© My Story by Jack Ragsdale
Excerpt from Chapter One
As I imagine all of us do, I sometimes consider what might have happened that night in April, 1913 if my father had not been amorous; if he might have been too tired; if my mother might have been angry and in a mood of refusal. What if the sperm had gone astray or the egg had not come down on time? A simple NO would have put a stop to all and there would have been no Jack. Fortunately for me, nothing negative happened that night and the delicate thread of life held firm. I was born at 51 Hendrix Avenue in Atlanta in the wee morning hours on January 2, 1914.
“My pregnancy” was my mother’s fifth. A boy-child had preceded me in 1912 and lived only six months. I have read two letters my mother wrote at that time and know the distress she suffered at her loss of that child.
Victorian women, (my mother having been Edwardian in that sense) produced prodigious numbers of babies, but in 1913, Ida Coggins Ragsdale, thirty-five, with three healthy children, must have had thoughts that she had already done her duty to motherhood. However, we are creatures of our hormones and for whatever reason, I slipped in under the barrier and was conceived on that chilly April night.
Having barely escaped the ban on the production of little ones, I cannot claim noble birth as did Carlyle, the Scottish historian. He concocted an ingenious story of having been found on his parents’ doorstep in a basket lined with rich silk. My father was from Anglo-Saxon stock and had only the most basic education in a lowly country school. He and his brother knew from stories told by their father that they hailed from a large family emigrating from Virginia, determined to settle in Texas. He was born in 1876, near Turin, Georgia, on a worn out farm that had been a part of a plantation.
Built on that meager morsel, one of the thousands of projects I have started and soon let die was the following:
How the Ragsdales Came To Be In Georgia
A la Gone With The Wind, I dreamt up a tale of a wealthy family (the Carberrys) living on a five thousand acre plantation thirty-five miles south of Atlanta in a magnificent edifice they called Sundown. Their hundreds of slaves lived in misery in huts while the Carberry’s lives were nothing more than extravagant balls and happy frivolities until, in the fall of 1865, General Sherman appeared in Atlanta and burned the city.
When his soldiers arrived at Sundown, they asked in dulcet tones for the Carberry’s silver service and other items of precious metal. The family pleaded poverty. Actually, they had concealed those valuables among the humble possessions of their trusted black house servants. They felt the soldiers would be satisfied with the family’s livestock and fine hams from their smokehouse.
The hated Yankee search party tore the house apart but found no silver and no gold. With their supply wagons groaning under the burden of edibles and having no time to dawdle in negotiations, they set fire to the house and continued their march.
It was on a forty-acre parcel of Sundown land, that Willy Ragsdale, my grandfather, settled when he had to drop out of the family caravan headed for Texas.
***
When my fifteen-year old father’s two older brothers married and left the farm, it was no longer a viable property for the family. My Aunt Ethel, petite dynamo and eldest sister, rescued the family by immigrating the thirty miles to Atlanta. She went to work in a department store and married a Mr. Beach who was a diabetic horse-car driver. Soon afterwards, Mrs. Beach brought my grandmother, my father Paul and my Aunt Virginia, to live in the biggest railroad terminal in the South. I once counted nine railroads in Atlanta.
The earliest stories of family I can remember are those my sisters told me of Mr. Beach’s funeral. Louise and Lunette remembered him fondly for he had given them candy. When he died, those two little girls were profoundly impressed by the splendor of his funeral and the number of horse-drawn carriages my aunt hired for the cortege.
Aunt Ethel was a charmer and after decent respect for social mores, she married a Mr. Tom Peak. Her politically oriented Tom, was an avid follower of another Tom—Tom Watson, a fascinating walk-on, walk-off character on the national political scene—utterly unknown today. Watson’s faded picture hung over my Uncle Tom’s mantelpiece until the day he died.
When I came along in 1914, my father was long established as a machinist and I, like most children of that time, was born at home, in the back bedroom on the unfashionable south side of Atlanta. As the youngest child in a family that kept few records or diaries, there are matters about which I am curious, but have no way of ever ascertaining the truth. I believe my Aunt Ethel, a socializing, church-going lady with a wide circle of friends, brought my mother and father together. In the late 1890s four Coggins sisters from Bellton, Georgia, somehow made their way to Atlanta after a falling out with their father and stepmother. I have a feeling the stepmother felt the four stepsisters were overshadowing her two daughters. The tale I put together from childhood memories is that since the girls did not get on with their stepmother who had raised them, their father would give them the Bellton residence, or alternatively, some money support. Seeing little opportunity in that tiny country town, they opted for the money and opportunity of the big city. The probable date of their arrival in Atlanta is 1897. In the next three years two of them married drummers and two railroad men.
