The Profundity of Having Brothers
We all four grew up in Atlanta, my three brothers and I. We grew up in a suburban residential neighborhood on Piedmont Road near the corner of Peachtree & Piedmont. The celebrities on our stretch of Piedmont were The Atlanta Constitution’s editor, Ralph McGill, and Frank Gordy, who started and ran The Varsity restaurant, starting from when he was a student at Georgia Tech.
In our adult career years, we all branched out from Atlanta. In between stints in other settings, some as far away as California and France, I always managed to come back to Atlanta. In contrast, my three brothers after college were mostly back just for special occasions. The oldest, now 86 years old, lives with his wife in Denver. The next brother, age 83, lives with his wife in St. Louis. I’m number three, now 81 and, with my wife, in Atlanta. And my younger brother, age 75, lives with his wife in South Royalton, Vermont (home of the Vermont Law School).
This past week eight of us – brothers and wives – spent three full days together in St. Louis, something we’ve tried to do annually over the past two decades in one of our cities or the other. This seemed to be an especially rich time, sharing walks and food together, with no other agenda really but to love each other and to sense where each person is. We used to evaluate each other by asking, “What have you read lately?” or “What movies have you seen recently?” Those judgements seemed unnecessary this past week; we saw the hours we had together as precious. Maybe it was an unspoken sense that we may not have each other in this way forever. For the longest stretch of one’s life there is the subconscious sense that we will live in this realm forever. Then the realization comes that such is not likely so.
Here are a few excerpts from my memoir, Don’t Miss the Miracles,[1] that will give you a sense of just how close we were as brothers growing up:
· From the time I can remember, Dick was always to me a Greek god. I know that was a blessing because I always admired him as someone to emulate. He appeared to me, five and a half years younger, to be handsome, built, and serious. We, his younger brothers, respected him. (32)
· I didn’t want to disappoint Dick; I feared that more than letting our parents down. (32)
· Dick set the example for the three of us who followed behind him of being modest about his athleticism and achievements; and he placed a high priority on sportsmanship. (33)
· I wish I had been as good a big brother to Warren as Dillon was to me. I’m sure it must have existed, but I don’t remember discord between Dillon and me …. he always seemed glad to have me tag along. When his friends would come over from school in my early double-digit youth, he was always glad to include me in touch football games or whatever they might be up to. (39)
· I followed Dick and Dillon to Vanderbilt. (41)
· Dillon and I ran Vanderbilt track together for the two years we overlapped as Vanderbilt students. (41)
· Upon my 1962 Vanderbilt graduation, I headed to NYC—my first time there—to stay a few days with Dillon. (41)
· We honestly couldn’t tell any stronger love from Mom or Dad for any one of us over the others. There was great comfort for us brothers in that fact, and that may have contributed to why we never fought. (44)
· Warren became a terrific little brother. We played together hour upon hour …. We shared the big room across the back of the house. (44)
· Warren and I each had our own shotguns and would go hunting together some in the winters. (45)
These childhood and pre-marriage years we had together have, I believe, given us brothers strength and confidence to go our separate adult ways, pursuing our careers and other interests, while keeping up with each other, if even from a distance. Now, even more than ever, we understand the profundity of BROTHERHOOD, and we don’t want to let it go.
[1] See chuckjohnstonmemoir.com for access to the book.
Shout-out to Jim McCallie
College fraternities are exclusionary by intention. I’m making these assessments from a perspective of sixty years ago (Vandy Phi 1962). It now dawns on me that that sense of being wanted, of being recruited, of being included is a lot of what hooks us in. I particularly remember the meals – breakfast lunch and supper – that were shared with those we were closest to on campus. After noon lunch we would often pull out the cards and play hearts until we had to break it up and head out to a 1 o’clock class. For me supper came after a day of classes and track practice; and it was the one hour all day that I didn’t have to think about assignments due or other stresses. Lingering as long as I could over the meal, I would finally tear myself loose to head to the library and try to stay awake over my studies.
My blood brother and fraternity brother Dillon, two years ahead of me, arranged for me to have Jim McCallie as my “big brother” in the fraternity. I frequently use the expression of “don’t miss the miracles;” well, this was a miracle at the time and for the rest of my professional career in education. I use the term arranged in explaining Dillon arranging for Jim to be my “big brother.” Jim, ten years later, arranged my marriage. I’ll explain that below.
I’d like to draw a few paragraphs out of my memoir[1] to show how important Jim McCallie has been to me:
McCallie, a boys’ school, was established in 1905 and quickly became one of the premier prep schools in the South, known for its academics and its character building. I signed a contract there for my first adult job, this in my last Vanderbilt winter. I was headed to McCallie for that 1962-63 school year. The co-headmaster responsible for hiring, Dr. Bob McCallie, was father of my fraternity “big brother,” which may have helped me get that job.[2]
That last phrase above about “might have” was written with tongue in cheek. I had nothing to distinguish myself from others in the stack of applications that must have been on Dr. Bob’s desk. It was only Jim’s word to his father that gave me that job. Talk about God’s plan: how different my career would have been if it weren’t for starting out at McCallie.
It was a full life with lots of bonding with an all-male student body. I worked hard; I earned $312 per month. There was no pampering of teachers, but neither did I hear teachers complaining. Every job hereafter I compared to my initial two years (and three summers) at the outset of my fifty years in education. I was imprinted with the sheer joy of how school is done well. I can’t imagine a better place for an eager young man to start his teaching career than McCallie School.[3]
I had vowed that I would never leave the classroom & sports field for an administrative job in education. In ignorance, this is what I said to myself: “If I wanted a desk job, I’d go into business.” Jim was God’s instrument for saying to me, “Somebody has to lead. It will never be as much fun as teaching and coaching, but it’s what I’m calling you to do”. Here is how Jim pulled it off:
[He] cleared with his Uncle, Dr. Pressley his visit with me, and arranged for us to meet in Westminster’s Carlyle Fraser Library after hours. “Chuck, I’ve been hired to start a new school and I want you to come and help me.”
“Wow, that’s exciting for you, Jimmy. So, you’ll be a headmaster. Congratulations! I don’t know about me, but I’m excited for you.”
“Thank you. But I want you to come and help me. It will be hard work, and I need you to do it with me. I can’t pay you much, but you can be the assistant headmaster.”
He talked about Columbus, Georgia, the site of this newly-named Brookstone School, as a sophisticated small city with many affluent prep school and Ivy League graduates who were serving on the Brookstone board. The account of that evening ends thusly:
At that he spread out a big roll of architectural drawings. He treated the plans with as much excitement as he would have had if he were showing me finished buildings with lush landscaping in place. I couldn’t see it, but Jim surely could.
