Cecil and Georgia

This is an interesting couple. Cecil and Georgia. Georgia was my mother's oldest of 12 siblings. As you can compare them to the car behind them they were not tall people.

They lived in Chattanooga and Cecil worked at a thread company not far away. They lived in a small house with one bedroom and a large closet. I remember as a kid digging through their closet stuff and found a mandolin and brought it out and Cecil played it and he was fairly good. Another little thing I didn't know about him.

I think Cecil was probably a compulsive person in his own quiet way. In the back of the house he built a little building, 8 x 12. In it he had a 16mm movie projector and a large collection of cowboy movies, mostly cowboy movies like Hoppalong Cassidy, Johnny MacBrown, and Bob Steele. He loved to go to his building after work and enjoy watching one of the cowboy movies he collected. I don't think they owned a television.

He died on top the building he built. He was on top nailing down some roofing when he hit a live wire with his metal nail and metal hammer. He was electrocuted instantly.

When I was preschool one summer my sister and I was to spend a week with them. They took us to a big water amusement park in Chattanooga... Lake Winnosota or something like that. Cecil and Georgia did not have kids and was not use to our wayward ways. We didn't stay rooted at home, we wandered the neighborhood - found things to get into. After about 3 days Georgia could take it no more, she was a nervous wreck, she sent us back to Marietta on the bus.

Whenever the Southeastern Fair at the Lakewood Fairgrounds in Atlanta would be every year, Cecil and Georgia would visit over the weekend. Cecil went to the Southeastern Fair alone each year and let Georgia visit with her three sisters living in Marietta. More times than not, their visits developed into heated arguments.

The arguements were based on the fact that father treated some of his kids like little angels and dealt with others as if they were possessed by Satan.

That was normal for my mother and her siblings. But what I wondered about why did Cecil go to Atlanta each year to the Southeaster Fair alone? Did he go to a hoochee-coo show each year at the fair? And if so, he must have did it with Georgia's knowledge, why else would she stay home and miss the lighted midway of the Southeastern Fair.

Georgia died while I was in the Navy.