🎙️ Interesting Humans Podcast
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🎙️ Interesting Humans Podcast
Jim Alford: Faith, WWII, and the Five Loves: A 97-Year-Old’s Incredible Story
James Alford reflects on a long, “wonderful” life that began in poverty and heavy responsibility as the eldest child on a Mississippi farm. He joined the Army at 17½, serving in the post-WWII occupation and later Korea, traveling across the Far East and briefly working around General MacArthur. A devout Christian and staunch patriot, he believes America was founded as a Christian nation and centers his “five loves” on God, family, nation, anthem, and flag. After the military he built a career in commercial art and advertising, starting at Coca-Cola and eventually running a successful agency with major accounts. Golf and business connections brought friendships with generals, executives, golf legends, and entertainers. He also cherishes his Civil War–era family history, which he recorded in a book. Now widowed and aging, he remains grateful, despite the nation’s troubles today, confident he’ll be reunited with his wife and loved ones in heaven.
To learn more about my work and the conversations I care about, find me at @hey_dad_can_we
I've had a wonderful life. I went to see that movie, Wonderful Life, with James Stewart. Yeah. And I loved him, by the way. He was a great actor.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I've had a life that would equal his in any way. When you hear the people I've known and how I got to know them, what I did and how I got the things happened to me. Yeah, it's it's I can't even describe it. I didn't deserve any of it. Wow. I was I was I I was trying my best just to grow up. Right. But I grew up so fast. I I grew up with, I never had a youth.
SPEAKER_01:What was it like when you were young?
SPEAKER_00:When I was 90?
SPEAKER_01:No, when you were young.
SPEAKER_00:When I was young, oh. I had two pairs of blue jeans, three shirts, enough underwear. Yeah. And I had two sisters that were three years younger, each one of them. Yeah. And so I was the oldest in the family. Back in those days, if you were an old child, you were the one that they looked to to do the things that had to be done to help your mother and daddy and your grandmother and grandfather. We all lived in one house. When I was seven years old, I started milking the cow. My daddy showed me how to do it. We had a Jersey cow that'd give a gallon and a half of milk a day. We named one pet, and then we'd have another and we'd change to her and sell off Pet. Then it would be Jane then. Jane and Pet. That was the two.
SPEAKER_01:What year did you what year did you sign up?
SPEAKER_00:Did I did I start doing that? I was seven years old.
SPEAKER_01:But then for service, for military, what what year did you join up? Did you join the military? What year did you join the military?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I joined the military when I was 17 and a half.
SPEAKER_01:17 and a half.
SPEAKER_00:And so when I got there, the war just ended.
SPEAKER_01:Just ended.
SPEAKER_00:The problem was that uh I took my basic training at um Fort Bliss, Texas. It was in anti-aircraft. They put us on a ship, the Adams. I've got a picture of that. And I'll give them to you to use if you want to. I was a book private at that time. On the ship, they made me an acting corporal on guard duty. I had met a lot of old sergeants out there in Fort Bliss, two of them from Mississippi. And they told me, they said, I'm going to give you one piece of advice. When you get over there and you're going into battle, he said, do not go in without a 45 automatic. I said, well, thanks for that. I'll try to get one. It's the only thing I ever stole in my life. I was on the ship going over to Okinawa. I had not been able to get a hold of 45, but I was on guard duty in the officer's quarters on the ship one night. And when I was on that, I walked past the lieutenant's room there, and I saw on the bed, there was one on his and one on another's bed on the ship. I had one on guard duty. I just strapped the other one on, went back, turned the other one in, because that's the one they had issued me, and I put it in the bottom of my um duffel bag. I put it on when I got off the ship in the Okinawa and didn't take it off until it was back on the ship because when the war ended, they just put us right back on and we went out to say the Yokohama. But the beauty of it was that I never felt guilty of that because I was I felt that was an order, catch you in a 45. Right. I kept that all the all the way and I was gonna take it back in with me. When I went back in in Korea, and I went up to get it, and somebody had stolen it. So that was how long I had it, but I I was a very good shot. I was very good with those automatic weapons.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it helped me all the way. The general I was telling you about was a man who loved the bow hunt. He liked me, I liked him. Now I won't tell you his name because I wasn't supposed to be on extra duty with him. But the people in general had headquarters and in what I did, AGJ on cable, would put me on TDY and I'd go with him out to these places. I went all over the Far East Command in a C-47 because he looked after all the material that belonged to that in every one of the countries in the Far East Command. Wow. I've been to China, I've been to Macau, I've been to Singapore, I've been to the Philippines, I've been to Malaysia, I've been to French Indochina then, which is Vietnam now, I've been to Burma, been in the outcountry on all those hunting bull with him. Wow. And he knew everybody to talk to to do that. And it was the most interesting thing you could ever do, seeing all those things. I've seen the sleeping Buddha, which is out in the jungles. I've seen practically everything you can imagine. The most beautiful place I believe I ever saw was in north of um Australia and New Zealand. Every part of New Zealand is different. You go over here and you see something you've never seen before. Yes, just beautiful mountains, everything. We took our advanced training there before we got to Okinawa. But uh I didn't get to do what I wanted to do, and that's being a unit. I was always a replacement and all that till I got to General Headquarters. I became a staff sergeant in less than a year because of the things I was doing, because it required a rank like that. And then the next year, of course, they sent me back, but all during that time we were getting communiques from everywhere in North Korea, all over the place, over in the Far East. We had two things against us that nobody knew about. Washington wanted to put the Emperor of Japan as a criminal like Tojo and all the others. We did not want that to happen, because there were not a lot of troops in Japan at that time. We were replacing men and they were going home. And the problem with that was that if we had hung Hirohito, he would have been considered that way, but the Japanese people would have risen up. We would have all been killed. There wouldn't have been a way in the world any of us could survive that. That's the reason I'm sitting here talking to you. It was as big a threat to my life as it was when I was in Korea. But the thing was that it was one of those things that we never knew what was going to happen. We didn't know whether it would be an order from Washington to kill him. Because he would have been in the one and given the order for Pearl