Finally, without being coy, I said, “I can’t resist, Jim. I like the idea of helping start something, and I’d love nothing better than to work with you. I guess I’m a sucker for adventure.”[4]
So, it seems that Jim McCallie has been a MAJOR influence on my 50-year-career in education. But I know that you, the reader, are going to balk at the idea that he also set me up for an arranged marriage; but it’s true, and this is how it happened:
In the summer before the school’s second year, when I first saw the woman that Jim was interviewing for an art teaching position, I thought she was too pretty to have much to her.
Later Jim said during our afternoon tennis match, “Chuck, this is the hire I am most excited about. Come on, give me some credit for having discernment about people. I hired you, didn’t I.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. Of course I trust you. I just thought maybe you were swayed because she had been ‘Miss Alabama,’ or something like that. I should give you more credit.”
“No, she wasn’t ‘Miss Alabama,’ but I see what you mean. It’s probably only because she didn’t enter the competition. So, Chuck, you only had brothers growing up, right? So, you don’t know much about women, do you? You’ve judged wrong on this one.” … Such was my introduction to JoElyn Jones, in the hot summer of 1970. Little did I appreciate that as pleased as Jim was to hire a really qualified middle school art teacher, he was more excited that he might just have found a wife for his little brother, for whom he felt quite responsible.[5]
At age 29, I had not outgrown my fear of calling a girl and asking for a date, but within the first three or four weeks of the school year, I felt emboldened to call JoElyn:
I called JoElyn from New York where I was attending an SSAT Conference. I thought she would be impressed by my calling from New York. In the ’60s all phones were “land lines” and you made special arrangements and paid extra fees for long-distance calls. We had a conversation full of laughs at the end of which I asked her if she would like to go out with me that coming weekend. She readily said “yes.” This was unlike any interaction with a girl I had ever had, particularly one so pretty.[6]
JoElyn and I were married June 12 at the end of that school year, not by a marriage arranged by our parents, but one arranged by Jim McCallie. Fifty years for me in education and fifty years of marriage, and Jim has been at the center of both.
[1] See chuckjohnstonmemoir.com for the book’s website.
[2] Don’t Miss the Miracles, page 81
[3] Ibid, page 82
[4] Ibid, page 93
[5] Ibid, pages 95-96
[6] Ibid, page 97
Martha Berry 80 Years after her Passing
The moving of people in the early dawn light towards a stone building emitting the aroma of baking biscuits and hot coffee felt like a scene from a movie of Amish men and women moving in the semi-dark of morning towards a barn raising. This past Saturday, May 21, 2022, JoElyn and I were joined on the Berry College campus (Rome, GA) by two of our daughters Jane & Evelyn Anne and son-in-law Terrell Gilbert for a meeting of the Berry Breakfast Club. We were honored guests along with Comer and Sally Yates, back to where Comer and I had served as boarding school masters back in the 1970’s.
The 80 or 90 men and women assembled were alumni of Berry Academy or its predecessor schools started by Martha Berry in the early 1900s. There truly is something special about Berry people. Ever so many made us feel an intimate part of the group. Many came to Berry out of hardship situations. Their stories of a place creating a life-changing experience were more profound than I would hear from any of the other schools where I have served.
Bill Thornton was among the first to greet us; it was he who had arranged for Comer and me to be honored with the Outstanding Faculty/Staff Award. He had served with us “back in the day” as Dean of Students. He is now 88 years old, bald, tanned and really fit looking. He’s an active Pickleball player – a role model to which some of us younger might aspire.
I was 33 years old, JoElyn was 28, and we had been married 3 years when we moved from Columbus, Georgia, to Rome, Georgia, for me to become headmaster of Berry Academy. When I wrote my memoir Don’t Miss the Miracles, memories of our Berry days came flooding back:
I relished the lore of Martha Berry. She was the most alive historic figure I have ever known. I probably learned more about fund raising from her than from anyone else, before or since. Miracle in the Mountains, the film about her starting the school, thrilled me every time I watched it.
In one scene she was talking to the mountain folks who would come themselves and
bring their children every Sunday afternoon for “Sunday school.” Out of this grew the Berry Schools. But in the film was this exchange between Martha Berry and one of the mountain men who spoke slowly with heavy mountain accent:
First spoke Martha to those sitting in the little Sunday School building
with clapboard sides and a shingled roof. “Now, folks, you know we have a leak in the roof of this little Sunday School building. So, this coming Saturday I want some volunteers to come and help repair the roof.”
Then one of the kindly mountain men spoke up: “Miss Martheee, iffen it don’t
rain, we won’t need to repair the roof. And iffen it do rain, we can’t fix it.” Even
today JoElyn and I will bring up this exchange in the film as relates to some
mangling of logic in something going on around us[1].
Here are two more paragraphs from Don’t Miss the Miracles about our Berry experience:
Pregnant JoElyn and I moved into the headmaster’s cottage in late June 1974.
Jane was born August 5th and spent the first six years of her life thinking it natural
to have horses she could go pet at any time, fields and lakes and waterwheels, and
a swan named Marble in the imagination of her bath-time stories from her dad.
“Jane, Jane, come quick. See the deer passing through our front yard!!”
“Daddy, Daddy, I’ve seen deer. I’m busy.” Imagine having grown up in the
center of a deer preserve and, at age four or five, being blasé about seeing deer. To
give her credit as a toddler and beyond, she was a girl of nature, loving every
aspect of this 30,000-acre nature preserve. Who’s to blame her if she thought this
was everybody’s childhood environment[2]?
We followed breakfast and our goodbyes with a drive around campus with Jane, Terrell, Evelyn Anne, and JoElyn – all being so full of humor. Seeing the water wheel, the Headmaster’s Cottage where we used to live, the Normandy barns, the horse stables and Possum Trot will leave a lasting impression on all of us. At Possum Trot we found Martha Berry’s original Sunday School building (circa 1850) and the adjacent classroom (full of the books of a long-gone era) were intact, much as they were when Martha Berry held Sunday School and school here at Possum Trot. We reluctantly departed, carrying with us warm memories of a rare experience shared.
I have over the past 42 years since leaving Berry had a dim view of our success – not that we didn’t have a close-knit, talented and passionate faculty and staff. From remarks made at the breakfast, I gained a fresh and perhaps healthier perspective on the impact we made on students and adults alike. I now see that I was not measuring success “in the Berry way.”
[1] Don’t Miss The Miracles, page 110-111. See chuckjohnstonmemoir.com for link to book.
[2] Ibid., pages 111-112
The Arrogance of an Aging Runner
Since from the fall of 1982, I have considered myself a marathon runner, I was in disdain of runs shorter than a half-marathon. For instance, I couldn’t figure out why people made such a big deal of training for a 10K which in earlier years here in Atlanta was primarily the Peachtree Road Race. OK, I was arrogant about my age-level sports exploits when I had no basis for that arrogance. Even in my age bracket, I was never far from middle-of-the-pack.
