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About Griffin daily news. (Griffin, Ga.) 1924-current | View Entire Issue (July 22, 1977)
Quimby Melton bought the Griffin Daily News and took charge of it on February 1,1925, and he wrote a daily column in this space for more than 40 years. As his eyesight got worse he limited it to a Sunday School lesson once a week. Finally he had to stop it altogether. Occasionally when he went out of town or was ill he asked his son, Quimby Melton, Jr., to write it, and he did. This Good Evening today is written by his son. My father, “Good Evening”, was a good man. He grew in grace and in spirit and in love. When he left this mortal earth he left it as a Christian gentleman. He was 86 years old. His final years he was blind, but even before that one of his favorite verses of Scripture was the one quoting the person whom Jesus had cured, “I was blind but now I see.” Even through his physical blindness, he saw first of all the Glory of God and the Love of Jesus, and he kept seeing good in his fellow man. Until such things became less fashionable, he was addressed by his military title of “Major”, one which he had earned on the battlefield in France, World War One. The Army wanted to keep him but he left it to return to his two first loves, my mother and newspapering. My father was a strong and vigorous man until the disabilities of age asserted themselves. Shortly after graduating from Emory College where his father was Professor of English, he left newspapering to coach football and teach math in Texas. (He was making something like |7.50 a week as a reporter, and as a coach and teacher he could make that plus room and board, maybe a dollar or so more.) He won the Texas State Championship in football, but baseball was his favorite sport. He could mentally run up a string of figures and pop out a business decision, or he could quote batting averages from memory. Dad came from a cultured home, and he showed it. His father was a Doctor of Philosophy in the day and time when a person with a sixth grade education was considered exceptional. His mother was from a Louisiana plan tation family, the Kellers, and Dr. and Mrs. Melton reared him as a gen tleman. My mother added the finishing touches, but few were required. I never saw a man more considerate and courteous without overdoing it. When he could hardly walk himself, my wife took him regularly to Sunday night church services and he insisted on opening the car door for her to enter then feeling his way back to the passenger side. God bless her, she let him do it. His grandfather had a tremendous influence upon him. Isaac Quimby Melton was a private in the Confederate Army. When he got back from that war he went to work as a shoe cobbler, travelled about until he had enough money to pay off the mortgage on his widowed mother’s Alabama farm, then became a preacher. He was one of the founders of the North Alabama Con ference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Often when my younger brother and I fussed as little boys, our father would quote his grandfather and tell us, “Put a little sugar in your voice.” He could be stern too, and he gave us many a licking with a Sam Browne belt, a remnant of his Army career which we had followed him into civilian life. Mother and Daddy had two children, my brother Fred and me. Fred was two and a half years younger than I. When World War Two came on Fred left the University of Georgia where he was dating the girls and enlisted in the Army. He went through Horse Cavalry basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas, was selected for Officer Candidate School and made Second Lieutenant when he was 18 years old. Before he was 21 he went after a wounded soldier in his platoon in Germany and a sniper got him. The Army sent Mother the flag from his casket and a Silver Star Medal, and we are flying that flag at half-mast at the News Office in Dad’s honor. It seems appropriate. The flag IJAIIA'#NEWS Daily Since 1872 Egood/^ 1 VENIN VF By Quimby Melton on my father’s casket is that of the Third Battalion, 82nd “All American Division” which he commanded in battle in France. Dad earned the Silver Star too. He asked that I send the flag after his funeral to the 82nd Division Museum at Fort Bragg and I will. From about the end of the war Mother began suffering from Parkinson’s Disease which gets worse and worse. Nobody could have been more considerate and loving than my father was of her. For a generation he cared for her and watched a beautiful and lively woman suffer the ravages of disease. But never did she experience the horror of neglect. He took her in sickness and in health and he loved and cherished her. Dad had the common touch. He was a teetotaler all of his years