Cohutta, Georgia, Natives Visit the Big Apple

 

On THE TODAY SHOW this morning, outside where the fans have traveled afar to be part of their outside part, and hold up bold signs to tell where you are from:  a group was holding up a sign that said COHUTTA, GEOGIA.

My mother and her siblings grew up just outside Cohutta, Geogia.  My mother actually was born in Gillette, Arizona.  After just a couple of years they moved back to Georgia.

Many years later my sister Frances and I went to Cohutta and spent a week with our grandmother Viola Ridley Petty, aunt Opal, and her young son Anthony.

The house we stayed in was just  a short distance from downtown Cohutta.  They lived on a hill that overlooked a pasture and RR tracks.  One time we saw men with clubs check the boxcars of a non-moving.  They opened one door and out sprang a hobo, I think.  They chased him out of sight.  That was probably in the late 1940s.

The pasture and the house we were staying in was owned by the Maples family.  Not yet born into the family was Marla Maples, future ex-wife of Donald Trump.