As the Atlanta Braves baseball team have been advertising this year, it’s been 50 years since they moved here.
I took my son, David, to the second game because I felt the first one would be a bit more than I could handle. His seventh birthday would be just a couple months from then and while he remembers going and that it was the second game they played in Atlanta, he obviously doesn’t remember anything else.
He went through school in Fayette County from the second grade through graduating from the only high school here at that time.
Three of his graduating classmates in 1977, Dennis, Scott, and Eric, went on to graduate from law school and come back to their hometown to live and to practice law. David, however, chose to head West to seek his fortune. He currently resides in Oregon where he lives with his wife, a son and a daughter and is a vice president of a large loan company.
He began in that type of business as a teenager working for someone whose first name, as I recall, was Bubba, right here on the square. Only then he had to personally call on folks to pay their past due loan or repo their car. Now he manages 70 millennials to do that and it’s my understanding most of them accomplish the task without leaving the office.
I have to admonish Bubba about one repo, however. At the age of 17, he sent David to Panama City to repo a truck. Flew him down there, got him a room, and gave him a spare key to the truck. At 3 a.m. David got a cab to this guy’s house, the truck was in the driveway, got in and hightailed it to Fayetteville without hardly stopping. You can understand that as a Mother, I didn’t appreciate giving my teenager this task.
David comes a couple times a year to see about me and take care of whatever needs taken care of. Of course, one of those times just always happens to be in October, about the time of a home game at Georgia Tech. Don’t tell him though, that I have figured this out.
His birthday will be Friday, July 17, and I have purchased a Braves shirt with 1966 on it to help him remember that long ago baseball game. Please don’t tell him about this, either.
