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. 

FAMILY

My nephew, Capp Council, and his beautiful daughter, Chloe Council

Chloe is graduating this year from high school. We don't have many girls in her generation of Council kids. Most of that generation are boys and the first child of the following generation is a boy.

This is a son and a grandchild of my brother Max, who passed away in February of this year. 

Capp lived next door to Barry and me on the farm. His first wife and first child, Kim and Carrie, often came to my house to visit. I always enjoyed their company. Carrie was a precocious child, smart and talented. She was the only girl in that family until Chloe came along. 

If I still lived in Albany, GA I would like to get to know Chloe as I did Carrie, but I am far away from there now. If not for Facebook, I would not know much about my family in south Georgia. Max often called me and talked about the family there. I miss his calls. 

I was surprised yesterday when a dear cousin down in Albany called me. She is a widow now. Her husband died on Thanksgiving day last year. The anniversary of a death is always a somber time with memories pouring back to us so I imagine she and her two children will always think of their loss when they sit down to eat the Thanksgiving Turkey.

I often think about how fortunate my family was to have few deaths when Gay and I were growing up. All my grandparents had died before I was born. Only my two oldest siblings remembered them. My oldest brother, Ray, served in the United States Navy during WWII, and I am so thankful that he didn't see battle. He came home safely. However, two of my cousins died during that war. 

Clyde Council, on my father's side, died in a plane crash. On my mother's side, Henry Robison died in a plane crash believed to be hit by friendly fire in an accident. Although I never met either of these young men, I remember them on Memorial Day which we celebrate on Monday. I also remember the families that loved them. 

Memorial Day also holds another memory that is important to me. Barry and I moved to the mountains of NC on Memorial Day, 1995.  That began an adventure and wonderful life as we drew closer and spent more time together.  As I begin making plans to move away from here, I get sad thinking of the happy times we shared and will never share again. 

I hope all of you have a safe and happy holiday weekend. I hate to hear the news of accidents that seem to happen on Memorial Day when people take to the roads, rivers, and lakes. I live near a big lake and it will be busy with tourists who come here this time of year. 

Be safe and thanks for reading my words. Please leave a comment if you can or email me. I love hearing from you, my friends.

Personal Sacrifices - Why can't we make them now?

I admit I had a melt down a few weeks ago - anxiety, depression, and physical illness. I have tried to understand why. Being alone is not that unusual for me. I have always enjoyed my private time. In fact, I am relishing the fact that I don't have children who would come in to see me and bring COVID-19 from their outings with friends. I think it was the uncertainty of what I should do to protect myself.  We were getting so many mixed messages in the beginning of this pandemic.

I am grateful I have my own home, and I do not have to go out to work. I can work from home, as I will do soon, teaching a writing class on Zoom. How fortunate I am to be savvy on my computer so I can do that. Many of my generation cannot.

I was thinking today about all the personal sacrifices my parents made in their lifetimes. My father had to go to work when he was just a boy, before there were child labor laws. His father died when he was ten. His childhood was far from normal.

Mother and Daddy lived through WWII and sent their oldest son off when he was only nineteen. They did not know if he would be killed or come home safely. Two of his cousins went to that war and did not ever come home. Those personal sacrifices for the sake of our country were the hardest anyone could ever make.

During the Great Depression when my parents had three little children, long before I was born, they lived above a store they ran. In front of the store were gas pumps and their place was called a filling station. When their customers lost jobs and had no money to purchase the food or gasoline, my family lived off the food on the shelves of the store. They did not buy clothes, groceries, and certainly did not travel. Today, if folks can't take their family vacation to the beach, they are angry and upset. They have not stopped ordering off Amazon and can get almost anything they want delivered. My parents stayed home in Pelham, Georgia. They were not the only ones. Most people had to sacrifice comforts they had once enjoyed.

A friend of mine who has a twenty-something son says his generation has always had what they wanted and won't sacrifice anything now to help stop this corona-virus if it means staying home or avoiding friends and gatherings. I wonder how they would handle the draft. What if they were told they must serve in the military whether they liked it or not in order to preserve our country?

