I went to high school in Thomson, Georgia and live about 25 miles from Thomaston, Georgia, but had never been to Thomasville, Georgia until last weekend. What an amazing town and area with history similar to Jekyll Island. I really enjoyed my tours and stay there.

In the 1800s rich folks from up north wanted to escape the cold weather, just like what we call “snowbirds” now. Without good roads, they needed to ride trains south if they didn’t have yachts and live on the coast, and the main railroad line ended in Thomasville. It did not extend into Florida due to the dangers of mosquito carried diseases like yellow fever and malaria that were widespread a little further south.

A couple fancy hotels survive from that time with elegant rooms and settings for the very rich. But even the very rich balked at paying high prices for rooms for their families and themselves and all their servants that traveled with them for a couple of months each year. They decided they could build their own places outside town and save money.

The results are mansions on “Plantations” out in the piney woods. Most centered on hunting, with deer, quail and turkey abundant. They also ran fox hounds for fox and bobcat.

The rich with yachts did the same thing on Jekyll Island, building huge mansions there similar to the ones in Thomasville to escape south to better weather in the winter.

Touring one of them in Thomasville, like Pebble Hill Plantation, is amazing. As you drive in past outbuildings for servants and other activities you approach a huge brick building designed after Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and think “what a beautiful mansion.” Then you are told that is the stable.

The house, built in the early 1900 after the original burned, has all the modern conveniences of that time, even air conditioning. Each room has a fancy embroidered bell pull to call a servant to your location. Each bed had a button to push for breakfast in bed. There was even an example of the printed menu for guests to check off what they wanted for breakfast.

I toured on a Friday afternoon and there were three weddings going on that day. It is a beautiful, popular place for weddings and other events. And you can still go there and hunt, for a price.

Out in the pine woods, our guide showed us a longleaf pine tree with the nest of one of the rarest birds in the Southeast, a red-cockaded woodpecker. The land on the plantation is managed for wildlife and nature, with proscribed burns to keep the area like it was before it was settled.

The wiregrass covered forest floor is home to many animals and a diverse population of plants. While we were there, yellow blooms carpeted the whole area under the pine trees for many acres. They looked like black eyed Susan flowers but my “Picture This” app on my phone identified them as swamp sunflowers or narrow leaf sunflowers, native to the area and beautiful this time of year.

On Saturday my group met at Myrtlewood Plantation in the clubhouse on a beautiful lake. Some of the members tried fishing but were unsuccessful, the bright sun, clear water and time of day made it tough. Unlike Pebble Hill, Myrtlewood is managed for hunting and fishing, with modern cabins for guests on several different lakes.

Driving in on a dirt and gravel road, we passed a modern five stand sporting clays range where hunters can sharpen their skills before going after quail and doves there. You can also hunt deer and turkey during those seasons. It is an ideal place to hunt, target practice and fish, all in one area.

Very impressive was the Ranges at Oakfield, a modern sport shooting facility owned and run by Thomas County and developed with help from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The facility includes two skeet and trap fields, a 5-Stand sporting clays range, a 100-yard rifle range and a 25-yard pistol range.

Rifle and pistol ranges include electronic targets that show you immediately on a screen by your shooting station where your bullet hits. That allows you to adjust sights and shooting stance without walking downrange to the target.

Future plans include development of a static archery range and a 3D archery range. Ranges are open to the public for a small daily fee, or you can join with a membership to use the facilities if you live locally. It was an impressive facility!

I was in Thomasville for the annual Georgia Outdoor Writers Association conference. The highlight of the conference for me was the banquet on Saturday night where “Excellence in Craft” awards were presented.

Each year members of the organization submit our work in about ten different categories. These works are then sent to another state, in this year’s case South Carolina, to be judged by outdoor writers there.

With about 30 outdoor writers submitting their best work in each category to be judged, it is a great honor to win one of these awards.

We did not have a conference this past year due to COVID so judged works were done in 2019. I won first place in the Ducks, Unlimited category for an article “Sportsman Night Out” and second place in the category Non-Game Outdoor Recreation for the article “Life Cycle of White Oak Can Be All-Encompassing.” Both ran in the Griffin Daily News.