Harbor. Finally, MacArthur just told the man we can't find any evidence of this. We cannot corroborate that he was in the meeting or whether he did anything like that. And that's because the Japanese would not give that information to the general in charge of looking after all the war crimes people. And then so I survived that. But everything that came in to that general headquarters as far as an order or anything, everybody in my area could see it if they wanted to. Everything went to MacArthur or these people. I'm standing on the street one day in the dripping rain, going to work at the Daiichi Building. And all of a sudden, this limousine came by, and I stood up, I realized who it was, and I saluted. It was Mike Arthur. All of a sudden I heard the brakes go on, and I got a millennial motioned to me to come over. I walked over and he had recognized me because he saw me a lot in there. And I went, got in the other side of the limo, and rode with him to the DIH building. And I asked him that question. I said, how did you make that decision, General? He said, I don't like Washington. And he said, I didn't think it was right to do it, and I knew what might happen. He said, so I made the decision. Wow. And then he said, I said, he said, I did the same way with that man that came over from Moscow. He tried to start ordering things done, and I told him, I said, you do that again, I'm gonna take you and put you in jail. And then I'm gonna ship you back to Moscow or shoot you. I said, very good.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:So I rode with him then, and every time I went in his office after that, he just smiled and do that. I met his wife and his child. They came to the general headquarters little area we had an entertainment place at Christmas time, 1946, and she recognized me from seeing me over there at Daiichi Building sometimes. I got to know a lot of people, a lot of generals, a lot of things. How do you get to do that when you're just a 11th grader? Never even. Only thing I ever did when I was a young boy was I worked on the highway department. I learned how to do stuff with that, and I worked on an oil rig when they found oil. And there. And the rest of the time, but when I was on one of those oil rigs, I spotted aircraft for for the for the peoples that were flying around in Mississippi. Because we had that, every part of the United States had that that time. But I was a lucky man. I was dating a girl during during that polio thing. And no not many people know this, I don't think. But Jack Benny was put in charge of that. And Rochester, he made him a cohort in it. And all these people gave dimes to the thing, and they found the polio vaccine and and and cured it. But in addition to that, that was American people that did that. In addition to that, there was a there was a situation that I never could imagine that dimes on those little things could help them solve the problem of finding that vaccine. But after that part, my girlfriend had developed it, and she had to come to Warm Springs here to be treated. Wow. And was there for two years living in an iron lung and also having her legs manipulated so she could get to back to where she could walk again? But all those things are just a part of my life, but every one of them shaped a little something, and that was a determination. I wasn't gonna end up not finding something that I could do.
SPEAKER_01:Was there something that you saw and you wish now that you never saw it?
SPEAKER_00:In the Army?
SPEAKER_01:Any time in life, specifically in the Army.
SPEAKER_00:Well, in in the Army, I I was worried about whether I would be a veteran of the war. And I was told that anybody that served the first part of the occupation would be a member of World War II. And that's what I'd worked for for so long during my young years. The determination to be a born-again Christian gave me the feeling of being so free of any of the cares that I saw of people who weren't like that. It was a hard time, but it was a time of learning. I am as strong right now in my belief as I was then. I determined that I was gonna be a good man if I could, but I knew I was a sinner. I made many, many mistakes that I'm gonna have to answer for when I get it before the Lord. But I was loyal to this country then, and I am loyal now, and I worry for this country more than you can imagine. Because I've seen what's gone on, I've seen how it's deteriorated in so many ways, and I know all the freedoms that we've lost, and we don't have that strength of purpose that the founding fathers had, and that was that we were a Christian nation, obligated to God, obligated to our nation, and obligated to the fact that we owed something to it, not it owes something to us. They had given us everything you can't get anywhere else in this world, and that's freedom. And the freedom we have is the most honorable thing, wonderful thing, defendable thing that I know of. And I know that, so I'll carry that to my grave. And when I walk through that gate, I know I'm gonna feel God's hand on my hand holding my hand as I stand in judgment. And when he says I'm guilty, and when Jesus wheezes my hand and says, I'll forgive him. I know I can kill him. It's the most wonderful reason to be free of what I see going on now. I cannot imagine anyone with common sense not knowing that. But a lot of Christianity's gone the other way. We did not become a nation of all religion. We can't become a nation of Christianity. It's the basis of our founding fathers believed it. Many thousands and millions of men have died for that flag, for that anthem, and without that, we're not a Christian nation. But all these things pulling against these politicians, they feel they've got to water it down. I heard something said by a very a man that I think is a Christian, but not in the way I am. They ask him, Do you think this we are a Christian nation? Can we still say that? And he hesitated by saying, Well, we've got all the other religions here, and we honor them as well as we do ours. We don't honor them as well as we we do the others. We gave them others the chance to be a part of our nation. They are not our national national creed or religion. Christianity is the basis. When we lose that. We lose our nation.
SPEAKER_01:What are the five loves that you live by? Tell me those. You walk through the first one, was God, the second one is family.
SPEAKER_00:Family.
SPEAKER_01:What are the other three?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Now the third one is our nation. The fourth one's our anthem. The fifth one is our flag. And if you honor all of those, you can call yourself an American. But the people that stand up and talk against our nation and talk against our religion and talk against everything that makes this nation pure and good for the Lord shouldn't be here. Not the way they talk. If they honor our nation and they want to be a part of it, and they honor our anthem more than they do another anthem and our flag above every other one, then I'll say you can be an American. And in all the other religions we have, like the Buddhist religions here. Everything's here. We honor them with allowing them to be American. They ought to honor our flag and our anthem to be a part of this country and be proud to say they're an American. Not talk against us. Not say anything that would harm the United States. And if they don't do that, they're not Americans. Find them another place to live and have fun.
SPEAKER_01:How did this book? Tell me about this.
