One of my new-found blog friends who grew up in Searcy Arkansas read a comment from me that said I was raised in Coolidge Georgia so therefore I didn't know everything and everybody who used to live in Searcy.
I found something in the mail a few days later. Jim Bohannon, who grew up in Searcy, had send me a 1920's map of Coolidge Georgia. He very tactfully suggested that I was surely not around in 1920 but most little towns changed very little from year to year.
I studied that map and my memories came flowing back. I decided to see if Googlemaps had pictures of Coolidge. They did!!! So I took a walk around my old home town. The most interesting thing that I found that was there when I lived there and hasn't changed one bit is the old Dr. Jones (I think that is what my mother called it) office building. He was long dead then and even deader now. But look at this building. Imagine the old bottles and medicinal antiques. Marvel, too, that is hasn't been changed or vandalized. It has to be the Coolidge museum.
This is a picture that I took last year. Google shows it still there. Interesting here is how houses in South Georgia were built up like this and had no underpinning. Kids could climb under and play.
Dogs could climb under and get cool.
Snakes could climb under and come up through the cracks.
I wish I knew the history, the real history, of this old building.
Here's the Google view.
The main street through Coolidge was taken in by the four lane highway leaving almost no sidewalk space. No wonder the city has suffered.
I checked on where my old eccentric and passed-on Aunt Mary used to live. The house was always foliage -covered and low on the ground. The highway took most of her yard too.
Then I stopped by my Aunt Sarah's house. She has been passed on only a year or two and she was off the highway but it also had lots of foliage.
My half-brother Odell Dillard, also now passed on, built himself a brick house on Mamie Street in the 50's and I had to stop there too.
Just a few doors down was where I lived. I didn't know it was Mamie Street. Mail then just came to Mr. John Doe, Coolidge GA. If the mail was mailed in the town, it might just say John Doe, City. There were big old pecan trees in the yard and I'd pick up those pecans and sell them for a little change.
The school was just a block away. I walked to school every day. The old gym where I played basketball shows in this picture. Sadly the old school burned after it was forced to consolidate with a larger school 12 miles away but I entered one end of the building as a little 1st grader and exited the other end as a 12th grade graduate. The things I learned there that have helped me most in life was typing and English.
I could also walk downtown each day to get the mail from the post office. I slipped on the polished floor one day, ruined my dress and a few days later the kind post office people presented me with fabric for a brand new dress. Nice people worked there and they knew how poor we were and that my mother sewed most of our clothes. This is the site of the OLD post office. Now there is a big new one.
Some people were not poor and lived in houses like these. The houses are still there according to my walk with Google.
I regret to say that the one I lived in looked more like this one.
Three years ago, before this blogging started, I wouldn't have met Jim Bohannan, I wouldn't have known there was a 1920 map of my home town and I wouldn't have known how to travel to it through the Googlemaps. So thanks to Activerain, Jim and Mr. Google for taking me on a memory trip to Coolidge Georgia, a little town that now has probably 500 souls and back then probably had 200.