I hope some of my articles this past year are good enough to be considered for competition.

h, the itches of summer. A huge poison ivy vine on my woodshed got me thinking about all the things that made me itch and sting during summer while growing up. There were many.

Poison oak and ivy were the most common plants. I always thought one had “leaves of three, let me be” and one had five leaves. And that one ran up trees and structures like a vine and the other grew up out of the ground like small plants.

I have learned that both can have three or five leaves and that vines run under leaves and can sprout up a stem with three or five leaves. And that poison ivy is much more common.

There is also a Virginia Creeper vine that looks like poison ivy and it will cause a rash, but not as bad as poison oak or ivy.

No matter the details, I finally learned to avoid them as a teenager, most of the time. From college on I seldom got the red itchy rash from it. For a while I thought I might have developed a resistance to it.

A fishing trip to the Ocmulgee River with Bobby Jean Pierce in the late 1970s made me think I was over it. We got down to the river bottom with our boat then took cans and started scratching up leaves, looking for swamp wigglers for bait.

We were crawling around on hands and knees, moving leaves with our hands. When my can was full enough with worms, I stood up and stretched. When I looked around, I realized I had been crawling around scratching in a huge poison oak bed.

I never developed a single itchy bump.

Then when I was in my 30s in the 1980s I cut down a tree for firewood. It was winter and I really did not pay attention to the vines running up the trunk. I cut it up as usual, loaded it in the truck, brought it home, split and stacked it.

I had sawdust all over me so I put my clothes in the washing machine and took a shower. The next morning I had some itchy rash. But worse, Linda had a red rash handprint on her stomach where I had rested my hand during the night.

I read that you can not transfer poison from one person to another, but that hand print proved different. You could see my palm and all fingers and thumb! It was so bad she had to go to the doctor for cortisone shots. My rash was not as bad.

Calamine lotion was a staple growing up and it was not unusual to see me or some of my friends with the pink crusty smears where we were being treated. And no matter how much we were told not to scratch it, we did.

Even more common were itchy bug bites. Mosquito bites happened every day and the red bump would itch for a day but then be gone. Chiggers and redbugs, the same thing I think, were longer lasting. I hated to get the red bump from them. It seemed to itch for days, no matter how much Calamine lotion was slathered on it.

One camping trip when I was 12 years old introduced me to another stinging critter. I went into our big six-man tent to get something, put my hand down on the floor and screamed. I thought daddy had left a lit cigarette in there and I had put my hand on it.

When we looked we found a small brown scorpion, the first I had ever seen. I thought I was gonna die. All I knew about those awful looking things was from movies where they killed cowboys.

Turned out it was about like a wasp sting. It hurt for an hour or so then got better. Since then I have seen hundreds of scorpions. I have to be careful around my wood pile and almost every time I open my garage door there will be one or two under it when it goes up.

I am not sure why I never saw a scorpion anywhere around home but there was one at Clarks Hill just 20 miles away. And they are common around Griffin, but thankfully they are small brown ones that are not very poisonous, unlike the ones in the movies.

I did get a bad scare on a trip to Cancun and Cozumel, Mexico years ago. We got off the ship and went to the beach. The water was beautiful so we decided to rent snorkel gear. The mesh bag with flippers, snorkel and mask were hanging around the roof of the thatched hut on the beach.

As we walked down the beach I felt something on my wrist. It was the one I was holding the bag, and a big black scorpion had crawled out of the bag and started up my arm. I managed to sling it off, kill it and put it in a small medicine box I had with me.

That critter was almost seven inches long, about three times as big as the little ones around here. I kept it at home for several years until it finally fell apart.

I am very glad that one didn’t sting me!

Wasps and bees are a whole nother story, as they say. My encounters with them have been numerous enough for another day.

I have sprayed that big vine on my woodshed with two different weed killers and I think it is laughing at me. So far not a single leaf has wilted. I bought some weed and brush killer at Tractor supply that is supposed to do the job. We will see.