SPEAKER_00:That book, that book is a compilation of knowing three, let me tell you the three men I knew. My great-grandfather, John McCormick. I'd never got to know my great-grandfather often because he lived in Crystal Springs. Back in those days, we didn't even own a car. The only way I could get to Jackson was my dad worked for WPA and would take me in his car up there on Fridays to give his report to the people there. My great-grandfather was one man. A guy named Potter lived about a block up from us, and he would come down to my great-grandfather's house and want to talk about the war. In fact, my great-grandfather would say, when he would start down there, he'd say, Oh Lord, here comes Potter. Because he didn't really like to talk a lot about the fighting and everything. He told me one day, we were sitting at the table, not much bigger than that, for breakfast. He says, you know, it's a funny thing. Every time I sit down at this table, he said, I think of Shiloh, and he said, I saw ten men die in the size of that table within ten feet of me. And I never got a scratch on me. And it was a long-range artillery, airburst that were coming in on him. And there are a lot of characters in this book. They're all akin to me in some way. Three of my grandfathers are in this book. He was John Alexander McCormick. John James Alexander Alford was my grandfather Alford. Luke Palmer was my other grandfather by my grandmother's side. So all of my people are represented in this book. The other was a um was from Texas, Lou Palmer, and he was he was a very unusual kid that came over during the war and brought cattle to Mobile. Two weeks after he got in Mobile, the Vicksburg surrendered. He was cut off from going back to Texas. He fought in all of the Georgia campaign. But all three of my great-grandfathers fought in the Georgia campaign, the Tennessee campaign, and then one one my great-grandfather Alford was down in Mobile when the war ended. My great-grandfather McCormick was in Brunsburg, North Carolina. And uh and he had to walk back to Mississippi because he was bound to buy an industry here. I'll tell you about that some other time if you want to. But um the other one, Luke, went back to to uh Tennessee to escape from the Yankee Army at that time. Then he went from there back to Mississippi with his wife to settle in in Coastal Spring. Um all of them were good men. They did their duty, but back in those days there was no such thing as a as a medal or anything or of you just did your part and you did a good job. But you didn't get much from it. It was just a matter of being a good soldier. Um my great-grandfather offered and my and my uh McCormick mostly went to Jones County between those bad times and stopped an insurrection that was done by a group of people that wanted to leave the Confederacy. And uh they were told they couldn't, so they rebelled against the Confederacy. And my great-grandfather told me one time, he said the worst duty I ever did in the war was to have to take care of that rebellion there. Because the people had the right, I think, to see. The only problem that brought us in was they started killing people. So we had to stop it. He said I hated to do that. But he he was a part of that. There's so much in there I can't tell you about that was interesting, but there's a photograph over there in that first group that's of all my great-great uncles that were McCormics. My Alfred clan only had five children, my my grandmother and grandfather. My great and and my my three three three children died, excuse me. My my my great my gr my uncle and my uncle and my my um daughter Catherine and uh Jim and um another one that that was died at childbirth. And um my the only thing that were left were my dad and my uncle. So they two out of the five left. But in the McCormick family there were nine boys and one girl. Wow. I'll tell you who they were. Gene was the oldest, and that's my grandfather, Jim, Arch, John, Dick, Cam, Don, and the last one was my aunt, my great aunt, Sis. My great-grandmother walked up to my great-grandfather when she got out of the car to go in the house, and I say, she said, that's all. And she had no more children. So that was that was the group, but I knew all those men except uh one who died. Tom, I'd had Tom was the last one. That's the reason I never gave you his name. He was a maverick. He got in more trouble than any man ever got through. And he died uh supposedly falling out of a window in my downtown uh uh in the hotel there. Yeah. Um he was the wild one of the whole boys. But all of them were kind of crazy. My great uncle Cam went to Tombstone, Arizona when Wild Earth was there. And he told me, he said, that that shootout at the corral was not like they described it. I said, well, how was it, Grandpa? He said, good grace, gracious, he said, they went out there, uh, Great Uncle started Grandpa, he said, they went around that corner, they had shotguns, they had pistols. The other guys had pistols and they had a rifle. He said, they shot them first with the shotguns. Every one of them got wounded. And the ones that got killed, got killed by the shotguns at two. They just shucked them out and put more in and shot them again. But they were at close range the second time. He said most of the killings in Tombstone took part after they had a poker game and somebody got mad when they walked past an alley going home. He had all kinds of things. But he lived in Phoenix's whole life after that. And um a lot of good stories about him that you'd you'd love to hear.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But um, I did this for my family. I did those things over there for them, and all of it is is the part I just told you would have been in my second book. I don't have the capability of writing it now. My wife did not want to go through them, anything like that after that. But what she did, she said, don't don't write another book. I don't want to have to go through that. I said, well, I know there was a lot of going someplace, seeing something, and getting information that took me away from you. And I said, I was very close to my wife. She's a beautiful woman and in every way. And uh she was she was as good a Christian as you could ever find. And she loved to be a part of everything that we did. I took a lot of time out of our ourselves, but I was retired. I that's another thing about how I got in business and everything. But after that I I said I won't do it for her. And by the time six to nine years was up, it was four about four years ago. And uh she developed my Alzheimer's and then died. But uh that's her up in that room back there. But she was she was exceptional, very exceptional. And uh she taught uh my children as many of the things that she knew would be needed in life, and uh she made them adhere to that. I did too. But I was I was working awful hard at that time.
SPEAKER_01:What kind of work did you do? And how'd you get into it?
