Decoration Day
Decoration Day at my family cemetery, Haynes, has taken place on Mother’s Day weekend for as long as anyone can remember – which includes the recollection of my 94 year-old dad. As a boy, he chopped brush and pushed a reel mower to prepare the grounds. Haynes is located in the Scribner Mill community of Maury County, Tennessee. My dad grew up on a farm across from Haynes which, by the 1930s, was a resting place for several of his kin...
Neighbors and Kin
Lauriston “Laurice” Mayberry was an old man who lived on Silver Creek and rode a little black Walking Horse to Galbreath’s Store. He was the grandson of Revolutionary War soldier Henry Mayberry who came to Tennessee from Virginia in the late 1790s. Both Laurice and his son Hardin took a great liking to my dad’s cousin and best friend Douglas White. In 1934, Doug was a goodlooking cotton-headed boy of 11, with a...
Three Mules and a Jack
From the age of ten, my dad worked a brace of mules named Matt and Dinah. “My dad would stay in the field and watch me to make sure I was safe but he turned me loose with them by the time I was twelve or thirteen.” My grandfather Bob White bought them in 1933 at the jockey yard off the courthouse square in Columbia. This is the lot at the corner of East 7th and Woodland Street, behind what are now the offices of the Maury County Clerk...
Good Dogs and Hard Times
Growing up on a Tennessee farm in the 1920s and ‘30s was a stark life. My dad, Jack White, had a fyce pup, part rat terrier and part something else, called Tip. “He had a little tip of white hair on his tail that stuck out.” Tip was a small dog, nearly solid white except for a liver spot over his left eye. “I really liked Tip,” said dad. “He was my pal. He was a first rate squirrel dog. He’d trot through the woods as quiet as an...
Sons and Mothers Great Outdoor Adventure — 2016
(note: click on photos to enlarge) Near the end of January 2016, Auburn, Alabama attorney Anna Funderburk Buckner was having a conversation with her friend Sidney James Nakhjavan decrying the fact that Lee County, Alabama did not have a Mother/Son answer to the Father/Daughter Dance. “Why can’t we come up with some sort of experience that celebrates mothers and sons?” she asked. This question sparked an idea. Sidney immediately called...
No Kin to Elvis Comes to Dixie
THE MARSHALL COUNTY COMMUNITY THEATER JOINS NASHVILLE AND ATLANTA THEATRICAL GROUPS IN DEVELOPING NEW PLAY No Kin to Elvis is a musical comedy based on a book by the same name. The story is set 1957 in the fictitious town of Marlburn, Georgia, a small community situated in the heart of a burgeoning carpet industry, still enjoying a postwar boom. Emmer Lee Prestley, a young woman transplanted from the mountains of North Carolina, must...