GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE, 11-18-2025

Good morning, my friends!! My goodness you are a sight for sore eyes. Or as my grandpa Raney Peebles used to say, "I ain't seen you since Shiloh." or he would say, "I ain't seen you since sherman come through!" Both were jabs old Confederate soldiers would say to the others, jesting of course, when they had not seen the other in a while. It was a joke really, based on a humorous reference to the thousands of Confederates who deserted at the Battle of Shiloh.

It was an insinuation that if they had not been seen since Shiloh, they must have deserted. The same humor was attached to the saying that a man had not been seen since sherman came through, as if they had done like many who tagged along behind sherman's army as stragglers, bummers, and riffraff. He would say that to me and many others each time I saw him. That was usually most Sundays when I visited them. I was thinking last night about how recent a phenomena it is for almost everyone to own good reliable and late model cars and trucks.

That really only came to be, in the 1980s. Before that, many women did not drive, most teens did not own vehicles, and most families owned one vehicle. Almost all towns once had several taxis, and buses ran local routes between small towns. I can recall when one Swainsboro High School student had a car and drove to school, and her dad was the mayor. When my great-grandfather, James Robert "Bob," Peebles died in 1946, on his farm on the Ocklawaha River in Marion County, Florida, well before I was born.

Daddy, Uncle James, nor Grandpa had a vehicle fit to drive to go down to stay with kin and attend the funeral. They wanted of course to go, and their daddy, Grandpa Raney McBride Peebles wanted and needed to be there for his daddy's funeral. So Daddy and Uncle James hired a local taxi owner in Swainsboro to take the three of them to Connor, where the kinfolks lived. They put the taxi driver up at a motel in Silver Springs, and they stayed with kin. Pa Raney was one of fourteen of G-Grandpa Bob's children, he the eldest lived here in Emanuel County Georgia.

All the others lived on that same old Florida dirt road with their families, so there was no shortage of friendly accommodations. That is where I spent many summers of my youth and I almost always went or returned home by riding a Trailways Bus Lines, bus. Other examples of the era when many still did not own vehicles, were when large construction projects that were to hire many men were begun, taxis services and local bus lines popped up to accommodate the workers' need for transportation.

I know that in 1953-1954, when Rayonier was constructing their Jesup, Georgia cellulose fiber mill, (a pulpmill, not a papermill) at least two men from Swainsboro moved to Jesup to set up taxi services for those out of town workers who stayed at motels or rooming houses and worked on the construction of the mill. Those men could easily get to Jesup and rent a room, but they had no vehicle so taxis were in demand to ferry them to and from the job, and to go to other local places of business.

When Georgia Power/Southern Company began building Plant Vogtle's Units 1 and 2, in 1976, vehicle ownership was still low enough that bus lines, as well as vans owned by a worker to carry several paying riders, popped all around in a 5-75 mile radius to make it possible for the workforce to travel there and back as needed. This did not happen when Southern Company began building Units 3 and 4, and is a thing of the past.

I will close with a funny little tale of a long ago local bus ride told by daddy.

A local man named "Grovie" Wilson, who was an elderly man then was riding a bus and a stranger got on and sat beside Mr. Grovie, and after riding in silence for a while, the man pointed to a woman sitting a few rows ahead of them and said quietly to Mr. Wilson, "I do believe that is the ugliest woman I have ever seen right there!" Ole Mr. Grovie replied quietly, "she's my sister." The stranger did not say anything for a bit, and trying to put the best spin on it, said, "well, I bet she's a damn-good woman!"

Love y'all. Thanks for sticking with us here. It means more than you know.

..... NUMBERS 6: 24-26, KJV

..... we boys three, babee conway, lil merle, & me