the Taco Bell, Burger King.
All those fast food outlets that you
see is a result of a lot of that timeframe.
And with all that comes infrastructure,
as far as water, sewage,
and gas is concerned.
And they had the foresight to see a lot of that
and put things in place to make that stuff happen.
So those are the things
that I observed for those timeframes.
And we're still seeing the results of a lot of that.
There is the Yan Mar
manufacturing facility that came into play.
A lot of folks don't realize I think there's if I
remember correctly and don't you're recording it,
so I guess you will be quoting
me you know manner of speaking.
I think there's eight Japanese firms in Bartow County,
five of those are located in A that puts
an international flavor on
a small Southern community that
you would've thought of in the 60s.
We have a several convenience stores
who have Indians who are their managers are owners.
Small Southern community.
We have a Godfrey Hurst who is currently in
the spec building that I
mentioned a little earlier, and Australian firm.
Small Southern community.
So there's a good international flavor
within the direction that we don't recognize a lot.
One of the things that I think that we miss
in our community is
a lot of these firms that I've just mentioned,
their middle and upper level management
don't necessarily live in the community,
and I think we miss that because we're not
able to draw on that from
a nonprofit community way.
And we need that brain power.
In that sense, it's a brain drain
because you get a lot of
your nonprofit faith based,
community based initiatives from
that segment of demographic.
And I'm not saying
we appreciate the being in our community.
I would like to see us have
more of those living within our community so that we
can create nonprofit boards that have
those to be a very integral part
of a bettering our community.
>> So when did you run for
mayor and what motivated your run?
>> Well, I ran in '07 and was
20 in January of '08
before I had the heart surgery in April of '08.
Motivation to run. That probably
is going to be a wide range of
questions depending on who you
talked to, and you're asking me.
My motivation to run really stemmed
from making sure that the growth that's
coming our way that continues to come
our way is growth that we can handle
from a financial standpoint and that we
can manage just from a general growth standpoint.
Atlanta has grown leaps and bounds.
I remember reading one time in time magazine.
It says, by the time you read this sentence,
another acre will have been cleared
for some development within Metro Atlanta.
That's struck me a long and of course,
that's way before the fall
off of '08 when everything died.
It's economically around and we've fallen
off a cliff nationally.
But what I'm I'm saying all that
to go back to say, managing that growth.
There's lots of places that we can look to in Atlanta
and see that growth was mismanaged.
It's not like that we don't see that template out
there that they overgrew
their capacity as far as sewage or water to supply.
So that was an issue in my mind.
At that time, we were going through
a drought similar to what we were going through now.
And the issues of water resources at that time,
during the drought, you may or may not remember.
There was much more than there is now.
The governor had issued water restrictions
and painted a broad brush because
Lake Lane was down in Atlanta was suffering.
They were odd and even days and then I
think it went to no days as far,
like water and lawn or lots of different things.
That didn't impact us as
much and actually hurt us probably some
because we're not surface
based as far as our water supply, we're spring based.
But those are issues about how do you manage that?
Where does judgment come in?
And some folks thought I had some judgment.
I've questioned their judgment in thinking that,
but and had talked to me about running.
Whenever Mr. Penson decided that he wouldn't run.
And Mr. Penson come to that he decided he
wasn't going to run that particular year.
And so I threw my hat in the ring.
And I had great respect for Mr. Penson.
And again, what he had done
and how he represented our community.
But I would not have ever run against Mr. Penson at all.
But when that time came,
I threw my hat in the ring and I made my wife
anxious for lack of better way to put that.
>> Well, how did you campaign?
>> Door to door. I knocked on
every door within city limits at least once.
And I got that from my grandfather.
I talked earlier about he had ran for
county Commissioner and he had saved stayed involved in
politics all my life. Until he died.
And I can remember him when different ones from
the county or the state would come to
his house and sit in his living room and talk,
he would always say nothing beats meet somebody
face to face and shaking
your hand and asking for their consideration.
And I can say that's what I did.
I should say that I never did ask for a vote.
All I asked for was consideration,
but that I can remember my grandfather saying,
would you consider me? Because that's all it is.
It comes back down to
that consideration and do you
think he asked a judgment to do the job?
In whatever election,
what the presidential election,
it's been as bad as any that I ever remembered.
But it comes down to who has the judgment to do the job.
That's what it comes down to.
Everything else is everything else.
They can talk about whatever they want to talk about.
It comes down to who do you
think has the judgment to do the job?
>> Well, I assume it helped that you
had served as city carrier for the post office.
>> I'm sure that had a lot to do it.
Everybody knew me.
But in a sense, everybody knew me.
Like I say, I grew up here.
My life is pretty much an open book.
That's different now.
It's it's been eight years, eight,
nine years since I ran and that's a little different
now because the people that
knew a lot of those people now are dead.
I could fill up two legal pages of people
that had faith in me that aren't with us anymore.