What if food was rationed? They could only have certain foods and only a small amount of it.
What if they could only buy a small amount of gasoline each month? What if they had to make a personal sacrifice to save the lives of their parents? What would be their answer?

That is what is being asked of them now. Make a personal sacrifice that can save the lives of your family and the lives of others.

A nurse told me today that she wore a mask, not for herself, but to protect others. Her grandfather is in his nineties, and she would be horrified if she brought this deadly virus  to him. She also said she was not sure she believed the mask made that much difference, but it was a small sacrifice to make if it saved even one person's life. In the hospital where she works, she said there was around 100 people diagnosed with COVID-19 at this time. That hospital is about thirty minutes drive from where I live. She had been with three of those patients in the last few days.

Recently a smart and caring young woman who wants to come and visit her family, after hearing how the mayor of Atlanta, who was being careful and following the guidelines given to all of us, has tested positive for COVID-19, decided not to come home and is self-quarantined in her apartment. Four members of her family are all sick with the virus. The older of the four is the sickest at this time. Even when we wear masks, and we go out among people, even people we know, we have a good chance of getting sick. Most people don't know where they caught the virus.

Many people are making huge sacrifices because they have jobs they must go to every day. Many are among those with the lowest income, minorities, people of color, and they are dying from this virus. That is the biggest sacrifice. Not missed vacations, missed concerts, missed entertainment. Some are concerned about their future - will they have a job when they finish college? Who knows, but still we all must give up gathering in groups where we could become infected.

I have had to give up going to certain doctors who will not enforce wearing a mask and who will not wear one themselves. I think, if they won't wear a mask to protect me, are they doing anything in that office - sanitizing after each patient, or are they just among those who don't believe there is a deadly virus going around that kills us? Why don't they believe something so obvious?

We must make the sacrifices necessary to stop this enemy in its tracks or we will never feel safe going out in the world again. I applaud the young people I know who are doing everything right, wearing masks, washing hands, avoiding crowds and practicing social distancing. If only those who seem to be selfish and uncaring would think of others when they are so determined to have a good time with no precautions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/magazine/personal-sacrifice-coronavirus-world-war-ii.html

Veterans, War and Women in High Places

A special friend is veteran, Ash Rothlein, who served in World War II. His mission to honor those who died in that war, is moving along swiftly. I hope to join him and many others at the memorial service in June of 2014 for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. For five years Ash has devoted all his time to a mission that has evolved into far more than he had expected with cooperation from leaders of military organizations, government and other veterans. Nearing 90 years old, Ash has a soaring spirit and a big heart that overflows with love and gratitude for those who lost their lives so that we can all be free.

Veterans Day, which we observed recently, brings to mind those I know and those I love who served our country in war time.

One of my uncles served in World War I. Many of my cousins served in the army and navy during WWII. My brother, Ray Council, and brother-in-law, Stan Hunter also served. Cousins I never met were killed during that war. I observed the never-ending grief of their parents. 

Both my husband and my sister's husband served in the military during wartime. In our world, war is constant. In some land at this moment, men, women and children are being murdered, hacked to death, blown to pieces and being tortured for no reason. Most of them are caught in a battle not of their making.

As the holidays approach my heart aches for those who have lost young loved ones in the horror of war. Those young men and women will not have the life their mothers dreamed for them. I'll never forget seeing my parents' tears when my brother left home to serve in the military. I am forever grateful that he survived his military years.

I believe if we had more women in government, not only in this country, but in other countries around the globe, there would be more use of diplomacy instead of arms to settle disputes.

Former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, believes that more female leaders included with the men who make major decisions affect the outcomes in very positive ways.
See her talk  at TEDtalks.com.

War and what I remember

I was a very small child in the last days of WWII. My brother Ray had joined the U.S. Navy and I remember him coming home in his sailor uniform, dark blue bell-bottom pants and shirt. He wore a white sailor hat, and I thought he was the most handsome man in the world.

I remember seeing his white hat through the little window at the top of our front door as I sat in my brother, Max's lap. I can still feel the happiness flooding the room as everyone realized our brother was home. We never knew when he would appear at the door.


