You say you like my family stories. Here is one for you.

Recently I found myself talking to a friend about my brother, Coy Ray Council. He was the second to the oldest child in our family. My sister, June, firstborn, entered the world in Pelham, Georgia. Ray is the only one of us to be born in another state. June 29, 1926, Ray was born in Rubonia, an unincorporated community in Manatee County, Florida. 

My father, Coy Lee Council, had moved his little family from South Georgia to Florida to work on a farm for his older brother, Charlie Council, also in Manatee County. In the early 1920s, Florida experienced a real estate boom. Huge immigration took place with people pouring there from the north and other southern states. Prices were soaring. People were moving to Florida in droves. Life was good. Many members of my Council and Robison families moved there and raised families that still live there.

Rubonia was a community of working-class people, mostly black, who worked in the fruit packing industry and in the orchards and fields. 

My father and mother lived in that settlement in the northwest corner of the county in a rented house. Daddy had to take a second job working nights at the ice plant to make enough to pay the rent and feed his small family. My mother said she was afraid, alone at night because she could hear strangers walking right outside her window. 

Rubonia is in the upper left-hand corner of the county.

When Ray was born in June 1926, two major hurricanes in Florida had caused millions in property damage and hundreds of lost lives. The boom was busting. The Depression was looming.

Moving Back to Georgia

My mother, Lois, wanted to move back to Pelham Georgia where her family still lived in the house where she grew up on the grounds of the Textile Mill where Coy had worked most of his life.

Soon after Ray was born, Coy and Lois left Florida and moved their little family back to Pelham. Coy did not go back to the mill. Instead, he bought a filling station on Railroad street from his brother-in-law, Jimmy Tinsley. That is the story I heard, but I think he might have rented the store from a landlord after Jimmy and Aunt Judy gave it up. I can't imagine he had money to buy a store.

Ray was a toddler by that time and June remembered Daddy standing little Ray on the counter in the store and letting him sing for the customers. That first son was the apple of my father's eye. June said he never gave her that kind of attention and I am not surprised. 

My father had a plan. He wanted a family filled with boys who could work on the farm with him, the farm he would one day own.

Little did he know how important Ray would become to the entire family. It is likely that he was the person who saved the land, the company, C. L. Council and Sons, and became the pseudo head of the family when he was a teenage boy. 

In 1943, Ray was seventeen years old. He missed the last three months of high school because he had to stay home and do the spring plowing and planting. The family depended on it. Daddy was too sick to do that work. 

Ray was not a big strapping boy. He was about 5 ft 8 inches tall and was not built like his younger brothers. He told Max later in life that on those days when he had to plow all day long, he became exhausted and had to stop at the end of each long row, lie down on the ground, and rest. 

What is beyond me is that he did not quit. He never said to Mother or Daddy that it was too much and he couldn't go on.

He plowed mules and horses because there was no money at that time to purchase a tractor. The heat and humidity in south Georgia are unbearable even in the spring months. But that young man felt such responsibility for his family and he knew his father was depending on him to get the crops planted. They say what doesn't kill you makes you strong, and perhaps that is what happened to my brother. 

Max said, "Ray missed the last three months of school, but went in to take his final exams. He aced them all." Max, who wasn't a good student, was in awe of Ray who never took books home with him. Ray finished his homework before he left school and then passed his tests with top grades. 

His teachers knew Ray was a diligent student who was not afraid to take on challenges. When given an opportunity, Ray entered contests at school. He entered and won an essay contest. As the winner, he had to read the essay to a group of adults, probably from the club that sponsored the contest. 

Evidently, Mother and Daddy went to hear him read because an influential man came to my father afterward. "Where is Ray going to college?" he asked Daddy. My family had no money to send any of us to college. 

I don't know what my father said to the man, but the wealthy man told my father, "When he gets ready to go, let me know. I will pay his way. This boy deserves and should get a college education." 

I am impressed that Ray was elected class president and even though he missed so much of his senior year, Max said he was Valedictorian at his graduation. What I am most sorry about is there is no school annual the year of Ray's graduation. Because of the war, it was not published.

Ray, at age 18, joined the military during the last year of WWII. He joined rather than wait to be drafted because he was told he would have a chance to serve in the Navy instead of being a soldier in the Army. I will never forget the sight of and my feeling of fear when I saw my father and mother embracing, both crying on the morning Ray left.

I can imagine Mother's fears for her son. She adored him and leaned on him after Daddy was hurt in an accident on the farm. I remember how my father suffered from chills and fever and pain. I can still hear his moans as my mother piles quilts on him. I don't know if there was ever a diagnosis for his illness, but I do know that he was treated for kidney disease at one time. 

I was five years old when Ray served in the Navy. It seems to me he came home almost every weekend, hitch-hiking in the dark on long south Georgia roads. He told us the story of when a long black car stopped and picked him up one night. It was dark in the car. He threw his duffle bag in the back seat and climbed in. Suddenly he realized there was someone else there. A man sat on the other side of the back seat. In the front was a driver.

He knew the men in the car had seen him on the side of the road in his white navy uniform. But who was this man in the car with him now? In the dark, he heard a voice ask him, "Where are you stationed, young man?" Ray answered and the man in the dark continued asking him questions about himself, his family, and what he thought about the Navy.

Ray politely answered everything he was asked. The man told Ray how much he appreciated his sacrifice for his country.

Ray asked to get out when the car reached Acree, a little settlement about three miles from our house. He would walk home from there. Ray, having been taught good manners, and being respectful of his elders, felt he had impressed the man in the dark car and was happy to have the chance to talk to someone of such importance. 

Somehow in that dark car, Ray came to understand he was riding with and talking to Georgia Governor E. D Rivers, a Democrat who accomplished many improvements in the state government. 

In today's world, one might be scared to get into a big black car in the dark with someone you can't see. But during that war, a man in uniform was treated as a very special person. Military men had no problem catching rides home on weekends. Civilians wanted to help in any way they could. In school, we donated our pennies to help the war effort. 

Ray would get to the farm Friday night in his uniform that made him so handsome and change into his farm clothes the next day to work with his brothers. One of them would drive him, now in uniform, over to Acree late Sunday afternoon where he would step out beside Hwy 82, hold up his thumb, and the first or second car that passed would stop and pick him up.

I will stop my tale for now. If you want to know more about my brother, Ray, and what he overcame to be the awesome man I miss so much today, let me know. I will tell the rest of the story.

Let me hear what you think.