Remembrances - Country Roads - Afternoon Delights

This day, Monday, February 23, our Knight is vastly improved.

Another Thank You, God Moment. Each night we thank Him for gifts innumerable ... both physical and spiritual. Life is now viewed in a more vivid, panoramic way. We remind ourselves it is indeed a time on Planet Earth when.... though we never take one more" Ride " for granted,.... so much is possible. Before this experience we had not truly considered ourselves "elderly", quite amusing in retrospect...everything seeming so relative. We now more fully comprehend the true "preciousness" of life both for the young and the old. Once again we are so humbled and so very grateful for your constant Love and Prayers on this incredible journey. Our unbroken Circle of Love remains constant reassurance on an unfamiliar, often frightening path. You are all more BELOVED than ever even imagined. Thursday we are scheduled for our Knight's third treatment of chemo-therapy. We hold you close and feel your loving presence as we move forward through this process.

This from Sunday p.m., February 2009

Remembrances....it had been a day of reminiscing, a nostalgic journey to simpler Sundays. The yearning for what had been perceived earlier in life as a true sense of freedom seemed very real following the second round of chemo-therapy and radiation earlier in the week.

The memories came rather clearly, interspersed with so many stories that could be told. It was the year 1947. As Howard recalls he was then fifteen years of age.

He cranked his beloved Whizzer Bicycle and left the driveway of home. How he loved the sound of the motor! All through Sunday School and Church at Bethseda Baptist Church, (earlier in the day.....first order of the day on Sunday,) he hadn't been able to get the thought of the Whizzer out of his head. He hoped his Mother, better known in the community as "Miss Sallie"... wasn't picking up on his mental ramblings. “Amazing Grace” perhaps would drown out his thoughts.. After all, he was the son of a Baptist Preacher...from a long line of Southern Baptist ministers. Thinking of motor-bikes throughout a sermon might not be the best of ideas.


The Wind in His Face

As the engine purred, Howard looked back glimpsing his family still in the kitchen...Mother, Aunt Robbie, Sister Nelle...finishing clean-up in the kitchen. A much smaller house, built from the pines grown on the property after the old house burned in l945, now sat where the old plantation house had stood for many years. Howard himself had helped with the construction of the new homeplace. The original house had been constructed of the virgin pines planted and harvested by Howard's Grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Perry. (Grandpa, as they had called him, had died when Howard was around six years old.)

Memories of the Homeplace

Ship-builders from Savannah had earlier come to Grandfather Perry's pine forest to choose timbers for the tall ships being built.
"Once you touch that tree with your ax," Grandpa would tell the shipbuilders, "that tree is yours' ....$25.00 a piece." He had been a very prosperous business-man, managing the land he had acquired just outside Dublin, during his early years. In later years before his death Howard remembers him, sitting on a pine stump just outside the log crib and speaking to people as they went by on their way home....sometimes commenting on how other people "made their livings."

Howard's mental images of the old place, were vivid. Family treasures that had filled the homeplace,(one room called Noah's Ark because it contained two of almost everything,) were lost on that dark day when a fire began in the kitchen fireplace .Beloved playmate and wonderful Sister Nelle, then a teen-ager, was working in the kitchen and had yelled a warning to Howard, his Mother, and Aunt Robbie who were working in a nearby field. (Big brother Perry, mentor and role model for Howard, had graduated high school with honors and gone on to Georgia Tech).

The day of the fire was one young Howard, then twelve years old, would never forget. A house built of heart-pine lumber becomes embroiled in flames within minutes. Family and neighbors had rushed from the fields but efforts to save the house were in vain....a few pieces of furniture, family pictures, etc., were salvaged before the flames engulfed the much-loved home place . Howard remembered. He had learned how things and places could go "up in smoke"....and life would go on perhaps not as planned...but in a brand new way.


The First Ride

With the taste of fried chicken and banana pudding lingering , he proudly revved the engine of his newly rebuilt bike. Pulling him forward was the vision of the roads of Laurens County.....the small city of Dublin, and Dexter. He could smell the creek water where he remembered watching the rescue of a mule years ago. " Free as the wind" he began his trek down Moore's Station Road, past the Buggy House, past the Pine trees originally planted by his Grandfather Thomas Jefferson Perry, past the crib (where Grandpa always stored the big sugar barrels in earlier years, past the woods where Sol, beloved black friend, would carry Howard as a younger child on his shoulders during "coon hunts," )

At the time. Howard recalls, his motorized Bike was one of only four in Dublin. His interest in motors had brought him together with his first Whizzer Motorbike, purchased from a friend who had become uninterested his earlier purchase. As Howard remembers his friend had paid around $100.00 for the bicycle when he purchased it "brand-new." Howard considered his offer of $25.00 quite fair for the second-hand bike....a special prize for a young man with a dream, eager to do the necessary work to make this bike a unique form of modern transportation. He could not wait to begin the restoration...he had envisioned it from the first sighting. BUT it needed a lot of work.

