home    shikar    biography    miscellaneous writing    events    links   

he's a good old boy

This piece was reprinted in a double-truck ad in Editor and Publisher in the late 1960s. While writing the breaking story, I was struck by the apparent anomalies and, a few days later, sent Don Phillips, later with the Washington Post, to do some background reporting. I did the writing, Don the reporting. The story ran under his byline.

     White Ga. (UPI) -- This place is very small, and half the people have known George Huskins since he was a youngster. They all agree that George, he's a good old boy.

     He fathers children with dumbfounding regularity and communes with his God daily. He had some funny spells now and then, acting kind of crazy, but he's really okay.

     But when George's troubles got too big for him and he crawled up on the village water tank to share his agony with the world, the folks came out to snicker and gape and taunt him like a cornered boar.

     Preachers came to pray him down and others summoned him in the name of everything he had professed to hold dear--God, Lester Maddox, his wife. But George remained unmoved in the shiveryh night, the sheriff grew more surly with each passing hour. lAnd an old man's tragedy became a cold day's diversion for this little mountain town.

     Life has become so savage and so impersonal in the cities, some say, that a man will not help a strange woman set upon by thugs. Faceless crowds urge a boy on the 20th-floor ledge to jump.

     In the primal fastness of the mountains, where man is close to nature, the theory is that he is also closer to his fellow man.

     But George Huskins, shrieking and prancing with his guns on a silvery water tower Monday night, might as well have been sitting on a window ledge high above Peachtree Street down in Atlanta. At least the people jeering at him would not have assured reporters they were life-long friends, and proclaimed him a good old boy.

     There is no doubt that no one in White gave George any real malice. In fact, as commitment proceedings are readied, they may thiink of him very fondly. After all, he provided White with more excitement than anyone could remember.

     There is a sense of awe, of brooding majesty, in the rocky, forest-choked mountains of the South, even in the foothills around White. It is serene and beautiful but it is also cold now, and in the mountains life is hard.

     George Huskins was nearly 60 years old last week when he took himself to the top of the water tank. He is a stocky man with bleary eyes and white-stubbled chin with a sort of lopsided-looking, ruddy face which people say was the result of an operation for throat cancer five or six years ago.

     Families in the rural South run large but George had managed during the course of two wives and a lifetime, to sire 18 children. Nobody seemed to know where all of them were.

     George couldn't read and neither could his wife, whom he married after his first wife died. He couldn't do anything but manual, heavy work, and at 60 years in a mountain winter that comes very hard. He spent much of his time brooding about God and Heaven and Hell and the difficulties of his family.

     The husband of one daughter obtained a divorce in order to marry yet another of George's daughters. This prompted an eight-page sermon from a son in Germany which, aft4er he got someone to read it to him, evidently put George around the bend.

     He took his guns, loosed a few rounds to get attention, and crawled to the top of the tower. Somebody called Sheriff Jim Wheeler in Cartersville, eight miles away.

     There is very little, if anything, the the way of public entertainment in White , which has Pop. 439, and is unincorporated, so George drew big crowds.

     "Lookit ole George," they said in awe. Soon some of the younger rustics began taunting him.

     "Hey, George, go ahead and shoot."

     "Hey, George, you got your Bible with you?"

     George would usually respond, generally with something properly irrelevant and man, and this kept the crowds amused for a while.

     It was peculiar that so many people professed to have known George for so long, yet knew so little about him. They didn't know where he worked or how many children he had, and there was even some confusion about what church he went to.

     As night fell and the temperature dropped below freezing, George's audience drifted away at the insistence of Sheriff Wheeler.

     The sheriff and some other onlookers huddled behind a rock out of George's sight. But you could hear George, up on the tank, because he was so cold his heels were drumming uncontrollably on the metal.

    "Hey, boy, he's cold up there," said one youth.

     "He might freeze to death up there," speculated another.

     "Naw, he's got lotsa coats on. We seen 'em when he was dancing around up there."

     "Hell, ole George probably got food and maybe even a coupla heaters. He mighta been planning this for days, comin' up here and stashin' food away."

     "All we know, he's got a bed up there," said one, and they tried to muffle their snickers. George's heels continued to beat a tattoo on the tower.

     "Come on down, George," one man called in the night. "We're your friends."

     "Hell!" screamed George, "You ain't no friend. When's the last time any of you was in my house?"

     George finally began to mellow when his brother Roscoe showed up. Roscoe went to the foot of the tank and talked quietly with him for a long time.

     "Roscoe, why ain't you been to see me?" whined George.

     "None of you people been to see me."

     And numb with cold, he crawled off the tank and went home with Roscoe to await the return of Sheriff Wheeler. Only a few newsmen and some townspeople saw him come down.   It had long since grown too cold for outdoor entertainment.

miscellaneous writing 

 baseball    civil rights    crime & punishment   funerals   

ghost story   good old boy    parachute jump   rescue   riding the rails   road racing   

short takes    space    survival   thus spake gates    zoo life