SPEAKER_00:That's an interesting story. Yeah. If if we got time for that. Yeah, we do. The um I got out of the first time in the army and then was called back the day after the war started in Korea. When I got back from Korea, and they got they sent us back right after we finished the long run up there and back. I came home and was sent to uh over to Atlanta here and went into General Headquarters, Third Army. I was released from the Army there, but not released from the Reserve Corps. So I had to get another, I've got another discharge paper that that is in 1953. I had uh been and taken some art lessons here in Atlanta in between the wars. And in that, Marshall Lane of the Coca-Cola Company came over one day to give us a talk. We got through with that talk, and uh I had asked some questions of him about what you did as a commercial artist. Because I was interested in that, and I I didn't want to be a portrait artist, any of that type of stuff. You get in too much trouble dealing with people like that. So he walk I walked up to him when he was leaving and I said, I enjoyed your talk. I shook his hand, told him I enjoyed his talk. And I said, um, how do you become a commercial artist? I said, like, how could I work for you? He said, would you answer doing that? I said, I would be delighted if I could. I said, I would like to get a start and learn how to do it because I like commercial art. I like things that sell products and do things. And he said, okay, when you get out of school, you come see me. And then I got called back in during career. I called him up when I got back home and I said, I'm out of the army now. I've been at Fort McPherson. I'd gone by to see them several times while I was in Fort McPherson when I would go out on a leave or something, and I said, Is my job still there? He said, if you want it, I've got one for you. I said, when could I start? He said, when could you get here? I said, it'll take me two days to get here and about three days to get settled into where I'll be staying. He said, Monday afternoon, come see me. I went in and had a job at the Coca-Cola Company, making 75 cents an hour. Wow. Making, because they just paid you on by the job. I knew that 75 cents wasn't a lot of money. But if you work nine hours a day and do it five or six days a week, you make enough to live on. So I took the job, and for the next two years I worked in the advertising department. But during that time I went over and got to know the head of Coca-Cola. He's the man that saved the um psychorama. He's the man that did the art museum. He's the man that saved so many things in this country, in this part of the country that are history. He liked me. I talked to him. I went down to his plantation one time and shot quail. And that was an experience that you couldn't imagine. Wow. That's the ultimate of what I call old money living. You'd have to, you'd have to experience it now.
SPEAKER_01:What was his name?
SPEAKER_00:Uh his name, the art museum's name for him, and I I've I he I can't bring it to mind right now, but he he was he was a man that did for Coca-Cola what so many ones did for other companies. Woodruff, right? His son. Are we Woodruff? His brother was um the head of the First National Bank here, and all the Coca-Cola's business went through that part of their bank, and they owned the bank and that. Um what's his name? Talk on it. I'm I'm 97.
SPEAKER_01:What year was it? Huh? What year was it?
SPEAKER_00:Woodruff, wasn't it? Yeah, Woodruff.
SPEAKER_01:Woodruff, yeah. Yeah, Woodruff, that's what I figured, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:He did all these business through his brothers, who was another Woodruff, down at the First National Game.
SPEAKER_01:Robert Woodruff. Right 1923 to 1954.
SPEAKER_00:He smoked big cigars, like those cigars were that big and they're Cuban.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:He smoked those, but he was, if he liked you, he liked you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I liked him and he liked me. I got to know him, and that that was another big step. Now something else happened after two years later I got married. Ah. My wife worked at 10th Street at the uh CNS Bank. A guy in name. What was his name? I wasn't expecting to have to tell all this because I gotta tell you this. CNS Bank? Because this is how I really got my next step. Um oh.
SPEAKER_01:CNS.
SPEAKER_00:It'll come it'll come to me the minute I stopped talking about him, but right now I'm drawing a blank. But anyway.
SPEAKER_01:Rodden?
SPEAKER_00:She huh?
SPEAKER_01:Rodden?
SPEAKER_00:No. The person in charge of that was uh a man that that hired this young man, and he became head of CNS Bank four or five years later. Um but anyway, I had been in my own freelance art studio for two years after I worked for Coca Cola, still working for Coca Cola and a lot of other people I knew. Several of them had said something to me about, why don't why don't you start an advertising agency? And I said, Well, I don't know about anything about advertising. He said, Oh, you could do it, you could do it. I think you could you could be an advertising man, and then you could place the advertising as well as draw it and and and and give words for commercial or anything. And I had several people I was doing stuff like that for. McIntyre, okay. John McIntyre. John McIntyre was the head of 10th Street at that time. And we were having our second child. And I didn't have enough money to get him out of the out of the um hospital, my wife and here. And uh she said, how much do we need? I said, I've got to get$400 because they haven't paid me from that big job I was working on. And uh she said, Why don't you ask John to loan it to you? I said, Well, that's an idea. So I went to John McIntyre and I sat down. And I said, John, I said, you know my wife, and uh I think you know me well enough to know I'll I'll pay my bills. He said, Yes, you do. And he said, um, what do you need, Jim? I said, I need$400 to get them out of the hospital, and I'll have it, I'm sure, within the next couple of weeks. He said, What do you want to do with your life, Jim? I said, Oh, I I got plans. He said, Well, what are they? I said, I want it on an advertising. He said, Why don't you? I said, It takes two things. I said, I've got to be recognized by the Atlanta Journal of the Constitution and WSP TV and radio. He said, Well, what does it take to do that? I said, you've got to have five thousand dollars in the bank, free and clear, that's yours, and you ask them to recognize you as an agency, and you can become an agency. I said, I don't need anything more than that. He said, No. I said, that's something to work forward to. And he sat there for a minute, he said, Why don't I loan you five thousand? I said, Whoa, wait a minute. I said, I don't have the five thousand now, I'm gonna have to raise it. He said, um, why don't I loan you five thousand dollars? You get your kid out of out of out of there and your wife, um, I'll give you a six-month note, and uh once you recognize could you get any more income? I said, I've got five accounts that said they'll go with me if I become one. He said, would that generate enough money to give you some money back? I said, Well, I'm not gonna go in debt anymore. Between now and then, I said, I'll pay you back the 5,000 uh as quick as I can if you could give me a note for for that six months. He said, You got the you got the you got the loan. So I went up to the hospital and I walked in the room of my wife, and uh she said, Did you get the money? I said, Yeah, I got the money. We we can get you out of the hospital now next next week. She said, how much did he loan you? I said, five thousand. And I thought she was gonna die in the bed right there. And she said, We can't do this. I said, yes, we can. I paid off that note in three months.
SPEAKER_01:Whoa.