Now it would come to fruition....a motorized bike of his very own....a young Knight's dream. He was "off...off...and away." The ride was even sweeter than he had ever imagined.

He had later purchased from a man “down the road” parts and pieces of two other Whizzer Bikes. He'd brought the bits and pieces home in a croaker bag.... his excitement overwhelming as he planned the rebuilding...a motor for a bike...a faster, more efficient form of getting around. As long as he could remember the fascination with motors had always been there. He seemed, for the better part, self-taught. Much fascinated also with steam engines he would later construct one himself while working for the Miller Company. Later his knowledge of mechanics would aid him in his work with management of two food industries, one Mrs. Filbert's Foods and The Charles Miller Company, creator of Mary Jane Candies....later his own company.

Sightings of Lost Treasure

Ironically, he would learn later, the father of his future bride, Paula, had purchased the dealership in Soperton, Ga., for Whizzer Bikes, along with the dealership for Kaiser-Fraser (sp.) cars, the somewhat futuristic cars from German makers that would prove to be far beyond their time in popularity. In later years, the parts, the motors themselves were discarded from the garage where they were stored after the dealership closed....too bad ....since Howard could have used some of them in restoring an authentic Whizzer Bicycle he purchased at a Great Gatsby Auction in Atlanta. Years later, Paula's Dad and Howard would become close friends. And in the years to follow when he would visit the old tin garage in her parents backyard he would stand and stare at the Whizzer parts and remember...but eventually the parts would slowly disappear in random clearing of "old junk.". Strange the things we toss away to bury in our landfills in order "to bring order" to other places in our lives.

(The Whizzers later disappeared from storage in the Buggy House....possibly upon the dismantling of the building.)

From Whizzer Bikes to Harleys

Later for the Knight's 36th wedding anniversary, his wife, Paula who counted herself one of earth's luckiest women, would give the Knight a much deserved, long-admired Harley- Davidson Motorcycle....a beautiful white classic soft-tail. He would ride it with pride, "free as the wind" until he was seventy years old.....when the two feared, not the lack of skills of a seasoned bike writer, but the possibility of injury to an irreplaceable body. After all, it had been a long, beautiful ride.
.........

Notes of Interest

Eight children had been born and raised there within the walls...many birthed by the beloved freed-slave, Caroline Henderson, (listed in Georgia State Archives), who lived on the farm in a cabin built for her by Grandpa Thomas Jefferson Perry after the War Between the States. Caroline was affectionately known by the family as "Cowline." Wood salvaged by Paul (great grandson of Thomas Jefferson Perry, and wife Delise was reconstructed as a small one room building, now housing chickens at Pineola Farms near Ft. Valley, Ga).

Sallie Perry Knight, youngest of eight children returned to her homeplace with her three small children after the sudden death of her husband, Reverend Blewster Knight, minister of the Eatonton Baptist Church, Eatonton, Ga. Blewster, only thirty-three years of age, had been much loved and admired within the Eatonton Community of Christian faith. The pastor um, then located next to the Baptist Church in Eatonton, had originally been the dwelling of Joel Chandler Harris, famous author and creator of characters such as Brer Rabbit, When Grandpa Perry went to Eatonton for Blewster's funeral service and his youngest child, Sallie, asked: "Whatever shall I do, Papa?" Grandpa quickly answered: "Well, Sallie, you will come home with me. That's exactly what you will do."

The birth of Howard, youngest of the three children, had taken place only six weeks before Blewster's unexpected death from pneumonia which developed following a small surgical procedure for a growth on the shoulder. Grandpa Perry was an elderly man at that time. Aunt Robbie, older maiden sister of Sallie, had resided with her father throughout the years. She quickly became also a loving caretaker of the three young children Sallie brought back to the homeplace. Sallie was a determined, loving, devoted single Mother to her three children and remained at the homeplace until her death in the l980's. Robbie, her older sister, became bedridden for many years. Sallie Perry Knight remained by her side as caretaker until her death in the 1970's.)