Grandfather Newt Coggins must have been a testy old feller for he had previously broken with his only surviving son, who it was my pleasure to meet briefly in 1920 on my sixth birthday.
Farm boys of my father’s generation dreamed of working on the railroad. With one brother already employed on the Central of Georgia Railroad in Macon, my father followed that route as a raw helper in an Atlanta shop. When I was a boy he still had the books he used to raise himself up in his profession. One such I remember dealt with the workings of the Westinghouse Air Brake system, a great innovation over the hand braking system in use in Civil War times.
My father also had an interest in the Spanish-American War. As a child, I used to take out an enormous, heavy picture book about that war. My frequent perusal of it contributed to its destruction, for its size and weight could not sustain even careful usage. I cannot recall its editorial direction, but I am sure it was in the style of the crudest propaganda, propounding the nobility and justness of that folly of Theodore Roosevelt, combined with the self-serving complicity of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Happily, my father avoided service in that fiasco, which killed five thousand American servicemen and untold numbers of Filipinos—perhaps two hundred thousand or more. The “permanent prosperity” the “China trade” was sure to bring the country never materialized. It was the fun war (John Hay called it “a splendid little war”) on which Roosevelt rode to glory and an unfitting position in company with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in the Black Hills of Dakota. I chose Hay’s cynical remark as the title of a history I wrote in the 1980s: America’s Splendid Little Wars.
I well remember the parlor of our house at number 51 Hendrix Avenue: gaslights, bedrooms on each side of the hall and a kitchen with the sink near the back door. A sink? Why such a sliver of memory? At three or four years old, my ten year-old-brother and I were playing war with two other boys in the backyard. Our ammunition—rocks, our protection—two wooden doors that opened outward from underneath the house. As I exposed myself to make an attack, I caught a rock just above my left eye. The young miscreants who bloodied my head ran away to protect their claim of innocence. It was a female Samaritan neighbor, I was told, who picked me up and held me, bloody and screaming, under the running cold water of the kitchen sink. I survived the ordeal and retain the scar as proof.
Very early in my young life there was an omen of trouble. My mother’s recovery from
my birth was marked by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and when I was a year or two old, it was decided that she should go to Hot Springs, Arkansas to take the baths. Water cures were a cure-all then—good for everything. Her chronic disease was little understood and the benefit from treatment—if any—was brief. Slow, inevitable, painful decline followed.
That happened during the first Woodrow Wilson administration. In July, 1914, when I was just six months old, World War I broke out in Europe and in spite of President Wilson’s explicit promise to keep the country out of that bitter struggle, within three years we were drawn into the existing stalemate. There have been few years since that we have been at peace.
In 1919, after the war, I remember my father taking my brother Paul and me to an army surplus sale at Candler warehouse. He bought some canned corned beef and two or three lead-heavy woolen blankets. The name Candler was then very famous in Atlanta, for Mr. Asa G. Candler bought out and developed Coca Cola—another name some may recognize. Besides the Candler Warehouse in Atlanta, there was the Candler Building, the Candler this and the Candler that. At one time, they even owned a cemetery.
I have another vague memory of that time: all of us except my father became sick with the Spanish influenza. I remember him standing over us apparently ready to leave for work and another time when we kids were with my father in the street inspecting the eight-passenger Studebaker touring car he had bought—surely his first car. It had isinglass curtains to keep out the rain and two pull down jump seats in the back.
Our house had a rather large back yard with a huge cage in which someone had once kept pigeons. At that time, it seems I was in love with little Jereene Adamson who lived across the street. Once when I refused to come home, Lunette, my redheaded sister, ten years older than I, came and dragged me out from under a bed where I was hiding. Two other incidents occurred in that era must be mentioned. Once a donkey or small horse grew weary of pulling his cart, as was his duty, and lay down in the alley that ran behind our house. The driver beat him unmercifully but he refused to stand. If there is a God, that animal is in heaven enjoying ease and kind treatment. I never saw such an example of animal cruelty since and hope I never shall again.
My last recollection of that house is also unpleasant. I was lying on a pallet of quilts and blankets on a table. My parents, ill-at-ease, were discussing me with Dr. Cochran. In the last years of my brother’s life we often had long telephone conversations and I once brought up that incident which I had never understood. My brother Paul, who had been a sophisticated ten-year-old at the time, had caught an inkling of what was up. He had been hiding out. I was about to undergo the barbarous rite of circumcision which is partly based on a very strange phenomenon: Little children don’t feel pain! There is a possibility that children do not know this. Perhaps, someone should tell them. © 2005
As I imagine all of us do, I sometimes consider what might have happened that night in April, 1913 if my father had not been amorous; if he might have been too tired; if my mother might have been angry and in a mood of refusal. What if the sperm had gone astray or the egg had not come down on time? A simple NO would have put a stop to all and there would have been no Jack. Fortunately for me, nothing negative happened that night and the delicate thread of life held firm. I was born at 51 Hendrix Avenue in Atlanta in the wee morning hours on January 2, 1914.