I ran nine marathons, including New York and Big Sur, for reason of only one notion: “Next time I will train better so that I can breeze through the last five of the twenty-six miles.” It was a fool’s errand that took me on nine adventures, each one leaving me feeling that the very marrow had been sucked out of my bones and the energy-supplying blood drained from my muscles. Don’t get me wrong, there were redeeming aspects of each undertaking; and I don’t regret those and the intervening half-marathons; but neither do I have room for arrogance about myself as an aging runner.
In going through my old journaling, I ran into the following entry from 1982. Read it, if you will, just to see what got me into marathons to start with:
Friday, October 1, 1982
I am preparing to run in the Atlanta Marathon on Thanksgiving morning. I have been inspired to do so by a preparation program authored by Jeff Galloway that calls for continuance of normal running mileage through the week (5-6 miles average per day for me) and a more substantial run on the weekend. [Bob May, Charles Collins, and I] run 10-12 miles one Saturday and then we run a distance on the alternate Saturday that increases 2 miles each time. We have run 19 miles, and this Saturday we will run 21 miles. This continues until we run 26 miles in a workout before trying it in the competitive marathon.
On the last Saturday in September we ran in a 25K road run in Cartersville (15 ). The cool, misty rain kept my mind off of aches and pains, and I ran the distance in 1 hour, 57 minutes (7:33 per mile), an encouraging surprise for me.
Jeff Galloway’s father, Elliot Galloway, was my mentor as a fellow school headmaster and as a runner. I wanted to be as much like Elliot as possible – in being a non-pretentious school leader and in my running. Elliot, who was almost exactly 20 years my senior , and who didn’t even start running until he was 52, gave me inspiration that, Lord willing, I could continue to run most of my life. To commemorate his 75th birthday, he ran the original marathon path in Greece in October, then the Atlanta Thanksgiving Marathon in November, followed by the 100th Anniversary Boston Marathon (April 15, 1996). Elliot’s 75th year was my 55th; but I knew then that I would not be able to match Elliot’s feat of three marathons on the occasion of my 75th birthday.
It might be of interest to some younger runners to anticipate where their running careers might go if they keep it up for a lifetime. While I was in 30s and 40s, my race results were generally in the middle of my age group; my life plan for advancing in the running world was to maintain my pace while moving up in age groups. Hence, if in my 60s I could maintain the pace of my 40s, I would move much closer to the front of my age group. While I had read that one could expect to have his or her per-mile pace decrease by 10% per decade as one grew older, I set out to defy that forecast for aging as a runner.
Let’s flash forward in my journaling four (4) decades later, from 1982 to 2022:
Saturday, April 23, 2022
JoElyn & I had sweet time together in a beautiful setting for a 5K run. It was the first of a series of Beltline races, this one around Bobby Jones Golf Course. I was a little cool in shorts & t-shirt, but both JoElyn & I felt elated by our accomplishments. My time was 42:22, a 13:36 mile time.
Let’s see how I am doing so far on bettering the forecast of my per-mile race times decreasing by 10% per decade. In 1982 (age 41), I ran a 25K (15 miles) in 7:33 per mile. Four decades later, I am told I’m going to have to live with the fact that my time will have decreased to 11:03 per mile. (math by Jonathan Clausen). Time to tell the truth: in 2022 (age 81) – four decades later – I ran a 5K in 13:36 per mile. When I was about to despair over my weak showing against age standards, my close running advisers told me that maybe I had a decade left to improve. If I work out twice a day going forward, maybe I could reverse the ravages of time and yet reach running glory. We runners can’t afford to give up the chase.
Appendage – Running Times Over a Forty-Year Span
1982 7:33 per mile 15 miles age 41 Cartersville/Indian Mounds 25K
1982 7:56 per mile 26.2 miles age 41 Atlanta Marathon
1987 7:15 per mile 6.2 miles age 46 Peachtree Road Race
1990 9:18 per mile 26.2 miles age 49 Big Sur Marathon
2005 10:35 per mile 6.2 miles age 64 Peachtree Road Race (with JoElyn)
2007 10:18 per mile 13.1 miles age 66 Atlanta ½ Marathon 12/41 in my 65-69 age division
2022 13:36 per mile 3.1 miles age 81 ATC Beltline 5K (Bobby Jones Golf Course)
… in a time of youth
Tuesday, September 7, 1982
JoElyn, Jane, and I, together with David, William, Lisa, and Kathy Siegel, went rafting on the Chattahoochee yesterday, Labor Day. It was fun seeing Jane and JoElyn in such circumstances. At one point the raft left me (when I had gotten out to dislodge it) and I had to hustle to catch up with it. At the “jumping rock” one college boy took off his bathing suit, shot the moon, did a little “hutchie cuchie” dance, and dove in. The kids [ages 8 and younger] will never forget that.
Why do I want to share this with you, the reader? Well, I am now 81 and when this story took place I was 41. The story reminds me of something that belongs in a time of youth – both the boy on the “jumping rock” and those of us in the raft. I would like to be back there with the river cascading down over the rocks, heading from “the hills of Habersham” down to the sea. This little snippet of a journal entry places me back into two poems – one, Sydney Lanier’s The Song of the Chattahoochee, and the other, Robert Frost’s Birches.
Here are a few lines that will give you the flavor of The Song of the Chattahoochee:
Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far from the valleys of Hall.
And then, the following excerpt from Frost’s poem still moves my heart:
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Following is an excerpt from my memoir, Don’t Miss the Miracles, (see chuckjohnstonmemoir.com) about an adventure I had at age twenty-three as a young teacher at McCallie School:
One early-March “spring” holidays, I took four or five boys on an overnight hike on the Appalachian Trail where we began at Newfound Gap (5,000 feet) in Tennessee and climbed to the top of Clingman’s Dome (6,643 feet) on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. I remember being surprised to find two feet of fluffy new-fallen snow as we climbed to this, the highest elevation on the Appalachian Trail. I was just as surprised to spot a birch tree that to my knowledge then only grew in the more northern clime of New England. I only recognized it by pictures I had seen of the American Indian birch-bark canoes.
We were having so much fun hiking when I said to the students, “Hey, this could be one of Robert Frost’s birch trees. I’m going to see if I can climb to the top and swing out, letting it carry me gently to the ground.” So up I went, branch by branch, until to my amazement the boys gathered at the base of the tree seemed to grow smaller. I moved by tiny increments, fearful of a premature descent. My heart was beating as if I were on a roller-coaster when it inches to the pinnacle before it starts its mad rush to the bottom.
