Its a Small World

Yesterday evening at the GOBAG meeting Jennings Patterson was told some of us  lot by lot of the who his grandfather sold property to, who at one time owned about the whole tract of land. When he got to the corner of Rose Lane and Marble Mill he said the Ellis family lived there. My mother-in-law, as a kid, lived across Rose Lane on the other corner. Her father died in that house.


Back to the Ellis family: They had a son named Dink. Dink was in the same explorer troop I was in, that Maple Avenue Methodist Church sponsored. Dink was a studious little kid.  The bunch I belonged to was sort of rambunctious.

Years later when I was a window clerk at the Post Office I waited on Dink one time..  He looked like a middle-aged business man who was deadly serious.  At the moment he was deadly serious in rrenewing his pass port and putting a rush on it.  I tried to jar his memory  of who I was, his old co-scout in the same Explorer troop and I don’t think he actually thought about that.  I didn’t register in his memory at all – as usual.

Dink had a brother.  I forgot his first name.  When I was stationed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, a guy by the last name of Ellis checked into our squadron.   I think his name was Mike Ellis, but I am not sure.   I processed him in.  I asked where was he from.  Georgia, he said.  I said so was I, what part of Georgia.  He said it was a little town near Georgia Tech.   A little town near by the name of Marietta.  A little town near Georgia Tech?  I wondered why he didn’t just  say a little town near Atlanta? 

I told him so was I.  What part of Marietta.  He said up by the hospital.  I asked him exactly what streets and he said on the corner of Rose Lane and Marble Mill Road.  I asked him did he have a brother named Dink and he said he did.  I told him Dink and I was in the scouts together.  He was a friendly person and for the next week or two we had drinks at happy hour of the E.M. Club every evening.   Small world.

During our short friendship period I told my family via mail about the Ellis kid in Marietta.  My mother reported back to me that the Ellis guy was a cousin of mine.  I forgot how she said, but I think we are related through the Tysons.   How she could rake up kin was always amazing.   I wished I had taken notes.

He got assigned to a helicopter detachment aboard an icebreaker ship in the Arctic for six months and that was the last I saw of him.