i ‘Hay lady’
He sits under a shade tree
while she cuts, bales hay
■
For the past 5 months Spalding
1 i County resident Beatrice Coates has
been working for hay.
On a dare, Mrs. Coates took on her
4 husband who bet her she wouldn’t
leave her household chores and begin
cutting, raking and baling hay.
She since has not only taken up his bet
I but has purchased not one but 2 tractors
® and is now working from 10-12 hours a
day in the fields baling hay.
4 And she looks forward to her work,
too.
And the pay—hay.
Mrs. Coates is contracting jobs to
’ clean pasture land for area farmers for
only the hay she bales.
The scenario all began after her
♦ husband, John Coates, had surgery on
J his back and was declared disabled to
work.
* i Mrs. Coates said she was willing to do
the work to supplement the family
income. A friend, Jerry Ellis, offered to
buy the raking and baling equipment if
‘ she would do the work. Mrs. Coates
agreed and her company was born.
“This time last year I couldn’t have
it put a gun on her to get on a tractor,”
Coates said.
Any day Mrs. Coates can be seen
GRIFFIN
Daily Since 1872
a
Take a lap, coach
Coach Max Dowis leads his pack of Griffin High Bears around the track as they
sweat and strain during a practice session to get in shape for the coming foot
ball season. Coach Dowis will take his charges to football camp near Indian
Springs Sunday in preparation for the 1977 season.
riding her tractor from early dawn to
near darkness. Her husband ac
companies her to the fields to assist
with correcting any problems with the
machinery that may arise.
He sits under a cool shade tree while
Mrs. Coates goes busily about her job
“making hay while the sun shines.”
Coates says he wonders what people
think when they see a robust fellow like
him under a tree while the little woman
is doing the work.
“You can see them do a double take, I
get a kick out of it,” Mrs. Coates said.
“I’m just the free advisor,“ Coates
said:
Mrs. Coates does not complain about
her work but notes there is one thing
she needs that might make her work a
little easier.
“If I had a radio I’d be as happy as a
bird,” she said.
Coates has promised to get her one.
Though she works hard at her job,
Mrs. Coates never pushes herself to
undesirable limits.
“I just do what I feel like today and
finish up tomorrow,” she said.
But just doing “what I can”
sometimes means Mrs. Coates will
make 1,300 bales of hay a day. She has
Griffin, Ga., 30223, Saturday Afternoon, August 13,1977
two men following her tractor and
loading the bales. Even so, there is a lot
of work exerted in driving the tractors.
This sort of dedication to her work
will mean that she can sell her hay to
local farmers at a premium price. The
harsh dry summer has made feed for
animals scarce.
“I make a little money and it gives
me something to do besides,” Mrs.
Coates said.
Visiting the Coates’ home, one would
wonder how Mrs. Coates would want
something else to do. While she’s at
home she is continuously working
around the house.
The Coates’ maintained an acre
family garden which very luckily she
says produced well this dry summer.
Mrs. Coates has been canning and
preserving the harvests of the garden
while she has some free time. She has
canned some 200 quarts of vegetables
this year.
She, however, does not want to have
too much free time due to tractor
breakdowns, etc. Mrs. Coates just
purchased her second tractor from a
local dealer and she says when they see
her coming they refer to her as the
“hay lady.”
U.S. school children
will get shots in fall
ATLANTA (AP) - State public
health officials will be urged to enforce
immunization laws this fall as part of a
program to protect at least 90 per cent
of the nation’s school children against
measles and other childhood diseases,
the national Center for Disease Control
said Friday.
The program will include a special
effort to stem measles outbreaks which
have shown tremendous increases this
year in some states.
“Hopefully, we’re going to try to get
the older children (vaccinated) as well
as those entering school for the first
time,” Dr. Neal Halsey, a medical
epidemiologist in the Division of
Immunization, said in an interview.
“If we can get the older children, I
feel that we can stem the outbreak of
measles,” he said. “We have usually
managed to vaccinate only about two
thirds or three-fourths of the kids in the
past.”
As of Aug. 6, the latest figures
available at the CDC show there were
52,290 cases of measles nationwide,
compared with 33,701 at the same time
a year ago.
Halsey said the CDC expects there
will be at least 60,000 cases of measles
by the end of the year, compared with
the record of 75,000 cases in 1971 and the
low of 22,000 in 1974.
The Country Parson
by Frank Clark
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“Retirement is a scheme to
get folks’ days to start later and
seem longer.”
She now has about $16,000 tied up in
equipment which means she will have
another tractor to take on a different
aspect of her job. One of the tractors
will be used for baling hay while the
other will have a bush hog mower at
tached. The bush hog will mow pasture
land for farmers who just want to
reseed their pastures with the fallen
grass.
That kind of hay means a different
kind of pay.
What would an enterprising woman
like Mrs. Coates do with tractors during
the winter months after the first frost?
She plans to attach a belt which
drives a saw. She will split fire wood
this winter to help pay for the tractors.
Will the hay lady then work for
wooden nickels?
With the kind of determination to
succeed that Mrs. Coates has, one can
be certain she will make the nickels into
quarters.
The Coates’ live on Hereford road
with their 6 dogs and 4 cats. They are
expecting an addition to the family
when their daughter, Mrs. Barbara
Denise Ogletree, will present them with
a grandchild later this month.
Vol. 105 No. 191
The mortality rate of measles is
about one in 1,000, but the disease also
can cause permanent brain damage.