While growing up, summers were a glorious time of sunburn, scrapes, scratches, poison ivy, stepping on nails barefooted and other similar joys. Wearing nothing but shorts most days meant lots of skin exposed to various dangers, and the farm, woods and ponds were full of them.

Calamine lotion was worn what seemed as many days as not. It helped with sunburn, mosquito bites and poison ivy rash. Its “skin” colored liquid dried to a crust if it stayed on long enough.

As often as not, mama would put it on in the morning and it would be gone within a few minutes, worn off on bushes or washed off in branch water. We didn’t actually wash in the branch but fell in or got in the water to cool off.

Mosquitoes were common back then but either their bite bothers me a lot more now than back then or they were not as big or strong. Little red bumps that itched a few minutes but were then gone have changed over the years to red whelps that itch for a couple of days now.

I learned young to identify poison oak and ivy but knowing how to identify it and avoiding it were two very different things in my life. After all, when you are gathering wood to build a trap for non-existent wildlife, who has time to watch for “leaves of three?”

It never failed, during the first week of summer vacation I would get sunburned on my back, stomach shoulders and upper arms where school shirts covered up until then. And my legs, newly exploring sunlight after nine months of hiding under desks in long pants, got blistered, too.

The sunburn hurt a little for a couple of days but by the end of the first of week of vacation the rest of my body caught up with my face, arms and hands from being exposed to the sun every day. And if I went to Shields Pond to the swimming hole that first week, I would get good and blistered, peel but be brown under it. We never heard of sunscreen back then, we just roasted to a golden brown naturally.

Every summer I stepped on somewhere between two and five nails. Around the farm there were always pieces of old wood lying around. No matter how hard we tried to rescue and reuse all old nails, some escaped out attention.

It probably didn’t help that we went barefoot everywhere and really didn’t pay attention where we stepped. It didn’t take long after shedding our shoes for our feet to get tough and most things we stepped on didn’t bother us.

On test each summer was to walk on the tar and gravel road in front of the house. At first the gravel rocks hurt when we stepped on them. But within a couple of weeks, we ran on the gravel without pain. But nails are a bit sharper and longer than gravel.

When we got a nail in our foot we would either pull it out and hobble home hopping on one foot, or, usually it would just go in and back out as we took our doomed step. When we got to the house mama would use an old cure. We would put a penny on the hole, put a chunk of fatback over the penny and an inch or so around it, wrap it up and cover it with a sock.

The actions of the copper and meat were supposed to pull the poison out. Fortunately, we also kept our tetanus shots current. And I will never forget the smell of that fatback as it “worked” on hot summer days.

Ticks were not a problem back then. Every once in a while, we would pull a big fat gray tick off our dogs and squish it between two rocks to kill it and see the tar like stuff come out. But I can not remember ever getting a tick on me until I grew up. I am pretty sure whitetail deer spread them as they increased their range and as they became more common so did ticks. Now I get one or two on me every time I go in my back yard!

Fishing trips inevitably meant hooks in skin somewhere. Since we mostly bream fished, most of the hooks were small and easy to remove. Bigger hooks, like catfish or bass hooks, often meant a trip back to the house for help removing them and some kind of band aid over the hole they left.

Encounters with wasps, bees and yellow jackets were a common problem every summer. Wasps seemed to like to build nest in the kinds of places I liked to explore. Any tree house or hut left from the past year had to be checked carefully before using them. And new construction had to be inspected every week.

Part of the danger was the use of wasps nests larvae for fishing bait. When I could find a big wasp nest either by looking or getting stung, I would make a torch and burn the adults off the nest, usually at night. Luckily I never set the house on fire. Then the nest would be put in a paper bag ion the refrigerator to slow down the growth of larvae.

Sometimes getting the nest would result in a sting since some adults might survive the fire torch. And more than once I got stung when taking a nest out of the bag if I opened it to get a larva for bait without checking for any wasps that had transformed to adults even in the cool refrigerator.

My body was always a road map of scratches with scrapes marking metropolitan areas. Walking or running through briars and branches in the woods always left scratches and bumping against trees or rocks left scrapes. And my knees were always raw from crawling around looking for stuff.

