DRIVING TO BRUNSWICK, GEORGIA

One of Grandpa's stories

While I was still in high school, I started living in an old house that belonged to the state. I stayed with Luther Glen. He was a bachelor and he was a state dairyman. The state gave me a hundred percent maintenance plus I think it was $25 a month or something like that - which was big money then. And it was great to even have a job.

Things went to changing. The war came on, and that put everything to moving. The farm superintendent at the blind institution, Mr. Boone, lived next door to me. One of his sons, Roy Boone, had gone to Brunswick, Georgia, to go to work with J. Jones Construction Company, which was building liberty ships on the river there that came into Brunswick.

He came home one Christmas talking about the opportunities that were down there and how much money they were paying and all that. He and his wife were going back after Christmas.

There was a big demand for welders working on ships because they had a tremendous amount of close places to get that bigger people just could not get. At that time I weighed about 118 or 120 pounds, real slim and trim.

I didn’t put any significance on being the assistant dairyman for the state. So I asked him, I said, “I’ll just go back down there with you.”

He said, “You’d be a natural. They’ve got a welding school down there.”

I told him, “I don’t know how to get down there or nothing.”

He said, “You can go back with me.” He and his wife had an apartment down there.

So I went home and told Mamma just right off the bat from one day to the next that I was going to Brunswick, Georgia. She had a pure damn conniption, and said I wasn’t going. I said, “Well, I am going.”

So I rode back down there with him. In fact, I drove the whole way. That was part of the deal. I didn’t know anything about driving licenses back then. Didn’t know you were supposed to have one! And the furthest I had ever been away from home was the distance I could ride on a bicycle, other than going to Wake Forest to visit my aunt and uncle. And once I rode with my cousin’s husband Jeff to Greensboro and back. And that was the furthest I’d been away from home until I went to Brunswick, Georgia.

Lord, I thought I’d gone slam to the other side of the world. Wrote Mama a letter trying to remember all the towns we’d been through. I thought it was something great. There was umpteen of them or more, and I finally gave up on that part of it.