Those people that I talked about that influenced
my life. But they're not here.
And so the fact that I
was city care certainly had a lot to do with it,
I'm sure, you know, because I
was in the front of their houses every day.
There was some issues about
that during that election process
that I'm very hesitant
to go into because of personalities and so forth.
But at the end of the day, it's still just a job,
it still comes down to judgment.
It still comes down to,
it's like a mutual fund advertisement.
Past history is no indicator of future performance.
But in a sense, it is.
They have to do that disclaimer.
But my past behavior was
an indicator of how I looked for our community.
The love of my community.
I was interviewed by somebody at
the Daily Tribune and they said,
what do you think about your community?
Or something to that effect.
That's not verbatim.
And I said, I love my community.
Why else would anybody put their self in this position?
Because you don't have to.
It's pretty much a thankless job.
I always remember thinking, well,
if I made 50% of people mad,
that makes hopefully I make 50% of
people happy and I must be doing pretty good.
That's a flippant way to put it.
But there's a little trick
because you can't please everybody,
you got to do again,
it comes down to that judgment that you
do on the information that you have at that time.
I'm an amateur student of history and, you know,
we talk about now about how dropping the bomb on
Japan how we think
about now is different than how it was then.
President Truman didn't have
the luxury of knowing what we know now.
President Truman had the information
that he had in front of him
right then in the catastrophe reports,
the projections and those things.
He had to make a decision right then.
We can rewrite history all we want to after the fact.
But all you have is the judgment that you have
with the information you have in front of him.
If you don't make a judgment, you've made a judgment.
If you don't act, you've acted and by that I
mean no act is in action in action is status quo.
And so I made a judgment call to run.
And I hope we did some good things.
I hope we did some things that
are positive for the community.
Because I didn't do it by myself.
I did not do any of that by myself.
>> I want to address that quickly.
How is the city government
structured here in Adairsville?
>> City government is with the mayor and
four councilman with the city manager,
with the city manager being
employed by the mayor council.
What's classified in
the Georgia Municipal Association
in those classes that did.
It's called a weak Mayor Strong Council type government.
The only vote that I would have
had was if the council tied.
So as far as being able to give influence to anything,
I could influence, but I
couldn't vote on unless they tied.
I like to think that I influenced
things in a positive way.
Again, I came in in '08
and Allen Halcom came
in at the same time that I did new to the council.
And a lot of the community was divided.
Much like our country is today.
I don't know that we'll ever get
in the United Way again in that regard.
But anyway, our community was divided
and different people pulling in different directions.
And it's like the dog chasing the car.
What do you do when you catch
it? It's like running for election.
What do you do when you elected?
Well, one of the things I knew I needed to do was listen.
Listen in is very important part of communications that
we've lost [NOISE] what I mean is,
I had to learn how things ran within
the government formally and informally.
And by that I mean,
you have formal and informal leaders.
You have a mayor and you have a council?
Are they necessarily leaders in your community?
In a very formal way, yes.
But you also have informal leaders
out there that are influencing things that are
going on and you need to be
listening and knowing where they're coming from.
And one of the things that I learned during
my listening process of
just treading water and figuring out how things work was,
what are the motivations of
some of these informal leaders?
Are there motivations for
the betterment of our community,
are their motivations for
the betterment of themselves
or the entities that they represent.
And so when you can discern that,
you can discern what you need to do
as a formal leader and the influence that you
need to make as a formal leader
to be positive for your community.
What I tried to do, and I hope was a little successful.
And what I tried to talk with the council to
do and tried to talk with the staff at City Hall to do.
We need to be listening to those who have
the best interest of the community at
heart, first and foremost.
That's not to say that you don't listen to
others that have their own interest at heart.
But you've got to you've got to
decide I'm in here and I'm doing this job,
not for Joe Blow or John Doe or Jane Crew.
I'm in here for the betterment of the community.
When you can ground your feet in that,
those other decisions become much easier to make.
And they're difficult.
There are other difficult decisions
that you're going to have to
face because they pulled
from lots of different directions.
>> And did you pursue
specific initiatives objectives as mayor?
>> Well, in one sense, I was a little fortunate.
The community had approved some SPLASH plans and that
the SPLASH plans had
specific projects in place when the money got there.
And again, through some fiscal responsibility,
we worked on the premise.
Let's don't borrow the money to do
the project and pay a portion of that in interest.
Let's get the money, then do the project.
So what's done, it's paid for.
And so in that regard, yes,
I was able to implement
some things that had already been approved.
And that gave me personally
some breathing room in my listening process.
We had some street and sidewalk projects that
had been approved and they came to me and said,
which one you want to do first.
And I said, well, how much money we got?
And so we got enough to do all of them.
I said in order to take the politics
but we've got these other things that we could do too.
The most visible thing, of course,
is street and sidewalks in front of people's houses.