in Griffin so it might surprise some to know that his first job in newspapering was to fetch a bucket of beer for the sports editor about midnight in Baltimore. He was at home with the mighty, and equally so with the meek. He loved his fellow man. Often I have seen him stop everything he was doing during the Depression days of the 1930’s to help a War One veteran with a claim. Because of his love of his ex-soldier friends and because of his devotion to his nation, he loved the American Legion. And he loved the Exchange Club. He and Nat Bailey and Bill Beck and Leo Blackwell usually sat together, and he enjoyed them and his friends. Most of all he loved God and Jesus Christ. Close behind was Mother and his sons, then the Methodist Church and the Men’s Bible Class which he taught for years. He loved Griffin. Usually he gave people the benefit of any doubt. More than once he has told me that if I just knew the troubles so-and-so was having I would not be so quick to call him a so-and-so. Then he would tell me the troubles and I would slow down. He pretty much gave me a free hand as an editor, but one time he did advise me not to be so quick to criticize. As I have grown older and more ex perienced I understand this better. It was good advice. Major Melton did a lot for Griffin. He was a builder, a constructive force, a fighter, an enthusiastic influence for good. This is a better place because he who could have gone wherever he wanted, he who had the personal resources and the financial backing to go where he would chose Griffin. And Griffin took him unto its heart. After 55 years from his diapering of me to my burying of him, I assess him this way: First a Christian. Then a loving husband and father, a truly patriotic American, a man who found good in nearly everybody. And an optimist. When he sold his home where he had cared for his invalid wife, where he received official War Department regrets about his son, he told me, “We’ve been happy here." And so it was. Just as he, I believe in God and I believe in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and I believe that this strong and good man has been freed from a once strong and good body which finally wore out. This final word: We come into this earth from the loins of women and most of us are cared for by them until old enough to look after ourselves. Then when the body fails and its functions slow down, women take care and nurture us again. So it was at the Living Center of Griffin where my father had lived for what would have been four years this fall. So it was in the hospital emergency room. Women looked after him at his start and at his earthly end. I know he would have wanted to say thank you to them all. So thank you white ladies, black ladies, professional ladies, scrub ladies. God knows they are ladies regardless of what part of town they call home or their social standing. Ladies. As he said so often, God bless you. And goodnight. This is the last “Good Evening” this paper ever will print. GRIFFIN Griffin, Ga., 30223, Friday Affernoon, July 22, 1977 Funeral to be Sunday for publisher Melton Mi' IHI i y y- > ■H- ’'■'TE |L I Ir H * Hii, y(7 jjlMr XL X < ■ — AwrlflL & Al Vh/A 11 J k -3 -■ '«■■■■■ ■Rr' Johnstown flood JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) - When the rains began, Richard Stantz was drinking Black Velvet and Mountain Dew with the boys. His fiance, Rita Jo Searle, had been swimming at Ideal Park with her three young sons and her mother. Richard’s brother, Ray, was minding their three children, while his wife, Deborah, played bingo at the Knights of Columbus — recreation on her day off from the maid’s job at the Enterprise Motel. The two Stantz families lived in separate apartments, two buildings apart, in the Solomon Homes project, along Solomon Run Creek in John- People ...and things Youngster struggling home old fashioned green, round watermelon that looks like it weighs nearly as much as he. Young people enjoying checkers on sidewalk at Griffin Country Club during invitational swim meet. Pre-teener sitting on curb, putting yet another knot in bandage on his stumped toe. Quimby Melton in his office at the Griffin Daily News. Saga of Solomon Run stown. Rita got home at 10:30 and put the kids to bed. Rich arrived at 11:30. “It was already pouring rain so bad I felt like a fish,” he said. Deborah, meanwhile, stopped off at a bar. As she prepared to leave, water already was coursing through the street, carbumper high. At 12:45 a.m. her girl friend Marian phoned to say if she was going home, now was the time. While Richard and Rita watched television the power went off. Their clock stopped at 11:52. Rita switched her radio to battery power. Deborah arrived home at 1:30 to an apartment lit only with candles. They