DOB: 8/28/1892, Meridian, MS
DOD: 3/22/1967, Atlanta, GA, 75 years, I believe from a heart attack triggered by apnea.
My father was a remarkable man. He was the third child, raised in a middle class Meridian family. His father was a lawyer and served for a while as district attorney. He attended Mississippi State University but only for a year, because his father died and he needed to help take care of his mother. His brother, Hector, had started a law practice and family and was limited inches ability to help.
Daddy’s first job, at 18 or 19 was as a clerk for a timber company in Southern Mississippi. One day he went to the bank in the local town. When he returned to the timber camp, he met an eerie silence. He walked on to the camp office and all hell broke out. Gunfire and screaming. He had interrupted a race riot but fortunately was popular on both sides.
He moved to Atlanta and joined the Mutual Life Insurance Company as a salesman. He did well and was promoted to manager of the Atlanta Agency.
I never learned how he met my mother but am glad that he did!
He was successful in the life insurance business which did better during the Depression than most other financial business - no mutual insurance company went bankrupt. We thus had an upper middle class life style. My parents hobnobbed with many of Atlanta’s wealthiest citizens.
He was usually involved in the Atlanta Community Chest or similar organization.
He retired from MONY at 65 or so and then managed the Southern Presbyterian Church’s Ministers’s Annuity (retirement) Fund. He continued in that role until his death.
Daddy’s passion outside of his family was golf. He usually went out to Brookhaven Country Club every Sunday afternoon and many Saturdays. He was not a long driver but was quite good at the short game. His handicap was 8 to 10, as I recall.
One day in 1966 Daddy was caught between two golf carts and suffered a compound leg fracture. It took about a year for him to recover. He returned to the putting green at Brookhaven on March 22, 2967. That night at dinner he was so happy to be out at Brookhaven again. He went to bed as usual but suffered a fatal heart attack later that night.
Included in this memoir is a photograph of four men walking across a field. On one end was Bobby Jones, the great Atlanta golfer, and at the other end was Robert Tyre Jone, the notable golf architect. My father was in the group.
That was the beginning of the Peachtree Golf Club, of which my father was a founder. He found the course too long for his game and rarely played there.
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