Nearly panicked about what to do next, I shouted down to the boys, “Grab the Frost book—front flap of my backpack. Quick, quick—read what I do next.” Curtis Baggett was the first to The Poems of Robert Frost and started reading frantically: “When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the line of straighter, darker trees …”
“No, no. Skip down. What do I do next?”
So on Curtis read: “He always kept his poise, / To the top branches, climbing carefully / With the same pains you use to fill a cup / Up to the brim, and even above the brim, / Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, / Kicking his way down to the ground.”
So, with heart in throat, I flung myself kicking into outer space for my memorable ride to the ground—only to hear a crack that echoed off the side of the hill and to find myself hanging helplessly at about the second floor of a three-story tree. As the boys helped me down, it occurred to me that Frost wrote his poem of a summer pastime when sap was running in the trees; here in the highest reaches of the Smokies, in two feet of snow, there was clearly no sap running.
I came away with only scratches and bruises; the boys came away with a great memory. To this day I will still say with Frost, “One could do worse that be a swinger of birches.”
Can’t you see how, at 81, floating the Chattahoochee or swinging birches would stir my soul? For me, God is a God of Adventure. He has led me into situations where the outcomes were uncertain, but never disastrous. Strong river currents, high mountain peaks, and invigorated poets – all have been a part for me of the good gifts of a good God.
Self-help Books
In my middle years – my 20’s through my 40s – I was consumed with self-help books, some of which you who are reading this will be familiar. Zig Ziglar’s See You at the Top was one. I liked Zig’s admonition against “stinkin’ thinkin’.” Here are a few of the Zig Ziglar quotes on which I feasted:
· “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
· “Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.”
· If you don't plan your time, someone else will help you waste it.
Clement Stone was a Chicago businessman who for the entire second half of the 1900s published a periodical entitled Success Unlimited. He "conceived of a monthly magazine to supply mental vitamins to revitalize those seeking self-help and inspiration...." Here are a few gems from that magazine:
· Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
· Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.
· Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
· Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it.
Norman Vincent Peale published Guide Post Magazine and wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.
· Go at life with abandon; give it all you got. And life will give all it has to you.
· Go out of your way to talk optimistically about everything.
· If you change your thoughts, you will change your life.
Last but not least in my pantheon of self-help gurus was Dale Carnegie and his How To Win Friends and Influence People. Here are a few quotes from his writing:
· You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
· When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.
· Life truly is a boomerang. What you give, you get.
I found a time schedule I set for myself in the summer of 1980, months before turning 40. It shows a little bit of the pressure I put myself under applying the power of positive thinking to driving myself:
5:20 a.m. Arise & stretch
5:30 Bible & Prayer
6:00 Run 4 ½ miles
7:00 Breakfast & dress
7:45 Depart for work
5:00 p.m. Depart for home
On top of this time schedule undoubtedly came an extensive to-do list for the 8 to 5 hours and then another for the 5 to 9 hours at home.
I have since learned to back off from thinking that I can outrun time and complete a to-do list by the end of a day. There is certainly value in being optimistic. But there is a danger in ascribing 100% to all of the sayings above that kept me going through my younger years. In my “second half of life,” I came to agree with Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who said, “The basic sin of this cult [The Power of Positive Thinking] is its egocentricity. … It helps [the adherents] feel good while they are evading the real issues of life.”
Some cultures other than mine value relationships more than time, and I now see merit in that. For instance, in some cultures, there is a greater possibility that one will linger in a sublime moment with a fellow human being rather than breaking off that sweet time to rush off to the next appointment. In the past I would have cut short a meaningful moment with someone because I knew I had to clear my to-do list by dusk. I am finally seeing my way out of the trap of busyness that, as Niebuhr has said above, has enabled me to evade “the real issues of life.” These other cultures may have a better grasp of truth – that positive thinking and productivity have their severe limits. And it’s more of this truth that has set me free.
The Creative Mind of Lester Maddox
It seems that back in January 1968 I distributed to my 7th grade English class a column written by my former Vanderbilt classmate Roy Blount, Jr., at the time a writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I don’t remember the dynamic teaching use I made of the column; but when I reported to him whatever use I had made of his satire, Roy, who was teaching freshman English – an evening course at a downtown college – said, “I wish I could believe that my students, by and large, had ever had an interesting English assignment before.”
Here are highlights of Blount’s column. I think you will see that much hasn’t changed on the political scene in the 50-plus years since Blount wrote his column:
On Christmas Eve … Gov. Lester Maddox unveiled the idea, which had come to him the day before, of staging next Christmas Day a nationwide demonstration for God and liberty. … Well and good. It’s a terrific idea, and you know that governors all over the country are kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.
As Blount’s column continues on to it absurd conclusion, it seems that Gov. Maddox has hired a “marketing person” to write cheers for next year’s God and Liberty national event. Gov. Maddox found a like-minded marketer, who in his supposed interview with columnist Blount said the following:
[Welfarism] denies a person his basic freedom to choose whom he wants to help and what he wants to give him, and what day he wants to do it on. And under welfarism, the giver doesn’t get any cute smile of gratitude, which is what makes him feel godly.
So, to the Governor’s delight, the marketer came through with a cheer not easily forgotten:
“A-singin’ and a-praying and a- beatin’ the band,
Let’s clamp Liberty down on the land.
You can stop communism, you can stop sin,
You can stop alligators, you can stop men,
You can stop a miniskirt, you can stop mod,
You can stop drinkin’ but you can’t stop God!
“A-weepin’ and a-wailin’ and a-gnashin’ of teeth.
Christmas-tree and mistletoe and holly wreath.
Let’s get to treadin’ where we ought to trod!
Liberty, liberty, God, God, God!”
In some circles, things haven’t changed all that much.
What Is It About Sports That Engages Some of Us?
When I came across the journal entry below, I had forgotten that 1966 was the first season that the Boston (aka Milwaukee) Braves were now the Atlanta Braves. Mayor Ivan Allen, my hero for his courageous civil rights stands, had used Eminent Domain to raze homes and churches in the Black neighborhood of Summerhill to build Atlanta’s first major league ballpark.
Monday, July 4, 1966
Yesterday our Braves beat St. Francisco (17 – 3) behind the two grand slams of Tony Cloninger. [Rico]Carty, [Joe] Torre, and [Hank] Aaron also hit homers, Aaron’s 25th [of the year].
For you who were not Braves or baseball fans (or maybe weren’t alive in 1966), let me tell you how illustrious these four men were in the world of baseball.
First of all, Tony Cloninger was a pitcher, and pitchers aren’t supposed to be a threat in the batter’s box. John Smoltz may have been the best hitting pitcher that I have followed in more recent Braves history, and he hit five home runs in his 21-year Major League career. Tony Cloninger, in that 1966 season, hit seven home runs, had a batting average of .240, and had 27 RBIs.