I said in order to take the politics out of it,
let's do all street projects first.
And that way, you can't say, well,
he favored them over them because they're
all done at the same time
because it was living in vehicle.
So we did that.
Some other things that we were able to do,
we had some companies after '08
that was hard hit financially,
and they had to leave our community.
So we had some vacant industrial buildings.
Fortunately, things as
the national economy and the state economy and
the local northwest Georgia economy
climbed out of that great recession.
We were able to fill up every vacant building
in the community from an economic standpoint.
I count that as a huge achievement.
I'm pulling this number out of the air.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 350-400 jobs.
Vista Metals came in and purchased the property
that had been vacated
from a company that
had just been there about two or three years.
Home legends came in and purchased
a property near Food line
from a company that had gone out.
Dr. Hearst came in the Australian company
and took the building over
that a company had left in the spec building.
We have some companies that came in out on
Interstate that's up behind quick trip,
those names don't come to me right now.
Just different ones and like I say,
somewhere in the neighborhood of
350-400 jobs over about a 3-5 year period.
For a community liked that's pretty big.
And then we got the shot Plant announcement.
And that came in
August of '13 after the tornado hits in January of '13.
That was big.
I talked about the post office truck being in
front of people's houses after a disaster.
We've been through that disaster tornado.
So that was a shot in the arm,
in my opinion, for our community.
When it's at capacity,
it's projected to be somewhere able
to in that one facility,
5-600 jobs. So that's big.
When you go back and you talk about
going through school and you talk about some
of your earlier questions about people who want to go to
college and what all of
us want our children to do
and what we all want to do is be to live
and work and play in a community that's healthy.
It has activities that is beautiful,
has amenities that families can enjoy.
These type of economic projects
help create those possibilities.
And I said all that to
say when we've got
kids that are coming out of school now,
they're not necessarily going to have to go to Atlanta,
Greenville South Carolina,
Birmingham, Alabama, to get a job.
They're going to be able to do that here.
And as I said, after
the announcement that Shaw was coming,
what people need to be doing now is preparing
for those jobs because the jobs
that Shaw now aren't the jobs that
Shaw had in 1960, 1970.
They're much more modern and you've got to
have training for those jobs.
And so that's what you need to be
give if that's what your plan is.
Because the job market,
I hear a lot of people talk about unemployment today.
Well, they're not riding down the same streets
I'm riding because what I see
is help wanting hiring.
Those type of signs are out there.
Now, is it a job that an individual might want?
Well, none of us started at the top.
When I started at the post office
some 30 years ago.
I started as PTF.
I'm a postmaster now, but
I didn't start out as a postmaster.
I had to learn what needed to be
done at the job that I was at.
And while that might not be
the job that you want when you see that
hiring or help wanted
sign in front of a specific business,
you can do that job until you
get the skills needed to do a better job.
But the easiest way to get a job is to have a job.
I've heard that all.
And I know I'm rambling with your question.
>> Well, how did you go out of office?
>> My son had a pretty serious medical condition.
And at the time that he was diagnosed,
we did not know the amount of
time and energy we would have to put into that situation.
In one sense, there was a shock on a personal level.
And my thought was, this is my son.
I only to got one, and whatever I can do to
make this situation better, I've got to do that.
And yet I say it now in a laughing manner.
I know it was, we had just hired a new city manager.
And I missed the opportunity
of getting to work with her
because I think she's doing a great job,
and she's got a difficult job.
But I was hopefully using
some positive influence in her being here.
But she had been hired a month or two and was
transitioning from an interim city manager to
her job when I announced my resignation.
It self-serve me, I know.
But I chose my son.
I did not feel that I could
devote my thought process
on what I thought it was going to
be needed to make his situation
better and divide that thought process
with the energy that it took to be mayor.
Again, I know that's selfish.
But given the situation,
I would've done it again.
I mean, same.
And it also illustrates the point of one of
the nepotism laws because
the natural inclination is to help your family.
>> Well, can you tell me about your interest
in historic preservation in the Dyersville?
>> Well, I own one of the buildings on the square
through an uncle who I inherited from.
He gave it to me.
My grandfather bought the building in
'78 the year that my wife and I got married.
And it's an old hardware.
When I was a kid, it was a hardware store.
But my granddad bought it in '78 and when he passed away,
of course, went to my grandmother,
when my grandmother passed away,
she left it to my Uncle Raymond.
And Raymond rehab the building in '99 and 2000,
top to bottom in and
out sprinkler system, the whole nine yards.
But I actually have a interest in
historic preservation that goes beyond that.
That's my interest in historic downtown
at Dyersville from
a financial perspective as
well as a aesthetic perspective.
As you've probably mentioned,
I've got documents when
my grandfather bought a house in 1932,
when he borrowed the money from
whatever the program was for World War I veterans.
I live in a house that was built in '38.