SPEAKER_00:I had the three accounts say they sign up with me. I got some money going through WSB TV. I got credit at the uh Atlanta General Constitution, and I got the chance to start varying what I was doing, doing something different, having fun with those things, and by the end of the year I had 11 accounts.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:I was making five thousand more a year in just placement of advertising. Plus, I was still making some money from Coca-Cola, which was just menial stuff, you know. And so I went down to um celebrate with my wife and everything. And um I said, you know where I want to go back and and celebrate this? And she said, no, where? I said, I want to go to the varsity. She said, why? I said, because he's the first man I met when I came to Atlanta, and he liked me and I liked him, and I've known him ever since. You know Mr. Gordon? She said, Oh yeah, I know him. So we went back down and I stood there with Mr. Gordon. I said, you know, when I met you when I came to Atlanta, you were the first place I came to eat. I said, I walked from 14th Street now to here to have lunch with you. And every time I went to work at Coca-Cola, if the weather was good, I walked right by here and I would come back here for lunch. And he'd he'd like me, and he'd showed me the ropes down at the Varsity. We sat and talked for about a half an hour, and he said, I wish you a lot of luck in your business. I've had a lot of luck in this place. I said, You certainly have. And he was the one that told me the story. Have you ever heard the story about how he went into business? No. He was going to Georgia Tech over there, and he was not a very smart man like I'm not. He was just a man, you know. But he had a brother that was named Gordon that had an automobile tower business. So he says, um, my teacher didn't like me very much. He said, he thought I was dumb. And he told me one day, he says, you can't make, you'll not make a living selling hot dogs and hamburgers. He said, so I went to my brother and I said, I want to start a hamburger in a place like that. And he said, What do you want to do? He said, I want to go do it right across from Georgia State. And he said, Okay, I'll I'll get set you up in it. And he set it up in it, and he became the largest drive-in in the world at one time. And he said, now I'm gonna teach you how to how to order when you come in here. I said, uh, what do you mean? He says, Come with me. It's the first time here I want to teach you. Took me back there, and that guy was saying, What do you have? What do you have? What do you have? So I got in line and he said, now when he tells you, he said, I'm gonna tell you what to tell him. He said, Okay. And so we went back there. I listened to that guy ask him, if you didn't say it real quick, you went to the back of the line. Because they were so busy. And he's a he was he's a he's a black guy that I knew for years and years and years, and was one of the nicest people you'd ever met. His son even worked there after it took over for him. So I got in and I lied down, went down there, and I got it up and I went dead black. I didn't know what to say. He said, What do you have? What do you have? And Gordy said, he wants a chili dog, he wants a chili steak, he wants onion rings well done, and he wants an apple pie and a PC. And he said, half of that's on me. God brought it out and gave it to me. I went in and sat down and ate it with Mr. Gordon. He said, What did you like the best? I said, I like the chili dog and I like the fries and the apple pie. And he said, okay, remember that when you come in and order it that way. And I'd been going to that varsity ever since. For every day I'd go for lunch because I could get it at that time for about 75 cents. That's all it took cost for all of that. Wow. But I'd leave off the hamburger and I'd, you know, some if I couldn't afford it, whatever I couldn't do. But that was my best friend. He was my best friend for many years. Wow. And then from that time on I I got into the advertising business. Mr. Gordy died, but everybody up there knew me as well as I knew them. And I had a place I could take my wife right across from it, which is now the expressway, which is called Pilgreens. And they had a steak dinner on Sunday for$1.25. And so we survived those first years. My agency started taking off a little bit. I ended up having a good business that brought me in a great income, and then I got an account because I handled some advertising for a man that worked in the um business with General Electric here in Atlanta and in Tennessee. And I placed some advertising for him. He called me up one day and he said, Jim, how big is your agency? I said, me and a secretary. He said, you do all the rest of it yourself? I said, yes. I said, but most of my business is in the trade business, like you are, and I said, I've had plenty of experience placing advertising all over the Southeast. He said, okay. He said, I'll tell you what, a man's gonna call you. He wants to talk to you a little bit about your advertising. I said, okay. So the head of the advertising for the Southeast in the Southwest called me a few days later. He was a hard man to work for, but I could handle it. I knew I could because most of it was placement. Two days later I had the General Electric account for all the home products for North Carolina all the way down through Texas. Oh my goodness. He had told me, he says, you're gonna have to do$600,000 worth of business through me a year. And uh it's gonna be a lot of replacement, but said uh we might need you in some other parts of it, like making ads up and stuff like that. I said, fine. That's right down my alley. Yeah. Uh I said, how many people do you think I'm gonna need to do the job? He said, well, you'll need a newspaper person, a television radio person, um articles in in magazines and things that I will need to place and things of that nature, and and ads and and and things like that. I said, okay. He said, I think you'll need probably about 12 people for 600,000. I said, if I get good people to do this, I said, I'm gonna I'm not gonna make much money off you. I said, I think I can do it with a few less. He said, how many? I said, a newspaper person, a television person, and radio, and a magazine. I said, but I might be able to do the magazine through my newspaper person. The first year we're going along and we're gone through six months, and I asked my girls, I said, are we are we doing what I think we're doing? She said, Oh yeah, we're doing well. I said, um, all right, how much business do you think we've placed on newspapers so far? She said it's been well over a hundred thousand. I said, a hundred thousand? She said, yeah. I said, hundred thousand, we make fifteen thousand dollars off of it in just placement. I said, how about the television and radio? She said, we've done at least fifty thousand through that. I said, that's well over what we're we're talking about for a year. I said, that means we'd be we'd be doing figure it up, figure it up. I said, girls, we're not gonna say a word about this, but we're making more money than I thought we're making. And I said, we're gonna make this work for us as long as we can. That first year he placed six million through me. And I made more money than I've ever made, but of course I'm paying the girls that are working for me in all three categories. And it's cost me a lot more money, too. But I looked at it and I looked at how much we're making. I said, if I can do this for a few years, I can take that money, we can start a full 1K for all of us, and and uh, and a way to have a retirement program. I kept it for two and a half years, and when they realized how much money I was making, and how much they could make back from it if they could establish it over there. That always happens. I knew I wasn't gonna keep it a long time, but it established my agency as a given. But I went to my girls when I established the 401k and the retirement. I said, now girls, this is not gonna last long, but you'll have some money when I have to let y'all go because I said, when I lose this, I can't afford to keep you unless I've got something coming into me big enough to cover that. And everything worked well for that two and a half years. And then they saw that they took it away from me. And I went to all the girls, I said, Well, girls, I'm sorry, it's over, but you've made more money than you could have possibly made in anybody else because you got a 401k that started, you've got it all in there that's making money for you. And I said, you've also got a retirement program. I said, your portion of that's coming to you. Well, it left, and of course, it cut me back down to quite a bit of money lost. But I didn't actually lose a lot because I went from those three people and my secretary down to just my secretary. But I had to replace some of that to be sure I could look after her money and my money in the 4010 thing if I can. It all worked out well for me, but for about four years later, I hit uh Amaco Fabrics and Fibers, a large account. But I could do it all myself. Through the trade magazines and the newspaper and the things that they did. They were fined for about, I guess, six years, and then a man was transferred down to take the place of the big man there. But in between time, things had happened very good for me. I'd gotten to know so many people in golfing because I was a good golfer. I came back from Korea, started my little business, and my uncle was a pro. He taught me all my bad habits and uh got me, was my hero when I was a young boy, as far as you know, that type thing was concerned. I used to go visit with him and stay with him down in New Orleans, and I knew everybody in New Orleans because if you draw a line between Hattersburg and Natchez, Brooke Awens right in the center. And a hundred miles from that south, you go into Louisiana and into New Orleans. I got to know so many people playing golf with my uncle, and in three or four years I'd become a scratch golfer. Well, in Atlanta, you had to know a lot of stuff. You had to know a lot of people. And I'd met a lot of people in my life. I joined the Civil War round table, got to know Wilbur Kurtz. You probably never heard that name. Everything in Georgia that's got a plaque on it that says this was a battle here, this, that, and the other, was put there by Wilbur Kurtz through the government of Georgia.