Rico Carty played eight of his sixteen MLB seasons with the Braves. In 1970 he won the National League batting crown with a .366 average. That year he played in the All-Star Game, in the outfield alongside Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. His career batting average was .299 with 204 home runs. One of the early major leaguers out of the baseball-rich Dominican Republic, Carty was committed to helping the developing nation. In the 1964–65 off-season, he undertook a trip to his home country, on a mission to deliver clothing and supplies.
On April 12, 1966, Joe Torre hit the first major league home run in the history of the Atlanta stadium. [The new Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium which, due to its less dense atmosphere in Atlanta’s high elevation, made it favorable to home run hitters, resulting in the nickname The Launching Pad.] Torre produced a career-high 36 home runs in 1966 with 101 runs batted in, a .315 batting average, and, led National League catchers with a 48.6% caught-stealing percentage. He was voted as the starting catcher for the National League All-Star team for the third successive year.
We know more today of Hank Aaron’s baseball career and his life after baseball since his prominence in Atlanta civic life and the extent that he has been honored in the year of his death 2021. Here is what was said of him in a Sports Illustrated article at the time of the Braves’ 17 – 3 July 1966 defeat of San Francisco:
Babe Ruth's record 714 is remote, but there are those who expect 200 more home runs of Willie Mays, who is 35; it is hardly less realistic to expect 300 more from Aaron, who is 32 [and who at this point has 424 home runs.]
Hank Aaron did surpass Babe Ruth’s record some eight years later, April 8, 1974. I found it interesting to learn that Aaron shares the record for most All-Star Games played (24) with Willie Mays and Stan Musial.
Does it matter that I grew up with three brothers and father that were all immersed in our own athletic pursuits and in sports at the college and professional levels? It could have been the arts or camping or any number of things, but for us sports was the glue that bonded us to our Dad and to each other. After my father’s passing, sports remains something that my brothers and I, in person and by phone, continue to squeeze into almost every conversation. As dessert is to a meal, so to life, for us, is an interest in sports.
The Braves’ First Atlanta Season - It’s Personal
When I came across the journal entry below, I had forgotten that 1966 was the first season that the Boston (aka Milwaukee) Braves were now the Atlanta Braves. Mayor Ivan Allen, my hero for his courageous civil rights stands, had used Eminent Domain to raze homes and churches in the Black neighborhood of Summerhill to build Atlanta’s first major league ballpark.
Monday, July 4, 1966
Yesterday our Braves beat St. Francisco (17 – 3) behind the two grand slams of Tony Cloninger. [Rico]Carty, [Joe] Torre, and [Hank] Aaron also hit homers, Aaron’s 25th [of the year].
For you who were not Braves or baseball fans (or maybe weren’t alive in 1966), let me tell you how illustrious these four men were in the world of baseball.
First of all, Tony Cloninger was a pitcher, and pitchers aren’t supposed to be a threat in the batter’s box. John Smoltz may have been the best hitting pitcher that I have followed in more recent Braves history, and he hit five home runs in his 21-year Major League career. Tony Cloninger, in that 1966 season, hit seven home runs, had a batting average of .240, and had 27 RBIs.
Rico Carty played eight of his sixteen MLB seasons with the Braves. In 1970 he won the National League batting crown with a .366 average. That year he played in the All-Star Game, in the outfield alongside Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. His career batting average was .299 with 204 home runs. One of the early major leaguers out of the baseball-rich Dominican Republic, Carty was committed to helping the developing nation. In the 1964–65 off-season, he undertook a trip to his home country, on a mission to deliver clothing and supplies.
On April 12, 1966, Joe Torre hit the first major league home run in the history of the Atlanta stadium. [The new Atlanta Fulton County Stadium which, due to its less dense atmosphere in Atlanta’s high elevation, made it favorable to home run hitters, resulting in the nickname The Launching Pad.] Torre produced a career-high 36 home runs in 1966 with 101 runs batted in, a .315 batting average, and, led National League catchers with a 48.6% caught-stealing percentage. He was voted as the starting catcher for the National League All-Star team for the third successive year.
We know more today of Hank Aaron’s baseball career and his life after baseball since his prominence in Atlanta civic life and the extent that he has been honored in the year of his death 2021. Here is what was said of him in a Sports Illustrated article at the time of the Braves’ 17 – 3 July 1966 defeat of San Francisco:
Babe Ruth's record 714 is remote, but there are those who expect 200 more home runs of Willie Mays, who is 35; it is hardly less realistic to expect 300 more from Aaron, who is 32 [and who at this point has 424 home runs.]
Hank Aaron did surpass Babe Ruth’s record some eight years later, April 8, 1974. I found it interesting to learn that Aaron shares the record for most All-Star Games played (24) with Willie Mays and Stan Musial.
Does it matter that I grew up with three brothers and father that were all immersed in our own athletic pursuits and in sports at the college and professional levels? It could have been the arts or camping or any number of things, but for us sports was the glue that bonded us to our Dad and to each other. After my father’s passing, sports remains something that my brothers and I, in person and by phone, continue to squeeze into almost every conversation. As dessert is to a meal, so to life, for us, is an interest in sports.
What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?
Jimmy McCallie’s father, Dr. Bob, gave me my first teaching job. He gave me the best formative opportunity in education imaginable, teaching English to five classes of 10th grade boys and coaching in a 24/7 life of complete dedication to the work and to the boys. I’ve often said that in any job after this one I felt as if I were loafing. [Be it further noted that I did not get this job on my merits but because Jimmy McCallie was my big brother in Phi Delta Theta.]
Dr. Bob McCallie died at age 54 of a heart attack as he was seeing his daughter off on at the Chattanooga Airport, this on November 26, 1965. Following was a note that I sent at the time to Jim, his mother, and his sister:
Dear Betsy, Margaret Anne, and Jimmy,
I do not write with any idea that I might be able to bring comfort with my words. I am, though, a friend and I merely want you to know at this time that I particularly feel the tie which binds my heart to yours.
Dr. Bob is a great guiding spirit in my life. The only way I shall be able to repay him is to pass on to others through my life some of the selflessness, clear perception, and active interest in others I saw in Dr. Bob. He lived a complete life. There was a wholeness to each of his days. Through the unity of life, he is now conqueror over death. In love, Chuck
While at Vanderbilt in graduate work, I got the news of Dr. Bob’s death. Thinking of him and his all too-short life strengthened my resolve to make education my lifelong career. I wanted to be able to say one day that I had lived a complete life, one worthy of that of my first boss, Dr. Bob.
