Porterdale Mill on the Yellow River NAMED for

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Porterdale Mill on the Yellow River
NAMED for: Oliver S. Porter, Mill Owner

 

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John “Johnny” Day:  Born May 18, 1932, PHS Class of 1948 

I’ve just finished reading the “Memories” on the web site and they sure brought back lots of pleasant memories to me.  I won’t try to duplicate a lot of things already there, but I’ll give a little personal/family history and add a few anecdotes about some of the people already named in the “Memories”. 

I was born in Covington on May 18, 1932, but my folks (John & Margie Day) must have moved to Porterdale when I was very young.  We lived in the second house on S. Broad St.  Sometime when I was quite young, my dad built a little concrete pool in the yard of that house.  It was rarely ever used, but probably is still there, though likely filled by now.  I think, but am not sure, that my parents were both working in the mills at that time.  (My mother may have worked in the office.) Just as everyone else in town, I’m sure my folks didn’t have much money.  One of the greatest Christmas presents I ever got was a little sack of blocks.  They were my favorites for many years.  A  favorite game was “Dictionary”, where one of us would look in the dictionary and pick out a word for the others to try to guess its meaning. 

I started school in Porterdale.  I believe my first-grade teacher’s name was Miss Ricker.  Because I had learned to read before starting school, I wound up spending 1/2 year in 1st grade, then 1/2 year in 2nd grade.  (I’ve always used that as an excuse for my bad handwriting.) 

About the time I was ready for 3rd grade, my parents moved to LaGrange, probably because work was hard to find.  They both worked there in a laundry owned by a distant relative.  My parents, at least, never really let on how hard times were in those days.  As best I can reconstruct, we returned to Porterdale when I was in 4th or 5th grade.  For a while, we lived in half a “six-room house” on Magnolia St. Somewhere along the line, my folks ended up moving to and running the hotel (The Welaunee Inn).  I had a wagon, and I can remember racing toward the glass doors in the dining room in it and turning just before I got there. (never hit them) 

Later, we moved to S. Broad street right across the road from where the old “Brown’s Bridge Road” came in.  The house was later occupied by the Edwards family. One of the funny things in our family relates to that house.  When our daughter was in grade school, she had to walk a mile to school in some very unpleasant Ohio weather.  I told her the weather was better in GA, but that I walked a lot farther to school.  The family was in Porterdale one day and I happened to remember this and told my daughter we’d measure the distance I walked.  6/10 mile!  I’ve never lived that one down! 

Things are very hazy about the sequence of events from here.  Somewhere along the way, my dad got the job of supervising the streets, parks, etc., and we moved to the 1st house on S. Broad.  (It was once part of an older teachers’ cottage.)   He had a small crew of black people working for him (Lee, Andrew, “Dad”, and others I can’t recall.)  The crew took care of all the grass and parks as well as picking up the garbage.  I’m probably prejudiced, but I thought Porterdale looked pretty nice in those days. I was appalled when I saw it in 1998.  I hope the clean-up campaign succeeds. 

There was a greenhouse on a hill above Porterdale mill, and my dad’s crew grew lots of flowers there and elsewhere for all the churches in town.  There were huge poinsettias growing in 5-gallon buckets.  Churches were filled with them at Christmas.  During WWII, they dug a huge ditch (still there), cleared the bottom land along the river behind the house, and grew vegetables for the folks in town.  (The field has since overgrown.)  A cannery was set up in an old tin building behind the stores, and folks brought their vegetables there and canned them, not just in jars, but in tin cans.  Miss Ruth Tanner was very much involved with the cannery. I helped out there in those days. 

One of the unique things about living in the house across the river was that, during WWII, we had the only phone on that side of the river beside the ones in the teachers’ cottage and the mill superintendent’s house.  We sometimes got calls from servicemen wanting to talk to their families, so it was my job to go and tell the families so they could come to the house and await a second call from the relative. 

At some point, my mother started supervising the school lunchroom located in the gym.  Peanut butter and grated carrot sandwiches were a staple. 

I became an airplane nut during WWII, building lots of model planes.  Sidney Yancey, a friend of my dad’s was flying control-line airplanes and I got hooked.  After the war, my cousin, James Mills, a navy veteran, took me to Atlanta to purchase a model airplane and engine.  We spent all the money we had and I still didn’t get the engine I wanted.  When I brought it home, Mr. Yancey spent HOURS with me before we finally got things right.  I usually flew the airplanes in the old baseball park by the power plant.  A lady who wanted to buy my airplane for her son showed up one day, and the deal was about done when I made one more flight and the crankshaft on the engine broke!  End of sale.  Sidney Yancey also gave me my first slide rule and showed me how to use it. 

