In My Father’s Time, Part Two

It is suggestive that our family has no photographs taken of my father in his teens. To continue his story after he enrolled at the University of Georgia is to explore again the tragic consequences of the devils that beset the South in his lifetime. His story can have been little different from that of many other young men and women. Their families and relatives had found the resources to send them off to college. Cruelly, fate intervened.

Largely through the efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal” Programs, the Great Depression relented somewhat in the mid-1930’s. Georgians in particular could take pride and comfort in the fact that the popular president had found refuge and recovery at his home in Warm Springs, Georgia. A victim of polio as an adult, Roosevelt came to Warm Springs to swim in the springs to relieve his tight and weakened muscles. Cured? No.

“Emotionally restored” would be a better description of FDR’s rehabilitation. He got to know his neighbors, found they paid too much for electricity. He was for the “little man” and the “forgotten man”. To prove his convictions, Roosevelt picked a fight with the electric power companies and set out to determine fair rates by building energy- generating dams in the Tennessee River Valley. He pushed the way toward rural electrification, much to the irritation of the Georgia Power Company and its political cronies. Electricity at last came to Gough.

Suddenly, in 1937 the Depression reasserted itself. It remained unremitting until the U.S. began arming itself for the coming war against Germany, Defense spending bolstered the economy and eventually benefitted Hugh. The University of Georgia lost many students who simply could not matriculate for the winter quarter. My father went home, began looking for work, There was no local work. He found a job clerking in a hardware store owned by a distant relative in North Carolina. When this fizzled out, he found construction work in one of FDR’s TVA projects.

They were pouring millions of tons of concrete to construct dams. Hugh was good at math and could quickly calculate square yards and figure how much and what materials were needed to build concrete forms. (There was no pre-stressed concrete construction at the time. Every concrete element required wooden molds, built in place, to hold the liquid concrete until it could harden.) Whether through aptitude, determination or simple desperation, he had found his niche.

If only he had written letters home. I can find not a scrap of any account of his time in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) projects. But the experience opened the way for other employment. War preparations meant expanded military facilities and Hugh took a job in Charleston where the Navy was building a new dry dock facility alongside the existing one. It required more than a year to build. (In one of those experiences that I call “congruence,” I would later be employed as the Director of the South Carolina Historical Society. One day in 1994 I had a call from the Charleston naval base commander’s office. He invited me to the ceremony at which the dry dock my father helped build would be decommissioned and dismantled.)

In his early twenties, my father was becoming a construction supervisor. His next job was at the shipyards in Norfolk Virginia. He must have traveled home occasionally, back to Gough, Georgia. He knew a young girl there. Everyone knew everyone in Gough. And, they “did for” each other as best they could. Calvin Sego, the town’s only tractor mechanic, had built a home there and was raising a family. When his home burned to the ground, White and Tressie Kitchens took them in while Calvin rebuilt his home in his spare time. It was a time of “do it yourself or do without.” The Sego girl, Mamie, was still a child at the time and no more than an annoyance to the older boys in the Kitchens household. That would change.

Mamie grew up. She was popular with her fellow students at nearby Vidette High School. The year she graduated, the state of Georgia added a twelfth year to its high schools. Mamie loved school and returned for an additional year. A petite beauty at 4’11”, Mamie was soft spoken, intelligent and closely bonded to her parents and younger brother, whom everyone called “Bubba.” After graduation, she reluctantly entered the county beauty pageant. She won. Suddenly, Hugh’s visits back to Gough were motivated by more than family ties.

On one of Hugh’s visits, the young couple eloped, were married by a justice of the peace, and spent their first night in Gray, Georgia, a little textile mill town some thirty miles away. Hugh went back to Norfolk. There was no scandal to it. Elopements were common, especially in working-class families and perhaps more so during the depressed times. The Segos and Kitchens accepted the marriage.

Early in their marriage, my parents faced a new catastrophe. On December 7, 1941, the naval forces of the Empire of Japan launched an air strike on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, sinking the most powerful ships in our Pacific Fleet. Hugh and Mamie became pregnant within a month. Like most couples at the time, they must have felt a need to insure that something of their love would survive the terrible war that had so suddenly drawn America in.

As the time grew short for my birth, Hugh brought Mamie from Norfolk back to Gough and took a rental house so they could have their own place while waiting for my birth. The tiny house was only about 200 feet from the Kitchens’ home and a quarter mile from Mamie’s parents, who lived on the “other side of the tracks.” Close to family, but with her husband back in Norfolk, Mamie endured the hot summer of her pregnancy in 1942. I have in my hand a letter written by Dr. J.H. Hudson (Hugh’s uncle) on August 8th, 1942 asking the War Rationing Board to increase his gas allowance so he could travel from Norfolk (where he was working for the War Department building shipping docks) to Gough where his wife Mamie was ill and expecting a child.

Hugh came home shortly before I was born on August 16th. Dr. Joseph Hudson performed the delivery at home – as the town’s only physician, he had also delivered both my mother and my father. Once again, things “took a turn for the worse.” I was born with “Whopping Cough.” Dr. Hudson drove me and and my father, over 30 miles of mostly dirt roads , to the nearest hospital which was in Augusta. This was especially traumatic for my mother who was left alone, while her newborn was being driven away in a distressed condition. Dr. Hudson’s speeding car was stopped by police on the outskirts of Augusta. Explanations were hurriedly offered and the patrol car led the way to the hospital with its siren blasting away.

I obviously survived the frightening circumstances of my birth. I was the last member of my family to be delivered at home. My brother, Jack, born five years later, would be the first in our family to be born in a hospital.

