Newspaper Page Text
Qtye ^ummerutlk News
— The Official Legal Organ of Chattooga County —
WINSTON E. ESPY PUBLISHER
DAVID T. ESPY JR GENERAL MANAGER
TOM KIRWAN EDITOR
WILLIAM T. ESPY ADVERTISING MANAGER
Subscription Rate: $5.15 Within
NATIONAL County: $7.11 Outside County
\ y Published Every Thursday bv
ESPY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
SS Second Class postage paid at Summer
ville, Ga. 30747.
PUBLICATION NO. SECD 525560
The Espy Publishing Company, Inc., will not be responsible for errors in advertising
beyond cost of the advertisement. Classified advertising rate 6c per word, minimum
$1.25. Card of Thanks. Memoriams, etc., same as classified advertising. Display rates given
upon request.
Address All Mail to: THE SUMMERVILLE NEWS, P. O. Box 310, Summerville, Ga. 30747
Editorials
June Days
June brings us the longest days of the
year, summer, holidays and school
closings. Poets and philosphers of cen
turies past have considered June the
finest month of the year. Because of
that, and because some believed May was
not a good month for marriages, June
also became the month of weddings.
It was also formerly the month of
military campaigns, when the weather
became good enough to move armies
about, a consideration which influenced
World War 11. The Allies waited on the
Death Methods Obsolete
The resumption of capital punish
ment in the United States emphasizes
clearly, again, that most states utilize
obsolete methods for executions.
Shooting one to death (as in Utah) or
electrocution are not the best ways to
remove a person from society—if that
must be done. Hanging is no better.
Surely there could be no serious
objection to forms of death which are
painless. An injection or gas, while the
condemned sleeps, or a poison vial,
Best of Press
IT’S TRUE
You make more friends be becoming
interested in other people than by trying
to interest people in you.—Grit
* * *
ABUNDANT SUPPLY
Talk is cheap because the supply is
greater than the demand.-Ottumwa,
(Iowa) Courier
* * *
|^j]From Our EarluFiles |
“kssils
FORTY YEARS AGO
The following excerpts are from the May 26, 1938, issue of The
Summerville News.
* * *
“Three years’ litigation over the Summerville Cotton mills, the largest
industry at Summerville, moved toward a climax yesterday as a compromise
agreement went into effect and holders of $400,000 in bonds, largely owned g
in Chattanooga, planned to foreclose and bid in the property.”
“PETERBOROUGH, N. H.—A purebred Guernsey bull, Riegeldale
Actor’s Vavalier 253109, was sold recently by the Trion Co.-Riegeldale
farm, of Trion to R. M. Crawford, of Lyerly, according to the American
Guernsey Cattle club.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“NEED GLASSES: Dr. Sapp will return to our store Friday, May 27
(one day only). Eyes examined and glasses fitted. McGinnis Drug Co., ®
Summerville.”
♦ * *
“On sale this week at Hair Motor Company in Summerville: Firestone
spark plugs only 65 cents each, Firestone auto radios only $19.95, and
picnic jugs only 98 cents and up. $
* * *
“See ‘Aunt Tillie Goes To Town,’ the senior play at the high school
auditorium Friday night at 7:30.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“ACE NORRIS and his hell drivers will be at Summerville Ball Park
Saturday, May 28, at 2 p.m. THRILLS-CHILLS and SPILLS, world’s most
daring madmen. Admission 25 cents.”
weather, until June 6th, to invade Nazi
Europe in 1944. Bunker Hill was fought
on the 17th, 1775. The Custer massacre
occurred on the 25th, in 1876. U.S.
troops first landed in France in World
War I on the 26th, in 1917 Etc.
Kentucky, Tennessee and West Vir
ginia observe statehood anniversaries in
. June (the Ist in Tennessee and Kentucky
and the 20th in West Virginia). It’s
Pioneer Days in Idaho on the 15 th. And
Susan Anthony was fined for voting, in
Rochester, N.Y. on the 18th in 1873,
which shows how times have changed.
which produces instant death, are but
some possibilities.
The public seeks not revenge in
capital punishment, but protection for
the rest of society. There is something
barbarous and medieval in executions
witnessed by the public and press. If
they are to be, they should be conducted
in private, in a painless manner, with
only the clergy, and perhaps an official
witness or two, present. And they should
be painless, There is no point in any
suffering if death is the victim’s fate.