We bought this house 16 years ago this past Monday
on Halloween day the year 2000.
And we do a little something to it all the time.
We've got a project going in the living room right now.
I like to say or I have
made the comments to my close friends.
I was born in the wrong century.
I'd like to have been born in the 1800s
instead of the 1900s because I like old things.
I'm not real good on modern technology.
I wouldn't know how to set up the camera,
you just set up.
And probably the scary part is, I don't want to know.
I like old trucks.
I like old people.
I like knowing when somebody tells me
the most important thing that I think that we have
lost as a society is
when somebody tells me that they're going
to do something that they do it,
and they don't waver in that.
Or if they can't do it,
let me know ahead of time
so that I can make arrangements.
What my grandmother and
my grandfather on my father's side instilled in me,
is if you're going to say
you're going to do something, do it.
If I'm going to be at work at
eight o'clock in the morning, I'm going to be there.
If I'm going to meet you at 2:30,
come hell or high water, I'm going to be here.
Or I'm going to let you know why I can't
be here one or the other.
I'm not wanting to diss anybody in that regard.
But I don't know the word.
I guess the word might be integrity.
You lose a sense of integrity
when you don't keep your word,
and I don't want to lose that.
That's important stuff.
Go back to my resignation as mayor.
To me, it was the decision from
a community standpoint of can
I give what I need to give to
my community and what I need to give to my son.
I couldn't do that. I didn't think I could do that.
So go back to my comments
about in my listening phase
of being mayor about motivations,
is it better for the community
or is it better for the individual?
I made a choice.
To me, it was better for the community
to know that I couldn't be there on
certain situations because I might have
to be with my son on certain situations.
Now, people can disagree with that, that's fine.
But for me for my integrity,
I couldn't commit to both.
And so that's the reason
I say in a funny way, that is integrity.
Does that make sense?
I don't know what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to make
you understand or make
whoever listens to this understand,
integrity is important part of what we do in life.
And if we lose integrity, we don't have much left.
The saying my word is my bond.
We've lost a lot of that and
we've got to try to get that back some
way or another. Again, I'm ready.
>> Did you get a lot of blow back?
>> I got a lot of questions.
I'm not going to say blow back.
No one would come to my face
and I had no one come to my face.
I had a lot of people that questioned me.
Surprisingly to me,
of course, it was not a pleasant time.
I got a lot of notes,
a lot of handwritten notes.
Thanking me for my efforts with the community.
I'm sure some of that was probably
sympathetic because of our situation personally.
But I like to think some of
it was because of what I did for the community.
Newspaper reporters wanted to
know more than I was wanting
to let out because my son was at the time, 21-years-old.
While I'm not under the restrictions of HIPAA laws,
it was a medical situation for him.
And it was a situation
that if somebody wanted to say something,
it should be him to say it and not necessarily me.
My reason for resigning
was I wanted to be able to help him.
That didn't mean I had to tell
people what his situation was.
But I have newspaper reporters comments
say, why did you do that?
And I would just say, I resigned.
And of course, they wanted more.
As newspaper folks do.
And so I'm sure that folks outside of
my circle of friends or
outside of people who have knowledge of me,
might have big questions about that.
But at the time then and my thinking now
is when you're dealing with your family and if
your family is what you've
decided is the most important thing to deal with,
which I hope everybody thinks that,
you can't let that influence that decision.
That goes back to that integrity issue.
I had to be able to say no.
And whatever hit me in whichever way it
hit me, let it slide off.
And that's what I did.
>> Well, I want you to talk about some of
the residents of Adairsville you previously mentioned.
So who was Lloyd Mauldin?
>> Lloyd Mauldin run a grocery store at the corner.
When you go out King Street,
on the left it's a vacant lot now.
He had a grocery store meat market.
And lots of folks talked about
the last good steak that they had Lloyd Mauldin cooked,
because he had a meat market in the back.
And when I was a kid, a friend of mine and I,
they would print flyers about this size,
about eight-and-a-half [inaudible] by 11.
Again, Tri-State was the shirt maker, and Cummin,
Chenille was the other employer,
Chenille mill out there.
And people came and
parked their cars in their parking lot.
Well, Mark and I would go leave
the weekly specials behind their windshield wipers.
And Mr. Mauldin was a quiet man.
After I went to work for the post office,
he told me the story,
and I was out loading up one morning to go on my route,
and he came up and we were talking,
and he said, "I was a substitute mail carrier one time."
I said, "I didn't know that, Mr.
Mauldin." He said, "Yeah,
I was a substitute mail carrier for
Regan Barton," and said
Regan's route went up
Old Dixie Highway and said
stopped at Burt Chambly's house.
And said Mr. Burt Chambly
had a subscription to the Carnesville paper, and said,
of course, being the substitute mail carrier,
I wasn't as familiar with the route
and the time it took up to put the mail up
to pull it down in order to get it on the route.