“My pregnancy” was my mother’s fifth. A boy-child had preceded me in 1912 and lived only six months. I have read two letters my mother wrote at that time and know the distress she suffered at her loss of that child.
Victorian women, (my mother having been Edwardian in that sense) produced prodigious numbers of babies, but in 1913, Ida Coggins Ragsdale, thirty-five, with three healthy children, must have had thoughts that she had already done her duty to motherhood. However, we are creatures of our hormones and for whatever reason, I slipped in under the barrier and was conceived on that chilly April night.
Having barely escaped the ban on the production of little ones, I cannot claim noble birth as did Carlyle, the Scottish historian. He concocted an ingenious story of having been found on his parents’ doorstep in a basket lined with rich silk. My father was from Anglo-Saxon stock and had only the most basic education in a lowly country school. He and his brother knew from stories told by their father that they hailed from a large family emigrating from Virginia, determined to settle in Texas. He was born in 1876, near Turin, Georgia, on a worn out farm that had been a part of a plantation.
Built on that meager morsel, one of the thousands of projects I have started and soon let die was the following:
How the Ragsdales Came To Be In Georgia
A la Gone With The Wind, I dreamt up a tale of a wealthy family (the Carberrys) living on a five thousand acre plantation thirty-five miles south of Atlanta in a magnificent edifice they called Sundown. Their hundreds of slaves lived in misery in huts while the Carberry’s lives were nothing more than extravagant balls and happy frivolities until, in the fall of 1865, General Sherman appeared in Atlanta and burned the city.
When his soldiers arrived at Sundown, they asked in dulcet tones for the Carberry’s silver service and other items of precious metal. The family pleaded poverty. Actually, they had concealed those valuables among the humble possessions of their trusted black house servants. They felt the soldiers would be satisfied with the family’s livestock and fine hams from their smokehouse.
The hated Yankee search party tore the house apart but found no silver and no gold. With their supply wagons groaning under the burden of edibles and having no time to dawdle in negotiations, they set fire to the house and continued their march.
It was on a forty-acre parcel of Sundown land, that Willy Ragsdale, my grandfather, settled when he had to drop out of the family caravan headed for Texas.
***
When my fifteen-year old father’s two older brothers married and left the farm, it was no longer a viable property for the family. My Aunt Ethel, petite dynamo and eldest sister, rescued the family by immigrating the thirty miles to Atlanta. She went to work in a department store and married a Mr. Beach who was a diabetic horse-car driver. Soon afterwards, Mrs. Beach brought my grandmother, my father Paul and my Aunt Virginia, to live in the biggest railroad terminal in the South. I once counted nine railroads in Atlanta.
The earliest stories of family I can remember are those my sisters told me of Mr. Beach’s funeral. Louise and Lunette remembered him fondly for he had given them candy. When he died, those two little girls were profoundly impressed by the splendor of his funeral and the number of horse-drawn carriages my aunt hired for the cortege.
Aunt Ethel was a charmer and after decent respect for social mores, she married a Mr. Tom Peak. Her politically oriented Tom, was an avid follower of another Tom—Tom Watson, a fascinating walk-on, walk-off character on the national political scene—utterly unknown today. Watson’s faded picture hung over my Uncle Tom’s mantelpiece until the day he died.
When I came along in 1914, my father was long established as a machinist and I, like most children of that time, was born at home, in the back bedroom on the unfashionable south side of Atlanta. As the youngest child in a family that kept few records or diaries, there are matters about which I am curious, but have no way of ever ascertaining the truth. I believe my Aunt Ethel, a socializing, church-going lady with a wide circle of friends, brought my mother and father together. In the late 1890s four Coggins sisters from Bellton, Georgia, somehow made their way to Atlanta after a falling out with their father and stepmother. I have a feeling the stepmother felt the four stepsisters were overshadowing her two daughters. The tale I put together from childhood memories is that since the girls did not get on with their stepmother who had raised them, their father would give them the Bellton residence, or alternatively, some money support. Seeing little opportunity in that tiny country town, they opted for the money and opportunity of the big city. The probable date of their arrival in Atlanta is 1897. In the next three years two of them married drummers and two railroad men.