TOO MUCH
Don’t worry about our Government
being overthrown-there’s too much of
it.-Marshalltown (Iowa) Times
♦ * *
NO ANSWER
The question today is not “what is
the world coming to?” but
“When?”—Bristol (Va.) Herald
* * *
®HL Jb
yjw : r
'g\ W
x r wiwJ I
। -TOM KIRWAN —
Off the Newsdesk
Change—'The Law Os Life'
I was sitting under a fan in the gym
during graduation at CHS Tuesday night,
making it difficult to hear the speakers
at times. As a result, I later asked Saluta
torian Jon Wyatt to give me a copy of
his address in preparation for the gradu
ation story I was working on.
After reading his thought-provoking
speech, I felt it was a shame there were
probably quite a few people who may
have had difficulty hearing it Tuesday
night.
His words are insightful, and I didn’t
feel that excerpting a few of his com
ments in a news story did him complete
justice. As a result, I’m reprinting his
speech here, confident readers will enjoy
his ideas as much as I did.
* * *
“Mr. King, School Board Members,
Mr. Herring, assistant principals, parents,
fellow students, ladies and gentlemen:
“Nothing is permanent but change,”
according to Heraclitus, who lived about
500 B. C., yet spoke wisely to and about
future generations. It is within the
framework of this ironical statement
that we, the graduating class of 1979,
find ourselves tonight. We recognize,
somewhat fearfully, that no factor or
situation in our lives since we began the
journey through our educational maze in
the first grade in 1967 has remained the
same.
“Being human, we long for that
security found in stability; but being
realistic, we realize that without change,
our lives would have become
stagnant. . . our minds would have been
smothered by narrow-mindedness. At
this moment, we are going through the
biggest transition in, our lives thus
far—from the completion of 12 years of
schooling and home life into the world
that we must make for ourselves.
Although this is a monumental task, and
should not be taken lightly, the Class of
1979 has a definite advantage that
should help us to deal more adeptly with
this transition. We are a part of a
generation that has witnessed, survived,
and benefited from more changes in our
18 years than has any other.
“We were bom into a nation with
the nerve to elect its youngest President
ever-a nation willing to put their faith
in someone who wasn’t a Baptist or a
Methodist. The people around us were
filled with social unrest because of a
growing arms race. Our young men were
fighting their first undefinable war in a
strange place called Vietnam, the first
war in our history without total support
on the home front. Racial tensions that
had been smouldering for many years
erupted in full force when someone
stood on the steps of the Washington
Monument and said, ‘I have a dream . ..
a dream for all people.’ Although we
were really too young to recognize the
significance of these events, we did feel
the tragedy as we watched, through the
media of television, the assassination of a
President.
“Not only did we witness these
events, but we also saw the changes in
our society that they brought about. Our
Senate is now voting on a treaty to limit
I
the number of nuclear bombs produced
in the two most power countries in the
world. Thirteen years and two Presi
dents, after we were born, we celebrated
the end of the war in Vietnam. Twenty
five years ago last month, the Supreme
Court ordered that our nation’s schools
should be desegregated. Although it took
a little time for ‘freedom of choice’ to
become total desegregation, we became
the second class to go entirely through
this school system in a completely inte
grated situation. Perhaps it was the
unique success of John Kennedy that
paved the way to the election of our
President from Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
Who can deny that this is a definite sign,
as Bob Dylan sang, that still ‘The Times
They Are A Changing?’
Some of us were already in kinder
garten when our shiny new high school
was being completed. We listened
intently as our elders debated the pros
and cons of burying the name “Summer
ville High” and bringing to life a strange
place called Chattooga High School. We
watched every day as this very building
rose from the ground to become the
center of our athletic department. Some
of us will never forget that fateful
Monday evening this past November
when a group of students descended on a
school board meeting to promote a great
and noble cause—long hair. We had,
much to our surprise, what can only be
called a “friendly chat.” The under
standing board members agreed with us,
and we left wondering why we hadn’t
done this sooner, instead of just talking
about it.
“Seniors, we have watched our
world, our nation, and our community
change, and thank goodness, we have
changed with it. We have gone from
matchbox cars to real, live motors. We’ve
decided that it’s a lot more fun to get
along with members of the opposite sex
than to fight with them. We have learned
that the old way of doing things is not
always right, but we have also learned
that “different” is not always right,
either.