And so I was a little bit later
than Regan was as far as delivering the mail.
And said one time, Mr. Burt Chambly met me
at the box as I was delivering a mail and said,
"Mauldin, Regan Barton
always has this paper here at such and such a time."
And said, "Well, Mr. Chambly, I'm sorry,
I run a little bit later than he does."
He said, Mr. Chambly looked at me and said,
"You know I can have your job over this, don't you?"
He said, I just looked at him and said,
"Well, Mr. Chambly,
you wouldn't have very much then."
And so Mr. Mauldin's son,
Ballard, is in Cartersville.
They only had one child,
he and Pauline. He was a great man.
She was a great lady. And their son went to
Georgia Tech and head of chemical products.
He might be retired now.
I haven't seen Ballard in a year or so,
but he might be retired now.
But they were the salt of the earth kind of people.
They just ran a small business,
saved their money, worked hard,
and just salt of the earth kind of people.
>> Who was Hill Johnson?
>> Hill Johnson, his wife,
Martha, was on the Planning
and Zoning Commission here in town.
She worked for Georgia Power.
He worked for [inaudible] in Rome.
They lived over here on
Summer Street next to Kenny and Linda Bass.
He was on the board of
directors at the bank for many, many years.
He was a deacon at the Adairsville Baptist Church.
Hill Johnson was a very quiet man, a short man.
About my height, maybe a little shorter than I am.
And tall in stature, that type of individual.
He was treasurer at the church for many, many years.
He was one of those type of people when you were in
a deacon's meeting with him or a civic meeting with him,
he's also in the Lion's Club for many years.
He didn't say much.
He didn't speak much,
but he was the type of individual that when he spoke,
you leaned a little closer to hear what he
had to say because what he had to say was important.
What he had to say was relevant to the situation,
and he had good judgment.
He had integrity.
And those are things that I learned from Hill Johnson.
That it's not always what you say,
a lot of times it's what you listen to,
and how you process what other people are trying to
say to you in order to have a response that's positive.
And a lot of that I learned from Hill Johnson.
>> What about Willis Boyd?
>> Willis Boyd, called him chief.
I'm sure that during some interviews,
you all have ran across his name more than a time or two.
Willis Boyd, I mentioned earlier,
my grandmother's father was Mr. Boyd's foreman.
The Boyd that he was foreman for was Willis Boyd's daddy.
And Mr. Boyd was a World War I veteran.
Mr. Boyd started the Boy Scout troupe in
Adairsville somewhere between,
I guess, 1915 and 1920.
Because he had seen the scouts and
the positive things that they had when he was overseas.
Mr. Boyd was an officer
in Word War I. I don't know specifically.
I've got some papers in there that could,
I know, let me know what that is.
He wrote letters to
my grandparents when he
was in Dublin at the veterans home down there,
that I've still got the originals of,
some of which you all have scanned.
He had a house in town, the Boyd house,
which is at the corner of Summer Street and Main Street.
It's right on the south side of town.
And the stories that I've
always heard about it and stories that he's
relayed was his father
built a house because when he would come to town,
in those days we didn't have car,
you didn't just run down
the mountain, that kind of thing.
You had to hook up a wagon, that kind of stuff.
And so when he come to town,
he might come to town and stay
two or three days to conduct
business or whatever he was conducting.
And then he had a house up on his farm.
And the house up on the farm is called High Lonesome.
I don't ever remember a name for the house in town.
But what I'm trying to get to is you could sit on
the porch on the house in
town and see the house
at High Lonesome up on the mountain,
and you sit at the porch, of course,
on the house at High Lonesome and see the house in town.
And I always thought that was a neat story,
neat thing to have.
There's another story related to that,
related to my grandmother.
And I just don't recall Chief Boyd's daddy's name,
but when my grandmother was a girl,
she, of course, lived on the Boyd place.
And Mr. Boyd had caught a train and gone out to Texas to
buy white-faced Hereford bull,
because he was working to improve his herd, I'm sure.
And so when he got back to Adairsville,
my grandmother and her father met Mr.
Boyd to take the bull
back up on the mountain to the farm.
And my grandmother said as they were putting
the bull in the barn,
Mr. Boyd looked at me and said,
"Bertha, if the first calf off of
this bull is a bull calf,
I'm going to give it to you because you met me."
He must have had a soft place in his heart for her.
He said, "But if it's
a heifer calf, I'm going to keep it."
It just so happens the first calf
off that bowl was
a bull calf and he gave it to my grandmother.
And my grandmother kept it,
I guess, as a pet, I guess,
in a funny sort of way,
until after she and my grandfather got married.
This is one of the stories she
told me when she was sick,
when I told you the earlier story about playing
with the children up on the mountain.
This is another one of those stories.
And she said after we got married,
we still had that bull.
