“I’ll Be Your Huckleberry”
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
I recently spent an entire week in my mother’s hometown visiting her family. During these visits I immerse myself in family history talking to my mother and her sister Kathryn including visits to the country outside Augusta, Georgia, to Jefferson and Warren counties. I always come back knowing much more about my family history and the history of Georgia and Augusta. The “Garden City” has spent millions of dollars on history to induce tourists to visit and preserving history within the city including the restoration of the Boyhood Home of President Woodrow Wilson, the Augusta Canal is a National Heritage Area including museum, boat rides and walking trail along the banks of the canal, a Riverwalk along the Savannah River downtown, a History Walk on the grounds of Augusta State University that was once the Arsenal for the United States and the Confederate States of America and the Museum of History downtown that at the present time has exhibits on James Brown and Baseball from Ty Cobb to Cal Ripken, the latter recently bought the minor league team in town the Augusta Greenjackets, a yellow jacket wearing a green coat like a winner of The Masters’ golf tournament would wear. I am going to write a series of blogs about the history I discover to go with blogs already written from previous trips. I will call it Sundays at Augusta paying homage to the golf tournament and the lazy summer days, I spent every summer in my youth. I spent two weeks every year with my grandparents Floyd Thomas and Elizabeth Irene Prescott Hobbs at their home at 1815 Fenwick Street. During these visits, I stay at my cousin Kathy’s while my mother stays a few blocks away with her sister. I get lots of work done during these trips reindexing all of my first four books while researching my fifth Notes From The Free State Of Patrick. Now Kathy’s only child is Amanda Marion Warr, who at this writing is a very pregnant architect in Raleigh, North Carolina, but she is a very good artist and I make jokes about staying at the Amanda War Art Museum. The subject of all the art is Amanda and being a self-absorbed only child, I can relate to this, but she is very good working in all sorts of media from paints to photography. Above is Amanda in her “Blue Period.” While staying the week of July 4, I found myself watching the television one night after a week of watching the entire HBO movie on John Adams and Ken Burn’s The War I came across The States marathon on the History Channel. The show included a segment on Kansas and there was the voice again. Deb Coalson Goodrich, formerly of Patrick County now Topeka Kansas, is talking about the Sunflower State with a particularly Patrick County accent. Deb shows up as a talking head on many documentaries these days and I enjoy seeing someone from Patrick County “doin good.” If it could not get more ironic, right after The States went off, History Channel’s Reel to Real at the movies comes on with Tombstone starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp. Now I know this is one of Deb’s favorite movies and mine too. Filmed just after Gettysburg the cast includes many of the same people such as Sam Elliott as Virgil Earp in one and Union General John Buford in the other. Stephen Lang is George Pickett in Gettysburg and Ike Clanton in Tombstone. Other in the cast include Powers Boothe of Deadwood, Billy Zane before Titanic and Dana Delany after China Beach, but before Desperate Housewives. All in a good night at the movies with Charlton Heston in possibly his last movie and narrated by Robert Mitchum. I do not know if the history is correct in the film, but the Shootout at the OK Corral is a favorite movie subject on mine from Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine, Kurt Douglass and Burt Lancaster in Shootout at the OK Corral, and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp, which came out about the same time as Tombstone. So there I sat the Amanda Warr Museum laughing aloud at Val Kilmer’s performance as Doc Holiday “I’ll be your huckleberry.”