Although summer memories often involve pain, the pain is tiny compared to the joy of those memories.

We celebrate freedom this weekend, and better enjoy it while we can. When the media pushes an agenda, lying to make their prejudices happen, and are believed by many voters, the US and freedoms we enjoy can not survive.

If you read the opinion piece by Dick Polman on the June 24 Griffin Daily News editorial page, you saw the path we are on. I’m not sure who wrote the headline “In the war on American democracy, journalists can’t be neutral,” but that is the problem in a concise sentence.

Poleman writing an editorial is no more “journalism” than is this column. It is his biased opinion, as this is mine. A “journalist” can not write with bias – but that is where we are now. Since Poleman is liberal, making voters show an ID is a “war on democracy.” The “shall not be infringed” statement in the 2nd Amendment means it is ok for government to infringe on rights, as long as they meet his prejudices.

I get tickled, and a little mad, when I hear idiots babble about the new law in Georgia that stops political groups from giving stuff, including water, to voters in line to vote to buy their vote. In the little town I grew up in back in the 1950s and 60s, Mr. Bill handed out half pints of liquor at poling places to buy votes. But he was a democrat so it was ok, I guess.

The media has special protections in the US Constitution since a free and unbiased media is critical for freedom. But when the media overwhelmingly takes one side, covers up for wrong doing on their side but constantly harangues the other for made up transgressions, and is never unbiased, we are doomed.

With bias and prejudice on both sides being accepted as truth, and voters electing folks that will give them “free stuff” no matter what else they do, we better celebrate this July 4 Independence Day like it is the last one we will ever have, since it may be close.

In April 1974 Jim Berry invited me to join the
Spading County Sportsman Club and fish the April club tournament at Clarks Hill out of Mistletoe State
Park.  I joined and fished the tournament and fell in love with fishing club tournaments.

I have not missed many tournaments over the years since then, and the club has not missed many Aprils fishing Clarks Hill, including this past one.

I grew up in McDuffie County and went to Thomson High School only 12 miles from the lake.  My church group, the RAs, camped there every summer and I got to go fishing there a couple times a year.  My family started camping at the lake in the early 1960s, first in a tent then a pop-up camper.

When I was about ten years old I was wading and fishing around our favorite camping place, “The Cliffs” and caught a small bass on a Heddon Sonic lure. That was my first bass of many from the lake.

In 1966 daddy bought a 17-foot ski boat and we joined the Raysville Boat Club, keeping the boat under the boat docks and parking our pop-up camper right on the water nearby.  We moved up to a bigger camping trailer a few years later.  

Although I fished a good bit, I skied constantly.  We often left Thomson High after classes in the spring and skied until dark.  And I was on the lake almost every weekend.

College slowed that down some but I was only 90 miles from the lake in Athens at UGA. I took Linda skiing – and fishing – on our second date, in 1969! I think her enjoying fishing convinced me she was the right one for me, and 52 years later that is still true!!

In 1974 I got tied of trying to fish out of the old ski boat although I had made a seat up front and put a trolling motor on it. That boat had some good memories, like Linda catching an 8-pound, 10 ounce bass from it while trolling and the memories of thousands of crappie daddy, mama Linda and I brought over its sides in the spring.

Linda and I bought a bass boat in 1974 and I went to Clarks Hill every weekend I didn’t have a club tournament somewhere else.  Since I was a teacher then school administrator, I had two weeks at Christmas and two months during the summer to spend there.

I spent many hundreds of days and nights in the camper sleeping and eating when tired and hungry and fishing the rest of the time. I loved those days. My parents visited often, usually bringing food. 

Those days lasted until they died, and I inherited the mobile home at the lake.  That was a couple years before I retired and I planned on endless retirement days there, but the first time I went over by myself there were just too many ghosts at the boat club. I got depressed and came home after two days.  It was just not the same.

Twenty years later the memories have mellowed enough I enjoy staying there again, but it is just not the same, and never will be. I guess that’s life.

Clarks Hill dam construction was started in 1950, the year I was born. I often say they built the lake for me, but it will be there long after I am gone.  I want my ashes dumped into the lake so I will forever be part of it.