SPEAKER_03:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:He was a head historian on Gone with the Wind. I'd climb the highest mountain in the great locomotive chain. I got to know him very well. I asked him one time, I said, um, would you um tell me a little something about the Battle of Recycle? I said, I don't know a lot about it because I said, I'm from Mississippi originally. I know everything about those battles, but I never got a chance to visit any of these battlefields. Three days later in the mail he sends me, I've got them right over in there in the thing, my cherished possession from him of all the units where they were in the Battle of Rissacca. Signed by him, everything about that, kept feeding me stuff about the war because he knew I was so interested. And in addition to that, he was working at that time right past the time that he had done the great locomotive chase. And um the man that owned Ain't Fanny's Cabin, which was a landmark in Atlanta, uh was very interested in a lot of things, and he and I talked, and he was a very colorful character, and had starred in it. He was just one of the character actors in it. But I found out that so many things about Wilbur, and I went to see him one day at his house. He took out from his pocket the pistol, the keys, and and everything for the limo of the the uh train that chased the Yankees back to Chattanooga.
SPEAKER_03:Oh wow.
SPEAKER_00:And and I got to hold them in my hand. That's something you don't talk about or even hear anything about. But the big thing about the wonderful people I met like that, every one of them added to my life so much. Then I got to know a few people and the golf thing that got me very interested in doing things like that. Because if you knew people in in that area, you got to meet other people that had a lot more to give to you than you could give to them. But every one of them I liked, every one of them I played golf with, and every one of them added to what I can do. At that time in my life, I knew five members of Augusta National. I could go over there anytime I wanted to play, take my clients, which solidified how I had time with my then, because every day you spend with a man that you do business with, you get to know him better. And he gets to know you. You can't do that now. Yeah. It's all over. Right. It's all over. Uh everything was a personal business back then. Now it's a computer, laptop, robot. Robot did business.
SPEAKER_01:How did you get member 001?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I belonged to Druid Hills Country Club. Everybody knew me and everybody knew them. I knew the beginning of uh Crystal Cr Crispy Kream. He became a member when he established that one in here in Atlanta. He liked Atlanta. And uh all the people I met had a lot through me. Um I met Bobby Jones one time. I also met Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicholas, and all those people when you had the Atlanta Classic, which was in my club in Atlanta, the Atlanta Country Club. Okay. The other thing that was the most interesting thing, I guess, in the world was talking to them personally because if they were coming to our club, I handled the advertising form to place the ads, and I had to go down to Jacksonville to the players tournament down there and interview the people that were come up here. I met Jack Nicholas, got to know him real well, and uh could get him to come up. I got a lot of those people that did. Jimmy Demeric was a good friend of mine. Um the the people here in Atlanta that were good golfers all knew me. And it just everything escalated. I could get you on Pebble Beach, I could get you on Cypress Point, I could get you on practically every good golf course in the country, including the first golf club on the list, the best golf club in the world. And that is up in in New Jersey.
SPEAKER_01:Pine Valley.
SPEAKER_00:Pine Valley. And I got to meet a lot of movie stars too.
SPEAKER_01:Who's your favorite? Who's your favorite? Huh? Favorite movie star.
