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...
Reunion
A picture hangs on my living-room wall in Columbia, Tennessee, magnificently framed, of which I am especially proud. It is an original 1902 photograph of Confederate veterans gathered for a reunion — friends, relatives, and comrades-in-arms of my great-grandfather James Lewis White, a private in Company F of the 48th Tennessee Infantry, who later enlisted in Company F of the 1st Tennessee Cavalry. The picture is probably taken...
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...
D. Man: My Life and Boxing
D. Man, a new book based on a memoir by Richard Paul Westcott and written by Dr. John White, is available at BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com CLICK ON THE DESCRIPTION ABOVE Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/D-Man-Boxing-Richard-Westcott/dp/1504911105/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432917034&sr=1-1&keywords=D.+Man%3A+My+Life+and+Boxing%3A+Based+on+a+Memoir Barnes and Noble:...
Random Recollections of a Railway Express Agent
My father was a Railway Express Agent in Columbia, Tennessee. Here are a few topics that came up in conversation after Thanksgiving dinner. Mr. Hardaway was the agent (manager) of the Railway Express Agency (REA) in Columbia, Tennessee in the early 1960s. He was nearing retirement when he became ill. The district manager in Atlanta called my dad, Jack White, in Cookeville and told him to return to Columbia to take Mr. Hardaway’s...