invited Marian, who had no candles, to come over with her five children. Lightning stabbed at the darkened city. “Marian looked out the window and said, ‘Oh, my God, the bridge over Solomon Run just washed away,”* said Deborah. The lawn outside their apart ment building, three feet above sidewalk level, was under water. By now the radio station was warning motorists to stay off roads. But nothing more. Then the saga of Solomon Run began. “I said, ‘My God, look at the cars floating down Solomon Street. There are people screaming for help,”* Richard recalled. “They were going so Vol. 105 No. 172 swift, no one could help them.” Rita: “I was stunned, it was too unbelievable to know water was deep enough to carry cars.” By 12:30, cars were tumbling down Solomon Street, a slight incline. Through the lightning flashes, Rita saw half of the office building that serves the housing project being washed away. On nearby Widman street, she could see a fire truck evac uating people. About that time, Ray and Deborah (Continued on page five.) The Country Parson by Frank ('lark Ego ■k “To prove a fellow wrong, elect him — you’ll never know if the loser was wrong.” Weather FORECAST FOR GRIFFIN AREA - Fair and warm tonight with low in low 70s. Fair and hot Saturday with high in mid 90s. LOCAL WEATHER - Low at Spalding County Forestry Unit this morning 72, high Thursday 97. The funeral for Mr. Quimby Melton, Sr., 86, long time publisher of the Griffin Daily News, will be held Sunday at the First United Methodist Church at 4 p.m. The Rev. Lamar Cherry, pastor, will officiate. Burial will be in Oak Hill cemetery. Mr. Melton died Thursday evening at the Griffin-Spalding Hospital where he had been taken a day earlier. He had been in declining health several years and had been a patient at The Living Center of Griffin. He purchased the Griffin Daily News in 1925 and was its editor and publisher for many years. His son, Quimby Melton, Jr., returning from duty in the South Pacific during World War 11, joined his father in the newspaper here as editor. Bom in Chepultepec, Ala., he was the son of Dr. and Mrs. Wrightman Flet cher Melton. Dr. Melton was a jour nalist, author, lecturer and at the time of his death in 1944, was Poet Laureate of Georgia. Mr. Melton, Sr., was a graduate of Emory University. He had a varied career before coming to Griffin. He was office boy in the sports department of the Baltimore newspaper, a cub reporter for the Birmingham, Ala., Ledger, and a teacher and football coach at Allen Academy of Bryan, Texas where he won the state championship. He was secretary of the Chamber of Commerce at Bainbridge, Ga., secretary of the Georgia-Florida Baseball League, editor of the Americus Times-Recorder, and city editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He left that newspaper to volunteer for the Army in World War One. He served in France and as a major and battalion commander in the 82nd Division and was awarded the Silver Star. He later was publisher of the Bir mingham Ledger where he had been a cub reporter. He was publisher of the Florida Metropolis, which later became the Jacksonville Journal. In Griffin he has participated in practically every civic endeavor and was active in the First United Methodist Church during all his years here. He was a long time teacher of the Men’s Bible Class and held practically every office in the church, among them chairman of the official board. He was a long time member of the Griffin Exchange Club and had a hand in getting the Griffin Kiwanis Club organized. The Exchange Club which initiated the Man of the Year program picked Mr. Melton as the first person to receive the honor. He was for many years active in the American Legion Post here and rose to be the Senior Vice Commander of the national organization. Mr. Melton was married to the late Mary Ella Davenport of Americus, Ga. They had two sons, the younger of whom, Lt. Fred Melton, was killed in Germany during World War II at the age of 21. Pallbearers will be Cary Reeves, Bill Knight, Ed Eschman, R. 0. Linch, Bill Cody, Dr. Lamar King, Dr. H. L. Cochran, Otis Weaver, Sr., Frank Thomas, Bill Thomas, Lewis Thomas, and Russell Smith. Honorary pallbearers will be W. H. (Bill) Beck, Nathaniel Bailey and Leo Blackwell. The Men’s Bible Class of the First United Methodist Church, Barnett- Harris Post 15 of American Legion, and the Exchange Club will serve as honorary escorts. Survivors include a son, Quimby Melton, Jr., four grandchildren, Quimby Melton 111 of Fayetteville, Ga., Mrs. Mary Forhand of Lawrenceville, Miss Laura Melton, R.N., of Athens, and Miss Leila Melton of Griffin. Haisten Funeral Home is in charge of plans. (Flowers or donations to the First United Methodist Church Memorial Fund or your favorite charity.)