SPEAKER_00:My favorite movie star that you met. Of all of them. I think Tim Hole. I met him, I did something for him, but he was a genuine good man. Wow. And he was Jack Hole was his father, and he was a he was a Western star too. But I never got a chance to get them other than that. I guess I could also throw in Phil Harris. Because I've always liked happy people, fun people, and people that wanted to have a good time. I used to play poker with uh Phil Harris out in Palm Springs when I'd go out there and play golf. I'd call him up and I'd say, Phil? Yeah, what do you want? And I'd say, you want to be a head person of our golf tournament this year and come down and play, won't cost you a nickel, we'll pay for everything. Yeah. Oh yeah, I'll come down. You want to go fishing? Yeah, I'll take you fishing. I'm gonna give you a big fish this time. She'd say, okay. He'd come down, he bought Jimmy Demerrit one time, and I said, I want you to do me a commercial I can use on television. And he did one and all the copy and everything. And I blanked out the right side of it for a reason. And he said, What are you gonna do with this? I said, I'm gonna put on a southern boy, and I he would do a commercial for an ad. He said, Well, all right, okay. So he put a little bag with little golf clubs on the marriage. He was a good golfer. He was on the pro show too, you know. And he'd hold that thing and he did his thing. He said, What do you want me to say? I said, In the land of do what did he, where the girls are mighty pretty. We're gonna have a little old golf tournament, and I'm gonna be the head of it. And he said, Oh, I can do that. So he did it. And he put Jimmy Demerrick standing right beside him there with that little bag on his shoulder. And he he was he looked dumb as he could be, just you know, just standing there. And after he got through, he said, hey boy, he said, what are you doing here? He said, I'm caddying for you. He said, Well that's great, but but says, uh, I gotta get from here to there. I don't know what club to hit. He said, What do you think I ought to use? Demarried looked at him and said, They ain't made that club yet. So what I did when I did the commercial for them to look at, I just opened that screen up so they could see the whole thing. And he standing there with that dumb look on his face, you know, like you'd do if you were, he didn't know what to do. And Pat broke out laughing, he couldn't handle it. And so I did the last three seconds with him just standing there crying his eyes out. But I went out there and started playing playing golf and then came in and I said, let's let's let's play some poker. So we sat down and got to play. And there was a telephone call. He they called him to the phone, he picked it up. Yeah, what do you want? Oh, oh yeah, honey, I'll be home in just just just a little while. His wife was a movie star, Alice Faye, and she was beautiful, one of the prettiest girls you ever met. And um uh so I got to know her real well when I was out there with him. And uh Hoagie Carmichael lived a little ways down, so he and Carmichael and she and I went to dinner one night. And Carmichael gets on and plays all his songs, and I'll never forget that night as long as I live. Because he was a great one. He won he wrote um um let's see That's what I like about the South and all those things that were about our part of the country, but he also did um Stardust. And that was my mother's favorite. She loved it. But he was he was a character too. But Harris just had something about him that you liked down to earth all the time, but a crazy man. He was riding with Ben Crosby one time, and they were in Scotland, just gotten playing golf, and he says, um, they passed this distillery up there, and he said, Ben Crosby said, I told you you couldn't drink all the scot in Scotland. And he said, Yeah, but I got them working overtime. He was a character like that, but all my life has been filled with people that have been happy, loved each other, just had so much fun, and nobody's had any more fun than I've had. Wow. Oh, I had the greatest kids, the greatest wife, the greatest families, the greatest friends, that in every category of the things I did. I never met a man I didn't like until he proved himself wrong. I placed advertising for Jimmy Carter during his run for governor. Um I knew everybody that you can know in government that that meant anything. I had more fun with them because you could get down to earth with anybody that wanted to get to know you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I got to know everybody.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I had but but you know, my Christian life was strong. It's still strong in every way. But Christianity has changed. I like the old Presbyterian church, but I don't like the new one. I became a Baptist and I I I like being a Baptist. I'm not hard shelled, hard shell, but I am believable. Strong. I just believe every word of the Bible. The Bible is a book that you can always go to if you can find an answer. When I lost my mom and dad, both of them were both the strongest people even then that I've ever known. My grandmother and grandfather were strong people. My my great grandfather was stronger than me, but let me tell you one thing about my my grandfather. He was the oldest in the McCormick family. When he was nine years old, he had to quit school and help his dad out who was a buggy maker. And um the depression was beginning to get in full swing. He was he had taught himself to be an architect, uh a designer, a goldsmith and a silversmith. The government came to him and said, We need somebody to run the CCC camps here in Mississippi. Would you be interested? He said, What what do you want me to do? And then at that day, all the people of Mississippi had had a lot more children than most places do. They had a large families, everybody did. They didn't have money to feed the kids, they didn't have anything that they could turn to to get more money to buy something, and stores were limited on what they had from what they could buy from people to produce things. We were very lucky to have an acre on the plow. Had the cow, we had everything you needed. We even had a pecan tree in our yard and lived inside the city limits. The thing that we found out from that was that he could do lots of things himself. He became the head of the CCC. There are men right now that wouldn't be here, many of them, if it wasn't for him teaching their fathers or their grandfathers, well their grandfathers, how to do things with lays and things of that nature, become a a carpenter, metalsmith man, or something of that nature. He taught so many people. There's a picture somewhere, and I wanted to have it for you to have to look at, that showed what he accomplished. He had a hundred and fifty boys sitting around him that weren't above the age of 14, but were learning a trade. It was like going to basic training camp for all those kids to learn how to make a living and live their lives after they got up to where they could get a job. He was he was a man that produced more carpenters, woodworkers, things of that nature than anybody that that was in the CCC camp. And the camp saves so many boys from from going hungry and dying. That's the only one I knew about because I hardly got out of that until I was in the my my you know teenage years. The um one thing about M2 that is the most amazing in nineteen forty four, early forty four. He was gone. He wasn't there. He was gone. I had no idea what happened to him. My mother had no idea what happened to him. He'd had to sign something if if he was just missing. But this man came back just before I went into um basic training in the army. My mother asked him, Where have you been, Dad? I haven't had no word from where we thought you dad. In fact, Dad replies to Dad in my hometown. He said, I can't tell you now, but I'll tell you later. And so when they dropped the bomb, he told them, and my mother told me that Christmas on the telephone when when I was in in Japan. Um she said, Dad came back. I said, he came back. I thought he was dead. She said, I did too, but he wasn't. He was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I said, he was at the Manhattan bride. She said, Yes, he was. And I thought to myself, was it that capital that well? But do you know that Harry Truman, when um general um when President Roosevelt died, had to be told that there was a um a bomb being made, and he didn't know a thing in the world about it? He knew nothing about it until Roosevelt died. A lot of people don't realize that.
SPEAKER_01:How long was he gone for? Your dad?
SPEAKER_00:How long?
SPEAKER_01:How long was your dad gone for?
SPEAKER_00:He was gone for from 19 uh 44 to 1945. Early part of 45.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And he was doing things in that. He didn't know what he was doing. Every morning they would blindfold him, put him on a bus, take him to where they wanted to work. He worked until he got through and take him back to where he out of the out of the project.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:He didn't even know where he was.
SPEAKER_01:Oak Ridge.