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Monday, November 1, 1965 Nashville, Graduate School
I am so sick of having girls turn me down on dates. Literally for years I have wandered around waiting for the right girl and now that I search she still doesn’t appear. I have not the heart for a great battle merely for the privilege to drink coffee with some radiant soul, feeling the whole time the pressure of the fact that my minutes are precious – that I might not be able to get another date for three weeks. Well, you say, things are unnatural at Vanderbilt. Where have I been that there wasn’t this unnaturalness? I would crave to know a beautiful and sympathetic girl with whom I could become great friends. I go for weeks without even a date and it’s not because I don’t expend the dimes in the phone. And then this is not my main concern. My studies occupy me 24 hours a day. I am a student and that comes first. Always something else comes first. Duty! If I reach 30 and still am not dating anyone, I shall go off with backpack on my back and shall never be heard of again!
By sharing in this blog what I wrote at age 24, I’m opening myself up to folks understandably saying, “You were really sick!” Please give me some latitude that “I shall go off with backpack on my back and shall never be heard of again” is far short of saying that if I don’t find the perfect soulmate “I’ll end it all.” Being a happy wanderer with backpack on my back is not a bad fallback – sad maybe, but not bad.
If JoElyn, my wife of now 50+ years, had come into my life around the time that I wrote this journal entry, she would have been a few days from her 20th birthday and not yet out of college; she is almost exactly five-years my junior. She is more mature than I am; even so, neither one of us would have been prepared to put as much into having a happy marriage as we later did. Having gone without a soulmate of the opposite sex for still five more years, we took marriage seriously from the start and knew that it would require attention and priority. That’s why for us we have had an utterly satisfying marriage that has gotten better from one year to the next all along the way.
Waiting until age 30 or beyond to marry is not something that I’m prescribing for all of my 20-something male friends. There are too many successful marriages that have begun in the early post-high-school years. In some of those cases it has taken these couples formed in younger years to realize the effort and priority that must go into growing a robust marriage.
Oh, was I lonely! The “unnaturalness” that seemed to hang over all of my attempted friendships with girls plagued me; but I’m so glad I didn’t “settle.” The modicum of patience that I was able to muster was enough to see me through to my marriage to JoElyn on June 12, 1971. JoElyn has been that “beautiful and sympathetic girl with whom I could become great friends.” And being friends, enjoying each other’s company, has been the backbone of our time-tested relationship.
Paris Is A Moveable Feast
”If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Ernest Hemingway
The experiences we have and the people we get to know along the way do become a part of who we are. In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, he has Ulysses say, “I am a part of all that I have met.” That is true for me. From my mother to whom I was attached, to the Black man who serviced our car at the filling station, to my grandfather and my 5th grade teacher, each has left his or her imprint on me. Experiences do the same. I was born in Boston and lived there until age one, and that is a part of me. So was the year I spent at ages 23 and 24 in France.
Those of you who are adventures at heart, read Hemingway’s short book, A Moveable Feast. He discovered in Paris as a very young man that he liked to write. He was impacted by Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce and other writers who hung out in Parisian cafes in the 1920’s. The “feast” he experienced in Paris never left him, and my “year abroad” has not left me some 50+ years later. Here are journal memories I made back then:
Tuesday, August 17, 1965 - Journal - Somewhere in the Atlantic aboard the M.S. Aurelia
The dark, deep blue of the Atlantic for days has stretched out from us in all directions and yet constancy has not diminished its beauty and enchantment. This morning we see fishing boats in all directions, this afternoon we will haul baggage and in the morning we will see the Statue of Liberty. The spell is broken. An incomparable year is drawing to a close.
Paris is my favorite single spot in Europe. …. Fondue and rabbit stew are my favorite new dishes. … The “deux chevaux” and the month’s vacation are my favorite French institutions. [deux chevaux = a cheap two-horsepower car; month’s vacation = all of France took the month of August off as vacation]
And did France truly leave its imprint on me? Oh, yes. Check what I wrote in my journal as I summed up that which would carry me forward as one reborn:
I should also like to fall in love. I lead such a fun life but I am sure these pleasures would be amplified if they could be shared. I should like to meet a beautiful, intelligent, and unselfish girl.
Five years later, in 1969, at age 29, I met and fell in love with JoElyn. I was semi-patient; God was humongously good!
A Season of American History That Stirs My Soul
Between my first two years out of college teaching at McCallie School, and returning to Vanderbilt for my master’s degree, I spent a year studying and traveling in and around France. That year, 1964-1965, was within 20 years of the end of World War II. There remained ruins from the fighting as well as vivid gratitude on the part of the French people that the United States joined with the British and French Resistance fighters to free France from the grip of Hitler and the Nazis.
Below are two of my journal entries relating to the War, the first written early in my year in France. It was written from a mountaintop on France’s southern coast, the Mediterranean Sea:
Sunday, September 20, 1964 (my age 23)
I had a wonderful bus ride from Cannes to St. Raphael and then on to Toulon by train. … This morning I rode a cable car up to a mountain which gave a wonderful view. There were battlements left from the allied invasion of August 15, 1944. In the museum my spine tingled to read an old U.S. poster with the Statue of Liberty on it which said: Au pays qui nous ὰ donne La Libertἑ … Nous rendrous la libertἑ. (To the country that gave us the [Statue of] liberty, we give it the liberty.)
Then, nine months later, toward the end of my year abroad, and now on the northwest coast of France, my brother Warren and I had the following experience:
Monday, June 21, 1965 (my age 24)
Our trip in Bretagne and Normandy is now ended …. We were in the heart of agricultural France, seeing herds of sheep and cattle, fields of brilliantly red poppies, and many farmers harvesting hay by primitive methods. … Day before yesterday we saw a very moving sight; row upon row of white marble crosses in the American Cemetery on the hill overlooking Omaha Beach. We have learned much of the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
That’s been over 55 years ago, yet the memory of these two experiences remains vivid. In the fall, and on the Mediterranean coast, I was alone so more subject to heightened emotion over this “love letter” dropped from the sky as leaflets. It was my first encounter of the lasting impact of World War II on two people groups that don’t speak the same language. And then later, on the official first day of summer, Warren and I stood above the Atlantic Ocean with its waves crashing against the rocks below, and except for that sound and that of the light breeze, we were in total silence. The unending rows of white marble crosses brought tears to both of us. The profound silence in both settings speaks as appropriately as any voice of “greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for another.” This may well have been The Greatest Generation.