And said at the time I was
working at the mills in Shannon,
would have to drive back and forth to the mills
in Shannon to work, cotton mills.
And said I came home one day and said
Clifford had butchered that calf and sold the meat.
And she said, I was so mad at him.
Said I didn't speak to him for two weeks.
But that's an interesting family story.
I'm trying to think of another story.
This is a very cool story.
She said while they were on that farm,
they had peach orchards up there.
At the time, Adairsville was a peach shipping capital of
the world was the PR statement that they had.
And I'm sure they shipped a lot of peaches.
But she said she and her older sister,
Aunt Beulla, was picking peaches in the peach orchard.
And said they heard something
and then they saw something in the sky.
And said they ran to the house to
their mother, because they didn't know what it was.
And that was the first plane that she'd ever seen.
And I sat with her when
she saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.
And I've always said that it'd be
hard-pressed for any generation
to see that much progress in a lifetime,
to see a plane coming across
and being afraid because of not knowing what it was.
And then seeing somebody walk on
the moon. It's going to be hard-pressed.
>> Is High Lonesome still there?
>> Hone Lonesome's still there. Jimmy Boyd lives there.
It's a grandson, still lives there.
>> So when I was preparing to come interview you,
you had mentioned that I could ask
anybody in town or on the street,
where do you live, and they would know.
So with that in mind,
what does living in Adairsville today mean to you?
>> Well, when you get to be older,
a lot of it's memories. A lot of it.
You think about people
that have influenced your life,
that have encouraged you.
You think about structures the downtown area,
historic homes, about the people who lived in those homes.
And you have to think about change.
And by that I mean,
the only thing we know in life for
sure is it's going to change.
We that's from a family medical situation,
or that's a death in the family,
where that's a piece of property being developed,
where that's different style of
automobile or now we
talk about automobiles that drive themselves.
All we know is it's going to change.
We talk about my grandmother who saw
a plane coming across that she ran
from to a man walking on the moon.
That's change.
So when I think about living in
a D And I think about where I came
from and what I have lived through to
this point because I
have a lot of living I plan to do, by the way.
The word change is never far from that thought.
We're going to see more change in
this community in the next five years,
I say, and we've probably seen in the previous 30 years.
And I say that because of a highway that's been for.
That's going to bring tremendous change.
It's going to bring tremendous opportunities
for developers,
for people to get jobs for lots of different things
for those who currently live in the community.
The challenge is in that change,
do we let those outside influences change us or do we
take a step forward and mold
the change so that enhances us as a community.
And as a community, you drill it down to individuals.
By that I think about our school system
is much better than what it was when I grew up.
Got more resources.
We've got a new mile school,
we've got a new high school.
We've got a new elementary school about to be built.
These things will be institutions within our community is
going to last the next 30-40 years
from an education standpoint.
But what is education?
Education is people coming through that process,
people coming through that institution those buildings,
through those classrooms, at the end of the day,
there's going to be a point
where they're complete with that.
So what are they going to do next?
And I know I'm rambling, but there's
an organization in my rambling in
my mind, if nobody else in mind.
One of the things I see living in a dairf now,
is a lot of kids, a lot of students
make the choice not to complete school high school.
I said earlier, young and dumb.
That could be from a selfish standpoint,
could be from my family situation,
could be from lots of different situations.
So then they get,
they're16, 17, 18 years old and they say,
well, I don't want to finish this.
Or they or they complete school and say,
I don't want to do anything else.
I'll just want to get a job.
Goes back to my earlier comment about those in my class.
Did they attend school to enhance
their other vocational aspirations
after we got out of school and that type of question.
I'm saying all that say this.
One of the things I would like to see as a community
is a local GED program
is helping in that regard for those folks that at 16,
17 18, said, I don't want any more school,
and then they realize they can't get
any job unless they've got at least a GED.
Important important program.
Then you've got again,
folks that have graduated and say, well,
this is it, and then they realized there's no advancement.
Unless I can improve
my skills and in order to improve my skills.
I've got to go to Kennisaw,
which is 35 miles away.
I've got to go to Floyd and
Card which is 20 miles away or
Georgia Northwestern, which is in County.
What one of the things I'd like to see is
some satellite classroom with
the technical slash college university system schools
within our community because not everybody
has the resources to provide for
that transportation and it's
disingenuous to expect that they do.
When a lot of them are walking on the on
the sidewalks because they
don't have the financial resources to make those trips.
So that's the thing that I'd like to see.
I think would be a big improvement for our community.
We'll see where that goes.
There's conversations, I'm sure,
besides my individual conversation to that regard,
because I've put that out there
since community meetings and things of that nature.
But change in being able to adapt yourself and hopefully
mode your community so that
the outside fluences don't bring
change that's not a positive change.
It's one thing that I think about
leaving an Adirll currently.
I think about a lot of
times we as a community and lots of communities,
not just adair lots of communities.