I also was the paper boy for “across the river”.  I inherited the job from Elbert Madden and eventually passed it on to Prentis Ollis. 

I was no athlete, so in high school I became the scorer for the high school basketball teams and the red-hot local softball team.  At one time, they were national-class.  Softball was the great community entertainment, with hundreds showing up for every game.  It was primarily a pitcher’s game, using locals “Freck” Newman and “Sid” Hodge, along with hired gun “Hank” Struble from somewhere in the Atlanta region.   (There’s a park up around Conyers dedicated to a Hank Struble.  I’ve wondered if it’s the same person.)  I’d sometimes get yelled at when I recorded that one of the locals got on base by an error instead of a hit. 

PHS didn’t offer much in the way of sciences, so 7(?) of us – 6 girls and me – were bussed to Covington for chemistry class in our senior year. 

After graduating from PHS (’48 – there were 11 grades then), I went to Emory-at-Oxford for a year, then on to Ga. Tech, where I was in the ROTC program.  During my freshman year at GT, my father died, but my mother encouraged me to stay in school.  My mother moved to Atlanta while I was at GT, and worked for the state for many years.  Late in her life, she moved to Columbus to be near us and died in 1984. 

The summer after my dad died, I did have a brief experience in the mills.  I worked the 11 p.m. – 7 a.m. shift as a maintenance helper in the automatic spooler room in Osprey Mill.  My boss was Richard Thompson, one of my old model-airplane buddies.  I started at 88 cents/hour and got a raise to 99 cents when the minimum wage went up.  If you think that’s a tiny wage, I have some of my dad’s pay stubs where he was earning $10.80 for a 44 or 48-hour week - with zero benefits.  I had an on-campus job for the rest of my time at GT. 

After graduating from GT, I eventually spent 2 years in the Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH.  When I got out, I moved to Columbus, OH to finish up a master’s degree and wound up working for Battelle, a contract research organization.  I married Lois Barrington in 1958.  We moved to Connecticut for a couple of years, then returned to Columbus, where I went back to work for Battelle until I retired.  We adopted Gail as an infant in 1963 – the best thing that ever happened to us.  As I write (2/21/04), she’s married and is expecting a baby in about 3 weeks. 

Now for some random thoughts triggered by names seen on the web site. 

Lucille Shaw  I went to the Methodist Church, and like most kids those days, went to Sunday school and church in the a.m. then to Youth Fellowship and church in the evening.  After all the evening activities, Lucille would load ALL of us in her Chevrolet coupe and take us to Covington to the “Ice Cream Parlor” – probably the closest thing to a fast food place in existence then.  As best I recall, she had as many as 13 of us in that little car.  Buying a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke was a big deal for the evening.  I suppose all the boys who went to the Methodist Church considered it an achievement to be big enough to be allowed to help carry James Lummus and his wheelchair up those big steps to the Church. 

Pete & Evelyn Vining  They lived just up the street from us on S. Broad.  They had a son, Don, who could play anything by ear on the piano.  Pete’s mother, Susie Vining, was the sister of my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth (“Liz”) Mills.  She also had a sister, “Aunt Jay”.  Aunt Susie, Aunt Jay, and Irene Hall shared a home on S. Broad.  I believe all worked in the mills for many years. 

James Mills  James was my first cousin, and the closest thing to an older brother I had.  He served in the Navy in WWII.  His parents were John Thomas (“Buck”) and Flora Mills.  They subsequently divorced, and “Buck” married Louise Hill, also a WWII veteran.  I spent lots of weekend nights with them after my mother moved to Atlanta.  The big weekend deal at the time was to go to square dances in various then-small towns around the area.  Most are now bedroom communities for Atlanta. 

Gold Star Families  I can recall at least two more.  Mr. & Mrs. Jim Cook had a son (James?) who was killed in an airplane in the South Pacific.  B. C. Chapman, the postmaster, had a daughter who was a ferry pilot.  She was one of the few women killed doing ferry flying. 

A few parting shots: 

As many others have observed, I never thought it was unusual to live in a “Company Town” while growing up.  Because I didn’t have anything else to compare it to, I, to this day, can’t really say whether times were harder in Porterdale than in other parts of the state.  We were all in the same boat together, and I don’t think that, as kids anyway, we ever thought of ourselves as “poor”.  

One thing which has bothered me as I got older is the way blacks were treated in my day – and how very little I thought about it at the time.  We’ve come a long way. 

In some ways, I got away from my small-town heritage after leaving GA.  Returning for my 50th PHS class reunion made me stop and think about my roots.  While I might not have as much in common with my classmates as I once did, I found myself repeatedly thinking “These are GOOD PEOPLE”   They were honest, decent hardworking folks – and still are.  I was lucky to grow up in such a time and place. 

John “Johnny” Day

Columbus, OH