Venturing Into the Uncertain
I grew up in the YMCA, as a camper and then as a camp counsellor. We wore on our shirts and shorts the logo of the Y, the triangle representing body, mind, and spirit. I’m somewhat amazed at how that balance has stuck with me for low these 81 years. I wonder, upon reflection, if I’ve given as much consideration to spirit as I have to body and mind. I thrive on routine, yet I am dulled by too much of the status quo. Perhaps one way spirit has been a compelling aspect of my life has been my urge towards adventure. As I look back at some of my early journal entries, I see signs of a yen for the uncertain.
The following excerpts are from late July and early August 1964 when I was 23, prior to my departure for a year in France:
I finally received my acceptance from [the University of] Grenoble. I have my passport and have gotten my health card. I also have permission from the draft board and have sent everything in on my visa. I cannot conceive of what life will be like in such a foreign land. Has anyone ever gone who was as poor in a country’s language as I am in French?
I am really looking forward to France now. What will it be like? Will I really learn to converse in the language? So much will happen in these next two years (France & grad school), and I can’t even picture how it will turn out. I hope I am accepted at Vanderbilt for graduate school.
In this same summer of 1964, I reflected in my journal on some ideas out of Christian thought that feed into my spirit of adventure. From then Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson’s book Honest to God come the following ideas:
God is at a depth of reality reached not on the borders of life but at its center, … in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, by ‘a deeper immersion in existence.’
It is not some religious act which make a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.
On the day of departing for my year in France, September 7, 1964, I wrote the following:
One must keep his spirit alive and awake so that at the time of death it will be alive. Worse than death is to walk the paths of this earth and have a dead and bored eye, [lacking] a sense of smell, sight, hearing, feeling, and an absence of love. These things I must work to keep sharp and alive. The Lord be [always] with you – and with thy spirit!
It was certainly at about this time in my life that I found a kindred spirit in these words from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 speech, The Man in the Arena:
It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
There is a book entitled All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten. So maybe I should entitle this piece All I Really Need to Know I learned as a YMCA Camper and Counselor – Body, Mind, Spirit. And sad is he or she who neglects the spirit part of the triangle.
The Arrogance of Being Connected
I have papers that I now come across that show that I lived among the privileged class. When I reflect on how “connected” we were, it tends to make me feel self-important. For instance, when telling people of my growing up years, I will often mentioned that we lived three doors down on Piedmont Road from Ralph McGill, Mrs. McGill, and their son, Ralph, Jr.
Now that I am able to put a little distance between myself and my childhood and early adult years’ arrogance, I am able to more soberly assess why I was given the opportunity to relate to opinion-makers of the 1940’s and ’50’s. Since I was blessed as I was, why? Maybe, as was true of Abraham, I was blessed so I could be a blessing, in turn, to others (Genesis 12:2).
How did a Ralph McGill relationship impact me?
· I saw a Christian journalist willing to stand alone, if need be, to try to steer the citizenry of Atlanta to treat one another as equals and with dignity. Over such an idea, radical to many at the time, the McGills’ mailbox was blown up late one night by the Ku Klux Klan in order to scare Mr. McGill and his family. This caused me as a teenager to think more deeply about the broad repercussions of hate and the imperative to stand against hate.
· I would read his daily front-page column. His words left an impression on me. Here are such words from the 10/15/58 column for which he won a Pulitzer Prize:
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
Hate and lawlessness by those who lead release the yellow rats and encourage the crazed and neurotic who print and distribute the hate pamphlets, who shrieked that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew; who denounced the Supreme Court as being Communist and controlled by Jewish influences.
· He walked the block from his house to the corner of Piedmont and Peachtree every workday and caught the bus into the offices of the Atlanta Constitution. He reversed this trek every evening. Even as a kid, I thought that was pretty cool. It lodged an anti-arrogance kernel in the back recesses of my brain.
Ralph McGill died in 1969, two days shy of his 71st birthday.
Following is the letter from Mr. McGill that I recently came across:
A 23-Year Old Sad to No Longer Be 22
December 15, 1963, Sunday
The other day I turned twenty-three. It saddens me to pass from my years of extreme youth. No longer am I too young to be teaching school. On Wednesday I received these words from Mom:
When you get this it will probably be your birthday, and though I suppose it will be a routine for you, I will be thinking about what a thrill I had when they brought you in the first time to see me in the Phillips House, Boston. You were a beautiful baby, and since then I have been so happy that you were beautiful, inside and out. You have been a joy to many people, and always to your own family.
It seems vain to record such words, but it is the idea that in one’s eyes I am remembered as a newborn that struck me. It is so rare that we get an objective glimpse of our own family, especially Mom and Dad. It is refreshing to think of them as fellow humans with emotions not unlike my own.
I was incentivized to write my memoir in part because I felt that the opportunity to see what the span of one’s life over eight decades might look like. Is it uphill to higher plateaus on to the end or does it turn downhill at some point? Do we become progressively wiser or is the pursuit of wisdom supplanted by routine and the fallback on old and comfortable ideas? What becomes of one’s faith? Does it die away or does it grow stronger to meet increasingly painful experiences? Here at age 81, this is how I would answer the questions here raised:
· First of all, I no longer dislike birthdays. I am glad to be 81. What will this year be like? Will 82 even be better?
· Downhill, uphill? Thus far, each year has been better than the one that preceded it, and that’s the truth.
· Wiser? In some things and in some ways. For instance, I’ve learned to consider my limitations and to accept them. Routine, as in good habits, may be the better part of wisdom; but I am conscious of my tendency to fall back on ideas that are comfortable for me, so I am trying to see the nuances of matters that previously were to me black or white.
· Faith? God has sent me just enough of the “increasingly painful experiences” to grow my faith, and part of that growing has been to be more comfortable with the Not Knowing.
The Assassination of Youthful John Kennedy
John Kennedy was 43 years old when he began his three years as president. By comparison, Bill Clinton was 46 and Barrack Obama 47 at that same juncture in their lives. I was 22 years old on the day that Kennedy died. Following is part of what I wrote in my journal on the day of Kennedy’s assassination:
November 22, 1963, Friday
Today President Kennedy was shot in the head and killed. …
To follow the news commentators from the point where all that was know was that Kennedy and Governor Connally had been shot in Dallas up to the point where it was rumored that two Catholic priests said that the President was dead – all of this made me feel strange all over. … Kennedy’s body was placed in a bronze casket, and … was aboard the plane as Lyndon Johnson [also on the plane] was sworn in [before leaving Dallas for Washington] …. Jackie Kennedy stood by Johnson’s side as a sobbing woman judge administered the oath of office to Johnson ….[All of this is] hard to absorb on the same day in which it all happened. The same night President Johnson met with cabinet members and congressional leaders in Washington. Jackie and Robert Kennedy spent the night in the Naval hospital in Washington with President Kennedy’s body.
He was certainly the most vigorous world leader of his time. … Vigor is snuffed out and is no more. What would he have done in another five years? … Would the South-North relation be different if Lincoln had lived?