Mother made a fuss over Ray's homecoming. She cooked special desserts and food she knew he'd been missing. We all celebrated until time for him to leave on Sunday. One of my brothers drove him to the highway about three miles from our house. We waited in the car. He crossed over and stood beside the black asphalt. Alone with his duffle bag on the ground beside him, he lifted his arm and stuck out his thumb. It was never more than a few minutes before a car stopped, blocking Ray from our view. The car pulled away and like magic, he was gone. None of us in our car spoke on the way home.

Although I was too young to understand war, I feared that every time he left, I'd never see him again. I knew he was preparing to go to a dangerous place. I didn't hear my parents or other members of the family voice this fear. It was just a feeling hanging in the air in our house, like an invisible smog we breathed.


When I think about the young men and women in Iraq and other warring nations in the world today, I remember that fear. For every soldier, sailor or marine serving in the military, a family, a mother, lives with that fear that I remember even today.


The war ended before my brother was deployed overseas. Two of my cousins died in military plane crashes but not in combat. One of them, my mother's brothers son, Henry, fathered a boy born after his death.

I saw the grief, first hand, of Henry's parents. So many tears, and such suffering.
I believe Richard Argo has the right idea about Veterans Day.











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VETERANS DAY IS SPECIAL

A World War II Unforgettable Experience
Ash Rothlein

I was a soldier during World War II. Our company was an advanced ordnance field unit closely following the invasion into the Normandy beaches of France on June 6, 1944. Once the shores were secured the allied forces fought their way slowly inland over the next several weeks.

One day before dawn, my buddies and I were startled out of our slit trenches. The deafening roar of studded formations of heavy American heavy bombers filled the sky. We were told there were three thousand aircraft, the greatest array of air power ever displayed during the war. We cheered until we were hoarse. They were on a surprise raid to break the impasse of the German stronghold in the city of St. Lo. The success of that mission became the springboard for the armies to make major rapid advances toward Paris.

Shortly after the raid our company commander, directed us to break camp immediately. We were urgently called to lead a convoy of armored vehicles and munitions supplies to our front line troops moving ahead. I was assigned to ride in the point vehicle, an uncovered 6x6 truck, awaiting a new canvas. It was a drab and unusually cold and rainy afternoon. I envied all those who rode in sheltered vehicles. All twenty of us huddled together against the biting wind. Standing firm we held on to the rails and open roof supports. Our driver rumbled along the hilly, pot-holed roads. Rounding a curve heading up a steep incline I saw far in the distance, through the mist and rain, a sprawling village crested atop a craggy hill. Below and behind us was our convoy of one hundred forty odd vehicles following in unison with a steady engine roar.

Approaching the village at dusk I was dumbstruck with the unfolding scene. Every church bell tolled non-stop. The citizens lined both sides of the road waving and cheering as one. Their reaction was a spontaneous explosion of energy, joy and tears. They were oblivious to the cold, windy rain. Our driver slowed. We were spellbound and overcome with this gratuitous reception. With the site of our massive convoy approaching they realized they were indeed liberated. They threw flowers and food toward us. We responded with cigarettes and candy. We pumped our fists with tears of joy. Every child, woman, farmer and worker reached out to us as we edged our way up through the village. Needless to say we were so energized by this once in a lifetime experience that we rode the rest of the night to our destination without a grumble about the weather. We each quietly absorbed, in our own way, the fullness of this spontaneous happening.

Burned into my soul to this day is the eye contact I had with all those beautiful French citizens. Their relief and gratitude at finally being freed from their Nazi oppressors spoke volumes to me as to why it was an honor to serve during that war. It was indeed, an unparalleled and unforgettable treasured moment of communion with people of another culture forever reminding me that we are all one where love abounds.

I am proud to say that Ash Rothlein is a student of my Writing About Your Life class at Tri-County Community College. This story was published by the Clay County Progress of Hayesville, NC along with several wonderful photos for their Veterans Day issue. Other than letters, Ash said he was not a writer, but now says he plans to write more about his life experiences.
Thanks, Ash, for letting me share your story with my readers.