From Marianna to Moosburg ... and Back (eBook)

CHAPTER TWO

Getting Adjusted to Florida

Twenty-two years earlier...

The year that I’ll always remember best from my time of growing up had to of been 1923. That particular year stuck out in my mind because a lot of big things just seemed to have happened in that part of my life that a person simply couldn’t forget. We lived, at the time, out in the middle of nowhere in the piney woods of northwest Georgia, in rural Chattahoochee County. Everywhere you looked, you could see nothing but long needle pine trees growing all around you, rising high into the sky. If you got your feet wet, you couldn’t help but know that all of that red Georgia clay was definitely going to get stuck between your toes. And heaven forbid, should it have time to dry there before you could wash your feet and get the stuff off of you. It dried like mortar and you practically had to pull your skin off to get rid of it. My little brother, Paul, and I, ran around the house bare footed most of the time, since it was a lot easier than having to go through the trouble of putting on shoes. If we weren’t looking up to the sky while Momma was pulling sandspurs out of the bottoms of our feet, then we were dealing with the clay between our toes. Being barefoot was just the way to go, because there was something special about being able to dip our feet in a cool creek or pond, if we happened to come up on one while we were outside gallivanting around, exploring every strange place we could.

Daddy’s farming had never made us all rich, but it had put food on the table and we all knew we were loved and cared about. I had barely turned six years old, but being the oldest left at home while Daddy was at work every day, I had already figured out in my mind that I was just a smaller version of the “man of the house”. Paul and I were playing in the yard on one particular afternoon, when we noticed Daddy as he came heading up the road towards our house. He had a set of reins in his outstretched hand and he was leading a horse along behind him as he walked. Evidently, sometime earlier in the week, he had traded our neighbor farmer a corn sheller for the animal he was pulling behind him. That day was going to turn out to be a special one for me, because the horse he had brought home would soon end up becoming my first horse, Charley. Daddy headed on up to us, guiding the smallish brown horse along behind him. That horse had to have been the most beautiful sight that I’d ever laid eyes on. It had a long, dark mane hanging from the back of its head and a light brown coat of hair that shined when caught by the brightness of the sun. The way I figured it, that horse had to be for me because it was way too small for Daddy to ride. Besides that, Momma now used the buggy and wagon when she needed a way to get into town and we already owned animals that could pull it. School had started the Tuesday after Labor Day that year, and Momma was already plenty tired of having to hitch up the wagon every weekday, get Paul ready so he could tag along, and haul me into town to get to school.

Sure enough, Daddy had figured that I was old enough to learn how to ride, and he got me started on some serious horse-riding lessons the next day. It only took a few times of getting up on Charley and having Daddy teach me a little about how to handle him, before I had learned to saddle and ride Charley well enough to make the half hour trip into town for school each morning all by myself. Momma would help me strap my lunch pail and primer book to the side of the saddle and off I’d go on my merry way. The only schoolyard for miles around was located at the north end of Cusseta, our county seat. It was built from bricks made out of Georgia red clay and looked to be the finest building in town. The only other building that could hold a candle to its fancy looks was, believe it or not, the county jail. The jailhouse was big, covering almost a whole city block, and was two stories tall. The school building had several big rooms and a simple pot-bellied stove for heat. There were four as best I can remember, maybe more, of the slide up type windows to get the air flowing through the building. It had a tin roof, so when it started to raining hard, you couldn’t hear the teacher talk. All of us liked those little kinds of breaks from all that schoolwork we were doing, even if it meant that we had to work harder after those squalls either let up, or decided to quit, to make up for lost teaching time. There was a bell out front that the teacher’s pet always got to ring when it was almost time for school to start for the day. The teacher usually gave us all a good five minutes to get inside and that was it. Anyone who decided to show up after that got a quick unscheduled trip to the principal’s office, and usually, a good bottom warming to boot.

Just a little piece south of the school was my grandfather’s house. It doubled as his office, since he was also the town’s only doctor. I would put Charley in the little stable right beside Grandpa’s place every morning and leave him a bucket of feed to munch on until I got back later in the day to pick him up. There was a watering trough there, too, so he’d have something to drink. I never really had to worry about anyone messing with him while I was up the road at school. If anything, the old folks from town sometimes made a point to stop by and check on Charley, and often hung around long enough to see me about the time of day they knew I’d be showing up after school. After all, I was a very handsome looking kid. The women in town just adored me.

There was a Mr. Sherman that Daddy had gotten to know fairly well that ran some naval stores operations in the piney woods of Georgia, which stretched from south of the Columbus area, all the ways down to Colquitt County. He had managed to make a lot of money setting up lumberyards and sawmills during the last few years. One day, while Daddy was in town, Mr. Sherman caught up with him before the day was done and offered him a job as a millwright in the Florida panhandle town of Panama City. Daddy may not have been the very best of farmers, but Mr. Sherman had heard from others in our area that he could fix almost any kind of mechanical equipment, and knew how to put things together so they would last for a long time. My dad, Curtis Gordy, was the fellow to see when something broke down or busted, and was just the kind of reliable person that Mr. Sherman needed to keep his business thriving. He not only needed Daddy now, but he needed him yesterday. Mr. Sherman’s job offer meant that Daddy would have to leave us behind for a short while, and eventually sell out everything we owned to take on this new kind of work full time. The way Daddy saw it, it was a move he needed to make to take care of all of us. Momma didn’t weigh in too heavily before telling him that he was our family’s breadwinner and he should go ahead and make that trip to Florida for that lifesaver of a good job.

Daddy hopped a train and headed south to Florida two weeks later. It was still cool outside when he set up shop in Panama City. He explained to Momma that he planned to be gone for just a short while before bringing the family along. That short while quickly turned into six long months. When summer rolled around, Daddy had already bankrolled enough money to send for us, aside from what he had Western-Unioned back to Momma for the rest of us to live off. He had quickly caught on to his new sawmilling way of life, and living in makeshift shacks that had been thrown up alongside the mills didn’t seem to bother him. The mosquitoes were bad, and the men had to keep their shotguns close by when they were sleeping since bobcats and bears would often come looking for food. Other than that, the work was tolerable and the pay was the best for a working man, who spent most of his spare time counting down the number of days left before he’d see his precious family again.

The one thing that everyone did make sure of in each mill town was that they all knew where the closest town doctor could be found. In the work they were doing, being bit by rattlesnakes was a real problem and one strike to the leg by a rattler could kill a fella. That particular kind of snake loved to lay up in the shade of the Florida palmettos that grew all around the trunks of the trees the company axmen had to cut down to feed the big saws at the mills. Those big guys with the broadaxes and the two-man crosscut saw teams stayed at it from dawn to dark, day in and day out, it seemed. Without those big loblolly pine trees they were felling, with all of the virgin heart pine lumber they yielded, there was no timber, and they’d all be quickly out of work. Daddy’s plan all along had been to save enough money to get Momma, Paul, and me to Florida, sell out our farm, and then, hopefully, stay put for a long time. All I cared about was being able to go fishing, without having to walk too far to get there. Being able to jump into a swimming hole nearby wouldn’t exactly hurt my feelings, either.

Daddy knew when he agreed to take that kind of job that the chances of him staying around one town for too terrible long of a time were not that great. Once an area got “logged out” or cleared of useable timber, the whole company would have to pull up stakes and move on to a new area where uncut trees could be found. By the time we were ready to join Daddy, things had already changed a whole lot. Mr. Sherman had figured out that the Miami area of Florida was booming and that he needed to provide a source of lumber to the building contractors who were building up...