SPEAKER_00:But it was Oak Ridge, yeah. But he didn't know it. It was the best kept secret in the world. Wow. I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki while I was in Japan. We didn't know if there was any danger. I mean, those days none of them had been infected by all that stuff. But it had gone down to where it wasn't that much. They wouldn't let us in Nagasaki. But they did let us in Yokong. I mean uh Hiroshima. Wow. Everybody thinks it's Hiroshima, but it's not.
SPEAKER_01:Hiroshima. Hiroshima. Hiroshima.
SPEAKER_00:I learned a lot of Japanese while I was in there and I taught a young major, I've got his picture right over there, how to speak English. And uh Southern English. Which I'm sure is pretty bad. Yell and all that sort of stuff. But every time I'd get in the elevator with him in the Daiichi building, he'd hold a book up and point to a word, and I'd tell him what that word meant. You know he'd Wow. He he was a character. He was a major in the in the Japanese army.
SPEAKER_01:But um Do you still golf?
SPEAKER_00:Did you know that the only um earthquake-proof buildings at that time were in Japan and the Daiichi Building was one of them, and the hotel, the Imperial Hotel, was the other one that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. Wow. And uh I've been in both of them, so I had a lot of time with it. But um, I've been so blessed, I I don't know how to even put it. Um I'm gonna die a happy man. Yeah. Because I haven't let a lot of things pass me by. But there are two or three things I always wanted to do and never got to do. I never got to fly the P-47, which was uh okay to 1943, middle part of it. I'd never been in one of them or sat in one of them or anything like that. But uh I always wanted to get that thing up to about 40,000 feet, dive through a whole squadron of 301s, measure smiths, attack the bombers, and then go down low on the ground and get 12 feet off and hit everything I could.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00:And that's a I guess that's a bad thing to say that you wanted to do. Yeah, but I wanted to do that more than anything, and I trained for it those first three years of the war every time I could. It was also a strange time. I wanted to be in it. I wrote a letter to Half Arnold, he sent it back to me and told me to stay and not try to get in the army too early. I knew I'd been passed over for any combat during during the war, but I knew also that I could be in the mopping up. Yeah. Because we were in Okinawa at that time, and there was only one more island to take before you got to Hunji or either i either Hokkaido or any of them. Um but I'm glad I missed that part of it. That was Okinawa was a horrible fire. We saw the remains of it when we got there, but thank goodness they put us back on the boat and sent us to Japan. But I saw everything in that was being built up there. They were not ever at the point that Germany was in trying to develop things to kill people. Their bombers were never big. They were like the ones that the Germans used during the bliss. They never developed anything but the zero and those those uh aircraft that they fought with at uh Pearl Harbor. We developed the thing all the way up to the Super Fortress. Um the thing that got them was the fact that we could outproduce them. We could out thank them too, the the Germans especially, because the Germans were dedicated to discipline. If your sergeant got killed in a in a in an outfit, the corporals and the privates could not take over for them unless they were real veterans. They were better in equipment than we were. They had better tanks, they had better um artillery. In the Pacific, they never had anything above a small tank to fight with. We had everything up to the flamethrowers. Yeah, right. And um, but they were great fighters, they were great fighters. If you ever get a chance to see what Iwo Jima looks like or Okinawa, you'll see why it was so hard. If you came up to a hill in in the Second World War and going up in Okinawa or Saipan or all those places up there, they were killing fields, every one of them. They had three three tiers of things to kill you. Bottom, middle, and top, if there it was a hill. If there were ways for them to get into little areas, everything on Corregidor and everything past that was all a defensive thing because they knew if they didn't win those first battles, the heads of it, that they would not be able to win the war. The reason they were in the war was the fanatics, the ones that thought they had a chance to whip us in one fight or two fights and thus give up. But they didn't know us. But nobody knew it. They still don't know it. The ordinary man now is just as strong in the United States for what we believe in and will fight and give their lives for it. There's no other country in the world that wants to do that. They just want to kill us. And uh we'll never be thought of as we were at the end of World War II. When we came back from that war, every country in this world liked us. And then the British could not handle the Israelis at that time because they wanted their country back. And when they passed the baton to us, for some reason, everybody in the Middle East wanted to do something to us. Wanted to hurt us, and they still do. But they've been wanting to hurt the Israelis for so long. It goes back to Abraham's line time and how. But we'll never change that. We'll we're never gonna be able to change that. The only thing we can do is try to protect ourselves. And we've got a man in there now that I don't care how anybody else believes, he loves us, he loves Israelis, he loves everybody in the world that wants to be a friend to us. But he also is very strong against our enemies. And we have gone through a lot of presidents that have given something away, and some of a lot of our stuff away to other people. And I think that's gonna be a problem for us unless we can keep what he's trying to do right now to get us strong again. We've got to be a strong nation, and we've got to protect the people that we have an alliance with. And all these assassinations and things are gonna have to cease, and all of our doings as far as dealing with people, is gonna have to be to the point of getting law and order back in this country and helping other people getting in their country back. Those are primary. This last assassination of a man who loved God, who was preaching to God, and has destroyed his family, and the things he stood for, are a very big portion of what's happening to us. We've got to get rid of that. That's got to be gone. But I've got a message for Erica that she can carry with her. She and I are both, one of these days, gonna stand at those gates. We're gonna be welcomed in by our Lord Jesus Christ. We're gonna get through what we have to go through in whatever form that the Lord wants us to be in. Be forgiven. And at that point, we're gonna be welcomed in, and the first thing I'm gonna hear when I walk down the street is my son calling me, Goosebob, because that's my nickname, and he knows me that way. Now my wife's gonna come up to me in her glorified body, and is gonna hold my hand. And Erica, you're gonna have the same thing happen to you. Oh, that's sweet. That's about all I've got to say, but those things mean a lot to me. And I know what she's going through now because I just lost mine.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I still long for her. I was I would I would still be with her in everything. But I lost her not only the disease, but to a breakdown of her brain because of a tumor. And when you put it all together, she's in a better place. One of these days I'll be with her. But I would love to see my great grandfather again. He was a great man.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for taking the time.
SPEAKER_00:Glad we could talk.