A vitally alive person has ended his chance to give to this old world. A vitally alive lady is without her lifelong companion. …. I think gapingly of the fact that my thrilling stay in this life will end sooner or later. And then I think of a lot of things which are shadowy and cannot be given words to express …. I can’t even think them straight. … I’m tired.
I haven’t resolved premature death. I reject a lot of the platitudes I hear at funerals of those who have died before their allotted three score and ten. Here are a few deaths very personal to me that I don’t understand. It’s a large part of my coming to terms with NOT KNOWING:
· My Aunt Virginia, my mother’s beloved younger sister, who died in her early 50’s in the Orly Airfield crash that took the lives of 103 Atlantans, this on the day of my college graduation, June 3, 1962.
· Mac Childress was a full-of-life McCallie student & camp counselor killed in 1964 (when taking a camper to catch a late-night bus) by a head-on crash with a wrong-way driver.
· Greg Simmons, husband, father of five (ages 2 to 12), Christian leader in business and the arts, fell to his death in 1988 while leading some of his own children and a nephew on a hike on their farm in the mountains of North Carolina. He was trying to skirt a bee’s nest and hit a slick spot along the side of a waterfall.
I Have a Dream - My Own
August 28, 1963, Wednesday
Day of MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”
While I didn’t make a journal entry at the time, some undetermined time later, … still in my 20’s, I wrote the following piece:
“In the time in which I lived, I heard a man stand before spine-tingling silence and say:
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
“And people sing, We shall overcome and it makes you want to cry …. If they’ve got a dream, they’ve got more than 99% of mortal ghosts.
“I’ve got a dream that I marry a beautiful and happy wife. I am incomplete.
I’ve got a dream that I’ll teach successfully, teach English and the tale I’ve got to tell.
I’ve got a dream that my insincerity will not get the upper hand in me.
I’ve got a dream that I’ll be young always. I think I will.
I’ve got a dream that somehow I can be a composite of all of the [truly] alive people who have poured illumination into me, who have showed me a spark.”
I date my intentional walk in life towards racial reconciliation –Black and White – to the one line of the “I Have a Dream Speech” that I quote above. I am so provincial that when Dr. King mentioned “the red hills of Georgia,” my attention peaked. Not only do I live in the “red hills of Georgia,” it dawned on me, but I am the great-grandson of a Mississippi plantation and substantial slave owner. And, the Negros I saw around me were, most likely, “sons and daughters” of enslaved grandparents and great grandparents. At the time of The March on Washington, we were less than 100 years from the end of the Civil War.
As you might guess by the self-centered nature of the personal dreams I state above, it was a few years later before I entered body and soul into the arena of racial reconciliation.
The Racism I Was Born Into
In the summers of 1950, ’51, ’52, I was nine, ten, and 11 years old. Each of those summers I attended a week-long Presbyterian Church camp called Camp Smyrna. In notes from that experience I find two references of interest:
· Tribes – Navajo, Choctaw, Pawnee
· Mess hall – Confederate flag, spirit of camp
We didn’t think, I’m sure, about offending Native Americans. I had never seen nor known a Native American at that point in my life. We were ennobling ourselves by connecting ourselves into the clan-loyalty and the athleticism of the American Indians. I grew up wishing I had some American Indian ancestry so that I could be closer to nature and so that I would be that much better physically.
Now in my 80’s, have I put away the ignorance of my youth? I do now know that the indigenous people, who came across the Bering Peninsula 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, embodied resourcefulness difficult for me to fathom. “These early Americans deserve our admiration,” says archaeologist David Anderson of the University of Tennessee. “I think they exemplify the spirit of survival and adventure that represents the very best of humanity.” (Source: Scientific American online)
And yet, in the 100 years from 1750 to 1850, from Blue Ridge to Columbus, in Georgia we shattered treaties and drove out these, “the very best of humanity,” as if they were a sub-human species that stood in the way of our greedy and insatiable land grab. Have we ever acknowledged the eradication that we practiced against the Cherokees? By the end of the Revolutionary War, the Cherokees had seeded half of their land to state and federal governments. In 1838, 4,000 to 5,000 Cherokees died during their forced march on foot to what is now Oklahoma. All of Cherokee land in Georgia was confiscated by self-righteous white men.
During the bulk of my adult years I have thought of America’s indigenous people as being almost extinct and that those still surviving were relegated to ghetto life on Reservations located in lands that were barely habitable. Most of my concern about Native Americans was rooted in our treatment of them in the past.
It has only been in the last three or four years that I’ve realized that a small portion of the American Indian population is flourishing and that the recent focus on justice/fairness has uncovered the needs of the majority who we have essentially forgotten. State and Federal courts have recently verified treaties made with Native Americans, some dating to the 1830’s cases involving sovereignty of American Indian tribal laws and lands. Some of these victories have occurred in the summer just past (2021). For the first time an American Indian, Deb Haaland, holds a cabinet post – the post being that of Secretary of the Interior which has primary responsibility for the interface of the U.S. Government with sovereign Native governments.
And, we didn’t think that we were offending anyone by singing Dixie at our church camp or by latching ourselves to what had effectively been portrayed to us kids as the nobility of those generations of Southerners who preceded us. In 1950 we were only eighty-five years away from the close of the Civil War (aka “The War of Northern Aggression”). At that point in history, we were the only part of the country that had experienced defeat. Maybe there was a group psychology that encouraged us to believe that the more Christian, the more righteous people had been taken down by an overwhelming rabble of pagans.
That Blacks might have felt excluded from our jubilation over Dixie and the Confederate battle flag never crossed my mind as a kid. In fact, it has only been in recent years that I’ve learned that the bulk of the confederate monuments and statues were erected around the turn of the 20th century and the couple of decades to follow, to say to Blacks, “Hey, we Whites still own you, and let these monuments remind you of that as you go past them every day. If you forget, lynching awaits you.”
As a kid, I certainly saw the outcroppings of Jim Crow laws. I didn’t know that term; and I didn’t consider that things could be any different. I may have asked a time or two why Negroes had to go to the back of the bus. But my concerns did not go much further. Now, even with the Civil Rights victories and an African American president, I know that the playing field is not level. When one starts a 100 meter race ten meters behind the starting line, it’s nary impossible to catch up. The metaphor of the ten-meter handicap represents unequal educational opportunities, lack of home ownership, and disparity in wealth, to name a partial list.
I have tried my part to bridge the gap between the economically disadvantaged Blacks and the prosperous Whites by creating equal opportunities in education, and, more recently, by providing the stability of attainable housing. The housing enables the parent to get to and from employment, and it enables the children to remain in the same school instead of changing schools every time the rent comes due.
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” I Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)