“The credit for our growth within
the framework of permanent change is
due partially to the individuality lying
deep within each of us; but mostly to
the support given to us by you, our
loved ones and our educators. In the past
12 years, we have consumed a wide
assortment of your values and standards
and combined them with our own beliefs
and thoughts. The result is that we have
taken the words of experience and set
them to the music of a different
drummer—and thus, experienced a major
and necessary metamorphosis. We
walked into this building tonight as high
school seniors, but we will leave as high
school graduates. Mingled with all those
hopes and fears twirling right now within
our minds is a statement made by
President John Kennedy shortly before
his untimely death: ‘Change is the law of
life .. ..Those who look only to the past
only at the present are certain to miss
the future.’ Thanks to all of you, we are
flexible enough to focus our lives in the
right direction.”
CLOSEUP “
Facing South
a syndicated column
voices of tradition
in a changing region
“I’ve got no complaints about livin.’ ”
MOUNDVILLE, Ala.-I first saw Allie Mae
Burroughs Moore in New York’s Museum of Modern
Art. The classic photograph of her face was titled
“Wife of Alabama Sharecropper 1936.” _
Her tightskinned jaw was set firm. i .
The creases in her brow looked like ~
the shovel-plowed furrows of the
cotton fields she tended. And
beneath the brow, haunting eyes
stared in pained resignation. g
The photograph, James Agree -if
wrote, is “a fraction of a second’s
exposure to the integrity of truth.”
It was the work of Walker Evans, A M
whose precise, lucid photographs, £ J 1
accompanied Agree’s study of white $
tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
On a listless August afternoon, 42 years later, Allie
Mae Burroughs Moore age 69, is putting up okra for
winter. She now lives in a trailer camp only three
miles from the weatherboard cabin where she posed
for Evans.
And now I see that the gaunt lives of the face in
Evans’ picture have matured into deep seams. The
darkened eyes are still penetrating.
She dries her hands on her apron and picks up the
famous photograph.
“I don’t guess I was special tired when he was
atakin’ that picture,” she says. “I was used to it by
then. I might’ve been tireder than I thought, but I just
took it for ‘life.’ ”
With her first husband, Floyd Burroughs, she share
cropped land in Hale County, Alabama, for most of
her life.
“Floyd and me,” she says, “we’d move about a
mile of two ever once in a while to try to get things
better. But it never did get no better.
“It wasn’t because Floyd didn’t work hard, but it
seemed like our work never paid off. We just worked
for what little bit we ate and what little bit we wore,
and it weren’t much either way.”
In 1964, Floyd died. He left Allie Mae his entire
life’s savings-a legacy of SIOO.
By that time, most crops were being cultivated with
huge agribusiness machinery-rather than by men,
women and children with hoes and handplows.
So Allie Mae moved to “the city.” Tuscaloosa is
only 17 miles from the fields she’d tended for 55
years, but those 17 miles took her to a whole new
world. She met a self-employed farmer named Archie
Moore, and Allie Mae describes their marriage as “the
happiest six years I ever lived.”
But with his death, Allie Mae returned to the
orange clay fields of Hale County to live in a trailer
and subsist on sl3l a month in Social Security pay
ments, along with Medicare benefits.
Perhaps Agree had summarized her lot when he had
written: “In what way were we trapped? Where, our
mistake? What, where, how, when, what way, might
all these things have been different, if only we had
done otherwise? If only we had known.
Allie Mae, however, is not bitter. She is grateful for
“what the Lord has done for me,” beginning with her
six surviving children who, she points out proudly, all
live in houses or at least mobile homes that they own.
“When they was little I never thought that would
be possible,” she says.
Rising, Allie Mae conducts a brief tour of her
trailer, pointing out the knick-knacks and odds and
ends that contracts sharply with the gray planking of
the tenant shack she had lived in during the ‘3os, in
which Agee had observed “the pastings and pinnings
of sad ornaments.”
Allie Mae Burroughs Moore has, indeed, endured.
She survived Evans, and outlived Agree, who died by
his own hand.
N°’ J wouldn t change my life none,” she says
softly. I m thankful and I’m happy. I’ve got no
complaints about livin’.”
SCOTT OSBORNE
professor
Westminster College, Pa