States reporting major increases to
the CDC include: California, 9,159 this
year compared with 1,842 at the same
time last year; Virginia 2,628 and 730;
Kansas 1,427 and 661; lowa 4,284 and 41;
Minnesota 2,617 and 389 and Missouri
945 and 17.
In California, state law requires
immunization but state officials say
enforcement in some areas has been
lax.
The California Legislature has a bill
pending which would provide $680,800 to
improve school record-keeping and re
porting of childhood diseases, and
would give school districts more power
to require documentation of im
munization from parents.
Virginia plans to bar children from
class who have not been immunized,
and a new law goes into effect in lowa
Aug. 15 requiring children to be immu
nized against measles and other
diseases.
Weather
FORECAST FOR GRIFFIN
AREA—Partly cloudy, warm and
humid through Sunday with chance of
afternoon and evening thundershowers.
Low tonight near 70; high Sunday in low
90s.
People
...and things
Line of frustrated drivers broiling in
afternoon sun and waiting impatiently
as flagman on highway chats
pleasantly with driver in front auto.
Father, covered with perspiration
busily mowing front lawn as 2-year-old
son follows in his path with toy mower
singing and as cool as a cucumber.
Elderly gentleman sitting alone on
bench at city park reading newspaper.
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By .»KWjk JT * ** a*.
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Mrs. Coates operates one of her tractors while cutting hay. She has been sup
plementing family income since her husband hurt his back and has been unable
to work.
Enterprise flight puts
man in new space era
By PETER J. BOYER
Associated Press Writer
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE,
Calif. (AP) — In a five-and-a-half
minute soaring glide over the
California desert, a craft called
Enterprise ushered America into a new
space era — one in which man’s space
ventures not only will fascinate him but
will work for him.
With astronauts Fred Haise and
Gordon Fullerton at the controls, the
space shuttle popped off the back of its
Boeing 747 mother ship on Friday, burst
through high-hanging clouds and
roared safely to rest in a storm of dust.
It was the first time the space bus for
the 1980 s had ever flown on its own.
For many of the thousands of persons
who came to this desert base northeast
of Los Angeles to watch the chunky
craft test its wings, the Enterprise
seemed to represent science fiction
come true. The craft, named after the
ship in the popular television show
“Star Trek,” can perform its space
chores and return to Earth for reuse.
The shuttle, which will eventually
carry scientists on flights into Earth
orbit, was lugged to a four-mile altitude
by the 747 before it was released for its
test flight and landing.
When the shuttles begin making
flights to outer space in 1979, they will
blast off from Earth like rockets, using
their own engines and supplementary
engines that will be shed after launch
and salvaged for later use.
When Haise, 43, and Fullerton, 40,
eased the shuttle down on a dry lake
bed runway, cheers erupted and every
where there was talk of the space
shuttle’s promise.
81-year-old balloonist
calls himself young
By VAL CORLEY
Associated Press Writer
INDIANOLA, lowa (AP) - At 81, hot
air balloonist and parachutist Eddie
Allen considers himself middle-aged,
with a long career ahead of him.
“I’ve made 3,253 ascensions and
parachute jumps in every state in the
union,” he said at the National Hot Air
Balloon Championships here. “I’m go
ing to still continue until I get to be 160
and then I’ll quit.”
Allen hasn’t flown his old-fashioned
smoke-filled balloon since he crashed
and was seriously injured at last year’s
championship meet. But he has ridden
in several of the modern balloons in this
year’s championship which ends today.
Allen’s balloon is made of four-ounce
cotton sheeting instead of the modem
California Gov. Edmund G. Brown
Jr. spoke of the shuttle as a means to
use outer space to aid an Earth running
out of resources.
Brown, who has the reputation of a
fiscal conservative and whose state is
benefiting from having Rockwell Inter
national Corporation of California as
the main contractor for the shuttle, said
the $2 billion spent to put the Enterprise
aloft was well worth it.
Perhaps Carl Sagan, Cornell
University astronomer and NASA’s
most persuasive salesman, put the
shuttle in clearest perspective: “The
shuttle is putting the human presence in
orbit around the Earth,” Sagan said.
“And utilizing space for human needs.”
The shuttle is the first spaceship that
can land like a plane and make regular
trips in and out of space. It will be able
to repair satellites, hasten the de
velopment of a system that will shoot
energy from space to Earth and will aid
in exploring other planets in the solar
system.
For Fred Haise, there was a more
personal meaning in the success of the
Enterprise. Haise was aboard Apollo 13
in 1970 when the spacecraft had to turn
back from the moon after an explosion
in mid-voyage. Three years later he
escaped death when a plane he was fly
ing crashed and burned short of a
runway in Texas.
“It is for me, a long time waiting,”
Haise said. “My last flight was Apollo
13, which was, of course, a great
mission. It was great to get back, but it
left me with a taste that something
didn’t go right.
“I certainly didn’t feel that way with
this one. On this one I’m very happy.
Everything went superslick.”
lightweight nylon. Instead of a basket
for three or four passengers, the pilot
sits on a trapeze and jumps with a
parachute when he is ready to land.
Allen says he has recovered from the
internal injuries he suffered last year
and will go up in his balloon and bail out
at next year’s contest.
“The crash was my own fault,” said
Allen of Batavia, N.Y. “I forgot to put’a
safety strap on.”
Following the crash, Allen was in and
out of the hospital for surgery and other
treatment. “But now, I’m all in good
shape. The doctor examined me and
said ‘Eddie, you’re 100 per cent.’”
Allen took his first balloon flight in
New York on Sept. 27, 1912.
“Do I ever remember it. I was 15
(Continued on page two.)