Grandfather Newt Coggins must have been a testy old feller for he had previously broken with his only surviving son, who it was my pleasure to meet briefly in 1920 on my sixth birthday.
Farm boys of my father’s generation dreamed of working on the railroad. With one brother already employed on the Central of Georgia Railroad in Macon, my father followed that route as a raw helper in an Atlanta shop. When I was a boy he still had the books he used to raise himself up in his profession. One such I remember dealt with the workings of the Westinghouse Air Brake system, a great innovation over the hand braking system in use in Civil War times.
My father also had an interest in the Spanish-American War. As a child, I used to take out an enormous, heavy picture book about that war. My frequent perusal of it contributed to its destruction, for its size and weight could not sustain even careful usage. I cannot recall its editorial direction, but I am sure it was in the style of the crudest propaganda, propounding the nobility and justness of that folly of Theodore Roosevelt, combined with the self-serving complicity of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Happily, my father avoided service in that fiasco, which killed five thousand American servicemen and untold numbers of Filipinos—perhaps two hundred thousand or more. The “permanent prosperity” the “China trade” was sure to bring the country never materialized. It was the fun war (John Hay called it “a splendid little war”) on which Roosevelt rode to glory and an unfitting position in company with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in the Black Hills of Dakota. I chose Hay’s cynical remark as the title of a history I wrote in the 1980s: America’s Splendid Little Wars.
I well remember the parlor of our house at number 51 Hendrix Avenue: gaslights, bedrooms on each side of the hall and a kitchen with the sink near the back door. A sink? Why such a sliver of memory? At three or four years old, my ten year-old-brother and I were playing war with two other boys in the backyard. Our ammunition—rocks, our protection—two wooden doors that opened outward from underneath the house. As I exposed myself to make an attack, I caught a rock just above my left eye. The young miscreants who bloodied my head ran away to protect their claim of innocence. It was a female Samaritan neighbor, I was told, who picked me up and held me, bloody and screaming, under the running cold water of the kitchen sink. I survived the ordeal and retain the scar as proof.
Very early in my young life there was an omen of trouble. My mother’s recovery from
my birth was marked by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and when I was a year or two old, it was decided that she should go to Hot Springs, Arkansas to take the baths. Water cures were a cure-all then—good for everything. Her chronic disease was little understood and the benefit from treatment—if any—was brief. Slow, inevitable, painful decline followed.
That happened during the first Woodrow Wilson administration. In July, 1914, when I was just six months old, World War I broke out in Europe and in spite of President Wilson’s explicit promise to keep the country out of that bitter struggle, within three years we were drawn into the existing stalemate. There have been few years since that we have been at peace.
In 1919, after the war, I remember my father taking my brother Paul and me to an army surplus sale at Candler warehouse. He bought some canned corned beef and two or three lead-heavy woolen blankets. The name Candler was then very famous in Atlanta, for Mr. Asa G. Candler bought out and developed Coca Cola—another name some may recognize. Besides the Candler Warehouse in Atlanta, there was the Candler Building, the Candler this and the Candler that. At one time, they even owned a cemetery.
I have another vague memory of that time: all of us except my father became sick with the Spanish influenza. I remember him standing over us apparently ready to leave for work and another time when we kids were with my father in the street inspecting the eight-passenger Studebaker touring car he had bought—surely his first car. It had isinglass curtains to keep out the rain and two pull down jump seats in the back.
Our house had a rather large back yard with a huge cage in which someone had once kept pigeons. At that time, it seems I was in love with little Jereene Adamson who lived across the street. Once when I refused to come home, Lunette, my redheaded sister, ten years older than I, came and dragged me out from under a bed where I was hiding. Two other incidents occurred in that era must be mentioned. Once a donkey or small horse grew weary of pulling his cart, as was his duty, and lay down in the alley that ran behind our house. The driver beat him unmercifully but he refused to stand. If there is a God, that animal is in heaven enjoying ease and kind treatment. I never saw such an example of animal cruelty since and hope I never shall again.
My last recollection of that house is also unpleasant. I was lying on a pallet of quilts and blankets on a table. My parents, ill-at-ease, were discussing me with Dr. Cochran. In the last years of my brother’s life we often had long telephone conversations and I once brought up that incident which I had never understood. My brother Paul, who had been a sophisticated ten-year-old at the time, had caught an inkling of what was up. He had been hiding out. I was about to undergo the barbarous rite of circumcision which is partly based on a very strange phenomenon: Little children don’t feel pain! There is a possibility that children do not know this. Perhaps, someone should tell them. © 2005
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