30 years of sharing our history

Thirty years is a long time.  For each week of the last three decades, it has been my serendipitous privilege to bring you “Pieces of Our Past” in this, my hometown newspaper.  My English teachers in school would have laid down big bets with long odds that I would have never written a word that anyone else would care or bother to read.

As a young boy, I listened to the radio and television news, in particular, the correspondents of CBS – Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt, Eric Sevareid, Douglas Edwards, Richard C. Hottelet, Robert Trout, Harry Reasoner, Charles Collingwood, and more.  I was fascinated with their voices and their words.  I even asked that my baby brother Henry’s name be “Charles Collingwood Thompson.”

Oh, how I wish I had the opportunity to be one of them now, to tell the stories of remarkable people in our country.  But life came along, and I took a different course until 1996, when Dubose Porter asked me to write random snippets taken from my first book, “Tales of the Emerald City and the Land of Laurens.”  Soon, Dubose asked me to write a weekly 1200-plus-word column. Fearful at first that I could never find enough material, the material came flowing freely as if someone had placed it there like an Easter egg in a sandy, open field.  The stories emanated from new books, old newspapers, good friends, and unimaginable sources. Divine guidance figured in somewhere as well.   So, here I am now, still telling stories about old and everyday people, more than 1500 of them.

Without a solitary shadow of a doubt, my most enduring inspiration comes from the late Charles Kuralt, who took his writer’s pad and two-man crew on the road to tell us the stories of ordinary people in our country doing extraordinary things with no hope of recognition or reward.

So, as I complete my 30th year, I beg your leave to tell you why I write, written partially in the words of my writing hero, Charles Kuralt.  His words are inserted in quotations.  The rest, well, they are my own – ones which I most likely borrowed from someone else whom I have heard or read. You English majors, please pardon my frequent instances of poor grammar. I write from my soul, not from a grammar textbook.

I had superior teachers in Dublin city schools. “Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students. When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don’t honor them enough, we don’t pay them enough.”

I have learned in my long life that history is not simply the story of tangible things, but the stories of people.  “The stories are true and about people who really live in the country.  You learn that the country isn’t in flames and there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.  I think it’s nice to be reminded of that.” 

  I have been blessed with a most wonderful and wise family, along with a seemingly endless force of friends. “The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege. My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.” 

I knew my grandfather Scott for only ten years, but I do remember that he loved to get in his car and just ride around looking for that special sight somewhere along the side of the road.  He told me lots of stories, which I don’t remember. Forgive me, as I was only a little boy.

  My parents, Jane and Dale,  gave me the gift of loving all people and the love of the history of our past, as well as the importance of the history of our future.    My father had more stories to tell than there are fish in the sea.  I still remember most of his jokes.  I repeat the clean ones whenever I get a chance. He rode me by all of the old home places, the burial grounds, and along the old, narrow, dirt roads while he told me the stories of a time when life was fun and good, but often tough and  hard.  My mother was my link, my portal to my past, riding with me to Virginia and to the places where her family once lived. She wrote many thousands of words, but none of them were ever published. It is from her loving, brilliant mind that my words flow.

It was my grandmother, Claudie Thompson, who passed on the genes of storytelling from her Braswell forefathers.   She kept her family tree book beside her sofa.  It was from that little, green, tattered book that I began my search for the people who came before me. 

I think she knew everyone from East Dublin to Soperton to Swainsboro to Wrightsville and back. She had a love for all things old, the interesting, and the unique.  She saved keepsakes, knick-knacks, and clipped historical and people-related clippings from every newspaper she could find.

On my writing style, I can only say that it comes from sixty-nine years of listening. “I could tell you which writer’s rhythms I am imitating. It’s not exactly plagiarism; it’s falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it. I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading. I don’t know what makes a good feature story. I’ve always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.”

Why I write about certain uncelebrated people these days of constant trials and tribulations is simple. “To read the papers and to listen to the news… one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads, and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.”

President Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history we don’t know.” So, for as long as my aging heart will keep beating and my crooked, narrowing spine will keep me walking, I will be telling you stories. I will keep wandering through the pages of our past and reporting the deeds of the people of our present, with my failing eyes focused on the future. “Above all else, I have learned to love my native land.”

  So, as I begin my fourth decade of writing this column, I deeply and most humbly, thank all of you for your kind words of gratitude and inspiration.  It is for you and for those who follow us that I have been given the gift of storytelling.  Please remember your history. Your family’s history and the history of your community are no less important than any others.  I beg you to study it, learn from it, and build a better world because of or, more importantly, in spite of it.   Remember this above all, that our most important history is yet to come. And finally, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “You too can find yourself through the service of others,” and Theodore Roosevelt, who said, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care,  and Sir Winston Churchill’s greatest maxim, “We make our living by what we earn – we make our lives by what we give.”