They react instead of
plan and when they
should be planning instead of
reacting because if you do the plan,
you don't have to react to move forward?
That's another thing I
think about living currently in at airs.
I think we've got a good core of people,
a good city government staff
that's interested in making positive change and making
sure that the community values the transparency
that they've been having with
community meetings
over the last couple of years is a very good thing.
They're getting that feedback as opposed
to supposing what the feedback is.
They're actually getting direct feedback.
So that's a good thing.
Very good thing.
>> Can you account for me the story involving
Karl Holleran that we
spoke about before I turned the camera on?
>> The story. I can't remember the story.
>> Football parking in your driveway?
[LAUGHTER].
>> With my son?
>> Correct.
>> Yes. Carl and I had been over
to do some work on
his mother's grave and passed away prior to that.
And we came back home.
We'd left before the ball game
and started before they were locked
traffic on the street out there.
And when we came back home,
I asked my wife where all these car because the driveway
was pulled the east side driveway, it was double.
I mean, he had to park double on that side.
And on the West side,
he had a single lane because I could pull
my truck into the garage.
And so Carl and I walked in because my wife was
fed fixed upper for us
and Carl was going to equally say that.
And I asked my wife, I said,
"Hey Jessie, where all these cars from?"
And she said, "I don't know,
but Avery got $3 out of every one them."
[LAUGHTER]
>> And this is because
the football field at that time, they were still being.
>> The ball game was still being played there.
>> And it's located across the street from your home?
>> From my house.
Yes. Shanley Field's, is the name of the field.
After King Shanley.
At the time they had rebuilt the school.
Again, I had talked about the class of
'75 and '76 being, I was from the old auditorium.
My wife graduated in the new auditorium.
But when they built a new school,
they built that football field.
And they named it Shanley Field for King Shanley
because at the time he
was chairman of the school board for the county.
And that's the reason they named it Shanley Field.
>> So to finish up, can you tell
me about your family today,
your wife and your children?
>> I have wife, Angie Holcomb King.
We've been married since November of 25th of '78,
we'll soon be celebrating an anniversary
somewhat 38 years, I think that would be.
And one son James Avery King was born in 1993.
Atlanta Bray Beth much I'll expose at 14 is two.
John Smas was pitching.
He's 23, goes to
University of North Georgia at Dahlonega.
He'll be graduating Spring of May of 2017,
with a degree in computer science,
and he plans to get his master's degree,
and he's doing very well.
>> Wonderful. Well, Mr. King,
if you have nothing else you'd like to add.
>> If you don't mind let me look at my note here
because I did jot down a few minutes.
>> Please.
>> One of the things that we did not get into
a lot, was when the tornado hit.
At that time, I was at the post office in Kingston.
I had been assigned as an OSE down there.
And our city manager at time was Pat Crook.
And we knew bad weather was coming in,
we saw the weather reports.
And I got a call in the midmorning.
That the storm hit Adairsville.
And of course, I had
responsibility to post office where I was at.
Kingston is about 10 or 12 miles
south of here on Hall Station Road.
And I had people out on the road.
Carriers out on the road. Rural carriers.
And so one of those routes joins an Adairsville route.
And so I was concerned about her on the route,
knowing that the storms were coming
through and then Pat like I say, called about midmorning.
And so I called that carrier and told
the carrier that I was responsible for him.
Be careful. There are storms out.
One has hit has Adairsville.
Well, a few minutes later, Pat called me back
and then she was
able to have gotten out to see what was going on.
And she said, this is bad.
And I said, well, Pat,
I'll be up there as soon as I get there.
And so I made some arrangements where I was at
and started coming up the road.
And I could tell where the scout
was down here on Hall Station Road,
that that was the beginning of the storm.
And I didn't know exactly what direction was.
I came up Hall Station Road
and made a ride in front of the city shop
and went out West George
hit George and then hit
East George and went to the post office.
And it was pouring buckets of rain.
And so of course,
that's the post office that I've
worked at for many years.
And I left my vehicle there
and some of the folks in the office was saying,
traffic was tied up, chaos.
Traffic was tied up out on
the highway because at that time,
the storm had already gone through
and news outlets were saying,
that is a tornado here at Adairsville.
Well, some of the folks
in the office had had some feedback
about what some of the damage was.
And you could look out the front of
the post office and see how the traffic was tied up.
And so I called the local radio stations.
When I said, local, Carl Him
was the most local station.
And at that time,
there's great a local guy that
worked at the radio station in room.
I called both of them and told
them what we needed for people to stay home for
our roads to be where
emergency vehicles and utility crews
could get to where the damage was.
It is essential. And I did that.
And then I started walking toward
40 from where the post office is out to where
the Dookie Plant is
and I have an uncle who's got a farm on the right there,
that's the Brickhouse for Clan [inaudible].
As I started walking,
I got to about where the Bank OZKs is.
