The Boy Driver
(Editor’s note — The names have been changed to protect the guilty.) My mother told this story about my dad, Jack White, when he was the 14 year-old bus driver at Culleoka School. He had been driving the bus since he was twelve, having been recommended for the job by his mentor, Bill Orr, the principal at Bryant Station. Jack White as a teenager It seems that the previous driver, a Mr. Harris, had been scaring the daylights out...
Two Jacks
Mr. Kinnie Polk “Sam” Freeland and Miss Ida had a boy born to them more than a dozen years after their last one, Tom (named after the bachelor uncle who lived with them in the big old house in Scribner Mill). Jack was the blessed infant’s name and, from the beginning, he was doted on and seldom corrected by Miss Ida. His uncle Thomas who lived in one end of the big old house was particularly amused by the boy and...
The Class Trip
Bryant Station School held classes for first through eighth grades in a two-room schoolhouse. There were two teachers presiding, one also serving as principal. When Mrs. Willie Hight was principal in the 1950s, she drove the school bus, in addition. The Bryant Station School in the 1950s with Mrs. Willie Hight and Mrs. Angeline Brown. In 1936, when my dad Jack White graduated from the 8th grade, the principal was twenty-five-year-old...
Homers
My dad was the Railway Express agent in Columbia and his office was in the old depot. In his long career, he shipped all kinds of livestock, everything from rattlesnakes to elephants – literally – without use of a forklift. It was all done with brawn, brain, and nerve. Jack White in a Railway Express office in Cookeville, Tennessee. A regular cargo was homing pigeons, usually shipped in custom woven basket crates from Evansville,...
The Art of Integration
In late February, the Alabama State Council on the Arts employed award winning Livingston, Alabama songwriter Jacky Jack White to work with students at Robert C. Hatch High School in Uniontown, Alabama. Their mission was to construct an original musical play using the techniques of “arts integration.” The deadline was May 16. Jacky Jack White with student. Diana Green of the State Council explains that White and Hatch teacher Darren...