In August 1945, , Hugh enlisted in the army. ( I believe that Dad was employed by the War Department from the time of my birth until 1945 and, for that reason, was given a deferment from the military daft. Whether he relinquished that deferment and joined the Army, or was released from federal employment and chose to enlist, I have not be able to learn.) Germany was already defeated, Japan was about to feel the shock of two nuclear blasts-the first and only atomic attack ever. Shortly after basic training at Fort Bragg, NC, he was sent to Ft, Knox in Kentucky. The war had ended by then and my mother and I traveled by train to visit Hugh. Although I was only three years old at the time, I can still remember riding in a passenger car full of soldiers in uniform. Many of them were jubilant and attentive to my mother and showered me with their service ribbons. I learned in later years that they were celebrating the end of the war and were on their way to Ft. Knox where they were soon to be discharged from service, as was my father.

For several years after the war, Hugh tried to start up a construction business in Waynesboro, the county seat of Burke County Georgia and only 12 miles from his parents home in Gough. Business was slow. Few discharged soldiers wanted to return to small town life. The migration to the cities that had begun before the war now became a flood.

Our family was to live in many places in the decade following the war. There was soon an industrial construction boom going on and Hugh followed his work from city to city: Texarkana (AR), Norfolk (VA), Charleston(SC), Drake’s Branch (NC) and Boiling Springs (VA) as well as many smaller Georgia cities. The GI Bill made it possible for many servicemen to go to college and to buy a home at low interest. Cracker-box housing developments soon surrounded the larger cities. And, industrial building was for a time active. Hugh built sewage treatment plants, a rayon mill, and expanded the Naval Air Station in Brunswick to better serve its blimp-manned antisubmarine surveillance network. (Blimps are lighter-than-air craft that could carry heavy radar equipment out over the shipping lanes. There was a great fear that the Russians might attack the U.S. using missile-carrying submarines.) Hugh built a new telephone exchange in Thomson. We were living there when my brother, Jack, was born. Five years younger than I was, he was slightly built and blonde-haired, a loveable child. Until I entered high school he was my closest companion. Then puberty kicked in and we spent less time together -something I came to regret.

While living in Augusta in the early fifties where Hugh superintended the construction of the Maxwell House Apartments-the first high-rise apartments in the city – my sister, Ellen, was born. Thirteen years my junior, she was a very young child during the worst years of Hugh’s career. Hugh lavished attention on her and she on him. It was the boys who seemed to bear the brunt of Hugh’s bitter disappointments. Ellen also grew up close to her mother, again perhaps because she was a girl. She was and is energetic, loving and the most determined of our brood. She also turned out to be rather glamorous, very bright and hard working. Of the three of us, she has the sharpest humor.

Hired on at a new firm in 1957, Hugh was to supervise the concrete construction at the new Atlanta Raceway. Afterward, a new control tower was needed at the Atlanta Airport. Construction was booming everywhere, as it had in Florida in the early 1920s. But, then, overnight, construction dried up.

It was 1957 and America was suddenly in the worst recession since World War II. It was called the “Eisenhower Recession”, a reference to our president at the time, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Ike’s” greatest legacy as president was the construction of the interstate highway system and his stern warning that America’s postwar wealth was being funneled into a “military-industrial complex,” blurring the lines between capitalism and government. We were indifferent to this cautionary. Our family was -once again-broke and “underemployed”.

Hugh entered his forties with few prospects. Major new construction projects relied on architects for design and college-trained civil engineers for its systems. Hugh found work occasionally as an estimator of construction costs and suffered the indignity for a while of selling aluminum siding. For a time we were without a car. My mother took a minimum wage job at Grant’s Department Store located within walking distance of our home in College Park. I worked weekends and summers at a Colonial Grocery Store (also within walking distance of our rented apartment on the unfashionable end of Main Street).

This period was the first time in our family’s history we had lived anywhere for as long as three years. I have often wondered if my father made a decision to stick it out in Atlanta until I could graduate from high school. If so, I am grateful. It was among the best schools in the state, the first I had ever attended with outstanding teachers and modern facilities. There was a summer baseball league in which I played and Hugh often served as an umpire. Today, I recall it as the best place I ever lived while growing up. For the first time, I had friends and a girl friend. My mother knew and befriended many of my school mates. I feel certain she enjoyed our years in College Park.

Hugh found solace in alcohol, especially after his mother, Tressie, suffered a stroke while in her mid-fifties. She held on for 13 years in a nursing home, unable to speak, one side of her body paralyzed. Hugh’s father, White, spent what little he earned to keep her there.

After graduation, I went to work for the City of Atlanta Water Department reading water meters. With my scant savings, I paid half my college tuition at the state college in Carrolton with little hope of staying or finding the other half of my fall tuition.

My family (Hugh, Mamie, Jack and Ellen) moved to Athens as I went off to college. Was history about to repeat itself? Would I be able to stay in college? After a job overseeing the construction of a school in Athens, Hugh moved his family back to Gough- hoping a break would come his way while he lived rent-free in his parent’s old home. His father, White” died of a heart attack at Thanksgiving 1960. Hugh’s next break would be a long time coming.

Note: I have written several pieces on the history of Gough, Georgia (“God’s Smallest Place”). If this is of interest to you check out the full list of blogs on my website, beginning with “The Sun is Going Down on Gough Georgia, Part One” and “The Sun is Going Down on Gough, Georgia, Part Two” from 2019. I have recently added period photos to those sites.

To return to part one of this three- part retrospective on my father’s life click on the title below

In My Father’s Time, Part One