And you could see power lines
everywhere, power post snapped.
And I got to the Dookie,
the east end of that building was gone.
And I didn't know how many lines were lost.
Fortunately no lives were lost in that building.
There were some injuries, but no lives were lost.
Some people had gone,
the storm had hit and
some people got in the north side of
bank building and some people got in
a safe room in the Dookie Plant itself.
And at the truck stop that was on the south side of 140,
there were tractor trailer flipped over on the side.
Just lots of damage.
Live wires flickering,
the power lines flickering, that stuff.
So over the course of the next several days,
is a clean up time, restoration time.
And they set up a command post
there on 41 because then when I
got through there and saw that people were
okay and things were good,
I walked back, got my car, couldn't go anywhere.
So I left my car at post office and started
walking south on 41.
And I saw where the damage had hit.
There's a supermarket was rubble.
The old gulf station was rubble across the street,
there was rubble, an old motel.
And that's where they had set up a command post.
And Steve had just
become county commissioner and
he was actually that morning.
He was with the road superintendent,
the County Road Superintendent
and the Road superintendent were just showing him
different things and and
they made their way to the command post.
And he was so both of them
so helpful. They said, whatever you need.
So we had a started cleanup crews,
the county sent cleanup crews.
They had National Guard people come in to help clean up,
a major cleanup clear.
At the vacant lot at the end of this street,
we had a guy set up a chipper
and all the tree debris
we brought there and they run that chipper.
We had a mountain of chips there just from the debris.
Everybody was we had people come in.
That following Saturday,
it was just descended upon us.
People just coming to help.
Individuals coming to help had an army.
My concern was going to have
chainsaw run where people
doing stuff going to have kids run everywhere.
Somebody's going to get to the arm hack.
I think we had a splinter.
Cardwell Medical Center sent up a team,
think Floyd sent a team
just in case they were those type things happened.
Very well coordinated.
We had a group come in called the Ex-military.
But they set up and they put us in
coordinates sector segments and
dispatch these volunteers to these various locations.
And they had their people there to coordinate
those efforts. Very helpful.
Various food vendors,
crystal different ones would come in and they would set
up portable food things
for the volunteers and didn't charge them anything.
Just an amazing thing to be a part of,
more amazing to observe.
We have one person that was
killed probably as a result
of a tree falling on a mobile home.
Other than that cuts and bruises.
Pretty powerful F three tornadoes
so we're pretty fortunate in that regard.
But the Faith Based Community
responded in a spectacular way.
In fact, we became a model for
the Georgia Emergency Management Association
to use when disasters hit
as far as messing the Faith Based Community
with the government resources huge.
We've had a water tank that had gotten hit
on the near Iron Mountain Road,
two mill gallo water tank.
The people who constructed that water tank,
they've been in the water tank business some 60 years,
build them all over the south all over the Carribean..
They've had them exposed
to hurricanes, lots of different things.
They said that's the first one they've
ever had damaged in that regard.
We had to build a new two mill gallo water tank.
And so we had
crews come in gas crews to
come in because we're a natural gas provider,
we had crews to come in to help in that regard,
just making sure that people's houses didn't
explode because you had gas lines that were disrupted.
I had lots and lots of help.
But that goes back to the fact
that when other communities need help,
you got to reach out to those
because it's a two way street.
But in my tenure, in my lifetime,
that was probably the most dynamic thing
to get a community as far as starting.
After the fact, after we got to clean up done,
after we got people's damaged houses,
we implemented some things because we got people.
We started have people from tucks from Florida.
These contractors come in,
they want to rip people off.
So we have to implement some things to make sure
that as much as we could to make sure that didn't happen.
But then after we got to clean up done,
we had lots of, again,
faith based volunteers to come in
and a lot of people's living situations
actually improved because of
that incident because where
they had might have had substandard housing.
These faith based people
cleaned up a lot and built new housing,
and they had a house that they could
had a good house to live in,
and they didn't have a payment for.
So in some sense, some things can improve.
It's go back to the word change and
change has to do with how we interpret
it and how positively.
We could have dug our hands in the sand and said,
this tornado was going to set us back. We didn't do that.
They're gritty, they're resilient.
And they went to
work and rebuild a good portion of opportunity.
Again, I go back.
I said, their supermarket was interrupted,
there's a brand new convenience store in.
An asset to any community from that standpoint.
That guy didn't have to make
that reinvestment in that community.
Darky, the one I talked about earlier,
a third of the east end of that building was blown away.
They didn't have to reinvest back in this community.
They saw something I
believe that sometimes we don't see in
ourselves because these are
outside entities that invested in our community.
And that what they saw
was that this is a good place to be.
And these are good people to work with.
And when I think about living in Adairsville now,
I reinforce that thought.
This is a good place to be and these are good people to
live with. That's how you can ask for.
>> Thank you very much, Mr. Chen.
>> Thank you.